Searching for Subversives by Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas

Author:Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Beating Barbed-Wire Sickness

The INS recognized that internee labor was a good administrative policy for a number of reasons. First, a work program could utilize internee labor without creating competition within the civilian workforce because at the time there was a severe shortage of unskilled labor in some sections of the country. Second, it would reduce internment costs without impacting supervision at the camps. And finally, employment would combat the “psychoneurotic tendencies among internees,” by engaging them in productive activity that got them away from the camp and took their minds off of their confinement.60

Under the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention, prisoners of war could be employed in work for which they were physically fit.61 The Detaining Power was responsible for “the maintenance, care, treatment and the payment of the wages of prisoners of war working for private individuals.”62 According to the Regulations Governing Civilian Internees pursuant to the convention, internees working outside the camp could earn wages at the rate of eighty cents per day. Money earned was to be credited to the internees’ accounts and not paid directly to them until their release or repatriation, or in the case of death, to their heirs. Subject to the approval of the commanding officer of the internment camp, the internee could draw on his account up to ten dollars per month, which was issued in the form of canteen coupons.63 Thus pleas by family members who wished for their interned loved one to work in order to help support his family at home were futile because the system did not allow money earned through work projects to leave the camps.64

The Geneva Convention allowed arrangements to be made for internees to work for the Western Montana Beet Growers Association, which was badly in need of help during the war. Approximately 300 Italian seamen interned at Fort Missoula in 1942 were the first group of internees to be employed in the sugar beet fields, returning nightly to the internment camp.65 Initially, the workers were transported under heavy security to the beet fields, but eventually policies became more relaxed.66 The success of that program, both in increasing the productivity of the farms and in improving public relations in Missoula County, led to a more expansive program the following year. In March 1943, when funds became available, the INS established a pay-work program whereby internees could voluntarily work both on projects at the internment camps and off site for private employers and other government agencies at the rate of ten cents an hour, not to exceed an eight-hour workday. Any internee who wished to work in the pay-work program had to get approval from the Alien Enemy Control Unit, which reviewed issues of internal security.67

Not only did the program put money into the camps, it had a great effect on the morale of the internees. The establishment of this program coincided with the transfer of all remaining civilian internees from army camps to INS custody. Thus the swollen population of internees at INS camps

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