Historical Narrative On Crystal City Internment Camp. [Cover title]

[Fountain Valley, California]: [Three Star Nursery, Inc.], 1990. Very good +. 11" x 8½". Thin card wrappers; bound booklet of 37 leaves, printed rectos only. 32 pp. typed report + 4 pp. photocopied archival documents + compiler statement at rear. Very good plus: a few small faint soil spots to wrappers; internally fresh.

This is a reproduction of a rare (and apparently now impossible to locate) United States government report on the Crystal City Internment Camp (CCIC). It was reproduced here with help from the National Archives by a Japanese American who had been incarcerated at CCIC.

CCIC opened in December 1943 near Crystal City, Texas as part of a program called the "Enemy Alien Control Unit." Along with Japanese American citizens and immigrants, the camp held Americans of German and Italian descent who had come under FBI suspicion. Many had been deported from Latin American countries. CCIC was designed to hold families during World War II; wives and children (often American citizens) opted to be interned with the men rather than lose them completely, a situation deemed "voluntary internment." By August 1944, there were over 2,000 Japanese and over 800 people of German descent interned at CCIC, housed separately by ethnicity. The camp was officially closed in February 1948.

A statement at the rear of this work shares that it was compiled by Kimiyo Hayakawa (later Takahashi), a Japanese American born in Los Angeles. We found a CCIC registry online that listed her family; she would have been around 18 at the time of incarceration and her father, a nurseryman, was assigned to the camp's greenhouse. Kim and her brother Gary operated a nursery in Los Angeles for decades after the war. The rest of the book consists wholly of material found in the National Archives. There is a photocopied government office memorandum that instructed CCIC division heads to prepare a "summary narrative" to be submitted "to the Bureau of the Budget for incorporation into a general war effort history of government agencies." It is unclear whether such a history was ever produced. This report, completed in 1945, is the only evidence we could find of a CCIC history created by employees of the camp.

The narrative discussed the establishment and construction of CCIC, including factors behind the selection of its location and acknowledgment of its severe overcrowding. There were thorough statistics on the arrival and numbers of Japanese, German and Italian "inductees," lists of camp policies, procedures, staff members and their roles. It claimed that "the vast majority of personnel employed at Crystal City were untrained in the work they were called upon to do" and bemoaned the isolated conditions which affected not only the hiring of staff but also the procurement of supplies.

Camp life was also covered in the report, which stated the staff's goal of providing "normal life for the internees, so far as circumstances would permit." It described the methods of distribution of clothing and necessary goods, cultural events organized by the internees, and work, recreational and entertainment programs. There were notes on visitation, surveillance and the censorship of correspondence: "the known fact that a third party will read a letter does not seem to bother the composer; so family secrets are bared, promises made and broken, anger and distrust portrayed, etc., just as though the writer or receiver was not in custody." Four pages were dedicated to internee education, noting the installation of an "official school, based on the regular school system in Texas . . . open to enrollment by any child, German or Japanese, who desired to continue or begin the American education." There were also distinct German and Japanese schools. The report recommended that ethnicity-based separation be utilized in other camps, noting conflicts between the "pro-American and pro-enemy factions" and suggesting that if there were separate groups not only of "like nationality, but of like attitude as well . . . internment utopia might be realized."

A rare compilation of data and descriptions of life at a family detention camp during World War II, made available through the dedication of a formerly incarcerated Japanese American. No holdings found online or in OCLC.