The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (8 page)

Before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Harrison lived a quiet life with Carol and their three sons. Their only daughter, Carol Hope, died of influenza in 1931. An independent liberal Republican like his father, Harrison was civically engaged. In 1937, he organized an effort to consolidate city and county government in Philadelphia. Two years later, he helped found a Democratic Fusion ticket, combined of Republicans, who held a majority in Philadelphia, as well as Democrats and independents, to campaign for consolidated government. It was not successful. He ran the United Way and helped start a local Boys’ Club.

He and Carol bought a large house in Rose Valley in 1932. It was in foreclosure, and they got it on twenty-four acres for a steal—only
$18,500, according to their son J. Barton Harrison. Earl had grown up playing tennis on public courts in Frankford, and in the yard of his home he built a large tennis court. He and his young sons played regularly. Carol brought them platters of hefty sandwiches and gallons of lemonade. In the run-up to the war, Carol planted a large victory garden. She had chickens and several cows. In 1939, as Jews streamed out of Europe, Carol and Earl sheltered several Jewish refugees behind the hedged lawn of their family compound.

Barton was only eight when his father visited Crystal City in 1942. Back home in Rose Valley the threat of another attack from either the Japanese or the Germans was a tangible part of their everyday life. “German submarines had been spotted off the Atlantic coast,” recalled Barton. “In our house we had long-handled shovels with buckets of sand nearby in case incendiary bombs were dropped. In our neighborhood, we set up a system of fire spotters. I was one. At eight p.m. I would light a flare outside our house. And then a spotter would write down the moment he spotted my flare. Everybody took the threat very seriously.”

Before the war, Harrison carried little political weight and had nothing obvious about him to attract the attention of Francis Biddle, then the solicitor general of the United States. On June 28, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, and Biddle decided to persuade Harrison, whom he knew from legal ties in Philadelphia, into public service. The act made it mandatory, for the first time in American history, for every alien living in the United States to register and be fingerprinted.

Biddle agonized over the passage of the law, which he believed was a reflection of irrational congressional fears that would alienate millions of foreign-born residents who were not citizens. That this program would be administered by the Department of Justice—normally charged with prosecuting criminals—particularly rankled him. As Biddle later wrote, “The very word
alien
suggested those who had been estranged and excluded.” With the passage of the act, Biddle wrote, “The beginning of the witch hunt was on.”

Biddle had only two months to put the bureaucratic machinery in place. He was worried about how to administer the program with skill and tact and chose Harrison as the director of alien registration. Of Harrison, Biddle later wrote, “He understood how important it was to make foreigners here understand how much they had contributed to us. He did not want to melt out the richness of their own cultures.”

Harrison accepted the job and turned his attention to how to convince aliens that the registration law was not something to fear, not a trick by the government to force their deportation. He decided to sell the program to noncitizens as an initiation into an “American club.” He argued that while registration didn’t mean citizenship, noncitizens who complied would demonstrate loyalty to America’s rule of law.

It was a grim sell. The fears of aliens were well founded. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson called the new law “a phase of our national defense program,” a mechanism for weeding out spies. Foreign-born immigrants knew that Hitler registered the Jews in Germany as a first step to stripping them of all their rights. Most approached the idea of national registration with panic and dread.

Harrison assembled a staff of twenty young lawyers, many of them his friends, and set up an office in an abandoned ice-skating rink in Washington, DC. It became the official headquarters of the Alien Registration Division of the Justice Department. The rink was not air-conditioned, and in the sticky summer heat the battalion of lawyers, briny with sweat, prepared the complicated apparatus for registering every noncitizen. It was like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle, with an unknown number of pieces and no clear pattern of how to solve the puzzle.

According to the statute, all noncitizens aged fourteen or over, including those in the process of naturalization, had to register with local authorities and be fingerprinted by December 26. Harrison and his team had only six months to register every noncitizen in the United States.

It wasn’t just a matter of a simple signature. All aliens were required to answer fifteen primary and twenty-seven secondary questions, including when they first entered the United States and how many trips they’d made abroad. They had to state religious affiliations and provide employment records. The questions had to be answered under oath, and violations were punishable by a fine of $1,000 or imprisonment or both. To lessen the aura of criminality associated with fingerprinting and the threat of imprisonment, Harrison insisted that registrations be done not at police stations, as the law directed, but at local post offices.

Within days after the implementation of Harrison’s plans, cities all over the country began to purge aliens from county relief rolls and denied them charity. Many employers fired aliens who were not citizens. In Texas, Mexican nationals, and even some naturalized and native-born Latinos, feared the plan was a deportation scheme. Some voiced their concerns to local authorities. In offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, Mexican American civil rights leaders from LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) directed registration of Mexican aliens in an attempt to avert fears. In the face of hostility and rising unemployment, many Mexican nationals and even US citizens chose to return to Mexico.

Convinced that aliens would trust foreign-born Americans more than those born on American soil, Harrison built his staff from a wide array of ethnic backgrounds. For his deputy, he chose Donald Perry, born in Yugoslavia, a trusted classmate of Harrison’s at the University of Pennsylvania. As director of communications to design a publicity campaign, Harrison chose M. E. Gilford, a Jew. Gilford’s assistant was the writer Mangione, an Italian. The choice of Mangione for such an important position was strategic. At the time, more aliens living in the United States were from Italy than from any other country.

Harrison urged his staff to think of the good that registration might do. The data gleaned from the questionnaires might dispel the ignorance and racism that characterized the average American’s
concept of aliens as saboteurs. Moreover, it might avert the passage of more anti-immigrant laws. As Mangione later wrote, “With a degree of empathy which at that time of my life I found remarkable in one who called himself a Republican, Harrison understood the fears of aliens and did everything within his administrative powers to calm them.”

Harrison made the deadline. Six months after the start of the program, almost 5 million noncitizens, including the fathers of Ingrid and Sumi, were registered. Out of all immigrants in the United States only 1,061 were prosecuted for failure to comply with the act, which Harrison argued proved that most were loyal to the United States and that the threat of traitors was exaggerated.

He resigned his position, cleared out his office at the rink, and on January 21, 1941, returned to his law practice in Philadelphia.

To honor Harrison for his service, the month before, Eleanor Roosevelt had invited Harrison and Carol to dinner at the White House. Though Harrison was a Republican, Carol was a liberal Democrat and utterly devoted to Mrs. Roosevelt. The first lady, still at odds with her husband over the treatment of foreign-born immigrants, wanted to talk to Harrison firsthand about registration. She had received a lot of mail from frightened noncitizens. In addition to the Harrisons, Mangione was a guest, and he wrote about the dinner party in his memoir,
An Ethnic at Large.

The president, on a Navy cruise to inspect American and British military bases, was not present at the party. The Harrisons and Mangione were ushered into a blue room with gilded chairs. An attendant explained that Mrs. Roosevelt would join them shortly and showed them a diagram of where they should sit at the table.

To Harrison’s dismay, the first guests to arrive were a well-known Chinese couple, Dr. T. V. Soong, the brother of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s banker, and his wife. Their presence might make it difficult to talk frankly about alien-registration problems. Since 1882, the Chinese had been excluded from US citizenship.

Henry Morgenthau Jr., the secretary of the treasury, arrived with
his wife. To make polite conversation, Carol told Dr. Soong that one of her favorite writers was Lin Yutang, whose translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers. Soong reciprocated that he admired the work of Pearl Buck about China.

Then Eleanor made her entrance into the room and offered apologies and warm greetings. She ushered them into a large dining room on the ground floor. The plates were rimmed with gold and etched with the Roosevelt family crest. After everyone took their places, Eleanor described to Harrison some of the mail she had received from frightened aliens. In one letter, she told him, a woman expressed fears that she would have to reveal embarrasing information about herself that her husband did not know. Prior to her marriage, the letter writer had been convicted of theft and served a prison sentence. Another letter told how a respected member of a community, who had been voting for years because he thought he’d fulfilled all the formal requirements of the nationalization law, learned that in fact he had not fully completed them. He had been voting illegally. What should the man do?

The rest of the table sat in silence. Harrison quietly explained that nothing in the Alien Registration Act required aliens to register in the communities where they lived. Both of the letter writers could avoid embarrassment by registering in any city where the registration clerks did not know them. That the man had voted illegally wouldn’t be known in his home county.

The presence of the Chinese couple did not prevent Eleanor from talking about the law. She spoke her mind, offering a window into how much she disagreed with Roosevelt and the Congress. What, she asked Harrison, about all the aliens who had never learned English, who lived in immigrant enclaves and knew only enough English to get by in their jobs and on buses? She was angry at the law because it discriminated against groups of foreign-born people, an idea she considered un-American.

Harrison, who also believed the law was flawed, adopted a diplomatic stance. He reassured the first lady that his office was doing
all it could to reach non-English-speaking immigrants through the foreign-language press and radio.

Coffee and cake arrived and Eleanor shifted to the subject of race relations. Earlier in the week, she’d visited a high school in Texas. W
HITES ONLY
signs were on all public restrooms, cafés, movie theaters, and swimming pools. Texas schools were all segregated. No
MEXICANS
signs were as common in Texas as
no negroes
. A young Latino in the high school crowd told Mrs. Roosevelt that in Mexico, where his family came from, Negroes weren’t segregated from society and racial intermarriage was accepted. The boy wanted to know how Mrs. Roosevelt, a powerful figure, could tolerate racial segregation.

That night Eleanor told her guests that the boy’s question put her on the spot and made her feel ashamed of the country. While she expressed disapproval of racial inequality to friends and confidants, she had been reluctant to speak against existing laws in public. Finally, she told her guests, she decided the boy deserved an honest answer. She told him that she agreed with him and said, “A democracy which does not serve all its people could not long survive.” The Latino students in Texas gave her a standing ovation.

Harrison asked if the statement had attracted press coverage. “Not yet,” Eleanor said. “Sometimes newspapers don’t print ideas they don’t like.”

When Eleanor signaled the end of the dinner party, she kissed Carol good-bye on the cheek and shook Earl’s hand.

Harrison was praised for his work as director of alien registration. The
Survey Mid Monthly
, an influential journal edited by Paul U. Kellogg that published essays on social reform, wrote that Harrison had carried out the registration program in such a way that anxieties were allayed, and what might have been a witch hunt became an “orderly experience in sound public administration and compliance with the law.” While many enemy aliens would not have agreed, Biddle was pleased with Harrison’s work. “I hope that the temptation towards public work will keep simmering in you,” Biddle
wrote to Harrison in a private letter. “Once you have yielded to it, nothing else can be as good.”

When Biddle became attorney general in 1941, he recommended to Roosevelt that he appoint Harrison to the position of commissioner of immigration. Roosevelt knew that Harrison was an independent Republican, an idea he did not much like, but he was willing to follow Biddle’s recommendation. However, Roosevelt wanted to know if Harrison had voted for him.

“Dear Earl,” wrote Biddle to Harrison on August 27, 1941. “Did you vote for the President and when?”

“I voted for the President in 1940 but not before,” Harrison replied to Biddle. “Which indicates how long it takes me in some situations to reach the proper conclusion.”

Roosevelt was amused by the answer. He told Biddle to go ahead with Harrison’s nomination, but to clear it with Senator Joseph Guffey, an old-line Democrat from Pittsburgh. Guffey, who held a grudge against Biddle from a previous ruckus over another presidential appointment, told the new attorney general that he would claim senatorial privilege and block Harrison’s appointment. Guffey quickly filed a “blue slip,” signaling his opposition, with the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization.