What Is An American?’: World War II Internment in Pasco

 

In 1943, U.S. soldier Sgt. George Yamauchi from Pasco asked: ‘What is an American?’ Yamauchi penned the question in the local newspaper after his family was persecuted and imprisoned in internment camps at Heart Mountain, Wyoming and Minidoka, Idaho during World War II. In this installment of the “Past as Prologue” series, Historian Robert Bauman discusses how the question defining who is an American is as relevant today as it was then.

 

RAMELLA: What is an American? In 1943, Sergeant George Yamauchi of the Tri-Cities penned the question in the local newspaper, and it’s relevant today as it was then. Here’s WSU Tri-Cities History Professor Robert Bauman, who studies the American West through experiences of Native, African and Japanese Americans for today’s Northwest History segment.  

BAUMAN: Sergeant George Yamauchi’s family settled in Pasco in 1907. His parents, Harry and Chieka Yamauchi, came to the Tri Cities with their oldest daughter, Lou, and for nearly four decades the Yamauchis – and their nine children – were viewed as exemplary American citizens. They opened several successful businesses. But, WWII changed things.  Home on furlough from the army, George Yamauchi became frustrated that the community had changed. His family faced persistent discrimination and hostility. His older sister, Mary, had been denied the renewal of a business license to continue the café that their family had been operating for almost three decades. In addition, his parents and family members were imprisoned in the internment camps at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and Minidoka, Idaho.  

George Yamauchi wrote a letter to the editor f the local newspaper and asked, “What does it mean to be an American?” He wrote he was “very much disappointed in the seemingly narrow outlook on life that so many… citizens have adopted since the war began….The neighborly attitude of the people had changed to that of distrust and suspicion.” Yamauchi warned against “falling victim to the very thing against which Americans are giving their lives!” He asked the readers “What is an American? Is he white, black, yellow, red, or any other certain color?  It is generally conceded that he is any one of these or a mixture of them all.  That is one of the principles of our Constitution, is it not?”  When George Yamauchi penned his letter in December 1943, his family had been torn apart by war and the internment camps.   

George Yamauchi’s plea was for fellow Pasco citizens to remember both the Yamauchi family’s central role in the community and to remember what it meant to be an American citizen. To Yamauchi, being an American citizen meant, in part, fighting for his country, exercising his freedom of speech, and using the freedom of the press at a time when he and other family members had experienced hatred, imprisonment, and bigotry. His poignant plea, “what is an American?”  and his answer demonstrate ways nonwhites in Pasco and the Tri-Cities challenged racial prejudice. His eloquent words and heartfelt message remain just as relevant and important in the twenty-first century, when migrant children are held in prison camps and racial discrimination and violence remain central to the experiences of nonwhites, as they were in 1943. 

RAMELLA: That’s professor of history, Robert Bauman, of WSU Tri-Cities. His recent book is Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland to 1943. His commentary and others about the history of the Northwest can be found at NWPB.org .

 

About the Author:

Robert Bauman is an associate professor of history and the academic director of arts and sciences at Washington State University Tri-Cities. He is an award-winning scholar whose research and teaching interests are in 20th century U.S. social policy, religion, and race in the American West. He is the author of a number of articles and book chapters and two books, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East LA, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008, and Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul: America’s Ecumenical War on Poverty, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. He also is co-editor, with Robert Franklin, and co-author of Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland to 1943, published by WSU Press in 2018, and Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region, to be published by WSU Press in December 2020. His article, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950” won the Charles Gates Award for the best article published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 2005.

 

 

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