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2. Forrest LaViolette

Race, Internationalism, and Assimilation

The career and complex views of Forrest Emmanuel LaViolette provide a special window into the question of Japanese American (and Canadian) resettlement and assimilation. LaViolette, a University of Chicago–trained sociologist engaged in research on Japanese Americans and cultural values, became a lecturer at the University of Washington in the late 1930s. Even as he conducted his research, he was welcomed into the Japanese community, and achieved an unusual measure of integration for a non–Japanese. After being hired as professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal in 1940, LaViolette further distinguished himself as a scholar of Japanese Canadians and defender of their citizenship rights. During World War II, he returned to the United States and volunteered for service as a social analyst at the Heart Mountain camps. LaViolette's dedication to action for racial equality in the public sphere, which made him stand out among his colleagues, poses important questions about the role of outside “interpreters” in struggles against discrimination. At the same time, his belief in assimilation at all costs, which led him to welcome mass dispersion and resettlement of ethnic Japanese citizens and residents, and his subsequent withdrawal from Japanese North American connections are puzzling and deserve scrutiny.

Little is known about LaViolette's early life. He was born on January 9, 1904, in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. His father, John Emmanuel LaViolette, who was of mixed English and French-Canadian ancestry, grew up in Montreal. His mother, Isabella, was an immigrant from Scotland. His older brother was Dr. Wesley La Violette, later a noted composer and teacher of jazz in Los Angeles.¹ Forrest moved to Spokane, Washington, as a baby. In 1918, he moved to Portland, Oregon. After completing a year of high school, he enrolled at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Portland. After receiving a radio certificate in 1920, he joined the merchant marine as a radio operator on ocean liners. During this period, he sailed around coastal Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia, interacted with native peoples, and made at least four trips to the Far East, including Japan.² After giving up his seafaring and returning to Portland, he graduated from Franklin High School, then enrolled for a year at Willamette University in Salem. He then spent three years as an executive for Montgomery & Co. In the end, he decided on a scholarly career, and in 1930 he enrolled at Reed College in Portland.³ At first LaViolette was interested primarily in anthropology. His senior thesis, written in 1933 under the direction of P. K. Roest, a professor of sociology, was entitled “Japanese Nationalism: A Social Study.”⁴ LaViolette then enrolled at the University of Chicago in sociology. His original concentration was in social anthropology, and it was primarily as an anthropologist that he wrote his M^A. thesis, submitted in 1935, and entitled “Some Problems Relating to the Concept of Culture.”

Over the following two years, as LaViolette completed the coursework for his doctorate and began to think about how to structure his doctoral project, he realized he was attracted more by sociology and by American society. At that time, under the leadership of Robert Park plus such stalwarts as Louis Wirth and Robert Redfield, the University of Chicago's Sociology Department was the brain center of race relations research in the United States. In particular, Park and his colleagues had undertaken a series of studies of minorities, notably “oriental Americans.” LaViolette thus began to turn his attention to the experience of Asians in the United States and to accumulate research for a doctoral thesis covering the “problem dealing with assimilation of the American-born Japanese.” While exactly why he chose to concentrate on Asian Americans is unknown, doubtless his decision reflected both his own West Coast roots and the influence of his professors.

In fall 1936, LaViolette was appointed to an instructorship in sociology at the University of Washington (where he was joined soon after by his wife, Vera). He was dissatisfied with traditional research methods and strove to include himself among Japanese American communities to absorb his subject firsthand. LaViolette was drawn to Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, a Nisei graduate student in sociology eight years his junior. He relied on Miyamoto not only for professional discussions and insights into Japanese American life but also for introductions to others in the community, of which Miyamoto was a native. Miyamoto later affirmed that LaViolette was an enthusiast whose highly intuitive and spontaneous thinking and frankly unstructured method complemented his own more formalized and systematic approach.⁵ The two men became such close collaborators that LaViolette invited Miyamoto to share a house with him and his wife. The unorthodox living and professional arrangement persisted for some three years and worked to the advantage of all concerned—by 1939, LaViolette had completed his dissertation, while Miyamoto had written a long essay, “Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle,” the first scholarly article by a Nisei social scientist.⁶ Meanwhile, the LaViolettes hired a Nisei undergraduate, Michi Yasumura, to join the household as an au pair, although Vera LaViolette continued to do much of the actual work of caring for Forrest (whose ulcer required him to eat a limited diet; Yasumura recalled that he used to throw parties and buy all the food he could not eat to have the pleasure of seeing others devour it).⁷

Frank Miyamoto and Michi Yasumura meanwhile introduced LaViolette to James Sakamoto, editor of the Seattle-based Nisei newspaper Japanese American Courier.8 LaViolette soon became a semiregular contributor—the only non-Japanese to be so honored. His columns reflected the assimilationist views and antiracist vision of chief editor Sakamoto.⁹ In summer 1938, LaViolette published serially in its pages his first “scholarly article”—the text of a manifesto he had delivered before the National Conference on Social Work on the citizenship activities of American-born Japanese. In the speech LaViolette stated that the task was fundamentally one of applying social science knowledge to the service of race and cultural pluralism. “Our nation's problem,” he stated, “is no longer that of the melting pot, but of the symphony orchestra.”¹⁰ He described in detail the social structure of Japanese communities, and examined the various restrictive immigration laws, job discrimination, and social stigma they faced.¹¹ In order to prepare for the inevitable crisis that would ensue in Japanese communities as family units broke down, LaViolette urged the government to abolish unequal laws and fund social service organizations (on the model of the National Urban League) to aid the development of a mature political consciousness among young Nisei.¹²

LaViolette completed his dissertation, “Types of Adjustment Among Second-Generation Japanese,” early in 1939. In it, he analyzed the development of Nisei society and its impact on character. As in his Japanese American Courier articles, LaViolette suggested that external factors would determine progress toward the ultimate (and desirable) goal of complete absorption of Japanese Americans into the larger society. He concluded that the acceptance and social integration of the Nisei was a complex matter, since it was not simply an interracial problem, like that of the Negro, but also an international one, as a function of the larger relationship between the United States and Japan and American hostility toward Japan's foreign relations.¹³ In an article summarizing his findings, LaViolette noted that Japanese Americans strongly distanced themselves from the Japanese culture of their parents and were not welcome in Japan (those who went to Japan for education, he explained, had experiences that were “usually not satisfactory”), and so were ripe for absorption into America. He added that Japanese Americans were as individualistic as other Americans and likely would not turn into a “racial bloc” like the Negroes. Conversely, he made clear that the Nisei, given an opportunity to prove themselves, would be completely loyal to the United States in case of war with Japan. “If the Japanese of the second generation are given an opportunity there is no question where their loyalty and patriotism would place them, either in peace or war.…This loyalty to the United States was shown clearly in Hawaii when the question of boycott came up.”¹⁴ Once the dissertation was accepted, LaViolette began on the work of transforming it into a book. However, because of the looming war situation and the widespread suspicion of Japanese Americans, two different publishers who had previously agreed to publish each cancelled his book contract.¹⁵

In fall 1940, LaViolette was hired as assistant professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal. Once settled in his ancestral French Canadian homeland, he was able to make use of his French-language fluency (in tribute to his roots, LaViolette would thereafter sometimes sign his name using the more French “La Violette”). He also declared himself attracted to the job because he could continue his studies of Native communities on the Pacific coast of Canada. Montreal newspapers reporting his arrival described him as an expert on “the yellow peril,” adding that in addition to his five years of study of Japanese on the Pacific coast, he had already visited the Vancouver area in order to make preliminary studies of the “Japanese problem” in British Columbia as well. LaViolette warned that a Pacific war would be deadly for those communities:

The United States is not sufficiently involved for that country to start a war with Japan [but] Japan might readily provoke a quarrel whose proportions could attain war. The Japanese on the Western coast [are] placed in an embarrassing position. They are not wanted back in overpopulated Japan, where, if they visit, they are more ostracized than by Americans on this continent. The Nipponese here cannot escape westernization. Native Japanese detect this easily and shun the visitors.¹⁶

He expanded on these warnings in summer 1941 in a long article, “The American-Born Japanese and the World Crisis,” which, like his previous contributions, was based on a paper delivered at a professional conference. In his text, LaViolette pointed out that the growing war climate between Japan and the United States was forcing Japanese Americans to choose sides more clearly, a process that could also clarify the marginal position the Nisei held in both American and Japanese communities by making American nationalism more salient in determining the actions of Japanese Americans than family sentiment toward Japan. “This means that individuals are now more fully committed to being Americans. It means a more definite incorporation into the American social system.”¹⁷ However, LaViolette was well aware of the threats to the community that still loomed in case of war, and he was prophetic on the potential consequences:

By Japanese novelists the second generation has been portrayed as a tragic character, neither fully Japanese nor accepted by Americans but yet expected to fight for America. Rumors have it that the nisei would be the first to be sent to the front; others say they will be sent to concentration camps. One nisei told the writer that he was “fattening” himself up for the “long lean days behind barb wire.”¹⁸

LaViolette was midway through his second year of teaching at McGill when the United States and Canada went to war with Japan. Although military service was out of the question, as he was nearly thirty-eight, overweight, and medically unfit because of his ulcer, he drew from his youthful radio training and volunteered his services teaching evening radio physics classes to the Royal Canadian Air Force in addition to his regular duties. In marked contrast to this patriotic activism, LaViolette remained startlingly disconnected from the removal of 113,000 West Coast Japanese Americans and 22,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes during 1942 and their confinement in government camps in the interior of their respective countries. Despite his predictions of harsh consequences for Japanese Americans if war broke out in the Pacific, he remained publicly silent as pressure mounted on the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada during spring 1942 for mass action against their ethnic Japanese populations. LaViolette did not join the tiny group of liberal academics who publicly protested mass removal or formed Fair Play Committees. While he corresponded with numerous Nisei friends from Seattle, there is little record that he offered them financial or logistical assistance. (Frank Miyamoto, hired by University of California sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas as a “community analyst” for the Japanese Evacuation Research Study, spent the early war years in the Tule Lake camp.)¹⁹

Nor, however, did LaViolette line up immediately in support of the government, either with supportive public comment or with assistance to the War Relocation Authority, the civil agency created to operate the Japanese American camps. Although the WRA was desperate to recruit social scientists with experience among Japanese Americans to be camp administrators and community analysts (so much so that John Embree was named the WRA's chief reports officer largely on the basis of his having written “Suye Mura,” a short anthropological study of a village in Japan), LaViolette evidently either was not asked to join the WRA or refused, for he remained in Montreal throughout 1942. In contrast, in May 1943 LaViolette took a leave from McGill and entered the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Over the following six months, he served there as an administrator and community analyst for the WRA (LaViolette also took a collection of stark photographs of the camp's guard towers and facilities). He clearly saw his role as one of an intermediary, trusted by both sides, between the camp administration and the Japanese “residents,” someone who could facilitate communication and community stability. He noted in one of his first memos:

It may not be obvious but I think we can see utility in the assumption that the Japanese community is tending to reconstruct itself somewhat along old lines. It should be helpful if we look to see what is likely to be missing due to certain limitations. In pre-evacuation days there were certain white functionaries who represented one of the few points of accommodation between the white and Japanese.…In spite of what we do, it is rather evident that the process of reconstruction is under way and that stability is coming, Here I think community analysts will be vital [in such accommodation]. First, we shall have to more and more make use of, cooperate with, these reconstructed and emerging patterns.²⁰

LaViolette added that he hoped to train schoolteachers and others to fit that role. “It is my guess that we should plan seminars for [schoolteachers] in which we would educate them about the Japanese, about the world in which we live, and also take then into a more active part of WRA program.”²¹ Given his emphasis on education, he was outraged when he discovered that Japanese American schoolteachers were being issued only restrictive teaching certificates by the Wyoming state school board, with the result that they were forbidden to teach elsewhere in the state following resettlement. “Obviously, this is discrimination,” LaViolette fumed. “But it is the same sort of discrimination which had such a large part in determining the entire evacuation. [However,] there is no evidence that the WRA is partner to this discriminatory action.”²²

During his residence at Heart Mountain, LaViolette spent much of his time meeting with inmates and compiling reports on inmate opinion. His goal was to encourage Japanese Americans to make plans to resettle outside camp. During this period, the WRA undertook the large-scale segregation of those the government adjudged “disloyal” (based on a hastily designed and egregious “loyalty questionnaire”) in a separate high-security camp at Tule Lake, and established procedures for granting “leave permits” (a politically expedient form of parole) so that those the government adjudged to be “loyal” could leave camp. LaViolette's chief contribution to the process was a confidential statistical study of those who had given negative or unsatisfactory answers to the questionnaire. His conclusion was that many Nisei acted from confusion, a result of being forced into a stark choice between family demands (the views of parents in prewar Japanese communities being law) and the instructions of the government. To his credit, LaViolette dismissed the influence of pro-Axis agitators, on whom other WRA officials had placed blame for the “wrong” answers by Nisei on the questionnaire. On the other hand, his writings also ignored the very real and swelling protest against confinement that had already led dissident inmates to form the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and would climax the following spring in its organized campaign of resistance to conscription.²³

LaViolette left Heart Mountain in December 1943. His public comments after his departure reveal an odd (and mendacious) defensiveness. In an interview he gave to the Toronto Globe and Mail, he stated, “Conditions are now so good in relocation centers that there are practically no grievances.” Food conditions were “highly satisfactory, and in every other respect the evacuees are carefully looked after.” The barracks, he contended, “have been constructed to provide adequate shelter during even the most extreme weather conditions.”²⁴ At the end of 1944, he published a review of Carey McWilliams's book Prejudice. LaViolette lauded McWilliams's book as a study of the irrationality of American social organization. However, he minimized McWilliams's description of the treatment of Japanese Americans as a particularly “un-American” phenomenon, and his strictures against West Coast whites, by saying that violent attacks of one kind or another on minority groups, particularly racial minority groups, were a long-standing feature of American history. Nowhere in his review did LaViolette even mention the central point of McWilliams's book: that Issei and Nisei were being confined en masse in camps. Instead he underlined the government's effort to atone for the “American wrongs” of evacuation by its concentration on assimilating Japanese Americans, which he contrasted positively with the “slower way of reconstruction” prevailing in Canada.²⁵

His mental block about discussing the camps was thrown into even sharper relief the following year when the Canadian Institute of International Affairs brought out LaViolette's book Americans of Japanese Ancestry: A Study of Assimilation in the American Community, adapted from his Ph.D. dissertation. More than five years had passed since it had originally been submitted for publication. Since that time, the situation of Japanese Americans and their communities had been completely transformed by the wartime camp experience, and LaViolette had ample opportunity, in an afterword if not in revisions, to discuss the impact of camp life on Japanese Americans and assimilation. Yet he remained silent—ominously so—about the wartime experience, and concentrated entirely on the prewar community. He thereby forfeited his chance to present an up-to-date analysis of Japanese American society.

How do we explain this enormous gap, even indifference, in LaViolette's approach to the official treatment of Japanese Americans, a subject that had previously energized him, and his failure to help those who had been his main friends? I think that a large part has to do with LaViolette's extreme focus on assimilation by any means. As noted, he had lauded in his review of the Carey McWilliams book the efforts of the United States government to bring about the absorption of the Japanese minority. Similarly, a generation later, he wrote that “one would be inclined to suppose that in spite of adversity, the assimilation of the children of Japanese immigrants was accelerated and facilitated by the war against Japan.”²⁶LaViolette's attitude also seems to have reflected a patriotic defensiveness about the government and its role. “Already [removal] is defined as a major failure in American ideals,” he complained in early 1946, “although there are aspects of the program that could support claims for major successes.”²⁷ Here he softened his position slightly in later years, and was willing to admit that the “momentous and egregious” evacuation, fueled by West Coast prejudices, had been “our greatest action in abridging civil liberties since the founding of the Republic.”²⁸ Nevertheless, he continued to deny that the camps themselves had been prisons—in some cases, LaViolette remained unable to actually mention the fact that “evacuation” even led to confinement. In 1971, LaViolette wrote in a book review that his goal was to

give the coup de grace to the idea that the Relocation Centers were concentration camps as some have called them. The Washington office and Center administrators quickly came to appreciate the social psychological personal expressions of evacuees coping with the facts of evacuation, public opinion and national policy [and worked] correcting the errors of the democratic process…while continuing to fight a major war.²⁹

LaViolette's caution in confronting and evaluating the wartime experience of Japanese Canadians resembled his position on the Japanese Americans. During spring 1942, as politicians and pressure groups in British Columbia made the case for mass removal of the ethnic Japanese population on the Canadian West Coast, LaViolette did not intervene. In July 1942, LaViolette finally broke his silence by publishing a short account of the situation for the liberal Asian studies journal Far Eastern Survey, which he ultimately followed up with a sequel two years afterward.³⁰ Both were largely factual articles on the history of anti-Japanese prejudice in British Columbia. In them, the author ascribed the federal government's decision to issue the Orders-in-Council exiling Japanese Canadians from the Pacific coast not to racism but to legitimate military factors. In the same way, LaViolette refused in his twin articles to pronounce on the harsh operation of the “settlements” for Japanese Canadians. Instead, he described the state of affairs for the larger community and underlined various unsolved questions of resettlement and readaptation. As with Japanese Americans, the progress of assimilation was his exclusive focus. Thus, he concluded that mass migration away from the prejudices of the West Coast was a positive step, as it might speed postwar assimilation of Canadian Nisei, even if he expressed limited concern for the individuals involved: “Military necessity may have dictated evacuation in part, but provincial rights, the rising level of race prejudice, and the marginal economic position of the evacuees are barriers to a thorough-going solution of Canada's Japa nese problem.”³¹

LaViolette followed two years later with another article for the same publication in which he updated the situation. As before, he refused to offer any judgment on official policy, even Ottawa's cruel confiscation and sale of the property of Japanese Canadians, who were then forced to use the proceeds to pay for their confinement. This policy left those already victimized by persecution financially destitute. The most the author would do was to present it as an unsettled question: “The government looks upon liquidation as good administration. The Japanese look upon it as a breach of faith. They suspect the government has given way to pol itical and economic pressure groups. Available evidence does not indicate conclusively the factors on which the decision was based.”³² After touring the confinement sites in British Columbia, LaViolette remarked positively in a lecture that the Canadian confinement experience had gone much more smoothly and had been less expensive than the American program, but he remained silent on the mass despoiling of property that had made it possible.³³

In the last days of World War II, LaViolette expanded his wartime articles into a pamphlet for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. He then in turn expanded the pamphlet into the prize-winning book The Canadian Japanese and World War II, which was published in 1948.³⁴ The book recounted the story of mass removal in Canada and the steps through which Japanese Canadians had resettled and rebuilt their communities. The work was the first to approach in detail the social and psychological effects of evacuation on the ethnic Japanese community in Canada. Once more, though, the author declined to make recommendations for government action in support of the rights of Japanese Canadians.³⁵ Although critics were unanimous in praising LaViolette's detailed and judicious presentation of the record of the wartime events, Tomatsu Shibutani, himself a former inmate, perceptively remarked that he was disappointed by LaViolette's failure to examine how the program appeared from the point of view of those affected.³⁶

Paradoxically, given his neutral stance on Ottawa's wartime policy on ethnic Japanese, LaViolette emerged during the wartime and postwar years as a major supporter of Japanese Canadians and their citizenship rights. He started by welcoming Nisei students such as Kim Nakashima to McGill and supervising their work.³⁷ When in 1944 McGill became the first Canadian university to officially bar students of Japanese ancestry, LaViolette helped guide the protests by students and community activists that led to the successful repeal of the policy the following year. While he made no public comment against the policy—no doubt he felt constrained by his position—he privately organized students and helped gain publicity for their efforts. Meanwhile, as early as February 1945 LaViolette gave a well-publicized public lecture in which he claimed that the government's seizure of the property of Japanese Canadians was “open to criticism” and had done more than anything else to arouse racial hostility on an international scale.³⁸ He asked whether Canadians intended “to try to keep in Canada people who feel that this is their home, or…to send to Japan people who are Canadian citizens, among them young people who can neither speak nor write the Japanese language.”³⁹ Shortly after, he termed mass removal a “complete defeat” for the efforts of Japanese Canadians to assimilate, and noted that community members, despite surface acceptance, remained inwardly hostile.⁴⁰ Yet in an article that explored the movement for total deportation of Canadian citizens, he declared against all evidence that the initial willingness of Issei and Nisei to go to Japan was due more to prewar prejudice in British Columbia than to the Canadian government's war time confinement and impoverishment of ethnic Japanese.⁴¹ The following year, LaViolette helped form the Montreal Committee on Canadian Citizenship to oppose government deportation policies. (Again, presumably because of his professional position, LaViolette did not officially join the committee, and he was careful to leave his name off its public manifestos). The committee was successful in finding jobs and housing for Nisei migrants and in challenging the government's policy of involuntary mass postwar deportation of Japanese Canadians.⁴²

In 1949, LaViolette accepted the chairmanship of a joint department of sociology and anthropology at Tulane University. During his years at Tulane, he pursued projects on diverse aspects of race relations, including urbanization in South America, Nazi war crimes against Jews, and housing for minorities.⁴³ His most significant contribution was the 1961 book The Struggle for Survival, on the adaptation of First Nations in British Columbia. After retiring from Tulane in 1967 he served as visiting professor at the University of Toronto, and later at the University of Guelph. In 1973, he returned to Portland, Oregon, with his wife, where he died on September 28, 1989. Over the last forty years of his life, LaViolette maintained an almost total public silence on the question of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, After 1949 he largely ceased to publish research on either group, although in a series of brief book reviews he made a limited attempt to engage the new scholarship on government actions during World War II. Curiously, he made no public comment in support of the redress movement that grew up in both countries in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether his turning his attention to other projects following his return to the United States in 1949-50 was based on a sense that he had completed his work or on the feeling of being stymied by the complexity of the problem is impossible to know.

To conclude, what can we make of the contributions of Forrest LaViolette? An unorthodox academic in his research and career trajectory, he nonetheless held to a strict objectivity in his writing. His approach aroused strong disagreement among later scholars. Ann Gomer Sunahara criticized his impersonality as false objectivity.

When Forrest E. LaViolette wrote…in the 1940s, wartime censorship hindered his efforts. In addition, as a sociologist LaViolette was primarily interested in the exile of Japanese Canadians as a social phenomenon, one that paralleled a similar exile of Japanese Americans. Accordingly, he accepted the explanation of the government of the day—that it had merely responded to a mistaken but overwhelming surge of public opinion in British Columbia. LaViolette was unable—or lacked the interest—to determine how that surge of public opinion materialized, or how it came to be translated into the repressive policies applied to the innocent Japanese.⁴⁴

On the other hand, Rolf Knight credited LaViolette with putting racial issues on the table amid a hostile postwar climate:

In retrospect, the era was the golden age for obscurantist social science and retailored history.…Whole fields of enquiry had been silenced by self-imposed taboos and it became bad form even to mention whole classes of events. When a book like Forrest LaViolette's…arose in class discussion it was sniffily dismissed as unscholarly—meaning that it stuck its nose into a topic which then had been expunged.⁴⁵

What is more difficult to understand is why LaViolette was such a weak reed in the defense of Japanese North Americans against official race-based wartime exclusion and discrimination. On one hand, he was clearly supportive of Japanese Americans and gladly joined in community life. Believing that he could help the Nisei by giving them guidance so that they could more easily be absorbed into mainstream society, he was a generous mentor and friend. In the prewar years, he also took their side, recommending to those in the larger society that they foster assimilation of minorities to bring an end to racial prejudice. Yet out of his interest in the abstract question of resettlement, and perhaps also his fear of alienating orthodox academics by pol itical activism that could appear to slant his work, he remained aloof from overt political activity, despite his behind-the-scenes presence in the fight to protect Japanese Canadians from postwar deportation. Worse, he remained an outspoken apologist for official confinement of ethnic Japanese, even as concerned citizens in both nations deplored the wartime policy and the former inmates campaigned for reparations. Still, both for its qualities and for its ambivalences, LaViolette's work merits further study.