The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was a United States government agency established to handle the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also operated the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York, which was the only refugee camp set up in the United States for refugees from Europe. The agency was created by Executive Order 9102 on March 18, 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was terminated June 26, 1946, by order of President Harry S. Truman.
After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to create zones from which certain persons could be excluded if they posed a threat to national security. Many people of Japanese ancestry were also suspected of espionage after the Pearl Harbor attack. Military Areas 1 and 2 were created soon after, encompassing all of California and parts of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, and subsequent civilian exclusion orders informed Japanese Americans residing in these zones they would be scheduled for "evacuation." The executive order also applied to Alaska as well, bringing the entire United States West Coast as off-limits to Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese descent.
On March 18, 1942, the WRA was formed via Executive Order 9102. It was in many ways a direct successor to the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and the efforts of both overlapped and intermingled for quite some time. From March until November, the WPA spent more on internment than any other agency including the Army and was on the scene with removal and relocation even before Executive Order 9192. Beginning on March 11, for example, Rex L. Nicholson, the WPA's regional director, managed the first "Reception and Induction" centers. Another WPA veteran, Clayton E. Triggs, was the administrator the Manzanar Relocation Center, a facility which, according to one insider, was "manned just about 100% by the WPA." Drawing on his background in New Deal road construction, Triggs installed such familiar concentration camp features as guard towers and spotlights. As the WPA wound down in late 1942 and early 1943, many of its employees moved over seamlessly to the WRA..
Milton S. Eisenhower was the WRA's original director. Eisenhower was a proponent of Roosevelt's New Deal and disapproved of the idea of mass internment. Early on he had tried, unsuccessfully, to limit the internment to adult men, allowing women and children to remain free, and he pushed to keep WRA policy in line with the original idea of making the camps similar to subsistence homesteads in the rural interior of the country. This, along with proposals for helping Japanese Americans resettle in labor-starved farming communities outside the exclusion zone, was met with opposition from the governors of these interior states, who worried about security issues and claimed it was "politically infeasible," at a meeting in Salt Lake City in April 1942. Shortly before the meeting Eisenhower wrote to his former boss, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, and said, "when the war is over and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people, we as Americans are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that we may have done".
Disappointed, Eisenhower was director of the WRA for only ninety days, resigning June 18, 1942. However, during his tenure with the WRA he raised wages for interned Japanese Americans, worked with the Japanese American Citizens League to establish an internee advisory council, initiated a student leave program for college-age Nisei, and petitioned Congress to create programs for postwar rehabilitation. He also pushed Roosevelt to make a public statement in support of loyal Nisei and attempted to enlist the Federal Reserve Bank to protect the property left behind by displaced Japanese Americans, but was unable to overcome opposition to these proposals. Eisenhower was replaced by Dillon S. Myer, who would run the WRA until its dissolution at the end of the war.
Japanese Americans had already been removed from their West Coast homes and placed in temporary "assembly centers" (run by a separate military body, the Wartime Civilian Control Administration [WCCA]) over the spring of 1942; Myer's primary responsibility upon taking the position was to continue with the planning and construction of the more permanent replacements for the camps run by the WCCA.
The WRA considered 300 potential sites before settling on a total of ten camp locations, mostly on tribal lands. Site selection was based upon multiple criteria, including:
Ability to provide work in public works, agriculture, manufacturing.
Adequate transportation, power facilities, sufficient area of quality soil, water, and climate
Able to house at least 5,000 people
The camps had to be built from the ground up, and wartime shortages of labor and lumber combined with the vast scope of each construction project (several of the WRA camps were among the largest "cities" in the states that housed them) meant that many sites were unfinished when transfers began to arrive from the assembly centers. At Manzanar, for example, internees were recruited to help complete construction.
Life in a WRA camp was difficult. Those fortunate enough to find a job worked long hours, usually in agricultural jobs. Resistance to camp guards and escape attempts were a low priority for most of the Japanese Americans held in the camps. Residents were more often concerned with the problems of day-to-day life: improving their often shoddily-constructed living quarters, getting an education, and, in some cases, preparing for eventual release. Many of those who were employed, particularly those with responsible or absorbing jobs, made these jobs the focus of their lives. However, the pay rate was deliberately set far lower than what inmates would have received outside camp, an administrative response to widespread rumors that Japanese Americans were receiving special treatment while the larger public suffered from wartime shortages. Non-skilled labor earned $14/month while doctors and dentists made a paltry $19/month.
Many found consolation in religion, and both Christian and Buddhist services were held regularly. Others concentrated on hobbies or sought self-improvement by taking adult classes, ranging from Americanization and American history and government to vocational courses in secretarial skills and bookkeeping, and cultural courses in such things as ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement. The young people spent much of their time in recreational pursuits: news of sports, theatrics, and dances fills the pages of the camp newspaper.
Living space was minimal. Families lived in army-style barracks partitioned into "apartments" with walls that usually did not reach the ceiling. These "apartments" were, at the largest, twenty by twenty-four feet (6.1 by 7.3 m) and were expected to house a family of six. In April 1943, the Topaz camp averaged 114 square feet (10.6 m2) (roughly six by nineteen feet [1.8 by 5.8 m]) per person.
Each inmate ate at one of several common mess halls, assigned by block. At the Army-run camps that housed dissidents and other "troublemakers", it was estimated that it cost 38.19 cents per day ($7.00 in present-day terms) to feed each person. The WRA spent slightly more, capping per-person costs to 50 cents a day ($9.00 in present-day terms) (again, to counteract rumors of "coddling" the inmates), but most people were able to supplement their diets with food grown in camp.
The WRA allowed Japanese Americans to establish a form of self-governance, with elected inmate leaders working under administration supervisors to help run the camps. This allowed inmates to keep busy and have some say in their day-to-day life; however, it also served the WRA mission of "Americanizing" the inmates so that they could be assimilated into white communities after the war. The "enemy alien" Issei were excluded from running for office, and inmates and community analysts argued that the WRA pulled the strings on important issues, leaving only the most basic and inconsequential decisions to Nisei leaders.