The Forgotten Generation: American Children and World War II

6. War Waifs

6 War Waifs † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † War like every other human ailment tends to leave the body politic folded along ancient creases and festering in old sores. —W. E. B. DuBois, “A Chronicle of Race Relations” (1942) To be a nisei was to participate fully in American life—school, church, sports . . . “to eat Wheaties and drink Ovaltine.” Yet it was also to be told and treated as if you were irredeemably different. —Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family (1993) † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † “Have you ever lain awake on Christmas Eve,” asked a child of the internment camps, “with everything about you strange, quiet, and still as death?” As Christmas drew nearer, the older children at the camp realized that gifts and attention and fun would be in short supply, so a small group decided to decorate the mess hall with red and green crepe paper and wreaths of desert holly. A young child praised the effort for the first Christmas behind barbed-wire fences: “As if with the waving of a magic wand, the bare cold mess hall was changed into an enchanting place.”1 For a few moments, a holiday celebration would be cherished and the fear of “military necessity” diminished. Most of the children felt very far from home. For Americans, the war meant movement. The Second World War dramatically redistributed the United States population more than any other historical moment, and in the three and a half years after Pearl Harbor, almost 15 million citizens changed their resident county. In December 1944, 89 90 The Forgotten Generation the President’s Committee for Congested Production Areas published a list of overwhelmed regions, which included eighteen cities in fourteen states. California headed the list with 782,705 new residents in Los Angeles and 514,815 in San Francisco, but 254,485 Southerners, black and white, had moved to Detroit, Michigan, as well. By war’s end, one of every five Americans had participated in this great war migration due to the decentralization of newly established war industries. More than 8 million men, women, and children moved to other states, usually in a pattern of south to north, east to west, rural to urban. America’s towns and cities boomed.2 Children might be left behind with relatives in their home towns, but most boys and girls traveled with their parents to new defense jobs and rather defensive communities. There the struggle began. Most boom towns did not welcome, much less prepare, for most of their new adult residents, but certainly children complicated the exploding formula. Assessing initial war conditions on the home front, Samuel Grafton found a Connecticut airplane engine factory’s community, for example, that had “little use for children.” One father with ten children had to distribute the siblings under six different roofs, including those of public institutions and relatives , in order to find adequate housing. “If you are a Hartford worker and have a new child, you hide it,” Grafton described the tense circumstances. “Should the landlord see the young one he will say ‘It!’ and raise the rent one dollar a week. Or order you evicted. Fifty-five families were evicted in April for the crime of having children.”3 No laws protected children from housing discrimination. “Should landlords bar children these days?” asked a new migrant worker in frustration to the Los Angeles Times. This anonymous worker had tried for days to find housing for his wife and five-month-old baby, but no landlords would rent their vacant properties to parents—”doing much to hinder the war effort.”4 As a new inspector for a St. Louis war plant, William Scheid received two hundred rejections from potential landlords because he had four children . Desperate for lodging so he could keep his new job, Scheid sent this poem to the local newspaper: Children, they say, are heaven-sent But to have them means you cannot rent. I’ve done my best, as has my spouse But, to save our soul, we can’t find a house. Landlords, it seems, were born full-grown, Or so you’d think to hear them moan; But surely somewhere there must be a few 91 War Waifs That also love little children, too. If one of you should see this ad, Rent us your house and you won’t be sad. The poem apparently pulled some heartstrings, and within days Scheid’s family had...