A Circus in Tulare: The Career of Representative Alfred J. Elliott and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

The wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans was not only one of the great stains on American history but also one of the largest domestic projects undertaken by the federal government during World War II. Although the U.S. government mobilized the nation to engage in total war against the Axis powers, few initiatives on the home front required the scale of organization and resources—resulting in long-lasting legal consequences—as the forced removal of 110,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry, more than two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. The incarceration began when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Immediately thereafter, the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, using their newly vested powers to designate military areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded,” began the gradual process of removing and then incarcerating all families of Japanese ancestry, regardless of citizenship and their rights of due process. Although the Western Defense Command assumed responsibility for the initial detention of Japanese Americans in temporary detention centers, the government created a new bureau, the War Relocation Authority, to develop a network of ten permanent camps to hold Japanese American families.¹

In the middle of this massive initiative were several members of Congress. In the weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a cadre of representatives and senators, mostly hailing from the West Coast, pressured President Roosevelt to take swift action and defend their districts by rounding up Japanese Americans, without consideration for their constitutional rights. When Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, it signaled not only his willingness to use executive power in the mistreatment of Japanese Americans but also marked the beginning of greater congressional involvement. From the initial planning stages through the closure of the last War Relocation Authority camp in March 1946, members of Congress participated directly in shaping official policy.² For example, Congress passed enabling legislation, namely Public Law 503, that enforced Executive Order 9066. The congressional Tolan, Dies, and Chandler committees successively held public hearings on questions involving exclusion, removal, and incarceration.

Japanese Americans found few supporters in the halls of government, including their elected representatives in Congress. While some, such as Senator Sheridan Downey of California and Robert Taft of Ohio, regarded the incarceration as a misstep, no member of Congress in 1942 stepped forward to publicly defend the Japanese American community.³ Others, like liberal California Representative Jerry Voorhis, initially questioned the idea of singling out Japanese Americans but acquiesced to pressure from their colleagues. In the end, most West Coast members of Congress catered to certain groups that dominated the political machines of the West Coast and supported the imprisonment of their Japanese American neighbors.⁴

Among the West Coast delegation, several individual representatives and senators were outspoken in their views that Japanese Americans did not belong on the West Coast. One such individual was Alfred James Elliott. The representative of California’s 10th Congressional District—which included the Central Valley—Elliott ranked high among politicians who advocated Japanese American exclusion beginning well before February 19, 1942. In the first months of the incarceration process, Representative Elliott leased his own private property, the Tulare Fairgrounds, to the federal government for use as one of the twelve California temporary detention cites, euphemistically referred to as “assembly centers,” constructed by the U.S. Army to hold Japanese American detainees while the War Relocation Authority constructed permanent camps.⁵ Elliott capitalized further on the policy by turning the Army’s construction of the Tulare Assembly Center into a media sideshow, grandstanding at the local and state levels to raise his own political profile. In April 1942, Elliott led efforts to incarcerate all Japanese Americans living in the eastern sections of Kern and Tulare counties, areas the Army had declared safe from removal and to which thousands of Japanese Americans had hastily relocated following Executive Order 9066.⁶

Elliott was only one of several West Coast congressional delegates who actively advocated for incarceration, but his personal reasons for doing so have thus far escaped scholarly scrutiny. Elliott’s crusade to remove Japanese Americans from Tulare and King counties underscores the ways in which powerful individuals manipulated a national tragedy for personal financial and political gain. This article contributes to the existing scholarship in an important way by focusing on the actions of Congress in the wartime incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans. Whereas previous studies have focused on the role of the executive or the significance of judicial rulings on constitutionality, the case of Elliott demonstrates the centrality of Congress in shaping and managing official policy.⁷

To be sure, Congress has not been entirely absent from the existing scholarship, but it has only received limited attention from scholars. For example, political scientist Morton Grodzins’s groundbreaking 1949 study Americans Betrayed offers a cogent analysis of how Congress and various pressure groups pushed President Roosevelt to enact Executive Order 9066. Grodzins identifies the West Coast congressional delegation as an “ad hoc bipartisan caucus of representatives of the Western region” with the capacity of holding hearings and producing reports to grab public attention. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, argues Grodzins, the delegation used their political weight to secure the removal and incarceration of West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans.⁸ Grodzins mentions Elliott’s statements before Congress, though without exploring the representative’s personal role.⁹

Similarly, in Concentration Camps USA, Roger Daniels presents Congress as one of several official and unofficial entities pressuring President Roosevelt, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and other leaders to authorize military removal of West Coast Japanese. Daniels shows how the actions of Congress were part of a chain of events that resulted in Biddle’s acquiescing to the War Department and Roosevelt’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066. More importantly, Daniels demonstrates how Congress “helped prepare and crystallize public opinion” in ways that created an atmosphere of intolerance.¹⁰ Greg Robinson’s 2001 study By Order of the President examines the complex relationship between Congress and the Roosevelt administration. In addition to providing a detailed portrait of Roosevelt’s decision-making process in regard to Japanese Americans, both before and after Executive Order 9066, Robinson shows how the White House and War Relocation Authority Director Dillon S. Myer were buffeted by attacks from hostile Congress members over their treatment of the inmates.¹¹ Lastly, David Neiwert’s Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community offers a stirring companion to the Elliott story by showing how local individuals in Washington State mobilized anti-Japanese sentiment against their neighbors. Neiwert movingly follows the lives of several Japanese Americans in the town of Bellevue, Washington. One particular individual, local newspaper publisher Miller Freeman, devoted significant energy throughout the war toward fomenting anti-Japanese hatred among the locals in order to keep Japanese Americans from returning to Bellevue—a sentiment shared by many xenophobes on the West Coast like Elliott.

Finally, this article aims to rekindle interest in the role of government officials in the incarceration. As shown, most—but not all—of the first generations of historiography took a top-down approach, focusing on government officials. In recent decades, historians have rightly shifted their primary attention to the experiences of the Japanese Americans who suffered as a result of the incarceration and their battles to earn redress from the government.¹² This new scholarship has not only enriched the field but has also given a voice to a community that had long been silenced, and now it is rightly the core of studies on the incarceration and its aftermath. It is worth reminding readers, nonetheless, that despite the wealth of scholarship on the incarceration, the actions of government officials were vital to the status and experience of Japanese Americans during World War II, and much of the decision making behind those actions remains uncharted territory.

This article therefore offers a microhistory of how specific members of Congress participated in the incarceration of Japanese Americans through the story of Alfred J. Elliott. As will be shown, Elliott coordinated his actions with powerful local farmers anxious to eliminate Japanese competition and racist nativist organizations determined to push out Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Pressuring the Army Western Defense Command’s leadership, Elliott and his conspirators called for the Army to remove those Japanese Americans living in the Western Defense Command’s Military Area 2, a stretch of land in the inland areas of California, Oregon, and Washington where the Army did not initially require Japanese Americans to report to camps. This close examination of one representative’s interactions with local interest groups and Army officials demonstrates how the racism and cupidity of individual public servants contributed to the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Elliott was not the sole politician active in whipping up anti-Japanese hysteria nor the loudest voice in the room—rather, he was typical of members of the historic West Coast political machine who manipulated anti-Asian hatred to garner support from elites and working-class Whites. Like the Southern barons in Congress who forced the Roosevelt administration to exclude African Americans from much of the New Deal in order to preserve White supremacy in the region, as Ira Katznelson poignantly demonstrates in Fear Itself, Elliott and several other members of the West Coast congressional delegation successfully pressured the federal government and the military to implement policies that worked for their particular benefit.¹³

Second, this study shows how thoroughly the U.S. Army, as well as the executive branch, responded to legislative directives. Although the Army justified the forced-removal policy under the guise of “military necessity,” in several cases Army officials modified their policies to appease local politicians, like Elliott, who wanted Japanese Americans removed from their districts. In June 1942, after intensive lobbying by Elliott and others, the Army agreed to extend their exclusion orders to incarcerate those Japanese and Japanese Americans who had fled to eastern Tulare and Kern counties from Military Area 1. This decision directly benefited Elliott and a select group of constituents, while harming an estimated three thousand individuals—many of whom were also his constituents—against whom no evidence of espionage, subversion, or sabotage existed.¹⁴

Like many of his constituents from the Central Valley, Alfred James Elliott came from a farming background in rural California. Born in Guinda, California, on June 1, 1895, he grew up in the rural town of Winters before moving with his family to Tulare in 1910. In his younger years, Elliott worked as a farmer and livestock breeder—which inspired his future work managing livestock fairs in Tulare.¹⁵ From a young age, Elliott showed an interest in politics. In 1918 he joined the executive board of the Tulare Chamber of Commerce, where he remained a member for nineteen years. He also became a director of the Tulare County Fair Association, a position that led him to locate his office within the Tulare Fairgrounds. He successfully ran for a seat on the Tulare County Board of Supervisors in 1933. In March 1937, following the sudden death of Representative Henry E. Stubbs, Elliott announced his candidacy for California’s 10th Congressional District. Running as a Democrat on a platform supporting irrigation projects for Kern and Tulare counties, Elliott received valuable endorsements from Tulare County newspapers (including his own), which dubbed him “the farmer’s friend.” He won the election by a landslide against Republican candidate Harry Hopkins (not the New Deal official Harry L. Hopkins) (Figure 1).¹⁶

During his tenure as a member of Congress, Elliott proposed legislation supporting irrigation for California’s Central Valley, road development for rural communities, and resources for migrant farmworkers arriving in Kern and Tulare counties. In many cases, Elliott’s farming background both boosted his credentials and earned him support from voters in his district. In one case, Elliott read a statement into the Congressional Record in praise of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, whose portrait of the dismal conditions facing migrants in work camps had drawn outrage from conservatives. Elliott declared that the book accurately portrayed the subject.¹⁷ Although a member of the Democratic Party, Elliott was often critical of the New Deal and blocked efforts to support workers’ rights (for example, he was opposed to the forty-hour work week). While he presented himself as a representative of the average citizen, he criticized union leaders like John L. Lewis for taking advantage of workers.¹⁸

Much of Elliott’s work in Congress related to projects that directly affected the areas of the Central Valley. His greatest initiative was the development of the Central Valley Project, a large irrigation project that provided water to farms throughout Tulare and Kern counties. Elliott orchestrated the appropriation of congressional funding for the construction of the Friant-Kern Canal, both before and during the war. When appropriations for the canal stopped following U.S. entry into World War II, he urged Congress to support the canal as a necessary part of the war effort. Elliott proudly told the Bakersfield California on August 8, 1942, that he had garnered over a million dollars in funding for the canal project.¹⁹ In 1943 Elliott filed a complaint against the U.S. Navy’s agreement with Standard Oil of California to develop the oil-rich lands surrounding Elk Hills. Describing the deal as having “the inklings of the Teapot Dome Scandal,” Elliott accused Standard Oil of war profiteering and orchestrated a campaign to prevent the deal from happening until the completion of a formal investigation the agreement. As will be seen, Elliott targeted government projects that engaged in wasteful spending, often stating that such projects would bankrupt the nation.²⁰

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Elliott joined the chorus of anti-Japanese voices on the West Coast. As a member of the West Coast Congressional Delegation—which included senators and representatives from California, Oregon, and Washington—Elliott served as a member of the Subcommittee on Alien Enemies, where he vehemently called for the expulsion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. While members of the committee in 1942 agreed that action needed to be taken to protect the West Coast, a clique within the committee focused on targeting Japanese Americans. Senator Sheridan Downey recalled that Elliott and Representative Leland Ford were “exceedingly unreasonable at [committee] meetings, shouting and swearing at the top of their voices and yelling all sorts of accusations at the Japanese Americans.”²¹ The committee maintained an extended dialogue with Major Karl R. Bendetsen, the Western Defense Command’s congressional liaison, about the logistics of dealing with Japanese Americans on a large scale, and members encouraged both the Army and other members of Congress to support the idea of forcibly removing Japanese Americans en masse from the West Coast. On February 12, 1942, the committee submitted recommendations calling for “the immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage and all others, aliens and citizens alike, whose presence shall be deemed dangerous or inimical to the defense of the United States.” The committee’s recommendations had a calculated effect of helping sway Roosevelt toward supporting forced removal. On the floor of the House, Elliott made several statements in support of incarceration.

On February 18, the Rafu Shimpo of Los Angeles ran a morose story on congressional approval for removing Japanese Americans from California. The article cited statements made by congressmen Leland Ford, Harry Englebright (House Minority Whip), and Elliott, who all insisted that “all of California should be declared a strategic area and martial law declared for evacuation of all Japanese, alien and American born.”²² For Japanese American readers of the Rafu, such stories had a foreboding effect that the future would be grim. Indeed, Elliott and the West Coast members of Congress got what they wished for; within weeks of February 19, the Army began initiating the removal of Japanese Americans from their districts. Very few West Coast politicians opposed the decision to forcibly remove thousands of its citizens. When one of the moderate members of the West Coast delegation, Representative John Tolan, decided to investigate the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast through a series of hearings in February 1942, Elliott derisively called his trip “a waste of federal funds.”²³

As the Army began preparations for forced removal, Elliott maintained his vitriol. The shelling of an oil derrick near Goleta, California, by a Japanese submarine on February 23, 1942, spurred Elliott to push the Army for swift action. He further complained about the fact that the shelling occurred within his district (although his district’s portions of the Central Coast were cut in the fall of 1942 during redistricting).²⁴ On February 24, in response to the Goleta shelling, Elliott called for the immediate removal of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast, charging that fifth columnists aided the attack. “Let us see that these American-born Japanese and aliens are removed damn quick from the entire Pacific Coast,” Elliott cried, “not only for our protection but for their protection.” Shortly after speaking, representatives Leland Ford of Los Angeles and John Rankin of Mississippi both joined in and endorsed Elliott’s statements.²⁵ A few days later, on February 27, Elliott wrote to General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, urging him to remove all Japanese Americans from Tulare and Kern counties. Elliott pointedly declared that several prominent leaders from his district, representing the city of Lindsay, local American Legion chapters, and several newspapers, were demanding action as well. Elliott also noted in his letter that several vigilante groups threatened violence against Japanese Americans if the Army did not act quickly.²⁶

Following Executive Order 9066, on March 2, 1942, the Western Defense Command created two zones of exclusion under Public Proclamation No. 1: Military Area 1, which stretched from the coastlines of California, Oregon, and Washington to the center of each state, and Military Area 2, which extended from the center to the eastern border of these western states. The Army announced that all Japanese Americans in Military Area 1 would need to leave, but that there were no plans to clear out those in Military Area 2. Indeed, the Western Defense Command initially approved a scheme to allow Japanese Americans to leave the coast voluntarily and settle in Area 2. General Dewitt announced in Public Proclamation No. 1 that Japanese Americans who resettle outside of western California may avoid detention “and in all probability will not again be disturbed.”²⁷ When Dewitt and the Western Defense Command realized that the scattered dispersions of Japanese Americans angered anti-Japanese groups in other states, he ended the voluntary evacuation policy in favor of forced removal.²⁸ To hold the Japanese Americans confined by official order, as the first stage in their forced removal, on March 11, 1942, the Western Defense Command created a new Army agency, the Wartime Civil Control Administration. The WCCA, directed by a newly promoted Colonel Karl Bendetsen, undertook the creation of holding pens euphemistically titled “assembly centers,” and in late March the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began constructing barracks at a dozen sites across the West Coast. In cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, the famous racetracks at Santa Anita and Tanforan were pressed into service. Elsewhere, fairgrounds in Pomona, Turlock, Fresno, and other cities were taken over.²⁹

Among the sites selected for assembly centers was the Tulare County Fairgrounds. On March 26, the Army began construction on the site of the fairgrounds. Representative Elliott, who continued to manage and use the buildings as his local office, flew to Tulare two days later to confer with the Army. On March 30, Bendetsen telephoned Elliott from San Francisco about the details involved in building the assembly center on the fairgrounds. Elliott declared that he should get a thousand dollars for his crops destroyed by the Army in the process of constructing facilities and listed his concerns over putting the camp site near the business center of Tulare.³⁰ Elliott even went so far as proposing an additional fence surrounding the fairgrounds to separate a nearby hospital from the assembly center. After consulting with his staff the following day, Bendetsen agreed to put up the fence, though he recognized that it was a needless and purely political gesture.³¹

Within a short time, Army officials began to resent Elliott. In one dossier, an Army engineer described Elliott’s attitude during their meeting on March 30 as “very assertive” and “anti-Army.” The engineer attributed some of Elliott’s vitriol to the fact that his lip was swollen due to a bug bite, but also hinted at a slight sense of paranoia on the part of Elliott, who was obsessed with cutting wasteful spending on the project and expressed frustration over the fact that his fairgrounds were selected for the camp. The Army officer also characterized Elliott as a fiscal conservative who criticized federal overspending on projects out of fear that the nation would descend into bankruptcy and one of a small handful of congressmen who voted against the establishment of a forty-hour work week.³²

Elliott’s demands soon grew more numerous and outrageous. On April 3, he telephoned Bendetsen urging him to immediately move out all 150 Japanese Americans from his district for fear that someone would dynamite the wells supporting the Tulare irrigation district. Bendetsen relayed his annoyance with Elliott to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, stating that Elliott never made a single constructive suggestion and simply stymied any progress on the center’s construction.³³ At the same time, though, Elliott continued to push the Army to remove all Japanese Americans from California cities. On April 2, he stated to the press that “we cannot make good American citizens out of Japanese,” and that they should all be put into camps for their own protection. A week later, on April 9, Bendetsen flew from Washington, DC, to Tulare to meet with Elliott in person and survey the areas surrounding the assembly center. On April 10, the military police captain in charge of Tulare Assembly Center took over the offices of the fairground building to set up his headquarters, not realizing it was Elliott’s personal office. Outraged, Elliott demanded that the Army captain leave and complained to Bendetsen, who phoned the Army chief of staff and General Dewitt. The chief of staff agreed to send Provost Marshall Allen Gullion to settle the matter.³⁴

Immediately after Bendetsen’s visit, Elliott sent a press release to the Associated Press criticizing Bendetsen’s handling of the Tulare Assembly Center. He accused the Army of wasting taxpayers’ dollars on the construction of the assembly center, arguing that the camp could have been constructed for “from 45 to 65 percent less” money and that construction had damaged the fairgrounds for the upcoming fair (which had in fact already been canceled, along with other major gatherings that year).³⁵ Elliott also accused one of the building contractors, R. H. Hougham of Hanford, of profiteering from the camp’s construction by taking in a 10 percent profit—an accusation that Hougham vehemently denied.³⁶ The article enraged Bendetsen. In a call to John Abbott, a member of Representative John Tolan’s staff who was involved in Tolan’s report on the forced removal of Japanese Americans, Bendetsen lamented that Elliott “is one of the people who screamed a lot about getting the Japanese under control.” Abbott responded that Elliott was “just probably one of the most unprincipled guys in the whole delegation,” and described Elliott as a man “who’ll knife you anyway they can.”³⁷ The Army Corps of Engineers produced a rebuttal to Elliott’s outlandish claims. The report stated that the amount spent on building contractors was a mere fraction of what Elliott listed in his statement, and that the construction did not damage the fairgrounds. Unsatisfied, Elliott threatened the Army with a proposed investigation unless they moved the center to another location. The threats eventually blew over, and construction of the assembly center moved on (Figure 2).³⁸

Elliott’s hostile and self-interested position was probed by political scientist Morton Grodzins during his interviews with members of the West Coast congressional delegation in mid-1942. In his field notes, Grodzins remarked that aside from pressing for money from the Army for his claims of damaged crops, Elliott used the Army and the purported “mishandling” of the evacuation by Bendetsen as a means of boosting his image among voters. In a conversation with Grodzins, Representative John Coffee of Washington stated that, among the delegation members, Elliott ranked among the most racist of all.³⁹

The next task on Elliott’s political agenda was to extend the border of the exclusion zone to all portions of Tulare and Kern counties. Initially, as noted, the Western Defense Command announced that all Japanese Americans living in Exclusion Zone 1, west of Highway 99, were to report for incarceration. This led thousands of Japanese Americans, with the Army’s encouragement, to move to the eastern parts of Tulare and Kern counties, which were part of Exclusion Zone 2. The new migrants soon became a political target for Elliott, who swore to remove all Japanese Americans in his district. On April 16, 1942, the Tulare County Farm Bureau directed a statement at the Army and Elliott that they would look with “disfavor on any effort to make Tulare County the dumping ground for Japanese that are considered undesirable in other areas of California.”⁴⁰ Richard Stark, director of the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District and regional representative of the Sunkist corporation, also wrote to Bendetsen arguing that Japanese Americans in all parts of Tulare County needed to be expelled to protect the water sources of the region. In response, Bendetsen told Stark on April 24 it was unlikely that Japanese Americans would be removed from Military Area 2, and that the irrigation district was a low priority:

Ignoring Bendetsen’s reply, Elliott and the Tulare groups continued the campaign to extend the exclusion orders to Area 2. A few days later, on April 27, Elliott wired Bendetsen another message stating he needed to remove the Japanese Americans coming into eastern Tulare County: “Has a decision for their removal been reached? Advise me by wire. My people becoming very much alarmed. When can we expect Japanese removed from Eastern and Northern Tulare County? You saw the danger.”⁴² At the same time, White residents continued to antagonize Japanese American families moving to Tulare County. On April 30 George Dean, a senior information specialist for the War Relocation Authority, published a report on the rise of anti-Japanese hostility in Tulare and Fresno counties. Dean documented several cases of residents destroying the windows of Japanese American businesses. Yet he also noted that while many residents were upset by the arrival of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, he found little evidence of vigilante groups organizing to committee attacks.⁴³

Yet Elliott continued to cite mob violence as a means for removing Japanese Americans from the region. On May 4, the Western Defense Command announced in Exclusion Order No. 44 that all Japanese American families in Tulare County residing west of Highway 99 would be required to report to the Fresno Assembly Center by May 13 (Figure 3). Elliott proceeded to persistently lobby Bendetsen and Dewitt to modify their exclusion orders to include the entirety of Tulare and Kern counties. In a letter to Stark from May 9, 1942, Elliott confidentially instructed him to use the local civic organizations in Tulare to pressure the Army to remove all Japanese Americans from the county:

Stark followed through on Elliott’s suggestion and began rallying various groups to push for the complete removal of Japanese Americans from the area. On May 14, Stark reported back to Elliott, stating that he would organize a meeting between the American Legion, the Farm Bureau, and agricultural organizations to strategize lobbying for the removal of Japanese Americans from Tulare. The same day, Stark wrote a letter to Bendetsen encouraging him to extend the exclusion zone further east, stating that “we in the area are left exposed to danger in order to simplify the job of the surveyor.”⁴⁵ On May 18, Tulare County Sheriff John Loustalot reported that the Western Defense Command would require Japanese Americans in Western Kern County to report to assembly centers by the 25th.⁴⁶

The ploy worked; on June 6, 1942, the Western Defense Command announced in Public Proclamation No. 6 that all Japanese Americans would be removed from the portions of Area 2 that included Tulare and Kern counties. The order was not immediately enforced; on June 16, Elliott wrote back to Stark reporting that the Army would move all Japanese Americans from eastern Tulare County into assembly centers when room was available. Elliott finished his response with a promise to “continue to keep after this problem until we are rid of them.”⁴⁷ Bendetsen kept Elliott apprised of the situation; on June 24, when Elliott telephoned Bendetsen about the status of Japanese Americans in eastern Tulare, Bendetsen informed him that the Army had issued orders restricting Japanese American movement and planned to send them to assembly centers when possible. Satisfied, Elliott stated that he would try to pacify the anti-Japanese population of Tulare.⁴⁸ On July 3, the Western Defense Command issued Exclusion Order No. 104, which expanded the zone to include all Japanese Americans in portions of eastern Kern and Tulare counties along with the entirety of Inyo County. On July 22, Exclusion Order No. 108 expanded the incarceration orders to include all land east of Highway 99.⁴⁹ Eventually all the Japanese Americans in the California portion of Military Area 2 were subjected to forced removal and incarceration. When the Western Defense Command published its deceitful final report, drafted largely by Bendetsen, in July 1943, it listed their justification for extending the exclusion zone to Area 2 as “to alleviate tension and prevent incidents involving violence between Japanese migrants and others.”⁵⁰ While several threats against Japanese Americans by local groups were relayed to Army officials by local leaders and politicians like Elliott, the Army’s unwillingness to protect the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans against domestic terrorists at home further underscored the tragic and unnecessary nature of their forced removal.

Between April 20 and September 4, 1942, the Tulare Assembly Center held a maximum population of 4,978 prisoners, predominantly Japanese Americans from the Central Coast counties (San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura) as well as Los Angeles and Sacramento counties (Figures 4 and 5). After being held in Tulare, most were sent to Gila River concentration camp in Arizona. Coincidentally, those Japanese Americans from San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties were from Elliott’s own congressional district. The Army recorded five deaths and eighteen births during the course of the Tulare Assembly Center’s operation. The cost of building the assembly center amounted to $300,000 ($5,789,080 in 2024 currency). Elliott received $1,000 in compensation for the loss of his hay crop near the fairgrounds ($19,297 in 2024 currency)—presumably he did not consider his own claim for repayment as excessive spending.⁵¹ After the last Japanese Americans left the Tulare Assembly Center, the buildings were used for the rest of the war as emergency housing for farm laborers. In April 1945, Elliott lobbied the California government for $44,000 in funding for restoration of the fairground buildings.⁵² Although the funds Elliott regained from the government barely allowed him to break even with his losses from the construction of the assembly center, it amounted to much more than what any Japanese American ever received from the government for the financial losses they incurred by the incarceration.

In contrast to the story of Elliott and his supporters, the tale of those Japanese Americans who fled to Tulare from the coast is tragic. Most faced not only racial prejudice and ostracizing but also great financial loss by making the perilous trek to Tulare. In her memoir Nurse of Manzanar, Toshiko Eto of San Luis Obispo recalled her family’s decision to move to the town of Ducor in Tulare County, a part of Elliott’s district, in order to escape the Army’s exclusion order. “Our sister Kozy and her husband George Fukunaga, who lived in Cambria (about thirty-five miles north of San Luis Obispo), said that they were able to make arrangements to rent a farm at a little place called Ducor, located way inland, east of the restricted line.”⁵³ The Eto family acted swiftly to sell the rest of their property in San Luis Obispo, and moved to Ducor on April 25, 1942—the Army’s set date for Japanese Americans in San Luis Obispo to report to camp. Similarly, Bill Nishimura of El Segundo learned by word of mouth that Japanese Americans east of Highway 99 would be spared from incarceration and moved to Visalia: “I took a dry run to Visalia and made a verbal contract with the farmer there. And on the next-to-the-last day of this evacuation, I loaded my truck and headed for Visalia.” From March to August, Nishimura stayed in Visalia to escape forced removal.⁵⁴

When Japanese Americans arrived in the Tulare region, they confronted another wave of prejudice. As Japanese Americans who had lived in the area for decades recognized, anti-Japanese prejudice was heavily ingrained in the local culture. Nelson Takeo Akagi, who was born in Lindsay, recounted in an oral history that Lindsay barred Japanese Americans from visiting public swimming pools and enrolling in the local high school. In nearby Porterville, Akagi recalled, residents posted a sign declaring “No Japs Allowed.”⁵⁵ For the Etos, who arrived at Ducor in May 1942, local life offered few opportunities. Toshiko recalled Japanese residents telling her family to “stay quiet and inconspicuous so as not to stir the suspicion of the people.”⁵⁶ Conditions were so bad in Ducor that Toshiko left, ironically, to take a job at Manzanar in June 1942. Nonetheless, the Army’s announcement extending the military zone was a shock. A month after her arrival at Manzanar, Toshiko learned that the Western Defense Command would require her family and other Japanese Americans in Ducor to leave their new homes and report to camp. However, unlike other Japanese Americans in the Tulare district, the Etos were allowed to transfer from Poston camp in Arizona to Manzanar to reunite with Toshiko. The Etos hastily entrusted their truck and other property to their landlord, Mr. Mueller, who later returned it to them after they left Manzanar.⁵⁷ Others were less fortunate; Bill Nishimura, who learned in August that he too would be sent to camp, distrusted the government’s offer to store his property in a warehouse. Instead, he left his property with his landlord, only to learn later that the barn housing his property had burned down.⁵⁸

Even after the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, Elliott consistently spewed anti-Japanese hatred, and pushed throughout the war for the permanent exclusion of Japanese Americans from California. On October 13, 1943, Elliott gave a speech on the floor of the House in opposition to allowing Japanese Americans to return to the coast. Elliott wasted no time in showing his racism; he told the House that “the only good Jap is a dead Jap and that is exactly what is going to happen” if they return. The blatant bigotry of Elliott’s words spurred Representative Herman Eberharter to denounce Elliott’s remarks and highlight the sterling record of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the contributions to the war effort made by resettlers. Elliott’s words reached Japanese Americans as well; on October 30, 1943, the Manzanar Free Press reported on Elliott’s speech falsely charging that Japanese Americans had already resettled back on the West Coast, and that, if not stopped, “violence and bloodshed would follow.”⁵⁹ On January 26, 1944, Elliott joined a group of representatives in signing a resolution that called for War Relocation Authority Director Dillon S. Myer’s resignation for his “mishandling” of the Tule Lake uprising. It also called for legislation that would automatically denaturalize any U.S. citizens who expressed loyalty to a foreign state.⁶⁰

Next, Elliott began his own personal crusade against Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes over a rumored proposal to have Japanese American farmers return to the San Joaquin Delta. The rumor surfaced amid Elliott’s effort to counter a new bill proposed by Ickes that would offer parcels of land to returning soldiers in the Central Valley Project. As a part of the bill, landowners in the Central Valley would only receive water access for properties between 10 and 160 acres. Elliott slammed the proposal as “socialistic” and accused Ickes, whose Department of the Interior had assumed control of the War Relocation Authority in February 1944, of wanting to bring in Japanese Americans to replace rebellious farmers. Elliott instead proposed his own legislation that would end the limits on water usage for farms larger than 160 acres. In his column for the Washington Post, Marquis Childs described Elliott’s fight for large corporate farms as a battle between wealthy farm owners and the average citizen.⁶¹ On May 15, 1944, the Tulare Advance-Register published a full-page editorial in support of Elliott’s renomination. The editorial also proposed the wild rumor that Japanese Americans in the camps were in cahoots with Ickes, and that Ickes was raising funds to defeat “loyal American congressmen” like Elliott in their elections.⁶² Ickes’s bill passed nonetheless, and for the duration of 1944, Elliott devoted his efforts to passing legislation to exempt the Central Valley Project from water restrictions. On October 11, 1944, the San Francisco Examiner announced that Elliott’s bill to end the restrictions had died on the House floor. Although Ickes never made public statements about opening the West Coast to Japanese Americans before December 1944, internal correspondence from June 1944 between President Roosevelt, Ickes, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull concluded that public opinion needed to be tested first about resettlement elsewhere. The episode suggests that Elliott and the Tulare newspapers created false rumors regarding Japanese Americans as part of broader political battles.⁶³

On December 17, 1944, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ex Parte Mitsuye Endo v. United States, the Western Defense Command announced the end of the exclusion of Japanese Americans the following day. As a result, Elliott began searching for ways to stall the migration of Japanese Americans from the camps and the East Coast. Starting in 1945, Elliott took charge of the House Public Building and Grounds Committee to investigate housing shortages in California.⁶⁴ In August 1945, Elliott gave a series of speeches in Central California calling for a statewide vote on banning Japanese Americans from California. However, he admitted that such an action would require a constitutional amendment and also asked his listeners to cooperate meanwhile with government efforts to resettle Japanese Americans.⁶⁵ Ironically, Elliott had no problem supporting a plan to use 3,900 Japanese prisoners of war as farm laborers in the Central Valley, under the assumption that the prisoners would be returned to Japan. On September 27, 1945, the Merced Sun-Star noted that Elliott consulted with the farm leaders of Tulare and Kern counties before approving the plan.⁶⁶ The hypocrisy was not lost on Japanese Americans. Several papers, such as the Japanese American–run Colorado Times, reported the news.⁶⁷ On February 16, 1946, the Japanese American Citizen League organ the Pacific Citizen reported on a cotton farmer in Tulare who posted a sign stating: “White country—restricted.” The article reminded readers that even as Japanese POWs picked cotton in the district, Representative Elliot had unapologetically stated a year before that “we don’t want any Japs back here.” As a silver lining to this incident, the same article stated that a group of Black American farmers across the road had posted a sign that read “God’s Country—No Restrictions.”⁶⁸

Elliott remained the representative of California’s 10th Congressional District until his retirement in 1949. During the first postwar years, he returned to his campaign to exempt the Central Valley from water restrictions. In April 1946, California Republican Senator William Knowland expressed support for legislation granting exemptions to the Central Valley Project. Elliott concurred, stating that he would support such a proposal but would not author the House bill.⁶⁹ Upon his retirement, local papers lauded Elliott for his career in Congress. Following his congressional career, Elliott remained involved in local politics. In late 1948 he started his own newspaper, the Tulare Daily News, which was directed at farmers in the Central Valley. The paper folded on November 2, 1949.⁷⁰ In September 1954, the people of Tulare named a new auditorium at the Tulare County Fairgrounds in honor of Elliott as a testament to his service to the city.⁷¹ He died on January 17, 1973. The Sacramento Bee eulogized Elliott as the “Father of the Central California Project,” labeling him as a key supporter of legislation for veterans, labor, and agriculture. No mention was made of his previous anti-Japanese prejudice.⁷² To this day, the Alfred J. Elliott Auditorium, now known as Building 1, remains a fixture within the fairgrounds.⁷³

The story of Alfred J. Elliott’s wartime career demonstrates the integral role that Congress played in instigating, enforcing, and controlling the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II. Elliott’s creation of a political circus during the construction of the center at the Tulare fairgrounds, along with his campaign to modify the exclusion orders to aggravate the suffering of Japanese Americans, showed how some members of Congress stirred their political base to garner support. Elliott’s self-serving appeal to anti-Asian racism—and his willful fanning of those flames—contributed to the Army’s extension of the removal policy to Area 2 and hastened its implementation on a broader scale. Likewise, Elliott’s politicization of the return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast during the war served the same purpose, garnering support from his electorate base at the expense of the well-being and constitutional rights of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Throughout his time in Congress, Elliott handily won each of his elections and, even after his tenure in Congress, remained a popular figure in local politics. Elliott’s grandstanding brought undue suffering to approximately three thousand Japanese Americans who settled in his district east of the first exclusion zone line to avoid incarceration (a total of five thousand, including those from Fresno County, were sent from Area 2 to camp). For families like the Etos and Nishimuras, the Army’s decision to uproot them for a second time not only ruined them financially but also confirmed their inability to trust the federal government to protect their civil rights.⁷⁴

Although Elliott’s tenure in Congress ended not long after the war, he had remained in power in part because of actions against Japanese Americans. The hatred he demonstrated toward his own Japanese American constituents, whose interests he ignored, underscores the ways in which bigotry was an accepted part of West Coast society during the war. His success in capitalizing on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans is an appalling reminder of how many West Coast politicians not only participated in the wartime hysteria against the community but also profited politically from their suffering. More broadly, this study offers a new starting point for thinking about the relationship between Congress and the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Although Roosevelt’s executive order set the wheels in motion for the Army’s forced-removal policy, it was representatives like Elliott who transformed the exodus of Japanese Americans to concentration camps into a political football. As scholars continue to examine the incarceration of Japanese Americans from new angles, it is important to remember the means by which the U.S. government was intimately involved in depriving its own citizens of their natural-born rights on the grounds of race.