Supporting the Nikkei during the internment was unpopular and viewed as anti-American. Rev. W. Sherman Burgoyne served as minister of the Asbury Methodist Church in Hood River, Oregon where approximately one hundred Japanese farmers were cultivating apple and pear orchards. Burgoyne preached against discrimination from his pulpit and also founded the League for Liberty and Justice to “fight for the democratic way of life.” Yet when he spoke against the local American Legion Post’s intensive anti-Japanese movement, he was ostracized by his community. Burgoyne had to travel outside of Hood River just to shop or get a haircut and his wife worried that they would be “beaten up or run out of town at any moment.” Eventually, he was pushed out of his small fruit business and his church.[1]
In Salem, Oregon, five Caucasian Christians confronted a large mob which had converged on the Japanese Methodist Church. Glenn A. Olds, a student pastor at the time, recalled,
The [mob] had guns, clubs, the works; and their intent was to “burn those Japs out!” [Dr.] Purdy [the Christian pastor] reminded them that they [the Japanese Americans] were Americans as we all were . . . we were also soldiers, of the army of Jesus Christ, who had fought such bigotry for 2000 years, and said, “We are only five that stand here against you, but everything you know in your hearts, and we represent, gives lie to what you are about to do. Men, you’ll have to go over us first, and tomorrow, you’ll be the sorriest men in Salem.”[2]
The Quakers received criticism for their stand as well. Floyd Schmoe was one of the only religious leaders who spoke up for the Japanese Americans before the Tolan Committee.[3] On February 21, 1942, Congressman John H. Tolan (D – California) had begun chairing a series of West Coast hearings on the mass evacuation of the Japanese conducted by the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration. Following Schmoe’s testimony, the Tolan Committee rigorously questioned his loyalty to America because of his Quaker beliefs of pacificism. Throughout the war, the FBI would keep Schmoe under constant scrutiny. In Kitagawa’s opinion,
I thought it was utterly unfair to Floyd, and even to this day I marvel at the patience with which he sat through that excruciating cross-examination. I am certain he bore it only because he felt the destiny of the Japanese Americans was at stake. I am glad that I heard his testimony, for in the subsequent months and years there were many moments when I was sorely tempted to become skeptical and cynical about the motives and purposes of the many well-meaning Americans.[4]
George Roth was a radio broadcaster on station KMTR in Los Angeles and also a member of the Friends Assembly in Pasadena. According to Tsukasa Sugimura,
During February and March, 1942, every weeknight from 7:15 to 7:30 PM, he spoke out on the radio arguing that the Nisei were the same as any American, that they had civil rights as citizens, and that they should be treated with justice. . . . Roth went against the grain by advocating that it was a reckless act. He sacrificed himself to defend Japanese Americans. His career was marred for life and he was not able to keep a job because of this sacrifice. Until his death in 1999, at 92 years old, he endured prejudice and utter exhaustion. However, for Japanese Americans, he was a hero who threw away his own life to fight on our behalf.[5]
Despite protests against the injustice of the internment, most Americans still supported the action. Undaunted, however, some Christians would offer soul care through acts of kindness and words of encouragement. As the Lord declared through the prophet Micah, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). The following stories will recount the ministry of those who showed their faith by their deeds (James 2:14-18).
[1] Sugimura, Quiet Heroes, 117. In 1945, Burgoyne would lead the effort to restore a commemorative plaque in Hood River when the American Legion Post Number 22 erased the names of sixteen local Nikkei soldiers from that war memorial. The names were restored, but many families left Burgoyne’s congregation, his family’s safety was threatened, and he was eventually transferred to a smaller church (Linda Tamura, Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River [Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2012]; see also Jenny M. James, “Hood River Incident,” in Okihiro, Encyclopedia, 63-64). In the end, Burgoyne’s principled stance was publically recognized. At a Waldorf Astoria banquet hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt, he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Medal by the Council Against Intolerance.
[2] Salem Leadership Foundation, “Japanese Community Church and the Japanese Community in Salem” (17 July 2017), accessed at https://www.salemlf.org/2017/07/17/Japanese-community.
[3] Floyd took a hard stance: “We could make these camps the finest in the world and they would still be prisons. Hope is outside not inside. They appeal to us for help. Our responsibility is to get as many out as possible” (Floyd Schmoe, Friends Journal: Quaker Thought and Life Today 38, no. 11 [November 1992], 24, emphasis in original). In 1942, Schmoe became the first executive secretary of the AFSC branch in Seattle. He was instrumental on April 1, 1942, when Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island were evacuated to the Manzanar Relocation Center. During that time, Schmoe also made weekly visits to “some of the twenty or thirty people of Japanese ancestry confined to local hospitals. Several of these were young people left behind at the Firlands Tuberculosis Sanitarium” (Floyd Schmoe, “Seattle’s Peace Churches and Relocation,” in Relocation to Redress, 117). Schmoe’s wife, Ruth, often accompanied him in ministry and his daughter, Esther, dropped out of the university “and went to work as a volunteer nurse at the Minidoka Camp hospital.” After the war, Floyd “mobilized a Friends organization that helped Japanese Americans who were returning to Bainbridge Island from the internment camps, even helping them to till their ruined strawberry fields so that they could once again harvest a crop” (Sugimura, Quiet Heroes, 31). He later travelled to Hiroshima to help rebuild houses for the victims of the atomic bomb. Schmoe was honored by the Showa Emperor for his labor of love and also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1966. He would receive the Hiroshima Peace Center’s Peace Award and gift the prize money to complete the construction of the Seattle Peace Park.
[4] Kitagawa, Issei and Nisei, 49-50. Other pro-Nikkei testimonies were given by Azalia E. Peet, former Methodist missionary to Japan and Rev. Harold Jensen of Seattle’s First Baptist Church (see Ellen Eisenberg, “‘As Truly American as Your Son’: Voicing Opposition to Internment in Three West Coast Cities,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 4 [Winter 2003], 542-65). In San Francisco, Galen Fisher, Frank Herron Smith, and Gordon Chapman also testified to the loyalty and character of Japanese Americans (Beth Shalom Hessel, “Let the Conscience of Christian America Speak: Religion and Empire in the Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1945” [Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Christian University, 2015), accessed at https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/8635], 122). Most of the testimonies, however, such as California Attorney General Earl Warren’s, were overwhelmingly anti-Japanese and heavily favored mass evacuation. Only twelve of the fifty-five speakers in Seattle were opposed to the evacuation and internment. Even the president of the Church Federation of Los Angeles declined to testify, on the grounds that he was “too busy” (Schmoe, “Seattle’s Peace Churches,” 117-118).
[5] Sugimura, Quiet Heroes, 62-63.
