This is the Milwaukee Oregon High School Class of 1946, pictured a year before graduation in 1945. (My father is in the back row, the fifth from the left.) Looking through the Milwaukee High Yearbook, I noted that there were no African or Asian Americans in the school. (Although I imagine there must have been black students in other Portland area schools.) The Japanese kids that my father knew about had been removed by the government in 1942--entire families forced to sell their businesses and homes at fire sale prices to whites and then "relocated" to internment camps.
By the next year (1946) there was one girl of Japanese extraction at the school in my father's class. I assume she had been at one of those dratted camps.
From Wikipedia:
"After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps.[4] In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders,[5] while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings.
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Over 120,000 persons were "relocated" to bleak areas of the West, and put into concentration camps. One such center, in Tule Lake California, is not far from where Ilive today.
I asked my father about this bleak chapter of American History when I learned about it in elementary school. He replied that of course it was unjust and racist but that "you had to be there at that time to understand why" so many political leaders and non-Asian citizens supported this draconian program. My father didn't try to defend it; he wouldn't anymore than he would have defended racism, period. I understood better the climate of those times after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
There was also other types of racism as well. This is a page from the Milwaukee High Yearbook, the Maroon.
The minstrel show cartoon in a non-Southern part of America shows an iota of just how far prejudice against blacks carried even to the Pacific Northwest. The Class of 1945 Seniors had put on a minstrel show--with white kids "corked up" to sing and dance and play on cruel stereotypes of "darkies"--as:part of the class play that year. I don't know how my father felt about this stuff at that time, but I know as an adult, although he and my mom were not political activists, they were anything but racists.
I'll let my father continue his story, starting in the Summer of 1946:
I had been turned down by the Army because of a severely irritated eardrum.
The Marine Corps had two-year enlistments, the only branch of the service that did. I wanted the GI Bill so I could go to college. I had a very short time before the Bill would stay in effect for recruits and draftees. The Portland Marine Recruiting Office was very particular about physical exams. They had a small quota to meet. The Sergeant there advised me to get some work done on my teeth and go to Seattle, which I did.
I took a bus to Seattle. After he examined me, I remember the doctor at the recruiting office up there asking me how bad I wanted to get in. I said I wanted to get in real bad because of the GI Bill. He passed me. I was put in charge of four other enlistees and was given train tickets and meal money and put on a train down to San Diego. I had a little trouble keeping the guys together, but we made it and were all whisked off at our last depot stop and sent to the Marine recruit barracks. It was quite an experience for me; for the first time in my life I felt homesick. It was just the idea of being alone in a strange part of the country. The first day, which started in the middle of the night, was hectic: at first we had to train in our old clothes, then had our hair cut off and were issued uniforms. The next morning they got us up about six, and we went to breakfast. We were then assigned to a platoon and reported to our new home (a Quonset hut). Then came indoctrination movies, and then the real training began in earnest.
Those first eight weeks were a living hell. We were made to feel like we were nothing. The Drill Instructor (D.I.) was not only verbally nasty, he was also a drunk. He would come back to barracks in the middle of the night, plastered from being somewhere, and then get us out of the sack for general clean-up. The whole place was spotless. Then we'd get back in bed for a cheerful three hours of sleep, maximum, and then up around four in the morning for chow, even before the mess-men arrived. It would take me six months to detail all the nasty stuff this guy did. Everybody hated the DI, which was just the way he wanted it.
Anyway, I made it through boot camp and was sent up to Camp Joseph E. Pendelton, assigned to a headquarters company, We were the guards for the camp: sent to ammo dumps, warehouses, someplace out in the boondocks, wherever they needed a guard. It was three days on duty and two off. Normally I was on duty for four hours, off eight and then back on.
I was sitting around the barracks one day and I heard this commotion up front. I went up to see what was going on. Some big Master Sergeant was standing on a locker. The next thing I knew he pointed at me (I was way in the back of the crowd) and another guy.
"Get your sea-bags!" he barked. "You're both coming with me."
I was taken down to the town of Oceanside, just outside the base, and put on town patrol. It was good duty. We lived in the quarters down by the beach. We got to fix our own breakfast and got our noon and evening meals brought to us.
(above--my dad on patrol with the Officer of the Day, circa 1947)
I was rotated next to San Mateo Barracks where we minded the rear gates and ran the motor patrol around that part of the base and on the beach. I had that duty for about eleven months before being sent to the main gate at Camp Pendelton.
Very interesting to read some real life accounts of the time
ReplyDeleteSometimes in those past times things were not seen as racist but we would see them as racist today. I remember when I was a kid there was a show called the Black and White Minstrel Show on TV here (in black and white too, we didn't have colour TV yet); I am not sure now whether the programme was American or British but it was white men painted "black" and my parents who also were not at all racist used to watch it and us kids watched it too. Mind you, in those days we did only have one TV channel too.
ReplyDeleteIts sounds pretty brutal alright. What was the GI Bill?
ReplyDeleteIt was an Act of Congress passed in 1944, something officially called the Returning Servicemen's Act, I believe, that provided veterans of the war the opportunity to go to a university they could be accepted at, with tuition paid in full, plus funds for books and a stipend for expenses. This opportunity, coupled with hard study, hurled millions of people from working class backgrounds into the American middle-class and beyond, expanding the US economy. Its estimated cost has more than paid for itself many times over.
ReplyDeleteThe GI Bill has been cut down over the years. Many veterans today only get a portion of the help their fathers and grandfathers got, despite the fact that so many of them have had longer tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan than did many of the WWII vets. Sad, I think.
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia,a Vietnam vet, has introduced a bill to guarantee all veterans free education at any public (i.e., state-run) university of their choice.
I agree about changing definitions of racism. I should have pointed out that many great or at least famous American musicians and comedians of that time (Bob Hope, Al Jolson, Buster Keaton, Eddie Cantor) did not think "blackface" was racist at the time they were on the vaudeville stage or Hollywood . Hope, for one, said he felt at the time it was a tribute of sorts to the black performers. Some of them, like Eddie Cantor, were brave enough to have black performers on their 1950's television shows when their corporate sponsors would have preferred them to remain all-white. So, yes,I needed to add more context there.
ReplyDeleteOh I see, thank you for that explanation. A very good and productive idea indeed.
ReplyDeleteyes, I can relate to your father's boot camp experiences. By the time I was in, a drill instructor would not have been allowed to drink like that or do some of the other things he mentioned. The military back then was much less regulated. But, at least your father had no racism to deal with because the military had not been integrated yet.
ReplyDeleteBack then it was ok to racist; it was part of the culture. Today, it's not ok but it is still there, done more or less underhandedly.
True. I don't think Truman intregrated the military until just before the Korean War. My father told me he was amazed at the fervor of racism among some of his fellow Marines. His part of Oregon had few black Americans, and most of the those from Jim Crow parts of America (the South and Midwest) had settled in the southern part of the state, the area I live in today. The KKK was rather active in Medford and Ashland in the 1920's for instance, but that's a blog for another day.
ReplyDelete