The Census Bureau and Japanese-American Internment-- Part 4: A threat to FDR

Under the March 1942 Second War Powers Act, which suspended the confidentiality protections for census data, the chief clerk had the authority to release census data to other agencies.  According to researchers, then the information released  was not illegal, but ethically questionable.

On August 4, 1943, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau requested the names and addresses of all individuals of Japanese ancestry living in Washington, D.C..  The request was to aid in a Secret Service investigation of threats made against President Roosevelt.

That request was triggered by an incident that had taken 17 months earlier when a Japanese-American man  being forced from Los Angeles to the Manzanar Internment Camp had said, "we ought to have enough guts to kill Roosevelt."

The man was later committed to a mental hospital for schizophrenia.

Information about 79 people in the D.C. area was released.  This request was filled in just seven days, very fast for a Washington bureaucracy.

The confidential provisions were reinstated in 1947.

--GreGen

The Census Bureau and Japanese-American Relocation-- Part 3

According to the researchers, the FBI and military intelligence agencies began pushing in 1939 to relax census confidentiality rules, but that was opposed by Census Bureau Director William Lane Austin.

After the 1940 presidential election, Austin was forced to retire and he was replaced by J.C. Capt, who backed efforts to remove confidentiality provisions..  His efforts helped clear the way for other agencies to access information on Japanese-Americans.

Documents were found that the Census Bureau provided information on where those of Japanese ancestry lived in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas.  (Why Arkansas?)

Then, it was found that the Bureau gave out micro-data about individuals and their addresses.

--GreGen

Census Bureau and Japanese Internment-- Part 2: 120,000 Relocated

Information from the 1940 Census was secretly used in one of the worst violations of constitutional rights in U.S. history --  the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

In papers presented by historian Margo Anderson in 2000 and 2007, evidence was found that census officials cooperated with the government providing data to target Japanese-Americans.

The Japanese-American community has long suspected that the Census Bureau played a role  in banishment of 120,000 of heir people, mostly living along the West Coast to nearly a dozen internment camps following the bombing of Pearl harbor on December 7, 1941.

Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta was one of those people banished to internment camps. He was 11 and living in San Francisco when his family was sent to live in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

For decades, census officials had denied they had supplied information.

This was not a great day in American history, but in war all sorts of things happen.

--GreGen

The Census Bureau In On Japanese-American Internments-- Part 1

From the April 12, 2018, Chicago Tribune  "Disclosure count against Census Bureau" by Lori Aratani, Washington Post.

The Census Bureau plans to ask people in the 2020 count if they are U.S. citizens, bringing about fears that the information might be used to target those in the country illegally.

This has not been done since 1950.

It is illegal to use that information that would identify individuals or families for target purposes.

And target is exactly what the government did at the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II.

--GreGen

U.S. 1940 Census Goes Online in 2012

From the April 3, 2012, Yahoo! News "1940 U.S. census viewable online after near freeze" by Cristian Salazar and Randy Herschaft.

The site received tens of millions of hits the first day it was online.  The 37 million hits were on the single largest collection of digital information ever made available online by the National Archives.

This was able to happen because confidentiality laws had expired even though 21 million of the persons listed are still alive.

This census gives details on 132 million Americans.

--GreGen