One of many profound effects of the economic troubles of the 1930's was the interstate migration of large numbers of people in search of employment. This mass movement in itself caused social and economic changes. On April 22, 1940, the House established the Select Committee to Investigate Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens to study the migration, the social and economic needs of the poor, and the existing government programs to meet those needs in order to gain better understanding of the situation and its implications and to aid Congress in enacting remedial legislation. John H. Tolan of California was appointed chairman. Between July 1940 and March 1941, the committee held public hearings in various regions of the country at which 371 witnesses testified; it presented its final report on April 3, 1941.
While conducting the study, the committee became aware of another large-scale migration that was occurring. Increasingly, workers were moving to manufacturing centers in search of employment in defense industries. Accordingly, on March 31, 1941, the House passed a resolution continuing the select committee under the title of Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration to study the ramifications of the defense-oriented migration. The committee conducted public hearings around the country from June 1941 to September 1942, including hearings on the West Coast in February and March 1942 to consider the problems inherent in the proposed relocation of enemy aliens and Japanese-Americans. The committee issued eight reports relating to national defense migration and the evacuation effort, culminating with the final report on January 8, 1943 (H. Rept. 3, 78th Cong., 1st sess., Serial 10760).
Excerpted from the National Archives webpage on Tolan Committee records.
Representative John Tolan, a Democrat from Oakland, California, was a New Deal liberal who had entered Congress in 1935, and he headed the committee that began in 1940 as the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens. Thus, the Committee's initial hearings centered on the problems that refugees from the Dust Bowl encountered as they moved west. By 1941, as workers flocked to military production jobs with the nation preparing for war, the Committee changed its focus and its name to the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration. The other members of the Tolan Committee were John Sparkman (D-Alabama), Laurence Arnold (D-Illinois), Carl Curtis (R-Nebraska), and George Bender (R-Ohio). Sparkman was also a New Dealer, albeit a virulent opponent of civil rights for African Americans. Curtis and Bender, both elected to the House in 1938, believed President Roosevelt and the New Deal to be far too liberal.
As discussion increased in early 1942 about the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, some liberals, including Carey McWilliams, believed that a sympathetic Committee chairperson such as Tolan could help forestall the most extreme anti-Nikkei actions. The Committee held hearings in San Francisco on February 21, 23, and March 12, in Portland on February 26, in Seattle on February 28 and March 2, and in Los Angeles on March 6 and 7. During the early sessions much of the testimony centered on whether any group of people should be removed from their homes en masse. In the later sessions, as the policy of removal became a fait accompli, some testimony shifted to the logistics of removal, and how to make it more humane. In all four cities, but especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Committee took testimony not only regarding Japanese Americans but also regarding German and Italian nationals on the West Coast. For example, the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, a refugee from Nazism, spoke about German expatriates in California, but made no reference to proposals to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
Excerpted from the Densho Encyclopedia