A new book details how the Woodwards spoke out against the World War II internment, despite popular opinion.
Seldom is history written overnight.
An exception rolled off the typewriter of an unknown newspaper editor in the wee hours between Dec. 7-8, 1941, on an island in the middle of Puget Sound.
With eight words – “These Japanese Americans of ours haven’t bombed anybody” – tapped out during production of an “Extra” edition of the Bainbridge Island Review, Walt Woodward wrote himself into the annals of American civil rights.
Credit, more precisely, Woodward and his wife Milly; like the newspaper itself, the Review’s stand that day was the product of their intellectual and philosophical union.
“It was definitely a collaboration,” daughter Mary Woodward said, “and (Walt) would be the first one to say that.”
An exhaustive new look at the Woodwards and their wartime support for the island’s Japanese American community, “In Defense of Our Neighbors,” is set for release this fall by Seattle’s Fenwick Publishing. Written by Mary Woodward, the 150-page tome is illustrated with scores of archival photographs. Many, like the images of the internees’ solemn march to the Eagledale ferry landing and waiting trains in Seattle, are familiar. Others from the Woodward family album show a more intimate portrait of Walt and Milly to which the public has never been treated.
Proofs are closely held pending final revisions, and were made available to the Review because timely publication rests on the raising of another $20,000 to cover production costs (see box).
“I think it’s going to be more than a Bainbridge Island book,” said island native and former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, one of the project’s patrons. “I think it’s going to be read up and down the West Coast, and maybe read across America.”
An untested author, Mary Woodward’s original thought was to refine “It Was the Right Thing To Do,” a scrapbook of news clippings and personal correspondence published several years ago by island internee Paul Ohtaki. But others saw a greater opportunity, one that Mary was uniquely qualified to write.
Munro and others approached her after several parents objected to the “Leaving Our Island” curriculum at Sakai Intermediate School, in which students explored the wartime internment of some 275 islanders of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens by birth. The story, they felt, needed a new and definitive telling.
Mary Woodward devoted herself to the project full time. But while she had grown up with her parents’ legacy and knew their story well – the Review’s support for Japanese Americans distinguished it among West Coast newspapers – she mined others’ archives to fill the gaps in her own memory.
“I wish there was a big file cabinet of all my parents’ papers,” she said, “but there isn’t.”
Enter the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, which has been recording oral histories by its members since the early 1980s and holds a trove of historical photos and documents. Listening to the taped accounts by internment survivors, Mary Woodward noted a trajectory toward openness as the years passed.
“The more recent interviews are much more frank,” she said. “There’s a national acceptance that this happened and that it was wrong, which hadn’t happened before.”
The book follows the islanders’ forced relocation to the California desert camp of Manzanar in March 1942; explores their life behind barbed wire among 10,000 fellow internees; and tracks their eventual return to an island far more welcoming than other West Coast communities still smarting from the wounds of war.
In a dozen lengthy sidebars, it also contextualizes the Bainbridge story within the regional and national politics of the day.
Those politics also touched the island, and the book details the efforts of a handful of islanders to prevent their neighbors from returning.
It is at points a somewhat personal account, as Mary Woodward’s references to “my parents” creep in. She is nonetheless confident in its objectivity, and the work has been vetted by National Park Service historians.
“I pretty much let the editorials and the letters to the editor tell the story,” she said. “I think there’s very little emotion. I tried not to preach or editorialize on my own.”
Their legacy
Even before the smoke of Sept. 11, 2001, had cleared, many Americans called for calm and spoke in defense of the rights of Americans of Middle Eastern descent – views perhaps made easier because of the Woodwards’ stand after Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier.
But in December 1941, from whose example did they have to draw? The Woodwards’ courage is all the more remarkable because they had taken over the Review just six weeks earlier, and weren’t necessarily known to their readers.
Although she was born on the island, Milly Woodward only summered here as a youth; she moved to Alaska for work as a school teacher, and only came back to Bainbridge after new husband Walt took a job with the Seattle Times. Not far removed from her grandmother’s Southern Confederate heritage, she nonetheless found within herself an intrinsically humanitarian bent.
Seattle native Walt Woodward, meanwhile, came from a staunchly conservative family — New Deal architect Franklin Roosevelt was never referred to by name, only as “that man in the White House” — and was a strict defender of the Constitution.
Together, they forged an unusual moral perspective, given the fears of the times.
“My father saw Japanese Americans who were being mistreated,” Mary said, “and my mother saw people who were being mistreated.”
While other newspapers whipped up anti-Japanese furor, the Woodwards enlisted Paul Ohtaki and other internees as correspondents, so the Review could include regular accounts of the births, weddings, deaths and other goings on among islanders in the camp. As a later Review writer noted, “Remarkably, [they] had not only grasped the full context of events that were just unfolding, but had also crafted a plan that would help reintegrate the Japanese Americans into island life…”
The Woodwards were celebrated as champions of civil liberties until Milly’s passing in 1989, and Walt’s death in 2001, and the book’s final chapter examines their legacy and its implications. Yet even after her father’s memorial service, a longtime friend asked Mary Woodward of the internment: “Did that really happen?”
Still, she believes the support for the Japanese American community — and the welcome they received upon their return from wartime exile — came from something innate to Bainbridge Island itself.
“I really don’t think my parents changed too many minds, but they provided the atmosphere for other folks to speak up,” Mary said. “That is what I think was missing in many other communities. There are people who want to speak up, but that’s hard to do when the newspaper is calling them ‘Japs’ and saying ‘we don’t want them back.’”
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Finish the book
● Donations to complete the publication of “In Defense of Our Neighbors,” to be released in September by Seattle’s Fenwick Publishing, can be made through the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community. All donations are tax deductible; contact Frank Kitamoto at 842-4772 to donate. Proceeds from the book will support completion of the Japanese American internment memorial at Pritchard Park.
