Ecumenism and Racial Integration During the World War II Incarceration of Japanese Americans

Steps to a New World Order: Ecumenism and Racial Integration during the World War II Incarceration of Japanese Americans Anne Michele Blankenship A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Advisor: Laurie Maffly-Kipp Reader: Barbara Ambros Reader: Yaakov Ariel Reader: David Morgan Reader: Eric Muller Reader: Grant Wacker © 2012 Anne Michele Blankenship ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract ANNE MICHELE BLANKENSHIP: Steps to a New World Order: Ecumenism and Racial Integration during the World War II Japanese American Incarceration (Under the direction of Laurie Maffly-Kipp) The global wars and totalitarian regimes of the first half of the twentieth century led many Protestants to believe that the world’s only hope for lasting peace rested in a new world order grounded in Christian ethics. This dissertation examines international campaigns for ecumenism and racial integration during that time and reveals how the Japanese American incarceration changed religious and racial boundaries within mainline American Protestantism. Several months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt allowed the incarceration of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent. People struggled with the reality that the United States was fighting a war against ideologies of racial supremacy within fascist regimes while imprisoning American citizens on the basis of their race. If American Protestants could not maintain a just social structure at home, they could not hope to do so globally. Subsequent reflections on the church’s religious and racial structures fostered two unprecedented experiments: church authorities required ecumenical worship within the camps and interracial worship among Japanese and European Americans after the war. In this way, the incarceration ironically created an opportunity to move toward goals of religious and racial unity—steps to a new world order. However, attempts to enforce ecumenical and interracial worship exposed historical tensions among denominations and iii challenged preconceptions about the viability and desirability of united worship. The mixed results of these experiments—primarily failures—gradually led mainline Protestants to expand their definition of unity to include pluralist representations of Christianity as imagined by different sects and ethnic groups. As Japanese Americans realized the value of their ethnic congregations, theologians formed the first manifestations of Asian American theology. Broadly, this project explores how religious people and institutions responded to injustice and global strife during this era. The perspectives and responses of Japanese pastors and congregants, camp administrators and the leaders of national and regional Protestant organizations collude to create a comprehensive view of the situation. Using oral histories, textual sources and visual artifacts, this dissertation contends with race and ethnicity, global ecumenism, the formation of Asian American theology, regional dynamics in the US and the role of religion during war. iv Acknowledgements My first recognition must go to my family for their ceaseless support through my years and years of schooling. My parents never suggested I stop messing around and get a real job, but provided encouragement and whatever help they could provide. My mother read these chapters repeatedly, sharing her valuable outside perspective and editing. My brother, sister-in-law and niece housed and fed me in during numerous visits to the University of Washington’s Special Collections. A visit to my grandmother, who lives near the original site of Minidoka Relocation Center, gave me the idea for this project, for which I am extremely grateful. I also want to thank my advisor, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and my committee, David Morgan and Grant Wacker from Duke University and Barbara Ambros, Yaakov Ariel and Eric Muller at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for their helpful advice from the beginning, when I was first feeling my way through this project, to its conclusion. I don’t know that dissertation defenses are supposed to be enjoyable, but I gathered a wealth of ideas at mine and appreciated every conversation. I am particularly grateful to Laurie and Eric for reading advance drafts of chapters and providing excellent guidance. Archivists within the special collections at the University of Washington, the Graduate Theological Union, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of California at Berkeley, University of the Pacific, the College of Southern Idaho, the University of Arkansas and the Japanese American National Museum all aided my progress. v Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, a digital archive of videotaped interviews, photographs, documents, and other materials relating to the Japanese American experience, has been an invaluable asset to my work. Special thanks go to Brooks Andrews, the Church Council of Greater Seattle, Densho, the Japanese American National Museum and the Occidental College Library Special Collections for granting me permission to quote or include images from their collections. Three grants funded my summer of archival research in California, Washington, Idaho and Arkansas: a Summer Research Grant from the Center for the Study of the American South, a Perry Family Research Award from UNC’s Department of Religious Studies and a travel grant from the UNC Graduate and Professional Student Federation. vi On Words Debates over terminology hint at the vast complexities related to the Japanese American incarceration. Just as there are conflicting historical memories of the experience, different groups and individuals adopt different vocabularies when describing these historical events. The rationale behind these choices ranges from an adoption of common parlance to attempts to minimize the perceived severity of the incarceration to a desire to more accurately describe the past. Throughout this dissertation, I will attempt to use words that most accurately describe the legal realities of these historical events. President Roosevelt and other government officials spoke of building “concentration camps” during the war. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), the government agency commissioned to move people of Japanese descent away from the coastal military zone, employed words in these ways: “Exclusion orders . evacuated . all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non- alien,” initially to “assembly centers.”1 However, an evacuation brings to mind rescue, not arrest. Calling American citizens “non-aliens” made the familiar sound foreign. After this time, the “residents” were transferred to “apartments” in “relocation centers” farther within the interior of the country. Many “evacuees” or “colonists” then “resettled” outside of the camps in the Mid-West or East. 1“Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry,” Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration, 3 May 1942. Such orders were printed on publicly posted notices. vii Public relations photographs supported the WRA’s vocabulary, showing cheerful, industrious residents at work within the centers.2 Their captions told of pioneering efforts to farm barren land. Some people of Japanese descent, or Nikkei, referred to themselves as “colonists” or “pioneers” as well, drawing parallels between themselves and early explorers and settlers of the West, taming desert land for civilization. Supporters and resisters, white and Asian people, citizens and non-citizens regularly used such words for a variety of purposes. Most public discussions of what happened to Nikkei living in the United States during WWII use the words “internment camps” and “internees;” however, these terms have fallen out of favor with many scholars of the period. Roger Daniels’ short article, “Words do Matter,” outlines the historical usage of these vocabularies and encourages the use of “incarceration” because “internment” is a legal term that refers to the lawful arrest of foreign nationals during a time of war. Daniels points out that the misuse of such language compounds misunderstandings about the Japanese American incarceration and veils the reality of the government’s decisions.3 Limiting the use of “internment” to its precise definition also coincides with the word’s use in contemporaneous sources. Most people involved with or affected by the incarceration used “internment” to speak only of Japanese (or German or Italian) nationals in Department of Justice camps. Given the distinctions among these words, I will speak of incarceration camps when referring to WRA relocation centers, except in places where it would inaccurately, 2Dorothea Lange’s photographs showing less idealistic perspectives of the eviction and camp life were censored by the government for decades. Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds., Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 3Roger Daniels, “Words do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans” in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, eds. Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 190-214. viii anachronistically alter the language of contemporary figures or documents. Similarly, rather than “residents,”

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