Formation
The WRA was formed on 18 March 1942 via Executive Order 9102 from president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The original director of the WRA was Milton S. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a proponent of FDR’s New Deal and more than likely disapproved of the idea of the internment camp as a whole. The original idea for the camps was to make them similar to subsistence homesteads in the rural interior of the country. This idea was met with opposition from the governors of these interior states at a meeting in Salt Lake City in April 1942. They were worried about security issues and claimed it as "politically infeasible." Shortly before the meeting Eisenhower wrote to his former boss, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, and said “when the war is over and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people, we as Americans are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that we may have done.” Milton S. Eisenhower continued as director of the WRA only until July 1942. His work in the WRA including pushing FDR to make a public statement in support of the loyal Nisei, raising wages that interned Japanese Americans were paid and petitioning the United States Congress to create programs for postwar rehabilitation.
Read more about this topic: War Relocation Authority
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“... the mass migrations now habitual in our nation are disastrous to the family and to the formation of individual character. It is impossible to create a stable society if something like a third of our people are constantly moving about. We cannot grow fine human beings, any more than we can grow fine trees, if they are constantly torn up by the roots and transplanted ...”
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