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 a “Vietnamese problem.” As in the case of the Japanese Americans, the goal was to ease the adjustment of the migrants and lessen prejudice against them in their new homes
It is difficult to measure whether any such dispersal strategy would have done much to dilute mass hostility toward Indochinese refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War. In any case, the punitive and ethnocentric nature of the policy undercut its purposes, and the policy was a radical failure on its own terms. Most of the refugees who had agreed to be dispersed soon undertook a second resettlement into ethnic enclaves (many on the West Coast) alongside friends and relatives, and a generation later the ethnic Vietnamese population in the United States remains concentrated in a few centers.
To conclude briefly, the lesson of Roosevelt's “political science” is that racial bias and eugenicist thinking can influence government policy in many ways, even—perhaps especially—when racial thinking bears the imprint of scientific expertise and is cloaked in humanitarian purpose. FDR and his advisors launched a visionary scheme through which they undertook to use scientific expertise to help guarantee a peaceful and stable future for the world. They genuinely believed that by shifting populations and deliberately remaking the racial composition of entire regions, they could lessen international tension and promote peace and economic growth. Yet what underlay this progressive goal was the reshaping of demographic patterns in accordance with Social Darwinist racial principles, which had already been called into serious question by Franz Boas and others, and which are outmoded and even shocking by current standards. While we are no doubt fortunate that none of the more radical elements of the MProject was ever put into effect, we should nonetheless remember that the project was designed (and funded to the tune of $180,000) to be used in a serious way. At the same time, the case of the Japanese Americans demonstrates the persistence of the dubious belief that destruction of ethnic communities will ensure assimilation and social harmony (the suffering of the Japanese Canadians, who were stripped of their property during the war, barred from the West Coast, and scattered throughout the nation, calls this thesis sharply into question). We must be wary of all attempts, however well meant, to redraw human population distribution patterns, for it is as easy to stigmatize so-called racial characteristics as to valorize them.
2. Forrest LaViolette
Race, Internationalism, and Assimilation
The career and complex views of Forrest Emmanuel LaViolette provide a special window into the question of Japanese American (and Canadian) resettlement and assimilation. LaViolette, a University of Chicago–trained sociologist engaged in research on Japanese Americans and cultural values, became a lecturer at