base stock will naturally include a considerable admixture of Indian blood. The President wishes to be advised what will happen when various kinds of Europeans—Scandinavian, Germanic, French-Belgian, North Italian, etc.—are mixed with the South American base stock.
The memo then listed some of the specific matters that Roosevelt had gone into:
The President specifically asked the committee also to consider such questions as the following: Is the South Italian stock—say, Sicilian—as good as the North Italian stock—say, Milanese—if given equal economic and social opportunity? Thus, in a given case, where 10,000 Italians were to be offered settlement facilities, what proportion of the 10,000 should be Northern Italians and what Southern Italians? He also pointed out that while most South American countries would be glad to admit Jewish immigration, it was on the condition that the Jewish group were not localized in the cities, that there wasn't to be “Jewish colonies,” “Italian colonies,” etc. How can you resettle the Jews on the land and keep them there? Historically, he pointed out, the Jews were originally an agricultural and pastoral people and the ghetto system…is of comparatively recent origin.
The three-man committee began slowly to set to work, but the tensions soon became unmanageable. As Carter later explained, “Hrdlicka was impossible to deal with because his whole idea was to use the government money to go down to Mexico to try to verify his theories about the migration of early American man.”22 By late fall 1942 Hrdlicka had withdrawn completely from the project.
The M Project (at first referred to as the “Bowman-Field Committee”) was officially established in November 1942.23 It was funded by allocations from the President's Special Funds.24 Bowman again declined to serve actively, although he agreed to be an advisor and to receive a copy of all reports. Field assumed responsibility for the project. Through Archibald MacLeish, who was librarian of Congress, assistant director of the Office of War Information, and a close Roosevelt speechwriter and advisor, the M Project was offered three study rooms in the Library of Congress. MacLeish also agreed to detail Dr. Sergei Yakobson to assist. Soon Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupé and Stefan Possony—both of whom would later be Cold War foreign policy specialists, and the former an ambassador as well—came to join them. Ultimately, a project staff of approximately thirteen was built up. Many of them were Jewish refugees who joined the president's project in lieu of military service. Although the project staff did not include specialists in all fields, they were able to draw on the talent of numerous researchers within the government because of their powerful sponsor. In addition, Sripati Chandrasekhar, a graduate student at New York University, was recruited as a special expert on demography and population transfers in Asia. (Chandrasekhar would later return to India aand become minister of health and family planning under Indira Gandhi, in which role he would arouse controversy for his forthright advocacy of voluntary sterilization and other means of “correcting” overpopulation.)
By mid-1943, the M Project was issuing reports almost on a daily basis. In Field's words, the task was to prepare “world-wide studies on areas with surplus population, their racial and religious composition, and their nationals' potential skill and adaptability as emigrants.” M Project staffers drafted studies of previous settlement attempts and of immigration laws of potential settler countries, as well as reports, translations, lectures, and memoranda on a wide variety of topics, including maize in Siberia, animal husbandry and the development of the paper industry in British Guiana, soils of San Carlos and Valencia, Venezuela, and the American Jewish Committee's detailed studies of eastern European Jews and Jewish colonies in Saskatchewan, Argentina, and other places.
Roosevelt remained informed about and interested in the M Project, although he had no direct contact with the staffers and did not issue further agenda items for M Project studies, apart from allegedly commissioning special reports on the status of Jews and minorities in the Soviet Union for ammunition prior to his meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Teheran. In October 1943, he invited Field to visit him at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat in Maryland (later known as Camp David), and encouraged him to continue the M Project. The resettlement of millions of refugees, according to FDR, “was not only desirable from a humanitarian standpoint, but essential from a military point of view as well…For the discontented can and will cause trouble, serious trouble.”25 Field would later claim that Roosevelt envisioned a wide network of irrigation canals to enable Europeans to resettle in the deserts of North Africa, as well as a project to use desalinated Mediterranean seawater to make North Africa the granary of Europe. Although he was aware that such a proposal (and a similar one to resettle Asians in Australia) would be tremendously expensive, he declared they were worthwhile in averting further wars.
Even as Roosevelt continued to receive reports from the M Project staff, he turned his attention to the domestic scene. In addition to asking the National Resources Planning Commission to come up with ideas for the distribution of Jews, Germans, and Italians, the president did some of his own canvassing on the question. In May 1943, Vice President Wallace reported in his diary that the president had spoken at length on the possibility of scattering Jews to avoid conflict. “The President consulted his neighbors in Marietta County, Georgia [the location of FDR's home at Warm Springs] and at Hyde Park, asking whether they would agree to have four or five Jewish families resettle in their respective regions. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”26 In a fictionalized dialogue, John Franklin Carter summed up Roosevelt's rationale for forcing assimilation: “It's only human nature for people to want others to conform to their standards. The Jews are a race apart, a religion apart…a special group inside every other nation. Such separations have always caused suspicion and trouble.”27
Meanwhile, the question of Japanese Americans drew his attention. In the weeks after Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the army prepared to remove some 112,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Roosevelt and his advisors seem to have given little thought at first to the long-term disposition of the inmates. On the contrary, they declined to assist a number of different projects submitted by Nisei leaders such as James Sakamoto, Hi Korematsu, and Fred Wada for voluntary relocation by groups of Japanese Americans and mass colonization of western farmland. Nonetheless, as plans for removal proceeded and a newly created civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), began constructing camps in the interior for involuntary mass confinement, the president and various officials began to consider possibilities for permanent resettlement elsewhere. On July 7, 1942, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote the president to warn him that California governor Culbert Olson, whom he facetiously referred to as “that great patriot,” had inquired whether Japanese Americans could be released from confinement to work as cheap labor during the autumn harvest. Stimson added scornfully that the same Californians who were so “hell-bent” on having the army rush “the Japanese” out should not be permitted to change their minds when it suited them. Instead, Stimson proposed going on with “our permanent relocation of the evacuees,” which he termed “the permanent settlement of a great national problem.”28
Once the Japanese Americans were moved into the camps, government authorities gradually developed a “leave clearance” system to permit those adjudged “loyal” to leave the camps and resettle in small groups outside the Pacific coast, which remained closed to Japanese Americans. Thus, a fraction of the inmates departed during 1943 and 1944. Within the government there were various discussions and exchanges of opinion with regard to the desirability of permanent dispersal outside the West Coast. For example, in April 1943, following a visit to the Gila River camp, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told the press, “I hope that as they go out, both after the war and during it, the [Japanese Americans] will go out in small groups to different communities scattered throughout the land. [Like] many people in this country [they] have lived at a concentrated point, in communities within a community, so to speak, a condition which has tended to delay their assimilation into the American society.”29 FDR himself told a Chinese American White House visitor, Hung Wai Ching, during spring 1943 that he favored resettlement of Japanese Americans nationwide and “felt that they should be spread around the country. [He]
