"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 14: Chicago Anthropology in World War II

Within a week after Pearl Harbor, Dean Redfield circulated to all social science departments a memo asking for reports on the “national defense activities” of their staffs retroactive to the summer of 1940. The most notable contribution of the Department of Anthropology was the Food Habits and Dietary Study of the Southwest, which Fred Eggan was directing as a pilot study for an ill-fated hemispheric project on Indian nutrition developed by Warner and Redfield for John Collier’s Inter-American Indian Institute. Although several of the faculty noted honorific or consultative activities as “service in Washington,” the Chicago anthropologists did not have much wartime involvement in what one of them called the “Washington pressure cooker.” This did not imply, however, that they carried on anthropological business as usual.

In retrospect, a striking focus of the wartime activity of the Chicago faculty is the concern with attitude and policy in the treatment of the Japanese, both in the United States and in postwar Japan. Early in 1942 President Roosevelt approved the recommendation that all Japanese be removed from the Pacific Coast and relocated in camps on Indian reservations and reclamation projects in the West – a move which Cole later attacked as a response to self-interested pressure groups rather than to the needs of national security. In the summer of 1942, after a visit to the camps, Redfield made basic policy recommendations to the War Relocation Authority (in which several Chicago Ph.D.’s played important roles). Arguing that the vast majority of American Japanese were loyal, Redfield urged the prompt reintegration of the native-born into American life.

Early the following year, negotiations were completed with the U.S. Army Provost Marshal General to establish training schools at the University of Chicago for officers and technical specialists who would serve in administrative posts in captured territories in the Far East. Commissioned as Captain, Fred Eggan became director of the Chicago Civil Affairs Training School, in which Cole, John Embree, and Braham and Mary Fujii Halpern also served. Although Eggan’s suggestion that the officers be taken for training at the WRA camps was not implemented, the program turned out most of the civil affairs officers for the Far East by the time it ended in 1945. In the meantime, members of the Department were active on other issues affecting the morale of the American public. During 1944, graduate speakers spoke to more than 50,000 high school students on the problems of race and minority group relations – which were the topic also of several of Redfield’s contributions to the University of Chicago Roundtable radio broadcasts.

Although the regular graduate program continued on a reduced scale throughout the war years, a large number of students were on active duty in the armed services. Their letters back to “Bingey” helped to fill the pages of Euphoria, the occasional newsletter produced by Ernestine Bingham, who as a departmental secretary did a great deal to create the esprit of its title. This overseas activity symbolized the beginning of the end of the long tradition of North American Indian insularity in American anthropology. The attempt made to organize anthropological expertise on Oceania early in 1942 foreshadowed a turn toward overseas research after the war. By 1944, Redfield was suggesting to one of the Department’s graduates that Brazil – where R-B had spent the war years – might become a major field of departmental activity. The circumstances of the war’s end, however, deposited a fall-out of anxiety on the hopes entertained for the postwar world. Writing to his daughter Lisa shortly after Hiroshima, Redfield wondered how to bring under control “this cancer-cell of human invention.”

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