WILL: This is December 6, 1999. This is Karen Will talking to Tom Bodine at Duncaster in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

BODINE: Hi, Karen.

KW: Hi, Tom.

TB: Nice of you to come out to see me.

KW: Let's go back and if you can, tell me a bit about where you are from, where you were born, and where you grew up.

TB: I grew up in Philadelphia, under the care of the care of the Quaker Meeting at Coulter Street. I went to a Quaker school, and decided when it was time to go to college I really ought to try to have a look at the outside world, at the world outside of Quakers, and therefore came to Wesleyan in Connecticut -- well actually because they gave me the biggest scholarship of the little three. I was -- I would have liked Amherst or Williams or Wesleyan, anyone of them. But Wesleyan produced the biggest scholarship.

I came to work for CT General (nowadays it's called Cigna) in the summer of 1937, and originally worked in the President's office and had a very rich and great experience. I mention the President because Frazar Wilde, who was president of Wesleyan (correction: Cigna), was one of the people who wrote to my draft board to vouch for my sincerity as a conscientious objector. There were 3 people who wrote letters on my behalf: Frazar Wilde, the president of one of the major insurance companies, McCaunnaghy, who was Lt. Governor of the state of CT, and president of Wesleyan -- that was the connection I had with him, and the third person who wrote a letter on my behalf was -- goodness, I can't remember names anymore at all, isn't it awful! Bill Foote, who was the managing editor of the Hartford Courant, the morning paper in Hartford.

And when in the summer of 1941 I was summoned to my draft board for a discussion of my conscientious objector status, they -- my draft board consisted of my postman, the father of a girl that I'd been dating, in fact of the 5 members of the draft board I knew 4 of them. So -- and they were very nice. They said, "We have no question about your sincerity. These letters testify to your activities. You've been working for German refugees, volunteering this and volunteering that. We find it very easy to classify you as a conscientious objector, but we don't like what we then have to do with you. If we make you, classify you as a conscientious objector, there are 2 problems," announced the draft board, "it would mean the draft board would have to deal with other people applying for conscientious objection, if they heard about it, and the second," I can't remember what the second one was now.

KW: Do you remember what the second one was?

TB: Um, the draft board's problems --

KW: Other people would have to --

TB: They would have to deal with other people who claimed conscientious objection. They had no problem with my conscientious objection, they were afraid of other people's lack of credentials. Anyway, they -- the second problem was that if they made me a conscientious objector, I would have to go a Civilian Public Service Camp, because that's what they were doing with CO's in the Second World War, they sent them all off to camp to get them away from everybody else, in the woods. And my draft board said that's just a waste of time, you should be able to do something more useful, even for the war effort, than being in a camp in the woods cutting trails for people.

So the draft board said, "We want to classify you as something other than a question they asked me was there something you could do. How about being in the, work for United Aircraft? I said, "No, I can't do that as a CO, that would be a terrible thing to do, building planes that kill other people." And they asked me if I couldn't be in the hospital in Middletown, the mental hospital in Middletown. And I said, "Well, I'm not trained for it, it's the last thing in the world I ever had any training for, but if you think that's the place for me, I'll be glad to do it."

"Well, one of them said, "what do you suggest, you must have an idea of what you might do."

"So I might go work for the Quakers."

"Oh, the Quakers, they're good people. Can you get a job with them right away? We have to do this right away."

"Oh," I said, "I think I can, because they have just organized a group of people to train for overseas relief work, and that group has just been meeting this week," said I to the draft board. "Well," said the draft board, "you go out into our anteroom out there, use our phone, to phone Philadelphia and find out whether the Quakers will take you right on in their program." So to my amazement I found myself. The draft board secretary was flabbergasted, but helped me get the long distance number which -- people didn't make long distance calls readily in those days. We put the call through and Elmore Jackson, who was the Personal Director of the American Friends Service Committee at that time, was there and was astonished when he heard that I was talking on the draft board's telephone.

At any rate, he agreed that I could come down and join this group if I could come right away, in the next 48 hours. So that was all right with me, and I went back to the draft board and said the Quakers had said they'd take me on, and therefor I would be going to Philadelphia right away. That's how I came to be, I was then in this study group, training, a course in training to do relief work when Pearl Harbor occurred.

Just before Pearl Harbor, the last week in November, 1941, Spencer Cox, who was one of the group in the training program, and I were assigned to go to Shanghai in China to help German refugees. Shanghai was the only place in the world where people could go without a visa. You could just show up in Shanghai and it was an open city. But the people who ended up there were in a terrible struggle, privation, and the Quakers were thinking of developing a program to help people who were starving in Shanghai, German Jewish people who had fled from Germany. We, Spencer and I, were to go on the China Clipper, which was an airplane that crossed the Pacific, to see what could be done for these people in Shanghai.

Well, Pearl Harbor intervened, fortunately from my point of view. If Pearl Harbor had been a week later, I might have been interned by the Japanese (unclear), which wouldn't have been very desirable. As it was I got just by good luck -- well, Pearl Harbor occurred and the Quakers in Philadelphia saw right away that one of the areas where there needs to be Quaker service would be on the west coast of America where the American Japanese may be treated badly with the war.

So now I guess I jump to Pearl Harbor itself and what happened. Following Pearl Harbor, the night of Pearl Harbor, the very night of Pearl Harbor, the Department of Justice through the FBI, rounded up all of the alien Japanese from everywhere in the United States, including Hawaii, and brought them to camps -- they were not concentration camps exactly, they were under the Geneva Convention, they were prisoner of war camps. There was one in Missoula, Montana, and one down in Vivaldi, Texas -- they were spread across the country. At the same time the Japanese were rounding up Americans who were in Japan and putting them in camp. So it was important that -- well anyway, the Department of Justice did a really humane and a good job of rounding up the Japanese, mostly elderly Japanese, who lived in America but were Japanese citizens, not American citizens.

(Phone rings, tape stopped)

TB: OK, we're talking about the night of Pearl Harbor and the fact that the Department of Justice did a good job of rounding up the Japanese foreigners, aliens.

KW: When you say good job, you mean a sensitive job?

TB: Yes, sensitive and humane. I couldn't fault -- I went to visit those camps as well as the other ones, and I couldn't fault the treatment they dealt out to the people like the diplomats in Washington, and businessmen, Japanese businessmen across the country, people who come here to help work on the railroads and stayed on. The point I'm making is that the alien Japanese were rounded up in a perfectly reasonable way under the rules of the Geneva Convention. The Americans that were rounded up in Japan were treated equally well by the Japanese, because this was international law. It's been established in wartime and the Geneva Convention will make for humane treatment of each other's nationals.

So right after Pearl Harbor there was no difficulty among the American citizens of Japanese ancestry. On the west coast, in the 3 west coast states there were about 110,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and at first they were not treated badly at all. It was just their bad luck to have ancestors that were Japanese.

The Orange Growers Association in California was very anxious to get hold of the land. Under the Yellow Peril Laws, gosh there are so many things, the Yellow Peril Laws of the 1920's, laws that said that Japanese and Chinese people could not own real estate on the west coast, in any of those 3 west coast states, Washington, Oregon and California. The Japanese couldn't own the land, they had to lease it, and the leases were written in such a way that in any year that the land wasn't tilled and didn't produce income, they would revert to the owner. So the Orange Growers Association saw very quickly after Pearl Harbor, if they could get the Japanese off the land, the leases would be broken and they could harvest this very valuable crop, particularly oranges, and make money. So there was a very strong financial incentive to round up all the people on the West Coast so that they couldn't, the farmers among them, couldn't be tilling their fields.

But the delegation from California particularly, in Congress, put tremendous pressure on Franklin Roosevelt to do something about these Japanese, Americans of Japanese ancestry, who knew nothing about Japan -- they had been born here and brought up here, they were used to American ways entirely. But they were of Japanese ancestry and that was enough to have them singled out.

On February 12, which happens to be Lincoln's birthday, Roosevelt issued a proclamation saying that there had been incidents of shipping, what is the word, there had been shells sent into Santa Barbara (where there never had been), that there had been forest fires started in Oregon (which had never happened). Various falsehoods were spread by the War Department, because it too was anxious to get the American of Japanese ancestry, whom they couldn't reach in any other way, to keep building a case, which is quite well documented in the books that have been written.

The Army eventually persuaded Roosevelt that he should round up all of the Japanese and put them behind barbed wire, for the duration. To "protect them" it was the same phrase that was used when Hitler rounded up the Jews, he was taking them into protective custody to protect them from their neighbors. The same concept was used in rounding up the Americans of Japanese ancestry, to take them into protective custody.

Roosevelt signed the decree on the 12th of February and he turned, at a cabinet meeting a couple of days later, he turned to Department of Justice and said, "You've done such (Attorney General Biddle was the Attorney General) a good job of rounding up the aliens, I want to have you round up the citizens now and get them off the west coast and into the inland somewhere where they will not be badly treated by their neighbors." And Biddle said, "I'll resign first. I won't do it. I won't round them up. I think it's a terrible mistake. We're just doing exactly what Hitler did with the Jews, and there's no excuse for it, no need for it, and I won't have any party to it."

So Roosevelt said, "Well, I can't afford to have any Attorney General resign right in the middle of fighting a war." So he turned to Stimpson, who was the Secretary of War and said, "Hank, it's your job." And Hank said, "Well, by God, I've got a war to fight on 2 fronts, and I'm building barracks and all energy's being spent. I can't interrupt and take 100,000 civilians off the West Coast and put them in camps in the interior. It's ridiculous, you're out of your mind!" (laugh) It wasn't the philosophy of it that distressed Stimpson, but the interference with his main job, what he was trying to do was win a war. But Roosevelt said "It's an order," and Stimpson said. "OK, you're the Commander in Chief, I obey any order, and I'll do the best I can to make it humane, particularly because I'm worried about the Americans being held by the Japanese in Japan."

So in April -- it took a couple of months to get the machinery moving around and choosing the 10 places they were going to put the camps, making plans for the transportation of the people. They were allowed to take with them from their homes on the West Coast only one small suitcase for each person. Their furniture and possessions were sold and usually lost -- sometimes they had neighbors who were willing to store things for them -- but it was a terrible experience. These were very nice people; thoroughly American, no more Japanese oriented than we are.

So those of us who had been in training in the Quaker overseas relief work program -- Spencer Cox, I've forgotten where he went -- I was just reassigned to work with Japanese on the west coast, because Clarence Picket could foresee that this was going to be a tough time. He had though first everything was fine and it was important to get some staff people out to the West Coast. The Balderstons and I -- the Balderstons were sent to LA and I to Seattle.

And first I don't think much happened. It wasn't until February that suddenly the roof caved in and we were trying to help these people who were being rounded up. My assignment then, at first, was -- well I went to Vashon Island, for example, on the day of the evacuation. The Vashon Island farmers wanted to harvest their crop of white flowers for weddings; I can't remember the kind of white flower that has a lovely odor.

KW: Gardenias?

TB: Gardenias? Well kind of like that, no it wasn't a gardenia; it was like the gardenias. Anyway, I went out with a crew of college kids from the University of Washington, and we went by ferry to help cash in on this cash crop. It was a small gesture, but it was Caucasian white people going out of their way to help this farmer get his produce sold so he'd have some money when he went to camp.

KW: Now were you doing this through the local American Friends Service Committee office? You were an additional staff member added to their already existing staff?

TB: Right. That's right. And I did that until the month of May, March-April-May, during the period of the evacuation itself. We found things to do. We put out a newspaper to try to curb the rumors that were falsely being circulated. We did, I can't remember now the sort of things we did, it was just being helpful. There wasn't anything very dramatic about it, but the fact that we were about the only white people who showed up.

We weren't allowed in the original assembly camps. Puyallup was the one; we could look through the fence and see how awful it was. It had rained a lot and it was all mud, but Puyallup was one of the better, considered one of the better assembly camps. Anyway, our function was to be helpful.

But then the college presidents up and down the West Coast were very distressed to realize that their graduates, people in the graduating senior class, were being sent off into the deserts of America to sit out the evacuation. They felt this was a terrible waste and therefore came up with the idea of organizing, colleges on the West Coast organizing to help the students to move east. If you, during the evacuation you didn't necessarily have to go to camp if you had a place to go somewhere in the east where you'd be vouched for, looked out for and protected. The idea was to get college graduates as ambassadors on college campuses all the way across the country. It would show the American people that the Americans of Japanese ancestry are not what they're being served up to be by the yellow press, or whatever they call it, newspapers that have a point of view.

Anyway, I was moved, transferred, from the work with the people who were being evacuated in Seattle, to San Francisco, to the Bay area where they were building up a little office staff to begin the work of interviewing students as to where they would want to go, because they weren't being just sent, they had to be getting, collecting their transcripts, doing the job of moving 3 or 4,000 youngsters from camp process into the east coast, into the middle -- well, off the west coast.

KW: Were there many people who were active in objecting to what was happening to the Japanese at that time?

TB: No, there was a Congressional inquiry that came out and moved up and down the west coast to get peoples' opinion, and far more opinion against the Americans of Japanese ancestry than there was people for them. The only political figure on the entire west coast who spoke out on behalf of the American way of life, who spoke out against what was being done to these American citizens, was the mayor of Tacoma, and he was particularly bothered by the precedent we were setting in that any citizens could be rounded up, that the things we stand for in America don't have any bearing in war time if the Army wants to say that this is a military necessity that they be moved. You didn't have to give any reasons; the phrase was "military necessity."

So it was a terrible period. The Quakers -- there were church groups, there were Methodists, I remember, who spoke out, but not the official Methodist structure, not the bishops or anybody like that, but individuals. There were among the Roman Catholics people from the -- oh, dear, what's the name of the peace organization among the Catholics -- who spoke out. But most people didn't. And after all, a war was on and we were losing it.

There was a mass hysteria of people being afraid, while it was untrue that there had been any invasion of the West Coast by any Japanese force. After Pearl Harbor, you didn't know what to believe. You could easily accept that the Japanese had set fire to the forests of Oregon, or had bombarded Santa Barbara with shells. I mean these stories were spread.

Of course, one of the strangest things was that the Japanese were a third of the population in Hawaii, American Japanese, American citizens. The alien Japanese in Hawaii were rounded up on the night of Pearl Harbor and were held in camps under the Geneva Convention. The American citizens in Hawaii of Japanese ancestry were not disturbed. The rules about the evacuation never applied to them because they were needed. A third of the population of Hawaii, and the fruit and vegetables or whatever it is that Hawaii produces, were part of the war effort. And so they didn't bother any of the Japanese Americans in Hawaii at the same time that they were rounding up all the people in the three West Coast states.

What they did, they rounded up the Alaskans. There had been Japanese fishermen go along the west coast fishing who left behind, what do you call them, illegitimate children, in the form of people who are of Japanese ancestry. They were Americans living in parts of Alaska, they were moved, not in this first group in 1942 but in 1943, they were moved to Poston (Arizona) which was the hottest of the camps, and where the people from the north suffered the worst.

The Poston Camp was at the point where the temperatures get to 130 in the summer and it was -- the people who lived at Poston dug down into the sand because they found that if you were 10 feet under group it was cooler. The moisture in the soil evaporates someway and makes it cool. So the people at Poston were busy digging cellars and these poor folks from Alaska came along; the people who were already in Poston helped them. I mean walking into camp, they helped dig these cellars for them because it was summer when they arrived. I was visiting at Poston at that time. But that gets ahead of the story.

KW: So you did, you were able to visit in some of these camps.

TB: In the, yes, down in the assembly centers we were able to get some of the deans of the colleges that governed the transcripts, were able to visit -- why the dean needed to see the student about something in the transcript, I don't know, there were instances where the Army gave permits to the college deans to work on transcripts. They did not give permission to people just being helpful who were apt to say unkind things about them when we came out. So I understand why now, it's perfectly reasonable that they didn't want us in their camps.

But then I was on my best behavior later on when I visited all the camps in rotation interviewing students about where they might go to school, what school they would pick. The schools were not unlimited. You couldn't just go anywhere, the schools had to be approved by the Army as not engaged in crucial war work. So we had a long summer of 1942, relatively few students were gotten out of the camps. In fact there wasn't any until September.

The exception was Harvey Itano. It's worth telling the story of Harvey Itano, as a kind of a special footnote. Harvey Itano was the gold medal winner at the University of California, Berkeley, top of his class.

KW: Gold medal, where?

TB: Gold medal winner, University of California, Berkeley.

KW: That's where he won the gold medal?

TB: Yeah, he was in the senior class, he was graduating in 1942 from University of California, Berkeley, and he was the top guy in the class, therefore the gold medal winner. He had been accepted by the University of St. Louis in Missouri to go to study medicine. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was very distressed at Franklin Roosevelt's handling, making this decision on the 12th of February, she and the Secretary of War, Stimpson, no she and the Assistant Secretary of War, thought this is a terrible thing we're doing, we're creating new Indian reservations. These people are never going to get out of camp. We'd better symbolize right away that these are only, that these are relocation centers, are not permanent places for these people to live. When the war's over they're going to be gotten out, they're going to go back home. We want to symbolize that while the war's on. Let's ask the Quakers to help us. It's difficult for the Assistant Secretary of War and the First Lady to appear in public in an unpopular cause. She telephoned Clarence Pickett and asked him to come down and see them to see if the Quakers would be willing to be responsible for releasing one student to them, to their care. Of course, Clarence said yes.

I was working on the west coast in San Francisco, helping sort transcripts and things of that sort, writing to colleges -- we had to get letters from college presidents saying he thought his community would not be hostile if one of these students came to their ... caught a lot of loose things. Every student had to be secured. On the morning of the 4th of July I was busy working, I wasn't taking a holiday, when I got summoned across the Bay to San Francisco -- our office was in Berkeley -- summoned across the Bay to the Army headquarters to meet with General Bendetsen. What had I done that I needed to be interviewed by the General!

So I went across the Bay and went to the General's office. Actually General Bendetsen turned out when I got there -- Bendetsen was too busy to bother with it, but another guy, "Bozo" Beasley his name was, so I interviewed Beasley at the instruction of Clarence Pickett in Philadelphia. Go across the Bay on the morning of the 4th of July. First we talked about how these people were not being deprived of their food. He opened the drawer of his desk and got out the menu, read me the menu of the lunch that was being served in all the camps on the 4th of July. But there was a civilian in the room, not another General, sitting in a chair behind, and he winked at me as if to say don't react to any of this, just take it as it comes.

And the next thing was, these people haven't been deprived of their opportunities to be happy. Let me show you some of the art work that's being done by these internees, they didn't call them that, relocatees, and he showed me some pictures people had painted. Then we discussed whether their liberty had been taken away from them, and "Bozo" Beasley said to me, "Young man, have you studied Greek?"

I said, "No, I've never studied Greek."

"Well, let me tell you, the word liberty in Greek has nothing to with the physical body of a person, it's their spirit. If their spirit is free, they are free." (Laugh) It was such a silly argument. They civilian behind the General's desk winked at me again so I didn't argue. I accepted his instructions.

So then we got down to the business of the day which was to sign a release. The Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy, was going to sign a statement releasing Harvey Itano from the ____ Camp where he was interned and put him on a train to go to St. Louis where they were expecting him on the morning of the 6th of July. Well, at the end of this conversation, first we had to sign up the release thing rapidly and get it signed. I was interested that there were male typists, the Army used male typists and that intrigued me. I was handed the release thing and told to get myself to ____ as fast as I could. Fortunately it was before gas rationing so I had no problem about that.

I went to ____ Camp. But of course it was 4th of July and all the senior members of the camp staff were off having a picnic and the only people on duty were young lieutenants who were horrified that they were to release one of these Japs, one of their Japs, to a whipper-snapper. I mean I was just a youngster and looked like everybody, a civilian. And I said "Well, you'd better phone your office in San Francisco because you're going to be disobeying an order if you don't obey it. I advise you to at least put a phone call through and ask if anybody down there knows about it." So the lieutenant in charge eventually phoned down to "Bozo" Beasley's office and was told that "Indeed, yes! And hurry up! He's supposed to catch a train (in Clammoth Falls (?), I think it was) to go to St. Louis. And he'll be late and miss the train!"

So then the lieutenant got all excited and jumped in his jeep and had me jump in, too, and drove down through the camp scattering grandmothers and chickens all out of the way, down to the camp where we came up to the Itano's door, the man banged on the door -- the Itano's knew nothing about any of this and banged on the door. And of course it's very frightening when the Army man in uniform comes and bangs on your door. At least I was frightened. It was quite an experience. So they said, "Throw together stuff for you to pack, you've got to catch the train in Cl___ Falls," you know. So he hardly had time to say good-bye to his parents and went off into the wilds with me, I mean he'd never seen me before. He may have known about the American Friends Service Committee, I don't remember that.

But at any rate, Harvey Itano and I drove hurriedly to Cla___ Falls. When the nightfall came, it was blackout and we could hardly see. You were allowed to drive in the blackout but your headlights had to be blocked off except for one little slit. So it was dangerous to drive much, and the speed limit was 35, and it was dangerous to drive much over that because you really couldn't see.

At any rate we did our best. We were late, a couple of hours late, but the train was later! It hadn't arrived yet. So we stood in the platform in the dark -- it was very dark, much darker, the blackout darkness is much darker than ordinary darkness. Anyway it seemed very dark. And suddenly the train came in -- great huge, in those days they were coal trains, smoke coming out, and it loomed -- very dramatic. The train came to a stop and Harvey Itano got on, said good-bye to me, and the train pulled out -- the most extraordinary moment as far as I'm concerned. I felt very involved with him by that point.

KW: What an incredible amount of trust on his part to take off and --

TB: Yeah, a young man -- his own memory of the story is a little different, but it's basically the same.

KW: Have you maintained contact with him?

TB: I didn't maintain any contact with him. It's just in the last couple of years, my Japanese-American friends have been pestering me to do more with my story. I put all my papers and all the stuff about it in the Stanford, the Hoover Institution. I tried to write a book and I wasn't doing anything new, I mean there are hundreds of books on the subject -- well not hundreds but, 30 or 40 books already written, and I wasn't adding anything, I thought, so I stopped. But I did arrange the papers so that other people could use them. A couple of the books that have come out since have use my papers with nice footnotes.

KW: How along were you out there on the West Coast doing this kind of work?

TB: I was there until the spring of 1945.

KW: Throughout the war really.

TB: Yes. In the autumn of '45 they changed the rules. Did I say that I had gotten a classification as doing work essential to the war effort, a 2A or 1A or something or other. I was not available for service, not sick or anything like that, engaged in work essential to the war effort. Well, this was so obviously nonsense. What I was doing was not evidently engaged in work for the war effort. I wouldn't have been happy if it had been! (Laugh).

So, anyway, the draft board summoned me back to Hartford. I was in Idaho visiting the Menandoka Camp when I got a telegram from my draft board saying catch the next train and come back to Hartford, we want to talk to you. I had no idea what they wanted, it was out of the blue, I was busy doing my job talking to students. But I got on a train, and in wartime you didn't get berths, you just sat up.

I went to see my draft board and they said, "Oh, we're glad to see you. We want you to know we've been reading the mimeograph forms we've gotten from Washington, instructions. And it seems that they've abolished this category of -- we the draft board no longer decide whether you're engaged in activities essential to the war effort. We don't decide that, it's going to be decided now by the appeal board, because too many people were using it as a loophole, Congressmen's sons and people like that were getting out, getting away from the draft."

So, therefore the draft board said, "We have looked up the mimeograph forms and we find that if you're outside the country, the jurisdiction reverts to us, the local board, and we think we made the right decision in your case and that we don't want you to go off into the woods at a Civilian Public Service Camp. And we're darned if it's going to happen just because somebody in Washington issued a stupid memo. So we'll take advantage of this loophole that says if you get out of the country, we the local board will resume jurisdiction."

KW: This was in 1945?

TB: No, the fall of '44. I was summoned back from Menandoka about October of '44. It took quite a while. So naturally -- "Are the Quakers able to send you overseas?" I said, "The Quakers would be delighted to send me overseas. There are problems getting a passport for me, because nobody except people engaged in war work were able to get passports at that point. So if you -- "Oh," said the draft board, "Well let us try again, to see what we could do. We've got contacts in Washington, too." They asked me whether the Quakers couldn't use their influence to get me a special dispensation, a passport.

Well, the Shipley woman that ran the passport office never gave any dispensations to anybody, even if she was a relative or had been born a Quaker herself. And after all it wouldn't matter, she was hopeless. The draft board, the local board, just simply resuming jurisdiction, declared me still in classification 2B or whatever it was, and therefore free to leave the country. True, the draft board did exert itself in the direction it shouldn't be, and through the Connecticut Congress people, various people made an effort. But it wasn't until the war actually ended, in May of 1945, the first week of May, that I got my passport. But I was free to go on, I mean in the interval the local board had resumed jurisdiction. The appeal board didn't have any process by which it could catch up to my being an exception to their rule. So I went to, was prepared to go to France, and went to France in the spring of '45.

KW: Still with the American Friends Service Committee?

TB: Also for the American Friends Service Committee.

KW: Working with refugees?

TB: No, well some refugees. I was in the Paris office. My primary job was food and clothing, distributions, "approvisionment." I was unsuited for it, I didn't like it because after the exciting time with the Japanese-Americans, who were such awfully nice people, working among them was a joy, and really working in France was not. It was war-torn -- (turn tape, 680). It was in the spring of '45, I finally got a passport, and went to France and served there until August of '46, at which time I (unclear) to come home.

KW: Tom, if you could go back to your own upbringing, I'm trying to figure out what led you to be a conscientious objector. Were you raised as a Quaker.

TB: Yeah, I went to a Quaker First Day School and a Quaker school.

KW: And your family were active Quakers?

TB: Well, reasonably active.

KW: So it was a logical conclusion to reach.

TB: Yes. My father really was a Methodist; my mother was a Quaker, and her parents before her. So I had a Quaker ancestry, so to speak. And it was, I think it was inbred in me, it was expected. Members of my class at Coulter Street, it was very unusual for any of them to go into the Army or the Navy.

KW: When did you graduate from --

TB: 1933 from high school, and '37 from college, but by then I was in a Methodist college, Wesleyan wasn't really -- actually Wesleyan had the highest percentage of conscientious objectors of any of the Ivy League colleges.

KW: Really!

TB: It was partly because they had in the Philosophy Department a man named (Cornelius) Kruse, and in the English Department a man named (Teddy) Banks who were models, role models for us CO's. We met in their homes, they were, you know, they inspired us.

KW: So you weren't considered ostracized for assuming that position in college.

TB: No, certainly not in college. The amazing thing was, CIGNA --

KW: Which was then Connecticut General?

TB: Which was then Connecticut General, and I got this assignment to go to Philadelphia to join the Quaker's work, the question was should I be given the same status with the company as the people who were leaving to go to the military, including the president's two sons who were exactly the same age as I. They were each going, one was going into the Navy, one was going into the Army, at the same time that I was going into, not the Peace Corps, but it was the American Friends Service Committee.

And despite the fact that his own sons were in the Army, he, President Wilde, Frazar Wilde first signed the letter favoring me with the draft board, vouching for my sincerity, and second, arranged, ordered that the rules for people being away should apply to me equally as they did to the military. Military leave was what I got from the company. And my pension was continued, my insurance policies were kept up to date, things like that. And my job guaranteed when I came back, those were the things they gave to people going into the Army. And they did that for me, which I think was extraordinarily big of them.

KW: Indeed!

TB: Not at all the kind of thing you'd expect a big corporation to do. And it was primarily because of the leadership of Frazar Wilde.

KW: When you were in college did you have a sense of the impending war and our involvement in it? What were the political feelings among the students leading up to the war?

TB: Well, we were quite anti-war. Remember the Oxford Movement and things like that, Peace Pledge Movement. Several times we went to conferences, once in Providence, once in Washington, D.C. In Washington, D.C. it was with Woodrow Wilson's grandson, who was a pacifist.

KW: Do you think that was mostly an East Coast phenomenon? I mean, I think of my father in the Midwest who lost his job because of being a conscientious objector, and wonder if there was less of that fervor in the Midwest than there might have been in the east?

TB: I think there's much more hostility toward people with differing views in the Midwest than there is in the East Coast. And I think Wesleyan was a hotbed of liberalism.

KW: How about Connecticut General?

TB: Connecticut General, I think, was a freak, what's the word --

KW: Aberration?

TB: Yeah, really. I don't think -- maybe I'm wrong, but it's hard for me to imagine what I know of the other companies. Travelers' (unclear) would never have done that I don't think. But then I don't know, I don't know whether a case arose. I doubt -- I am impressed with the fact that there is -- that Hartford was a more liberal place. The fact that -- my draft board reflected it. It was trying to find a common sense decision in what they considered a sticky situation. They never had another CO, that particular board.

KW: Did you know CO's who had gone to Civilian Public Service camps?

TB: Oh, yeah. Bob Walker, most of my classmates at Germantown Friends School went off to CPS. Steve Cary ran it for a while.

KW: Ran the CPS camp?

TB: Yeah.

KW: He was a classmate of yours? At Wesleyan?

TB: Not at Wesleyan, at Germantown Friends.

KW: Oh, high school. Well, it sounds like you had an unusually fortunate experience.

TB: I don't deny it. I was very lucky. And the funny thing about it is that I didn't expect it to be so good. I had read up on the literature of the First World War, and what they did to pacifists then and expected the same, which was the solitary confinement sort of things. And I was busy memorizing Houseman's poems so I'd have something to keep my mind going when I was in solitary confinement. I think it was somewhat naive and silly but I did it very earnestly. I walked to work in Seattle, it took about a half an hour each way, in order to practice the poems

KW: You mean even after you had this job with the American Friends Service Committee, you still expected that it might change.

TB: Oh yeah. I expected -- I didn't think this draft board situation was going to last. I was a pessimist. But it did last. In fact they called me back in mid-war to say we don't want you to go overseas so your jurisdiction stays with us.

KW: Tom, can you tell just a little bit about what you know of the Quakers trying to meet with the Gestapo?

TB: In nineteen forty--, gotta start with the year 1938. There was an event called Kristalnacht, an occasion when the Jews in Germany realized that the Holocaust was upon them. The events of that Kristalnacht was the breaking of store windows of Jewish-owned stores and looting the stores.

KW: Were you aware of that over here?

TB: No.

KW: It wasn't a newsworthy event as far as young people in the United States --

TB: I don't know when I learned about Kristalnacht. I think it was after I arrived in Europe. I don't think we were conscious of it. We were working for the refugees, were trying our darnedest to get refugees out of Germany. When Kristalnacht occurred the Quakers immediately thought, "Let's go see somebody and see if we can't get permission to have the Jews moved out of Germany." The German government had indicated that it would let people go if they had a place to go, if they had visas, but nobody'd give them visas to the United States. Anyway, Kristalnacht caused a sensation and the Quaker reaction to it was, "We must call on somebody high up in the German government and ask for the German Jews to be released to us, and we'll take responsibility for them." I think there were 120,000 -- something like that, I've forgotten how many.

At any rate, three Quakers were chosen: Rufus Jones, Clarence Pickett couldn't go because he had speaking engagements, Rufus and a man named Evans, I'm trying to figure out, anyway there were three Philadelphia Quakers of considerable eminence, I mean important people in Quaker life, who got on a boat and sailed for Germany very soon after Kristalnacht. If Kristalnacht was early in November, it would have been the latter part of November, or it may have been early December, I don't remember the exact dates.

They arrived in Berlin with no letters of introduction to anybody and just assumed that you could go ring the doorbell of the, of Hitler, they were going to go call on Hitler. Of course, people in Berlin who were trying to help Jewish people were aghast at these naive Quakers coming from outside. They didn't want attention called to themselves. It was a terrible thing.

Fortunately there was somebody in the American Embassy who thought the best, who was worried also about what the presence of these three would cause, hardships it would cause to people carrying on the fight to get the Jews out. The best thing to do -- somebody in the American Embassy arranged an interview for them with the Gestapo. They couldn't possible arrange an interview with Hitler, that was a crazy idea. Even though there were Germans sprinkled through the Nazi machinery who had been fed by Quakers after the First World War. That was a very useful tool, even when I got to France. The Germans that I met were often people who had been fed and remembered the Quakers from the child feeding program in 1921-22.

At any rate, Kristalnacht -- they went to call on the Gestapo. The Gestapo was a form of three very severe serious gentlemen on one side of the table, and the three Quakers on the other. The three Quakers explained that they had come proposing to relieve the German government of all the Jews in Germany, to be taken to take care of them somewhere. Well, where? They didn't quite know. Holland said they'd take 20 (laugh). It was a silly (unclear). At any rate, the three Nazi, the three Gestapo people said in the middle of the interview said, "Well, we need to consult our superior. Now we know what you would like to do, you'd like to have exit papers given to any Jewish person wanting to, that you can house outside. Now that we understand what you're here for, let's us go and consult our superior."

So they went out of the room, the three went out of the room and left the three Quakers sitting behind this table. And the three Quakers went into a meeting for worship, they didn't know what else to do, they had nothing to talk about so they had a silent meeting for a half an hour, or three quarters of an hour, which is said to be the only Quaker meeting ever held in the Gestapo! (Laugh) At the end of that time the Gestapo people came back and said, "You know, of course, that this room is bugged, but you never said anything, you didn't help us, (laugh) not telling us your real reason for coming here."

The story's in a book called Quakers and Nazis. But I didn't know about it at the time. I learned about it I think in the stories, as the German Jewish refugees -- we were helping some get out of Paris to somewhere more suitable for them --

KW: I assume that nothing ever came of this meeting with the Gestapo.

TB: Nothing whatever. But, they came back saying we triumphed, we got permission to take all these people out. And they went to the Jewish Joint Committee, which is one of the Jewish organizations that were helping the Jews get out, and got a grant of $100,000 to set up a program for getting visas for the Jews coming out of Germany. They got the money, it's in the book at any rate, they got -- on the assumption that they'd be successful. But they weren't, nothing ever happened. In another year the war was on, 1938 Kristalnacht, in August of '39 invasion of Poland.

KW: Well, Tom, thank you for sharing your experiences.

TB: I can't see how oral history works (laugh).

Tape off.

Added a few minutes later:

KW: Tom, now many Japanese students did you actually help to transfer into colleges outside the camps?

TB: Well, the Student Relocation Council, which was the body the American Friends Service Committee supported, originally a group of college presidents on the west coast, in the years that they worked to get students out of the camps onto college campuses, they in all helped 3,500 transfer. Some of them were youngsters who had been in college or university before the evacuation, some were the ones who grew up in the camp and graduated from the camp high schools and went from the camp high schools onto college campuses. And it was mostly the smaller colleges across the country that had permission to take them.

Getting permission from the Army was easier from 1943 on. We decided when they started winning the war they felt better. It was easier for them to sign releases.

KW: Are there any particular colleges that stand out?

TB: University of Connecticut had 6 or 8 as I remember. What particular colleges were -- places like Oberlin were, it was widespread. I mean I wish I had my files because the lists of the institutions is a roster of -- at first institutions like NYU and (unclear) schools, Swarthmore was never allowed to take any.

KW: Why?

TB: Swarthmore was never allowed to take any Japanese-American students onto its campus.

KW: But why?

TB: Because of the war contracts they had, contracts that Swarthmore had with the 

KW: Research contracts?

TB: Well, research, whatever they were secret, they were secret contracts. Even at the end Swarthmore hadn't been able to take any. Haverford could, because they didn't take war contracts.

KW: What a surprise!

TB: And Bryn Mawr could.

KW: And then what was the reaction of the students to your efforts?

TB: Oh, I think that students now have mostly forgotten that there ever was a Student Relocation Council. I don't think there's been adequate telling of the story of the Council itself and what it was able to achieve and how it achieved it. There were those of us who worked for the Council who saw this as an opportunity to restore American citizens belief in themselves. These youngsters were Americans who were quite distressed by the war, naturally. But being treated by some people, and the colleges they had been at and the colleges they went to, and the Student Relocation Council and all its supporters.

KW: You mentioned that some of them were reluctant to leave?

TB: Oh yeah. One of the reasons for my visits was to persuade, particularly the girls, to persuade their families to let the girls go. It was very scary, if you were in a concentration camp and not able to know what it's really like on the outside, you might easily believe the stories that were circulated in camp about how badly the Nisei were treated when they got out. And they weren't treated badly, but that kind of story is easy to spread because people are expecting it. So I had to try to persuade the Isei, the Japanese-speaking parents of these kids, that it was safe for the daughters, particularly, to go to college campuses in the east.

One of the ways, I did it in silly ways, when I came to a camp, the first thing I did was have an assembly of the high school, the entire high school would be called into an assembly. I opened the assembly by singing the Manzanar Love Song, as a kind of joke, but it related to the kids, and I became one of their pals, just from singing that song.

KW: In Japanese?

TB: No, this was American, these are -- the camps are, they were American camps. But I tried -- I did speak to groups of Isei --

KW: Oh, that's right, this wasn't the parents, was it.

TB: No, the kids were the ones I sang the song for. Not the parents, they wouldn't like that. The parents I met with, usually under the auspices of some Buddhists or Shinto church group, who were having competition with the Christian church groups in the camps, to retain their influence and authority and their helpfulness to people for religious purposes.

At any rate, the various settings in which I spoke, I would always try first, I had memorized some Japanese introduction, "While I am not worthy to speak to you... ," the regular speel of the Japanese speaker, as a little introduction that goes with -- and I learned that and used it and it always impressed them. It established rapport between me and the older ones, because other than that I talked through interpreters usually. So 

So, one more story. When I first went to visit the camps I stayed in the staff area, I slept in the staff area, ate my meals in the staff cafeteria. I always wanted to be able to live out in the campus area with my clients, with my student friends and their families. And I usually was able to get an invitation from a Japanese family inviting me to come and stay in their barracks and eat in their mess hall, but not always was I given permission at first, at any rate. Toward the end of my traveling and visiting the camps it was expected that I would be the exception. Normally white people wanted to stay with white people, they didn't want to go out to live in the camps. At any rate, they let me go out to stay in the camps, out in the --

But the thing I wanted to tell about was the shower room -- I realized how white I was, in contrast to the darker-skinned Japanese. And I realized what it meant (phone, tape stopped) The fact that it made me aware of what racism is like.

KW: To be the minority, you mean.

TB: Yeah, to be the minority, to be the oppressed, to be conscious of one's difference.

KW: Interesting.

TB: I'd never had that experience before, being in a large group of dark people. Since then I've been in Africa and other places but that was my first experience of it with the Japanese.

KW: That's great.