there is no evidence that the WRA is partner to this discriminatory action.”22
During his residence at Heart Mountain, LaViolette spent much of his time meeting with inmates and compiling reports on inmate opinion. His goal was to encourage Japanese Americans to make plans to resettle outside camp. During this period, the WRA undertook the large-scale segregation of those the government adjudged “disloyal” (based on a hastily designed and egregious “loyalty questionnaire”) in a separate high-security camp at Tule Lake, and established procedures for granting “leave permits” (a politically expedient form of parole) so that those the government adjudged to be “loyal” could leave camp. LaViolette's chief contribution to the process was a confidential statistical study of those who had given negative or unsatisfactory answers to the questionnaire. His conclusion was that many Nisei acted from confusion, a result of being forced into a stark choice between family demands (the views of parents in prewar Japanese communities being law) and the instructions of the government. To his credit, LaViolette dismissed the influence of pro-Axis agitators, on whom other WRA officials had placed blame for the “wrong” answers by Nisei on the questionnaire. On the other hand, his writings also ignored the very real and swelling protest against confinement that had already led dissident inmates to form the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and would climax the following spring in its organized campaign of resistance to conscription.23
LaViolette left Heart Mountain in December 1943. His public comments after his departure reveal an odd (and mendacious) defensiveness. In an interview he gave to the Toronto Globe and Mail, he stated, “Conditions are now so good in relocation centers that there are practically no grievances.” Food conditions were “highly satisfactory, and in every other respect the evacuees are carefully looked after.” The barracks, he contended, “have been constructed to provide adequate shelter during even the most extreme weather conditions.”24 At the end of 1944, he published a review of Carey McWilliams's book Prejudice. LaViolette lauded McWilliams's book as a study of the irrationality of American social organization. However, he minimized McWilliams's description of the treatment of Japanese Americans as a particularly “un-American” phenomenon, and his strictures against West Coast whites, by saying that violent attacks of one kind or another on minority groups, particularly racial minority groups, were a long-standing feature of American history. Nowhere in his review did LaViolette even mention the central point of McWilliams's book: that Issei and Nisei were being confined en masse in camps. Instead he underlined the government's effort to atone for the “American wrongs” of evacuation by its concentration on assimilating Japanese Americans, which he contrasted positively with the “slower way of reconstruction” prevailing in Canada.25
His mental block about discussing the camps was thrown into even sharper relief the following year when the Canadian Institute of International Affairs brought out LaViolette's book Americans of Japanese Ancestry: A Study of Assimilation in the American Community, adapted from his Ph.D. dissertation. More than five years had passed since it had originally been submitted for publication. Since that time, the situation of Japanese Americans and their communities had been completely transformed by the wartime camp experience, and LaViolette had ample opportunity, in an afterword if not in revisions, to discuss the impact of camp life on Japanese Americans and assimilation. Yet he remained silent—ominously so—about the wartime experience, and concentrated entirely on the prewar community. He thereby forfeited his chance to present an up-to-date analysis of Japanese American society.
How do we explain this enormous gap, even indifference, in LaViolette's approach to the official treatment of Japanese Americans, a subject that had previously energized him, and his failure to help those who had been his main friends? I think that a large part has to do with LaViolette's extreme focus on assimilation by any means. As noted, he had lauded in his review of the Carey McWilliams book the efforts of the United States government to bring about the absorption of the Japanese minority. Similarly, a generation later, he wrote that “one would be inclined to suppose that in spite of adversity, the assimilation of the children of Japanese immigrants was accelerated and facilitated by the war against Japan.”26LaViolette's attitude also seems to have reflected a patriotic defensiveness about the government and its role. “Already [removal] is defined as a major failure in American ideals,” he complained in early 1946, “although there are aspects of the program that could support claims for major successes.”27 Here he softened his position slightly in later years, and was willing to admit that the “momentous and egregious” evacuation, fueled by West Coast prejudices, had been “our greatest action in abridging civil liberties since the founding of the Republic.”28 Nevertheless, he continued to deny that the camps themselves had been prisons—in some cases, LaViolette remained unable to actually mention the fact that “evacuation” even led to confinement. In 1971, LaViolette wrote in a book review that his goal was to
give the coup de grace to the idea that the Relocation Centers were concentration camps as some have called them. The Washington office and Center administrators quickly came to appreciate the social psychological personal expressions of evacuees coping with the facts of evacuation, public opinion and national policy [and worked] correcting the errors of the democratic process…while continuing to fight a major war.29
LaViolette's caution in confronting and evaluating the wartime experience of Japanese Canadians resembled his position on the Japanese Americans. During spring 1942, as politicians and pressure groups in British Columbia made the case for mass removal of the ethnic Japanese population on the Canadian West Coast, LaViolette did not intervene. In July 1942, LaViolette finally broke his silence by publishing a short account of the situation for the liberal Asian studies journal Far Eastern Survey, which he ultimately followed up with a sequel two years afterward.30 Both were largely factual articles on the history of anti-Japanese prejudice in British Columbia. In them, the author ascribed the federal government's decision to issue the Orders-in-Council exiling Japanese Canadians from the Pacific coast not to racism but to legitimate military factors. In the same way, LaViolette refused in his twin articles to pronounce on the harsh operation of the “settlements” for Japanese Canadians. Instead, he described the state of affairs for the larger community and underlined various unsolved questions of resettlement and readaptation. As with Japanese Americans, the progress of assimilation was his exclusive focus. Thus, he concluded that mass migration away from the prejudices of the West Coast was a positive step, as it might speed postwar assimilation of Canadian Nisei, even if he expressed limited concern for the individuals involved: “Military necessity may have dictated evacuation in part, but provincial rights, the rising level of race prejudice, and the marginal economic position of the evacuees are barriers to a thorough-going solution of Canada's Japa nese problem.”31
LaViolette followed two years later with another article for the same publication in which he updated the situation. As before, he refused to offer any judgment on official policy, even Ottawa's cruel confiscation and sale of the property of Japanese Canadians, who were then forced to use the proceeds to pay for their confinement. This policy left those already victimized by persecution financially destitute. The most the author would do was to present it as an unsettled question: “The government looks upon liquidation as good administration. The Japanese look upon it as a breach of faith. They suspect the government has given way to pol itical and economic pressure groups. Available evidence does not indicate conclusively the factors on which the decision was based.”32 After touring the confinement sites in British Columbia, LaViolette remarked positively in a lecture that the Canadian confinement experience had gone much more smoothly and had been less expensive than the American program, but he remained silent on the mass despoiling of property that had made it possible.33
In the last days of World War II, LaViolette expanded his wartime articles into a pamphlet for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. He then in turn expanded the pamphlet into the prize-winning book The Canadian Japanese and World War II, which was published in 1948.34 The book recounted the story of mass removal in Canada and the steps through which Japanese Canadians had resettled and rebuilt their communities.
