The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (7 page)

Once the Latin Americans set foot on American soil in ports in New Orleans or California, the INS was in charge. Officers arrested them for “illegal entry.” They were deloused with strong showers, sprayed with DDT, and loaded on trains bound for internment camps. Jerre Mangione, an Italian American writer who worked for Harrison at the INS and helped decide where to locate the family camp, later wrote in a memoir about why Latin Americans were deported to the United States: “The rationale for this international form of kidnapping was that by immobilizing influential German and Japanese nationals who might aid and abet the Axis war effort in the Latin-American countries where they lived, the United States was preventing the spread of Nazism throughout the hemisphere and thereby strengthening its
own security.” According to Mangione, many in the INS, including himself, opposed the arrest of Latin Americans. One of the officers in charge of an INS camp told Mangione, “Only in wartime could we get away with such fancy skulduggery.”

In the wake of all that had occurred, Harrison wanted the camps under his jurisdiction to be as efficiently and humanely administered as possible. By law, interned civilians were not officially subject to Geneva Convention protocols that dictate treatment of prisoners of war, but the policy of the US government was that the treatment of enemy aliens should follow the principles of the convention. In most US internment camps the principles were loosely applied. In a manual he wrote for INS officers Harrison insisted that INS “humanize” immigration laws. “Immigration laws often appear to work a hardship on aliens. Officers can humanize these laws at the same time carrying out the intent of Congress and the will of the people. Officers should always keep in mind that their decisions may spell future happiness or despair for those affected by such decisions.”

With Harrison in Crystal City that day were two other people, Willard F. Kelly, Harrison’s number two man, who served as assistant commissioner for alien control, and Dr. Amy Stannard, the officer in charge of the INS internment camp in Seagoville, Texas, a small town near Dallas. Stannard was the incarnation of Rosie the Riveter, a wartime symbol on posters of a woman laborer performing what previously was a man’s work. A graduate of the University of California medical school with a specialty in psychiatry, Stannard was the only woman in charge of an internment camp, or any type of POW camp, during the war. The Seagoville camp opened in 1941 as a federal minimum-security prison camp for women. In the spring of 1942, Stannard’s facility was adapted to an alien detention camp for women and children, and she was named officer in charge. “I was surprised,” she later told an interviewer. “We didn’t have much advance notice, so I didn’t much dwell on the novelty of being the only woman with this kind of job. I had to get to work.”

The women’s camp in Seagoville was built on eighty acres and
was surrounded by a six-foot, woven-wire-link fence topped by barbed wire. The guardhouse was manned at all times by agents of the Border Patrol. Guards also patrolled the perimeter of the camp, sometimes on horseback. The women and children lived in Victory Huts, prefabricated, small dwellings built during World War II, and six dormitories. Many of the women were Japanese, including fifty Japanese-language teachers from California. In addition, there were women and children from Latin American countries sick with flu, some with tuberculosis.

“We began admitting women and children from Central and South America. They were the families of male aliens, of enemy nationals—Germans, Japanese, and a few Italians who had been interned in other camps in the States. They had been caught up in a sort of dragnet because they were thought to be potentially dangerous to the security of the United States,” Stannard said. “It isn’t clear to me why the State Department came to work that out. Apparently it was the result of some fear that Japanese, Germans, and Italians in Central and South America might rise up in some way to endanger the United States. I know of no episodes where that happened, however.”

It was November and the temperature was about eighty degrees as Harrison, Stannard, and Kelly walked around a 240-acre Crystal City site that was used as a migrant-worker camp for Mexican laborers. Later, an additional 50 acres was acquired to the south of the existing camp, enlarging it to 290 acres. Due to the mild winter climate, landowners in Crystal City had four growing seasons a year, much of it devoted to spinach. In March 1937, a statue of Popeye, built of shiny fiberglass, was erected in front of the tiny, one-story city hall in Crystal City. It was dedicated to “the children of the world.” City leaders, all Anglo, proclaimed Crystal City the Spinach Capital of the World. Spinach was referred to as green gold. In 1945, the Del Monte Corporation bought the town’s cannery and produced 2.5 million cases of spinach a year. Popeye became the city’s iconic symbol, a totem with mixed messages. On the Anglo
side of town Popeye meant prosperity, a tribute to the thriving spinach industry. But on the Mexican side of town, where a majority of the citizens of Crystal City lived, the statue symbolized poverty.
“We hated that statue,” said Jose Angel Gutierrez, who grew up in Crystal City and later became a civil rights leader in Texas. “The statue symbolized our servitude to the spinach and the Anglo owners of the company.”

On this day, only a few Mexican workers still lived on the migrant-worker site, which was owned by the Farm Security Administration. When war broke out, many Mexican migrant workers who came to Crystal City from the Northwest and Midwest each winter stopped coming for fear of being arrested. The federal government had doubled the number of agents patrolling the Mexican border, which was in effect closed.

It wasn’t only rock-ribbed Texas conservatives such as Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the feared House Un-American Activities Committee, who stirred anti-immigrant sentiment. In San Antonio, liberal mayor Maury Maverick, who had served two terms in Congress as a loyal Roosevelt New Dealer, called on the chief of police to arm every officer with a submachine gun to defend against German spies who might cross the border from Mexico. Maverick’s edict alarmed San Antonio’s large German population.

At that time, one in every six persons who lived in San Antonio was of German heritage. The central street in town was King William Street, known by German Texans as Kaiserwilhelmstrasse. The street was lined with stone mansions built by the wealthy Germans in San Antonio who formed the mercantile class. Until 1942, San Antonio had a German newspaper, the
Freie Presse für Texas
, which was closed when war broke out. German Texans in San Antonio who were involved in German cultural and singing societies became afraid when they learned that the FBI had arrested several hundred German Texans. Newspapers in San Antonio and Dallas asked their readers to be on the lookout for German agents. The readers responded. An FBI agent in Dallas stated that citizen reports had
led to the arrest of sixty-one Germans, thirty-six Italians, and seventeen Japanese.

On the day that Harrison arrived in Crystal City, the internment of enemy aliens was well under way. Unlike in some less conservative towns and cities on the East Coast, Texas welcomed the idea of incarcerating suspected spies. Five internment camps were in Texas. The camp in Seagoville was occupied by single women and a few families, and the camp in Kenedy incarcerated only men. In San Antonio, a prisoner-of-war camp at Dodd Army Airfield at Fort Sam Houston held primarily German and Italian men. In El Paso, German and Italian prisoners of war were held at Fort Bliss. If the proposed family camp were to be located on the East Coast, opposition would be strong. Harrison understood political nuances and recognized that the establishment of a multinational family internment camp would not provoke hostility in Crystal City. Indeed, it would be welcomed. The farmworkers would be moved out, replaced by Japanese, German, and Italian enemy aliens and their families.

Surveying the site of the migrant-labor camp, Harrison noted what amenities existed. The site had been used to confine Mexican migrant laborers during their work stays, as well as illegal aliens arrested for border violations, and the facilities were stark. None of the 41 cottages or 118 one-room shelters had running water. The workers used outdoor privies. They slept on cots and hung their work clothes on nails.

The land itself was an expression of the American frontier. There were no paved roads. Most of it was farms and ranches, far from large cities. The social setting was western: intolerance, vigilantism, with economic competition the rule. When Mexican laborers at the camp failed to produce, some ranchers resorted to locking them in tiny chicken coops. Mexicans were viewed by Anglos as a subservient class, cogs in the wheels of business and daily life. Mexicans, despite their majority status and historic ties to the land, played the role of strangers in town.

From Gutierrez’s point of view, the camp fit into the political and
economic patterns that were already in place in Crystal City: “Before the war and after, Zavala County existed as a kind of stable dictatorship with the Anglos in charge of the majority population, which was Mexican. As a boy, I understood that I lived in a city in which my Mexican heritage was being subtracted from me, slowly and surely. The Anglos called this process ‘assimilation.’ It did not occur to them that we Mexicans were perfectly happy the way we were. Assimilation meant: We learn to act like Anglos. We don’t get to be ourselves. We were, in effect, subjects on land that was native to us.” The irony was that the majority of German, Japanese, and Italian nationals and their American-born children who were later interned in Crystal City welcomed assimilation. Indeed, they wanted desperately to be Americans. But for the accident of their countries of origin, they would never have found themselves in Crystal City.

Harrison had many practical issues to consider: how many miles of roads would need to be built, how many more cottages erected, the cost of a barbed-wire security fence and a guard tower suitable for twenty-four-hour surveillance. The Farm Security Administration had offered to donate the land, but Harrison realized it would take a million dollars or more to build and maintain the family internment camp.

A precedent existed for converting a government-owned facility to an internment camp. Earlier in 1942, the INS established the camp for single men in Kenedy, Texas, on land owned by the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of FDR’s New Deal programs. On the day Harrison visited Crystal City, the camp in Kenedy was overcrowded with more than a thousand German and Japanese men, and conditions were harsh. Swiss inspectors, acting under the terms of the Geneva Convention rules, found the German internees “in an uproar.” Upon their arrival, seven hundred German internees were lassoed by Texas Rangers on horseback and herded into a stockade. Their living quarters were primitive as well, with internees sleeping in four-men Victory Huts that offered little shelter from the weather. Snakes slithered through the cracks in the walls. Following the protocols
of the Geneva Convention, which required that nationalities be segregated in prisoner-of-war camps, Ivan Williams, the officer in charge in Kenedy, packed the Japanese internees en masse into dormitories notorious for the stench of the communal toilet.

In Crystal City, at least the Victory Huts were secure and the site dotted with a few existing buildings. Still, much of the family camp would have to be built from the ground up. Utilities wouldn’t be a problem. Electrical service could be purchased from the Crystal City Power and Light Co. Natural gas was plentiful and cheap in oil-rich Texas. Telephone service might be a challenge in such a remote location, but there was a local carrier.

From Harrison’s point of view, the isolated location of the camp was also a positive. Crystal City, situated fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred miles from the East and West Coasts, areas that were considered vital to the war effort, was not a likely target for sabotage. It was geographically close to Latin America, from which many families would be transported. By the next day when Harrison boarded the train to make his journey back home to Rose Valley, he’d made his decision. Crystal City would be the location of the family camp.

•  •  •

Harrison’s trip to Crystal City had been a long time coming.
He was born on April 27, 1899, in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, to Joseph Layland Harrison and his wife, Anna. His formal name was Earl Grant Harrison. Grant because he shared his birthday with Ulysses S. Grant.

Both of his parents were foreign-born. The immigrant experience was the primary lens through which Harrison viewed the world. His father, Joseph, was born in England and was brought to the United States as a child by his parents. He settled in Philadelphia and became a moderately successful wholesale grocer. Harrison’s mother, Anna, came from Northern Ireland with her three sisters, all of whom worked in the textile mills in Philadelphia, and died before the age of thirty-five.

Physically, Harrison resembled his father, a robust man who
thought nothing of riding a bicycle from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, a round-trip of 130 miles, on Sundays, his only day off. But Harrison’s strongest memories were of his mother, an amateur actress who performed in stock companies around Philadelphia. In temperament, he shared Anna’s Irish charm and good nature. Like his mother, Earl made a point of rising each day with a smile. The idea of wasting time was anathema.

He grew up solidly middle class and attended Frankford High School, where he was president of his freshman, sophomore, and senior classes. He played all sports in high school, except cricket. Anna died before Earl graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as valedictorian of his class in 1920. After college, Harrison went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1923. That year, he played the role of a hero in a play put on by Mask and Wig Productions, the university drama club.
The heroine in the play was a pretty, dark-eyed student named Carol Sensenig, who, like his mother, was outgoing. Carol’s family came from Mennonites who had emigrated from Germany in 1690 and settled in Pennsylvania in search of religious freedom. The two married after graduation, and Harrison joined the law firm of Sawl, Ewing, Remick and Saul, a distinguished downtown Philadelphia firm. It was exactly the future his mother had in mind for him.