Margaret D'Ille Gleason

MARGARET D’ILLE GLEASON
Camp: Manzanar, CA
Address: WRA Staff Housing

Written by Susanne Norton LaFaver, Margaret’s great niece.

I was born Margaret Lillian Matthew in Springfield, Illinois, November 20, 1879. My parents, Winfield Scott Matthew and Marion Lillian Pomeroy, were both graduates of Northwestern University and married on Christmas Day 1877. I was the first of their 12 children.

My father was a Methodist minister, and we moved often. My parents had five children by 1887 when we traveled by train, with my grandmother, to Los Angeles. There, Father was dean of the University of Southern California. We moved to Berkeley in 1892 when Father became editor of the California Christian Advocate. He commuted to San Francisco on the ferry and was there when the 1906 earthquake struck. My father said the sorrows and toils of those awful days were beyond human words.

After I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, I taught school for a brief period. In 1903, I joined the national staff of the YWCA. For five years I traveled, organizing groups of girls in the preparatory schools of New England and other eastern states.

It was my younger brother, Allen Matthew, who first introduced me to UC Berkeley freshman Ralph P. Merritt. No one was more surprised than I to meet Ralph again many years later when he became project director at Manzanar.

I was called to Japan in 1908 where, for ten years, I was a secretary of the National YWCA. It was during this time that I learned to love and admire the Japanese people and culture. During the Russian Revolution, 1918 to 1920, I served the Indochinese Red Cross in Siberia doing relief work for the Russians. I was based in Vladivostok. Returning the United States, I again joined the national staff of the YWCA, working with the financial division. In 1927, I became General Secretary of the Oakland YWCA.

I was 56 when I married Arthur D’Ille in October 1935. We had met in Siberia, where he was in the U.S. diplomatic services. For a year and a half we lived happily on an avocado ranch in Vista, Southern California. When he died, I moved to San Francisco and took up social work with the California State Relief Administration. A friend described my work as “visiting the poor people living in abandoned boats at Hunter’s Point.”

I was 63 when I moved to Manzanar War Relocation Center as the Chief of Community Welfare and head counselor. My experiences in Japan decades earlier were important for helping me to understand Japanese culture and Japanese Americans.

The central office of the Community Welfare Section was established in Block 1. Our small office was equipped with one cupboard, two long tables, and benches. We had a corner for private interviews behind two screens. There were no desks, chairs, files, or telephone and only one typewriter.

During 1942, the Community Welfare staff usually met each day to discuss our work and policies. A training course with lectures and discussion about social work philosophy and policy was conducted by Harry and Lillian Matsumoto, superintendents of the Children’s Village, the only orphanage in a war relocation center. During the war, it housed up to 101 children, newborns to teenagers.

Our staff meetings and training programs were often hampered by language. Many older people spoke and read only Japanese while most young people spoke and read English. Since not everyone spoke both languages, we had a combination of older and younger employees. Language and cultural questions were a constant consideration. The question of how far Japanese language, culture, ideals, and manners should be recognized in a community whose background was Japanese, but we felt should increasingly be a part of American life, came up repeatedly. We attempted to unite both cultural patterns, but worked constantly toward future American understanding.

We encountered great difficulty in family conflicts between old Japanese cultural ideas and those of modern young Japanese Americans. The close life under crowed housing conditions aggravated this clash of ideas. Grandparents wished to control their grandchildren in discipline, manners, food, and sleeping habits. Parents’ control of selection of their children’s mates was accentuated in the camp. Young people’s lives were constantly under the eye of their parents and others. Children had difficulty finding space, time, and quiet for homework. There were often strong differences of opinion between the older and younger Japanese Americans. Our staff stood between the old Japanese thinking and extremes of modern ideas, with an effort to unite family life and development. We tried to urge preservation of the best in both ways, and the need for preparation for the future on the basis of reality and not prejudice.

On Thanksgiving Day 1942, my old friend Ralph Merritt became project director of the War Relocation Authority at Manzanar. As he walked into the mess hall where the 200 staff gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, I waved my hand beckoning him. I was a friendly and familiar face. He was relieved to find me Manzanar’s Community Welfare Director. Ralph later said that with my background and long acquaintance with Japanese people, I was the “right person in the right place at the right moment to minister to the needs of the 10,000 evacuees living behind barbed wire fences.”

On Sunday afternoon, December 6, 1942, the turbulent forces that had been at work broke into a mass “riot” like a thunderstorm over the Sierra Nevada. It was a tragic affair – no one person was to blame. There was no one cause. Many grievances of many kinds created uncontrollable mass emotions. Late that night, the final tragedy was enacted with the gunfire that wounded and killed men.

In the day and nights after the “riot,” the incarcerees at Manzanar refused to come out of their barracks to do any of the necessary work for a city of 10,000 people. It was a dead city. No children came out to play. No lights burned at night. Days went by and Ralph could find no way to bring about the normal way of living, where children played and went to school, and people went about their daily routines.

Two weeks following the “riot,” Ralph was sitting in his office listening to telephoned instructions to “get tough.” Kindly, I asked him what he planned to do. “Ralph Merritt, have you forgotten your Christian upbringing?” I asked. “Have you forgotten that this is Christmas and what Christmas means?” I said there was a warehouse full of presents that had been shipped to Manzanar by churches and friends who wanted to give Christmas happiness to the more than 1,000 children living behind barbed wire. I suggested Ralph send trucks and men to the mountains to cut trees and bring them back to the camp to set up in front of each barracks, decorated with lights; and that presents should be distributed the day before Christmas so people could prepare Christmas trees for Christmas morning.

I reminded him there was a Children’s Village at Manzanar, which was under my department. The babies and teenagers had picked up by the army from Alaska to San Diego as “security risks.” I proposed we arrange a great children’s party at the Children’s Village on Christmas Eve. That night, Ralph, his wife Varina, and I walked through the dark, dead camp to our Children’s Village where happy voices welcomed us. We sat Japanese fashion on the floor surrounded by excited, happy children while the Christmas scene of shepherds and wise men was enacted upon a little stage. Then, there was Santa Claus, and presents, and we began to sing Christmas carols.

As we sang, we suddenly realized that there was more singing than the voices of the little children gathered in that room. Ralph got up and quietly walked out into the night. The clear moon and stars were shining over the Sierras. From out in the darkness, Christmas carols were being sung by children outside the village.

Ralph looked out on the upturned faces of boys and girls of Japanese ancestry, born in America, American citizens, from our own schools, who were standing there in the night singing Christmas carols along with the children of the village. We called out to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and they wished all of us a Merry Christmas. Then Ralph, Varina, and I stood alone watching the star that was above us. Ralph turned to me. He said, “Peace has come again to Manzanar.”

I was 67 when I met Manzanar visitor George Gleason, formerly a YMCA secretary in Japan. Manzanar closed in 1945, and George and I married on February 9, 1946. We moved to Los Angeles where I lived for eight years in the midst of many old and new friends, enjoying two auto trips across the continent, and one into Western Canada.

From my two marriages, I acquired three stepdaughters and six grandchildren. I loved them as a mother and grandmother.

For the last four years of my life, I was an invalid, and for the final two and a half months was confined to my bed. Even so, my life was rich in outgoing and incoming love, in wide interests and in friendships reaching around the world.

Based on my experience at Manzanar, I hope today’s young people will protect civil liberties and stand up for one another. Recognize, appreciate, and show respect for people of different ethnicity. At one time or another, we were all immigrants to this country. I pray young Americans continue to practice the values on which our country is based: freedom and justice for all.

Wind and Dust
This wind and dust I have to bear
How hard it blows I do not care.
But when the wind begins to blow –
­My morale is pretty low.
I know that I can see it through
Because others have to bear it too.
So I will bear it with the rest
And hope the outcome is the best.
– George Nishimura, age 16 (Manzanar, 1943)

Read this to learn more about the demographics of each of the ten facilities administered by the War Relocation Authority.

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