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. The work was the first to approach in detail the social and psychological effects of evacuation on the ethnic Japanese community in Canada. Once more, though, the author declined to make recommendations for government action in support of the rights of Japanese Canadians.35 Although critics were unanimous in praising LaViolette's detailed and judicious presentation of the record of the wartime events, Tomatsu Shibutani, himself a former inmate, perceptively remarked that he was disappointed by LaViolette's failure to examine how the program appeared from the point of view of those affected.36
Paradoxically, given his neutral stance on Ottawa's wartime policy on ethnic Japanese, LaViolette emerged during the wartime and postwar years as a major supporter of Japanese Canadians and their citizenship rights. He started by welcoming Nisei students such as Kim Nakashima to McGill and supervising their work.37 When in 1944 McGill became the first Canadian university to officially bar students of Japanese ancestry, LaViolette helped guide the protests by students and community activists that led to the successful repeal of the policy the following year. While he made no public comment against the policy—no doubt he felt constrained by his position—he privately organized students and helped gain publicity for their efforts. Meanwhile, as early as February 1945 LaViolette gave a well-publicized public lecture in which he claimed that the government's seizure of the property of Japanese Canadians was “open to criticism” and had done more than anything else to arouse racial hostility on an international scale.38 He asked whether Canadians intended “to try to keep in Canada people who feel that this is their home, or…to send to Japan people who are Canadian citizens, among them young people who can neither speak nor write the Japanese language.”39 Shortly after, he termed mass removal a “complete defeat” for the efforts of Japanese Canadians to assimilate, and noted that community members, despite surface acceptance, remained inwardly hostile.40 Yet in an article that explored the movement for total deportation of Canadian citizens, he declared against all evidence that the initial willingness of Issei and Nisei to go to Japan was due more to prewar prejudice in British Columbia than to the Canadian government's war time confinement and impoverishment of ethnic Japanese.41 The following year, LaViolette helped form the Montreal Committee on Canadian Citizenship to oppose government deportation policies. (Again, presumably because of his professional position, LaViolette did not officially join the committee, and he was careful to leave his name off its public manifestos). The committee was successful in finding jobs and housing for Nisei migrants and in challenging the government's policy of involuntary mass postwar deportation of Japanese Canadians.42
In 1949, LaViolette accepted the chairmanship of a joint department of sociology and anthropology at Tulane University. During his years at Tulane, he pursued projects on diverse aspects of race relations, including urbanization in South America, Nazi war crimes against Jews, and housing for minorities.43 His most significant contribution was the 1961 book The Struggle for Survival, on the adaptation of First Nations in British Columbia. After retiring from Tulane in 1967 he served as visiting professor at the University of Toronto, and later at the University of Guelph. In 1973, he returned to Portland, Oregon, with his wife, where he died on September 28, 1989. Over the last forty years of his life, LaViolette