Further Reading
WRA Community Analysis Section
The WRA’s Community Analysis Section employed primarily social scientists as analysts to research the impacts of evacuation on social organization and family dynamics as well as the psychological response of the evacuees across gender, age, class, and occupational groups. Lantis was employed as a Community Analyst late in the war, and the collection contains Section correspondence, memorandums, and publications written by Lantis and other analysts.
One of these reports, from 1943, details the countless potential causes for social unrest at Relocation Centers, including a disillusionment with American democracy, feelings of extreme social and financial insecurity, and the disorganizing effect of evacuation on traditional forms of community life and social control. The sudden relocation of a heterogeneous population into the artificial social and economic contexts of Center life created a new situation in which prior systems of social control and leadership were now irrelevant.
Additionally, community analysts emphasized the impacts of the Centers' physical atmospheres, and one report notes the lack of privacy and overcrowding within the barracks, the armed guards, barbed wire fences, searchlights, and visits of government agents “all engender the feeling of being in a concentration camp. To expect people to be receptive to lectures on democracy and freedom under such conditions is too much to ask of anyone, especially an American.”
Lil Dan'l
The collection’s WRA series includes a 28-page illustrated booklet called "Lil Dan’l: One Year in a Relocation Center." This satiric booklet is a compilation of comic strips that ran in the Rohwer Outpost, the Center’s newspaper, in 1943. The editorial cartoon character was created by George Akimoto who, years after the war, became a successful movie and commercial artist.
The booklet opens with Lil Dan’l walking the reader through the “little tragedies and minor comedies” endured by the eight thousand Rohwer Relocation Center evacuees during the year.
Upon arrival to the Center, Lil Dan’l remarks that he put on a “cheerful grin and a friendly ‘How y’all,’ and started his life anew with the motto ‘One for all, and all for one.’”
The comic references the barrack’s issued furniture (1 cot, 1 mattress, and 1 heating stove) and the evacuee’s resourcefulness at creating more. The strip takes a jab at the Center’s recreational activities and clothing allowances, and provides commentary on the physical, social, and economic pressures of Center life.
In“Putting Up Wallboards” featured on this page, Lil Dan’l notes “wallboards were distributed to each apartment to be put up by the residents themselves. These plaster-boards covered the ugly, bare lumber on the two walls that were left unfinished by the contractors and added the necessary warmth and finishing touch to the appearance of our new home.”
In the featured “Familiar Sights,” Lil Dan’l remarks on the all-too familiar sights, sounds, and smells of Rohwer:
“Rows and rows of long black barracks, same size, same shape, same number of windows, the victory gardens surrounding the dusty tar-papered houses, mess gongs clanging in the distance, the clacking of ‘geta’ on the wooden walk leading to the shower room, the fish odor from the mess hall, the crowded Canteen, olive-drab trucks thundering by, howling babies, a morning glory beaming from a roof-top---this is Rohwer.”
