The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (9 page)

On March 24, 1942, Roosevelt ignored Guffey’s opposition and nominated Harrison to the position. Guffey told reporters he would ask his fellow senators to reject the nomination as a courtesy to him. The fight was on.

“A first class row is in the making in the Senate,” the
Washington Post
said that day. “Biddle Dares Guffey on Harrison: Assails Senator as Inconsistent,” said the headline in the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

In private correspondence with Biddle, Harrison offered to withdraw his name to spare embarrassment to Roosevelt but Biddle would have none of it; the fight was now personal. Guffey had taken aim directly at Biddle. In April, the
Evening Bulletin
in Philadelphia wrote, “Guffey today assailed Attorney General Francis Biddle as
the ringleader of a ‘silk stocking’ move to gain control of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania.”

A few days later, the
Philadelphia Record
responded with a defense of Harrison: “Earl G. Harrison is an excellent example of a new type of public servant attracted to government work in the last decade. The politicians now throwing eggs at Harrison seem to forget that the Democrats would never have carried the country and would not have come close to carrying Pennsylvania, were it not for Roosevelt Republicans.”

Finally, Biddle persuaded Roosevelt to intervene, and the president wrote a letter to Guffey:
“Dear Joe: As one old friend to another I want to ask you to forgo your fight on the Harrison appointment. I know how deeply you feel about it, but I do not believe that the matter is one of sufficient importance to make an issue out of it that is bound to embarrass a lot of your and my good friends. Will you do this for me? F.D.R.”

The following day, Guffey withdrew his opposition, and the Senate quickly confirmed Harrison. As a condition of accepting the appointment, Harrison insisted that the national headquarters of the INS be transferred from Washington to Philadelphia for the duration of the war, as he did not want to be separated from his family. Biddle agreed and Harrison took over as commissioner six months after his nomination.

•  •  •

When Harrison returned to his office in Philadelphia from Crystal City in the fall of 1942, he wrote a report recommending the small South Texas town as the site for the family internment camp. On December 12, 1942,
thirty-five German families, who had all been in custody at Ellis Island and Camp Forest, Tennessee, arrived in Crystal City. Most of these families, which totaled 130 people, had agreed to be repatriated to Germany in exchange for Americans being held there. They were under the jurisdiction of the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State, not the INS, and eligible for quiet passage. From the beginning, the two sides of
America’s internment policy—detention and exchange—were intertwined at Crystal City.

The Germans entered a primitive camp that was unfinished. A planned ten-foot-high perimeter fence with floodlights and guard towers did not yet exist. So few guards were in Crystal City that Border Patrol agents were sent from San Antonio to guard the German internees.

Nick Collaer, whom Harrison had chosen to be the officer in charge of the family camp, was a career US Border Patrol officer who had the year before established the all-male internment camp in Fort Missoula, Montana.
He, his wife, and three children arrived in Crystal City by train from Fort Missoula five days after the German internees and took up residence in one of the forty-one government-owned cottages. Collaer paid $15.17 a month in rent.

In a nearby roped-off section, the German families were crowded into twenty-nine of the same style of cottage as the Collaers lived in, except the German families shared cottages and the Collaer family had its own.

Before leaving Ellis Island and Tennessee, the male German prisoners promised to construct housing for internees, but changed their minds when they arrived and discovered the camp was conceived as primarily for Japanese enemy aliens and their families, the first of whom were scheduled to arrive on March 17, 1943. In a memo to Harrison on January 1943, Collaer explained that the Germans refused to do work that would benefit the Japanese. When pressed, the German men arrived to work sites late, complaining that they had no alarm clocks or other means of awakening. “Some of this work does not require journeyman carpenters—merely men who can handle hammers,” wrote Collaer. “There should be a considerably greater number of these in the present group of internees than have been working recently.” Collaer’s memo was a precursor of future disputes between German and Japanese internees.

A warm front arrived in Crystal City, and by midday in January 1943, the temperature rose from eighty to ninety-six degrees.
Rattlesnakes were everywhere. S. F. Oliver, the camp doctor, issued an order to employees and internees regarding rattlesnake bites: “A tourniquet should be applied above the bitten area and as much of the poison sucked out of the bite by mouth as possible. It is imperative that these cases be gotten to the hospital as soon as possible because delay may mean loss of life. Treatment with serum will be available at the hospital. Whiskey is of no value in this condition—it may even be harmful.”

Both the internees and Collaer’s staff of eight INS employees suffered with the monstrous heat and the isolation. Collaer’s daughter, Christine, who was five when the family moved to Crystal City, said her only memories of Crystal City were “the heat and the terror of rattlesnakes.” She remembered her father was anxious and overworked. His requests for fencing, lighting, and guards took a long time to be answered. Once when Christine didn’t move fast enough for him, he looked her in the eye and said, “You know, I could trade you for a yellow dog—and then I’d shoot the dog.” She knew he didn’t mean it; it was the tough talk of the frontier.

Little by little, more German prisoners arrived and construction progressed. The ten-foot-high security fence topped with barbed wire was completed and lit at night by searchlights. The lights from the camp could be seen for miles in every direction. Border Patrol agents manned the watchtowers twenty-four hours a day. Every detail of the camp’s growth was noted by Collaer and sent to the INS in Philadelphia. For instance, on February 13, 1943, Harrison sent a radiogram from Philadelphia authorizing Collaer to buy one hundred board feet of lumber from Mexico. A few weeks later, he gave Collaer permission to conduct transactions that did not exceed $50.

That summer Harrison named Collaer acting assistant commissioner for alien control, and the Collaer family moved to Philadelphia. In Collaer’s place, Harrison named forty-seven-year-old Joseph O’Rourke, an Irishman who had served as Stannard’s assistant at the Seagoville camp, as officer in charge at Crystal City.

A tall man with wavy hair and a rugged face, O’Rourke was born
in Brooklyn, New York. He completed four years of high school in Poughkeepsie, but records show he did not graduate. Instead, he joined the Army during World War I and served for two years. In 1924, he became a Border Patrol agent with the INS and made a career of it. He consistently received high marks from his superiors within INS. One report in 1933 praised O’Rourke for his “loyalty, integrity and efficiency” and singled out his “fine manner of handling personnel under his supervision and inspiring loyalty, respect, and affection in his subordinates.” Before his post in Seagoville, O’Rourke had worked at a detention camp in Hot Springs, West Virginia, where Japanese ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu were interned after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In Crystal City, O’Rourke’s experience in dealing with Japanese, German, and Latin American internees, and his knowledge of how to manage people, would serve him well. He spoke halting Spanish, enough to know that the term
Agent Pancho
, which he heard regularly on the streets of Crystal City, was a slur used by Mexican nationals who feared deportment.

Despite his record and charismatic personality,
O’Rourke was lonely when he arrived in Crystal City to assume control of the camp. He was separated from his wife, Loretta, a strict Irish Catholic woman, who lived in their small house on Cleveland Street in Buffalo with their only daughter, Joan. According to his granddaughter, Pamela Smith, it had been O’Rourke’s decision to end the marriage. He left Loretta embittered and Joan confused.

In Crystal City, his staff and others described O’Rourke as a “jolly Irishman” who paid particular attention to the children, who followed him like a Pied Piper.

One night Mangione, Harrison’s special assistant, visited O’Rourke at Crystal City. The two drove the short distance of less than two miles into town and spent the evening at a beer joint. Mangione asked O’Rourke how he tolerated the isolation of the area and demands of his work. “The only way I can keep my head
straight is to do a little drinking now and then and try to find some loving woman,” O’Rourke said. He related that he’d recently picked up a woman in the beer joint: “She was in her forties, and so damn grateful.”

O’Rourke transformed Crystal City from a migrant camp to the largest and busiest internment camp of the war, a place of constant coming and going of internees and their families. Eventually the INS spent more than a million dollars to construct 500 buildings on 290 acres, including a hospital with 70 beds, administrative buildings, and separate barber and beauty shops for Germans and Japanese. The three schools included one for Germans, another for Japanese, and the Federal Grammar and Federal High, which offered an American-style education to any child in camp. O’Rourke’s staff grew to 150 INS personnel and 200 additional employees who served as construction workers and laborers. On December 23, 1943, O’Rourke sent administrative order no. 9 to his staff and the INS offices in Philadelphia:
“Effective this date, the auditorium in the Federal High School will be known as Harrison Hall, in honor of the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Mr. Earl Harrison.” The auditorium became a central gathering place in the camp.

After O’Rourke was named officer in charge,
Harrison paid another visit to Crystal City and saw the changes. During a tour, Harrison and O’Rourke encountered a group of small children. O’Rourke asked what they were doing. “Playing war,” a young boy said.

“Okay,” said O’Rourke. “But I hope nobody gets killed.” He and Harrison continued their tour.

On the way back, they stopped at the same spot. The children were seated on the ground, looking glum.

“What happened to the war?” O’Rourke asked.

“It ended,” they explained. “Nobody wanted to be the enemy. We all want to be the Americans.”

On
the morning of January 9, 1942, the day after Mathias Eiserloh was arrested, Ingrid woke to the familiar sound of guinea hens cackling in the bare linden tree at the corner of the house. For a moment, it seemed like an ordinary day. Then Ingrid remembered events from the night before—the inexplicable look of confusion on her mother’s stricken face, her father arrested by the FBI.

She got up, dressed quickly, and slipped out the back door to feed the farm animals before her mother saw her. As usual, Senta, her German shepherd, was by her side. Pal, the golden collie, was tied up in back by the outhouse. She fed both dogs, then went to the chicken coop and gathered eggs. Even at eleven years old, Ingrid was conscious that without the $60 per week from her father’s job in Cleveland, her mother would need egg money now more than ever.

Ingrid walked to the garage. Several months before, she’d found three wild owls, two small ones and a single large one. Mathias had built a cage for them and the owls were now in the garage. Johanna had scolded Mathias for indulging Ingrid’s habit of collecting wild animals. Often the child brought home green frogs from the creek and she rescued lame birds. Once she trapped a family of otters. But Johanna’s complaints were too gentle to make much of an impression, so great was the whole family’s pleasure in the woods and wildlife around their homestead.

Now Ingrid decided she should liberate the owls. The idea of her father behind bars made the sight of the incarcerated owls unbearable.
She swung the door of the cage wide and stepped aside. The owls beat their comblike wings and made a muffled, almost silent, ascent into the cold, gray January sky.

After Ingrid returned to the house, Johanna left to go to Cleveland, a drive of a little more than twenty miles, to find out what she could about the fate of her husband. If Johanna harbored the hope that Mathias’s problems could easily be resolved, she soon found out otherwise. Mathias and several other German-born men were behind bars at the Seventh Precinct Station of the Cleveland Police Department. Upon her arrival, officials confirmed that Mathias was there, but wouldn’t tell Johanna why. She pressed for answers. They only said that her husband’s status was “under investigation.”

“For what?” she asked.

He wasn’t charged with anything, but all her questions were turned aside. At least Johanna knew where Mathias was. All over the country, FBI agents had seized German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants without notifying their families.
According to one State Department memo, some suspected enemy aliens had “disappeared for as long as two weeks, leaving businesses in operation, cars parked on the streets which were taken by the police for over-parking and families totally without knowledge of their whereabouts.” Johanna left the station, not knowing when or if she would see Mathias again.

Over the next few weeks, Johanna carried baskets of eggs to her usual customers. Neighbors spoke to her through cracked doors, mumbling rejections. Many refused to talk to her. No one believed an innocent man could be jailed, much less be held in jail without charges. The coldness of her neighbors astonished her. Already a subtle, but important, aspect of American internment was embedded in Johanna’s mind. She believed that her husband was innocent. As an immigrant, she still believed in the integrity of American justice. She understood that the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed that no one could be deprived of liberty or property without “due process of law.” But the arrest of Mathias, without charges, defied that guarantee. She didn’t yet understand that these
two beliefs—in her husband’s innocence and in the American right to due process—were unrelated. It was wartime and Mathias was a citizen of Germany, not America.