The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (6 page)

Prior to Pearl Harbor, Biddle had been Eleanor’s strongest ally in the battle to protect the rights of legal immigrants and their children. About a month before Pearl Harbor—on November 5, 1941—Eleanor, concerned in particular about the threat to Japanese immigrants on the West Coast, wrote a letter to Biddle asking about
the “possibility of loyal Japanese aliens of many years’ good standing becoming naturalized citizens.” In his reply on December 1, Biddle explained that Japanese aliens could not “enjoy the privilege of naturalization.” State and federal laws prohibited them from becoming citizens. They were also banned from owning land. For Japanese to become naturalized citizens would require amendments to both federal and state laws. “However,” continued Biddle, “they should be reassured by the knowledge that their alien status will not prejudice them in any way or deprive them of scrupulously fair and just treatment, so long as they remain loyal and engage in no activities hostile to the United States or inimical to its welfare.”

Only six days later, the attack on Pearl Harbor forced Biddle to take the very steps against Japanese, Germans, and Italians that he had assured Eleanor in his letter would never be taken. Biddle had been naive to think that he could stop it. Though Biddle repeatedly pressed Roosevelt not to carry out internment orders, he was the newest member of the cabinet and he did not have the power to overcome public opinion.

Roosevelt’s position was clear: the war could not be lost. Shortly after the president and first lady returned to the White House after the speech to Congress, Biddle reluctantly took over an executive order authorizing the attorney general—that is, himself—to intern enemy aliens previously identified on Hoover’s black list. By the next day, 1,212 Japanese enemy aliens had been taken into custody, along with 620 Germans and 98 Italians. They came from all parts of the United States. “I do not think Roosevelt was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” Biddle later wrote. “He wasn’t theoretical about things. What must be done to defend the country must be done.”

Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States. Roosevelt called Biddle to come at once to the White House, this time with an appropriate proclamation of war. Biddle arrived in the afternoon. The president was in his study with Admiral Ross T. McIntire, the White House physician. Roosevelt was
suffering from a sinus attack, brought on by the stress of the events of the last few days. When Biddle entered the room, the doctor was bent over the president, swabbing out FDR’s nose.

Roosevelt looked up, motioned for Biddle to take a seat, and asked, his voice hoarse and harsh, “How many Germans are there in the country?”

“Oh, about six hundred thousand.”

“And you’re going to intern all of them,” said the president angrily. “I don’t care so much about the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different: they may be dangerous.”

“Please, Mr. President,” the doctor pleaded. FDR sank back into his chair, and McIntire resumed the swabbing as Biddle quickly withdrew. When he looked back, he noted that Roosevelt’s color had returned, his cheeks were ruddy. Biddle later wrote that the prospect of war, so long in coming but now here, had revived Roosevelt.

James H. Rowe, who was Biddle’s assistant and a confidant of Eleanor’s, continued to press the first lady’s case. On February 2, 1942, in a private memorandum to Tully, Roosevelt’s private secretary, Rowe warned that the president would soon receive a proposal by the military to relocate and intern all Japanese and Japanese Americans in California. Rowe opposed the proposal. He believed it was unconstitutional and driven by public hysteria.

“Please tell the President to keep his eye on the Japanese situation in California,” wrote Rowe. “It looks to me like it will explode any day now.” He told Tully that “public pressure” to move all Japanese out of California—citizens and legal aliens—was “tremendous.” If that happened, Rowe wrote, “It will be one of the great mass exoduses of history.” He also warned the mass arrests would require the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the ancient right of detained prisoners to seek relief from unlawful imprisonment.

Rowe’s admonitions went unheeded. Seventeen days later, on February 19, Roosevelt accepted the argument of military leaders and the increasing public demands for evacuation of all Japanese
from the West Coast states. On that day, Roosevelt signed the War Department’s blanket order—Executive Order 9006. The order required the forced removal of all people of Japanese descent from a “military zone” that included the entire state of California, the western half of Washington and Oregon, and the southern part of Arizona. Germans and Italians who lived in the zone were also subject to evacuation and internment, but because of their larger numbers were not evacuated en masse.

When Eleanor heard of Franklin’s decision, she was disappointed. Even though the country was now at war, Roosevelt’s order, signed in his own hand, seemed to her a violation of democracy at home. For more than one hundred thousand people to be taken from their homes without any charges or chance to defend themselves against accusers seemed intolerable.

Eleanor went directly to Roosevelt and asked if they could discuss the issue. “No,” he told her coldly. And then he asked her never to mention it again.

When the novelist and humanitarian Pearl Buck, Eleanor’s friend, wrote to her protesting the “inhuman and cruel treatment” of the Japanese, an action Buck compared to the actions of the Nazi Gestapo, Eleanor replied, “I regret the need to evacuate. But I recognize it has to be done.” All through the war, Eleanor and Franklin would maintain their different stances. In the end, the president’s decision was the only one that mattered. However passionate an ally Eleanor was to families such as Ingrid’s and Sumi’s, her duty was to support her husband’s decision, and she did.

Earl G. Harrison, Roosevelt’s new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, stood, on the morning of November 6, 1942,
in a place so strange that it might have appeared imaginary to him. Before him stretched a desolate prairie of dusty soil, dry cactus, and a variety of wild, dense shrubs. The small town of Crystal City was named for a vast stretch of artesian springs, now dangerously dry due to a drought. The landscape was incongruous to the town’s name. Thirty-five miles to the west, the flat, bleached-out land emptied into the Rio Grande, and across that river the land stretched wide into Mexico. Locals called the region the Wild Horse Desert. It had a between-worlds feeling, not quite Mexico, not quite America.

Sixty-five million years before, in the Late Cretaceous era, this desert was the floor of the ocean. When the waters receded, deposits of oil and salt domes were left, grown over by grasses, plants, and trees. Small, peaceful groups were the first to live on the land. For sustenance, they gathered roots, hunted deer, and fished in the Gulf of Mexico. Apache and Comanche, warring tribes, followed them. The first European—Cabeza de Vaca—didn’t arrive until the sixteenth century. De Vaca was so struck with the loneliness of the land, so vast and so barren, that he named it El Desierto de los Muertos, the Desert of the Dead.

When Anglo settlers streamed into Texas in the 1820s, most colonists
steered cleared of this forbidding brush landscape, calling it “heartbreak country.” Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas settlement, preferred the rich, wooded lands of East and Central Texas. After a trip to Matamoros, Mexico, Austin wrote of the land near the future Crystal City, “It is generally nothing but sand, entirely void of lumber, covered with scrubby thorn bushes and prickly pear cactus.” On March 2, 1836, Austin and other Texas colonists, many of them slaveholders and secessionists, formed an independent republic. The new Republic of Texas had its own Texas Constitution, capital in Austin, and flag. Texas was its own nation—unto itself. Nonetheless, South Texas, where Crystal City was located, continued to function as it always had—as a direct channel into Mexico. As late as 1839, the Texas maps described South Texas this way: “Of this section of country little is known.” In those days, maps of Texas stopped in San Antonio, even though Texas extended farther south, all the way to the Rio Grande River and into Mexico.

One hundred and twenty miles from San Antonio sat the small Texas town of Crystal City. Large ranches dominated the border area. On both the US side and the Mexican side,
vaqueros
, Mexican cowboys, worked cattle on horseback. In 1905, two bankers from San Antonio, Carl Gross and E. J. Buckingham, bought a ten-thousand-acre ranch and platted the town site of Crystal City. They subdivided the ranch into ten-acre farms and set about selling the area to unsuspecting outsiders as a Garden of Eden. With other owners of large ranches, Gross and Buckingham invested $345,000 to build a rail line to connect San Antonio, Uvalde, and the Gulf of Mexico. The SAU&G line originated in 1909 in Crystal City and Uvalde, and by 1914 was extended between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. By 1914, the line, nicknamed the Sausage, was completed. Before the railroad arrived, Crystal City had a less-than-thriving population of 350 souls and no reliable connections with the outside world. The culture was built around cattle. With the arrival of the railroad, small farmers, many from the Midwest, made their way to South Texas. Most of the new residents brought
farming methods and equipment unsuitable to the arid land. They introduced sheep, which ate closer to the ground than cattle, causing overgrazing and ferocious conflict between the ranchers and the sheep owners. Yet over time, progress came to Crystal City. Fields of Bermuda onions and spinach were planted. Cotton gins hummed. In 1928, Crystal City became the county seat of Zavala County.
The train was a lifeline for the tiny town. In 1930, 3,959 train cars of spinach, 443 cars of onions, 214 cars of vegetable plants, and 140 cars of cattle were shipped from Crystal City.

Twelve years later, when Harrison arrived in Crystal City, the population had climbed to six thousand, 90 percent Mexicans and their children, most born in America. The town was divided into two segregated neighborhoods. Mexicans lived to the west, many of them in fifteen-by-twelve casitas made of adobe. In the morning, women hosed down their porches and watered their trees and plants. In the late afternoon, men gathered in backyards under the merciful shade of pecan, orange, and tangerine trees. They pulled chairs around small tables and listened to Spanish-language radio and played dominoes. To the east lived the Anglo population, farmers, small-business owners, doctors, teachers, and police officers. Though Anglos were newcomers to a land that was originally part of Mexico, they nonetheless saw themselves as dominant and viewed the Mexican Americans as outsiders. Schools were segregated, as were hospitals and funeral homes. The language spoken on the streets was a hybrid: English, Spanish, and both languages rolled into one, a mixture called Tex-Mex. In so vast and isolated a region, identity was confused and complex.

From his house in Rose Valley, a bucolic suburb of Philadelphia, it took Harrison three days on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to arrive in Crystal City. At forty-three, Harrison made a striking impression—grave blue eyes, wavy blond hair, strong jaw, broad shoulders, a face animated with thought. His friends called him an “indefatigable worker” and marveled at his capacity for long hours on the job. His secretary, Miss Margaret Paul Parker, who worked
by his side six days a week for twenty-five years, described him as “always industrious,” a “real doer.” Harrison traveled to Crystal City that day to consider the town as a possible location for the only family camp for internees and their families during World War II. This much Harrison knew for sure: the future camp would be busy and require enough space and facilities to house as many as four thousand internees and their families at any given time during the war. Not many places in the United States offered enough empty space to accommodate Harrison’s needs, but Texas, a state larger than Spain, certainly did.

As commissioner of the INS, which in 1940 had become part of the Department of Justice, Harrison had jurisdiction over twenty-two district offices and ten internment camps that housed the aliens of enemy countries. During the war, the US government operated more than thirty camps, some administered by the Army; others by the War Relocation Authority, a civilian agency created by Roosevelt; and others as federal prisons, where prisoners of war were held in isolation.

The camp at Crystal City would be the largest INS camp, used to intern a wide variety of prisoners of war, including Germans, Japanese, and Italians, from the United States and thirteen Latin American countries—and their wives and children, many born in America. Many of these men were leaders in their respective communities—Buddhist and Shinto priests, German and Japanese businessmen, men of great wealth and influence from Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Panama, and other Latin American countries. All of these enemy aliens had been separated from their bewildered families upon their arrest.

In Harrison’s mind, the need for a camp to reunite families was a humanitarian step, one of many reforms he hoped to make as commissioner. He had his hands full, especially with the Latin American phase of the internment.
In 1938, Roosevelt became convinced that in the event of war, Axis nationals living in Latin America would engage in pro-Axis propaganda and espionage. In October
1941 the State Department had reached secret agreements with Panama, Peru, Guatemala, and the other countries in Latin America to restrict Axis nationals living in their countries and to prepare for their arrest and deportation. The FBI station agents, known as legal attachés, were stationed at US embassies throughout Latin America. As early as July 1941 newspapers in Latin American countries published La Lista Negra—the black list—of Axis nationals. Hours after Roosevelt declared war on December 8, Guatemala froze the assets of Japanese, Germans, and Italians, and restricted travel. Costa Rica ordered all Japanese interned. Police in practically every Latin American country, except Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil, which had their own internment camps, arrested fathers first, held them in jail, and deported them to the United States on American troop ships. Their families were then arrested and deported as well. Those arrangements had been made by the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State. The justification for the arrests, from the point of view of the United States, was to protect national security. The media reported nothing about the deportations. Some of the countries—including Peru, which arrested 702 Germans, 1,799 Japanese, and 49 Italians—deported Axis citizens for economic motives. In return for delivering Axis nationals to the United States, the governments seized their homes, businesses, and bank accounts.