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if-you-fan-a-fire · 6 months ago
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"In 1942, at CPS [Civilian Public Service] camp number 21, tucked into the Columbia River Gorge near Cascade Locks, Oregon, the conscientious objectors in residence put up the rare sustained protest against the federal policy of removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast and locking them up in internment camps. Or at least they fought the aspect of it they could hope to defeat. The men battled (nonviolently) to prevent the removal of one of their number, a pacifist and conscientious objector named George Yamada, who was the only Japanese American on hand. Most of the two hundred men at the camp fought fires, built and maintained trails, and did other conservation work in the nearby Mt. Hood National Forest. Yamada, born in 1918, had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, the son of a man who had emigrated from Japan in 1902 to avoid military service.
The family was Methodist, but Yamada stopped going to services when he was twelve because
I was not impressed by the social application in daily life of Christian teachings. From that age my interpretation of the Gospel of Christ was uncompromisingly pacifist, and I was determined to carry out the pacifist premises of the Christian gospel as I perceived them.
At nineteen, chafing under his father’s authority, Yamada moved to San Francisco. There he worshipped at the Evangelical Reformed Church in the Nikkei community, where the new minister was a pacifist. At San Francisco State, one of his professors introduced him to a visiting A. J. Muste (who led the assembled in singing “God Bless America”). Yamada was certified a CO [Conscientious Objector] by his draft board and arrived at Cascade Locks two days before Pearl Harbor. He arrived in time to meet Bayard Rustin, who visited on a speaking tour for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. At Cascade Locks, Yamada read about Buddhism (his family’s faith in Japan) in the Encyclopedia Britannica with the Hollywood heartthrob Lew Ayres, famous as Dr. Kildare, who had arrived in March of 1942. A vegetarian and free thinker, Ayres risked his career for his pacifist principles and stayed only six weeks. He would eventually serve as an army medic. He was, Yamada recalled, “a man unaffected by fame.”
When the War Relocation Authority demanded that Yamada be transferred to an internment camp, he protested, and the director at Cascade Locks, Reverend Mark Schrock, refused to comply. Yamada also had the support of the other men in camp. Kermit Sheets, one of the COs, recalled:
Wow, that camp blew apart! Because here was a guy as isolated as you could be. We knew George, he was a conscientious objector, for crying out loud! He wasn’t going to send messages to Japan that would make them shoot us! The whole thing was absolutely ridiculous. Then we had loads of meetings as to how we were going to handle it when they came for George. It got extremely tense, verging on the melodramatic…wondering how many people should lie down in front of the car that was to take him away
Letters from Cascade Locks to camps around the country enlisted support from COs at those as well, including invitations for Yamada to relocate to one in Massachusetts, and a readiness, on the part of men in an Ohio camp, “to follow your lead in non-violent direct action if necessary.” Muste also weighed in. Ultimately the authorities settled for pointlessly relocating Yamada to a Mennonite camp near Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he remained for three years. During that time he spent eight days in the county jail as part of a CORE project to desegregate a local theater, after which he was transferred to the camp for incorrigibles at Germfask, Michigan.
There is a thin line sometimes between anarchism and anarchy. Marooned on Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula adjacent to the Seney National Wildlife Refuge, the Germfask resisters demonstrated how easily radical protest can slide toward vanity and nihilism. At Germfask, some men simply refused to work while others drove foremen to distraction by doing everything slowly, partially, and wrong. Chopping down even a small tree would be a daylong project. When directed to clean out a truck platform, the men would spend the day sweeping out a portion. “We got to be experts at not working,” recalled Roy Kepler of his time at Germfask. “We became experts at digging a hole that never got dug.” The camp’s director, sensing the futility of trying to make anyone work and no doubt aware that the war was coming to an end, didn’t require anything, and in return the men tolerated their confinement. One sympathetic visitor was taken aback, just three months after the camp opened in 1944, to find
washrooms the filthiest anywhere, dining habits those of hogs, 75% of the men unshaven, unkempt and dirty, liquor being drunk in the dorms on Sunday morning at church time, almost no project work being done.
Germfask might have muddled along in this way had not the campers thoroughly antagonized their rural neighbors, in part by giving the impression that they would, “attempt to date girls in the high school library, in churches and on the street.” Things went from bad to worse when the press depicted a mutiny among idle COs lolling about on the U.P. while other American boys were fighting and dying overseas. Time ran an exposé of the “studied defiance” of the troublemakers, whom it called “guardhouse lawyers” for their skill at staying within the law while thwarting Selective Service officials. The magazine said these officials were
at their wit’s end. The problem that vexed them: how to deal with a group of draft-age Americans who have refused to fight, who now decline to work, and spend most of their waking hours finding new and more ostentatious ways of thumbing their noses at all authority.
Washington got involved, but nobody had any real answers—and meanwhile the camp descended into conflict and recrimination, with once moderate COs siding with the worst antagonists. The camp’s fourth director, a former serviceman only weeks on the job, resigned and called the CPS system “the re-establishment of slavery.”
When Kepler arrived on January 20, 1945, he recorded his impressions of a bunkhouse known as Tobacco Road, where he found a “Saturday night atmosphere of beer and mixed singing that was somehow pathetic and strained, a put-on performance to convince themselves they were Bohemian.” He told all this to the War Resisters League in New York, where an official responded with the same sort of question Selective Service officials were asking, and that parents would ask a generation later about some new young radicals:
Are they heroes, valiantly fighting a vicious set-up? Are they high-spirited pranksters, gaining a relief that keeps them sane? Are they psychopaths, revealing symptoms that need treatment?
To the extent that Americans respected “conchies,” it was because they stood on conscience. But many at Germfask belied the stereotype of devout war resisters too religious to kill. The crowded and smoky Tobacco Road dorm, so dubbed after Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel of backroads dissolution, featured late night poker games, a coffee pot going all the time, food lifted from the mess hall, and nude pinups all over the walls. Some Germfask campers took their campaign against sainthood into the surrounding communities. Delivered to the nearby town of Munising for a bit of leave, they disabled their vehicle by tampering with the engine and then got drunk at the local bars, where one got into a fight with a soldier outside.
A campaign of vandalism and sabotage at Germfask included clogging toilets, hiding light bulbs and silverware, and spreading an inch of flour on a floor, the better to write obscenities on it in coffee grounds. An even more embarrassing episode occurred on the night of January 30, when some of the men broke into the kitchen and, in a time of national food rationing, made a shambles of the place, dumping a hundred-pound bag of beans, a three-gallon jar of mustard, seven quarts of orange and lemon extract, and thirty pounds of baking powder. They smashed or removed bulbs and oven doors, and in the cooler blended stewed apricots and prunes with steamed rice.
...
At Germfask, Yamada fell in with a militant group of resisters including the soon-to-become-notorious Corbett Bishop. After taking part in a work slowdown, Yamada (with others) walked away from camp, earning himself a prison sentence of three and a half years. At Ashland, Kentucky, where he was sent off to do his time, he was reunited with Rustin."
- Daniel Akst, War By Other Means: How the Pacifists of World War 2 Changed American for Good. New York: Melville House, 2022. p. 176-179.
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