According to Ching's cryptic notes, FDR likewise proposed mass intermarriage of Japanese and the creation of a “Neo-Hawaiian” race,” in view of the “success of Chinese mixture with others,” and referred to a “Smithsonian anthropologist” (presumably Hrdlicka) as support for his ideas.30
All the same, there was little concrete planning, either in the White House or elsewhere in the bureaucracy, of means to encourage dispersion. Rather, the president and his advisors assumed, with good reason, that most Japanese Americans would seek to resettle in their prewar locations once released. FDR publicly pledged in September 1943 to permit the camp inmates to go back to their homes once the military situation made it possible, and even altered the draft of an official statement to excise language implying that Japanese Americans would not be able to return to the West Coast in due course.31
In spring 1944 the matter came to a head, as White House officials reached consensus that there was no threat to security that would justify further exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who was responsible for the WRA, called for the immediate opening of the camps. However, in the face of concerns over potential violence against returning inmates, mixed with election-year political considerations, the president demurred. Instead of having Japanese Americans “dumped” in California, he proposed gradual release and piecemeal relocation of the camp inmates in areas such as Hyde Park. “He stated that by personal inquiry he had reached the conclusion that quite a few could be distributed in Dutchess County and that if the same could be done all over the country it would take care of all.”32 On June 2, Ickes wrote FDR to plead with him to revoke immediately the order excluding Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast. He explained that in the absence of military necessity there was “no basis in law or equity” for the ban, and added that exclusion interfered with resettlement elsewhere by stigmatizing inmates as disloyal. Ickes warned that the “retention” of the Internees in the camps would be “a blot upon the history of this country.”33
Roosevelt replied on June 12 that he opposed a “sudden” revocation of exclusion. Rather, “for the sake of internal quiet,” his plan was to avoid doing anything “drastic or sudden.” He proposed a gradualist approach, involving several steps:
(a)Seeing, with great discretion, how many Japanese families would be acceptable to public opinion in definite localities on the West Coast,
(b)Seeking to extend greatly the distribution of other families in many parts of the United States. I have been talking to a number of people from the Coast and they are all in agreement that the Coast would be willing to receive back a portion of the Japanese who were formerly there—nothing sudden and not in too great quantities at any one time.
Roosevelt added that he had concluded from discussions with people in the East, Midwest, and South that inmates, “one or two families to each county as a start,” should be “distributed” around the rest of the country. “Dissemination and distribution constitute a great method of avoiding public outcry.” He asked Ickes to proceed with that plan “for a while at least.”34
While Roosevelt's advocacy of “distribution” was clearly attributable in good part to political expediency, as well a genuine desire to avoid conflict on the West Coast, he also sincerely believed in the benefits of dispersion, and tried to push it along by asking for updates on resettlement in the weeks that followed. He consulted Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy and General Charles H. Bonesteel, the West Coast defense commander, about schemes for “dissemination” of Japanese Americans throughout the country. A skeptical Bonesteel remarked, “The President seemed to feel that there should be no difficulty in accomplishing a solution of the problem whereby one or two Japanese families would be placed in each of several thousand small communities throughout the nation. He went into detail in showing how the plan would work in his own county.”35 Even after the November 1944 election, when Roosevelt at last gave his consent to preparations for lifting exclusion and opening the West Coast to return by Japanese Americans, he continued to favor dispersion. In a press conference on November 21, 1944, Roosevelt hailed the progress the government had made in “scattering” Japanese Americans through the country. “In the Hudson River valley or in western Joe-gia [Georgia] probably half a dozen or a dozen families could be scattered around on farms and worked into the community.”36
Franklin Roosevelt did not have a chance to implement plans for mass dispersal before his death in April 1945, shortly before V-E Day. The M Project never extended beyond the planning stage. After Roosevelt's death the M Project was ordered continued for several months by President Truman, and by the end of 1945 it had produced 665 studies, making up ninety-six volumes. However, Truman did not have the same faith in planned migration as Roosevelt had had, and he did not act on the studies. Truman did ultimately evince interest in using the M Project data to promote wise disbursement of aid money under his Point IV Program for economic and technical assistance for development of Third World areas, and in 1949 he asked that each regional director be sent the papers on the relevant area. However, Point IV was a small, limited program, and the information was by then long out of date. It is interesting to speculate on the uses FDR would have made of the M Project studies. As Carter stated, “Of course, if Roosevelt had lived, maybe something could have been done, but Roosevelt did not live.” Instead, all the tremendous labor involved in the M Project came to naught, although Robert Strausz-Hupé insisted dubiously, “I do not believe our labors were entirely in vain. Only a few of the migrants of World War II vintage have been settled upon homes or on the land. Yet some were. These would have suffered greater hardships had it not been for better planning based upon the research of [our] geographers, agronomists, anthropologists, sociologists, and experts in legislation on immigration.”37
Meanwhile, the president's plans for domestic “distribution” of Japanese Americans remained equally unrealized. Once the West Coast reopened to Japanese Americans in January 1945, camp inmates began to return to their prewar home regions in large numbers, and even those who moved outside the West Coast tended (with various exceptions) to congregate together in large urban colonies. Officials offered financial support for those settling outside the West but recognized the futility of trying to interfere with the constitutional right of citizens to settle where they pleased.
It is as well that no such program was implemented, as it would have been not only tyrannical but also probably flawed.38 One powerful indication of the limitations of such an enterprise is the official program to resettle Indochinese refugees during the mid-1970s, the first occasion after World War II that the government attempted a conscious policy of dispersal and absorption of an ethnic/racial group. Although the government had previously created the Refugee Relief Program in the 1950s to aid European and Cuban refugees and had sought assistance from religious and charitable organizations for aid in resettlement, the case of the Indochina refugees represented a race-conscious remedy in which dispersion was the favored tool to promote assimilation and overcome racial hostility. Following the fall of Saigon in April 1975, President Gerald R. Ford signed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. Under this law, the White House undertook a humanitarian operation to absorb and assist some 135,000 refugees from Vietnam, most of whom were military or government officials of the deposed South Vietnamese regime, plus 5,000 more refugees from Cambodia. In a notable case of public-private partnership, the White House and State Department put together a network of religious, ethnic, and progressive organizations, from Catholic charities to Ukrainian aid organizations and Chinese community groups, to sponsor the refugees. The Ford administration set up refugee camps at military bases, most notably Camp Pendleton in California, and arranged for the release of family groups from government custody once they had received offers of sponsorship. At the same time, in an unconscious echo of wartime policy, Ford administration officials insisted on the dispersion of the refugees in small family groups outside the West Coast as a condition of their release from the refugee camps. The government's strategy of dispersal—even blocking the collective resettlement of family groups beyond immediate family members—was based on hindering the growth of ethnic communities in order to avert
