Toward evening of a day in June, 1942, the cold wind swept the flat lands on the outskirts of Rupert, Idaho. The canvas of the rows of pup tents which were to be our quarters flapped violently and in the center of the fenced-in compound stood the big tent which was to be our mess hall.
An hour before, 129 of us had arrived in this strange town as volunteers from the Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif., to help save an estimated $16,000,000 sugar beet crop which was threatened by overgrowing weeds.
A drunken sheriff had met us at the. railway station and with his hand on his revolver holster, had warned us to stay in the camp. He told us to remain within the fence and to leave the camp only when farmers came for us with their trucks.
When we volunteered from behind the barbed wire and watch-towers of Manzanar, we were promised complete freedom in Idaho by a sugar company recruiter and government authorities. The evacuees were told that if volunteering did not have a good response, we would be drafted into labor battalions and put to work under the surveillance of military guards.
"All you Japs stay in the tent city!" the drunken sheriff had said, and he told us in the presence of white spectators who had come to see us that he would not be responsible for vigilante activities. Coming from him, who was responsible for maintaining peace and order, this was nothing short of agitation to stir up vigilantes.
Only a few days before our arrival, Governor Chase Clark of Idaho had said publicly, the ''Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats." He had emphasized that he did not want "Japs" in Idaho. He had advocated dumping all "Japs" on the islands of Japan, to be drowned like "rats" when II. S. aircraft bombed them.
In this situation, because I had been asked by the government authorities at Manzanar to look after the volunteers during transit from California to Idaho, I became their spokesman.
Harry Elcock, the manager of the Amalgamated Sugar Co., of Twin Falls, Ida., was deeply concerned because the evacuee volunteers began talking of returning to Manzanar. He told me that the governor's speech was "political" and that since the farmers needed us, he would have to tone down or have his political future jeopardized.
The atmosphere was charged with suspense. We did not know how the white people of Rupert felt toward us. Did the sheriff reflect their thinking?
The sugar company representative gave us a good supper at a restaurant and our men who finished eating, walked out to the U. S. Employment Service farm labor tent camp. Later, the manager and I went there.
Inside the compound were excited evacuees, and leaning on the newly-erected fence were farmers who had come to size us up. Merchants, city officials and sugar company officials were there, too, discussing us volunteer laborers.
"We Want You To Talk To Us"
Meno-san, the tall Issei, who turned out to be a strong leader among the Issei, came up to me and said: "We want you to talk to us."
"I know only as much as you do," I told Mm.
"Talk anyway!" he said. "That will do all of us some good. The men are confused and they want to know whether they will have protection and freedom. Look at these tents! We were promised good living conditions!"
He pointed toward the evacuees—at a calisthenics platform— and told me to climb on there and "say anything."
We All Have Something To Offer
Meno-san and I moved toward the platform, he telling me to give the men some conficence. With the passing of years. I have come to appreciate his encouragement more and more, for I see that this experience brought a great change in me. I became more deeply convinced of the necessity of consistent and organized struggles among common people to better their social and economic positions. And during the course of my development, spurred by such experiences as these, I came to see more clearly the necessity of participating in such struggles. I can see that my thinking and convictions then and now have harmonized. We all have something to offer toward improving general conditions, in the face ' of opposition by bigoted and vested interests and the super-patriots who are used as their tools. Within our limitations, we can make our contributions.
In time of reaction, repressive measures such as the Smith Act, under which seven of us here are indicted, are used to attack those actively taking part in such activities, but sanity will return to take the place of fear and hysteria, as it must.
We Must Be Guaranteed Freedom
So on that windy evening, I climbed on the calisthenics platform and began talking to my fellow evacuees. I reviewed my conversation with the company manager. The volunteers had seen the canvas cots in the pup tents and I told them that it would be freezing cold during the night. I said that working and living conditions can be bargained for between us and the farmers—but only as pre-condition for us to remain in Rupert, we must be guaranteed freedom.
The evacuees nodded their heads.
The crowd edged closer. The evacuees were near the platform and the white people formed a half-circle behind them. More farmers arrived on trucks.
To all these people I said we were not "rats," did not breed like "rats," but were human beings just like them, and that we disagreed with their governor. Smiles broke out on their faces; the tension seemed to have eased.
The Farmers Talked To City Officials
From the platform I appealed to Rupert's city commissioners to hold an emergency meeting right away to rescind their sheriff's orders to us. I reviewed the evacuation, its injustices and our sacrifices, and our volunteering to come to Idaho to save the sugar beet crop. I said that if the sheriff and his kind of law were the extent of security we would enjoy, we would be compelled to ask government authorities to ship us back to Manzanar.
James Kubo, a Hawaiian AJA who had been on the Mainland for many years, spoke fluent Japanese and he interpreted for the Issei what I had said in English. As Kubo talked, some farmers moved back toward the sugar company officials and they and the others met in a huddle. The company manager came to the platform to inform us that the city commissioners had gone back to town to hold a meeting. We reported this to our men. Smiles of relief showed on their upturned faces, and the meeting became animated with evacuees asking question after question. We asked them to get organized and they nodded their heads.
"They Promise You Full Freedom and Protection"
Twenty minutes later, as night was falling and we still stood talking in the chilly breeze, the manager came back toward us.
"Give them the good news," he said. "The city commissioners have rescinded the sheriff's order. They promise you full freedom and protection!"
And for as long as we stayed in Rupert, we were told, the sheriff, who owned a saloon, would tend to his bar and keep himself scarce.
I asked the manager if there was a newspaper in Rupert. He took me to an elderly editor who promised us favorable editorial comment. The editor kept his promise and as I recall, he hammered away on this line: "The Japs are good spenders."
An Education In Democratic Processes
That night we held election for camp councillors and committeemen. It was extremely encouraging to find the Issei taking so active a part in our common welfare. Some of them told me that this experience was an education in democratic processes. We formed a labor committee which was to play an important role in ironing out grievances between our group and the farmers.
Before we retired night some laborers wrote alarming letters to relatives in Manzanar—about the sheriff, pup tents and bare canvas cots. When morning came, I went to the washroom. An old Issei, with misery and anger written on his face, came rushing up to me. He yelled at me that he had inadequate blankets on the canvas cot it was so cold, he had not slept a wink. I was blamed for his suffering because I had been elected chairman of the camp council the night before. This was a good sign, an indication the we would get backing from the laborers to bargain effectively with the company and the farmers.
People Saw the Injustice
In the ensuing days, some laborers wrote back to Manzanar about the back-breaking toil, and this was especially so among those who had never done a lick of farm work. And sugar beet thinning is one of the most difficult of "stoop" jobs.
Because of the letters written back from Idaho and the concern they caused among relatives and friends in Manzanar, the director of Manzanar and an Issei spokesman came to Idaho a few weeks later to investigate conditions. But by then, conditions had improved through the give-and-take bargaining of the volunteers on the one hand and the farmers and the company on the other.
Cool headedness prevailed among the people of Idaho and they were not swept by the anti-evacuee hysteria. While we had been put behind the barbed wire fence of Manzanar, ostensibly for security reasons, the people of Rupert and vicinity quickly saw the injustice of uprooting and locking away 110,000 people because of common ancestry.
Like the Smith Act victims of today, they had not committed any overt act of crime against this country. But the hysteria whipped up by special interest groups brought fear and hatred and persecution, and revoked civil liberties en masse.
Governor Clark Made No Mention of "Japs"
One evening as I returned from work in the fields, the sugar company manager and William S. Bronson, director of the U. S. Employment Service labor camp, told me that Governor Clark was coming to Rupert to deliver a political speech. Our tent camp was too close to town and they were afraid the governor might give an inflammatory speech on "Japs" which might provoke a few "trouble makers." They said the farmers and the merchants were all for us and they would tell the governor how they felt about the evacuees who were saving their crops.
Instead of posting guards of our men and some farmers around our tent camp, the two suggested that we move to a former CCC camp further away from Rupert. The accommodations at the CCC camp were good, with frame buildings and adequate living quarters. We agreed to move.
The governor came and made his speech. He made no mention of "Japs." The efforts of the people to lick hysteria had won.
The America We Look For and Struggle For
The short sugar beet thinning season was over. We worked in the potato and bean fields. As the slack season approached, some of us decided to go back to Manzanar, to return to Idaho in the fall to top sugar beets.
The night before the majority of the volunteers left for Manzanar, we invited to our camp the white businessmen, farmers, professional people and Mexican migratory laborers in Rupert and nearby Burley. We put on Japanese skits and! the Issei sang in Japanese. The program was immensely successful and the whole white community and the Mexican workers laughed and enjoyed the fun with us. This was the America we look for and struggle for, a nation of people of various cultural backgrounds, living in harmony and in enjoyment.
How different this was from the chopping down of cherry trees in Washington, D. C., and the re-naming of the Japanese tea garden in a San Francisco park, just because the U. S. was fighting Japanese militarism and its financial and industrial backbone.
Our Struggles were Basically Common
Here were Mormons of the sugar company, a persecuted minority who had suffered in the past. Here were German immigrants and their offspring who had lived through World War I and after, when they were targets of attack from bigoted elements. And the Mexicans were there, unorganized and drifting from one farm area to another, exploited and abused. And we were the homeless exiles from the West Coast.
We spoke of our common struggles, of the need of preserving and extending constitutional rights. If the people got together and kept special interest elements from dividing them, we would have a better country, a better world.
Such was our agricultural furlough experience. Other evacuees from other relocation centers experienced similar success. All this contributed to paving the way for more ambitious and planned relocation of evacuees from the center to outside communities. A hitch anywhere in our agricultural furlough would have retarded, not helped the resettlement program which came into effect months later.
We all had found new hope out of this experience, and a better perspective.