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Show 4 Utah His tori cal Quarterly l d nd zinc. Fi h r' field w r fertile, and water from the drain tunnel ail bl for irrigation. The Union Pacific railroad built line t th town, nd with this timulus population grew, reaching high of between five and ix hundred in the late 1920s. Fisher him elf built five home and an apartment house for the miners. Howe er, the depres ion of the 1930s hit the mining industry hard and the to n began to decline. Soon it settled into a modest existence, it hundred or sore idents profiting from their location on Highway 40, a major interstate route. 13 When the United States entered World War II the people of Utah quickly felt its impact. While Utah Mormons were not as Japanophobic as their compatriots on the West Coast, they were as outraged by Pearl Harbor as other Americans, and they shared the nation's suspicions about the loyalties of Japanese Americans. In addition, the Mormons had always been chary of in-migrations of non-Mormon groups that might upset the homogeneity of their culture, and they also feared adding to unemployment in the state. 14 However, the war brought a labor shortage, particularly in agriculture, which led to a growing interest in using voluntary migrants from the West Coast as agricultural laborers. In early March the Utah State f"'arm Bureau Federation met to consider the problem of wartime antipathy. The executive secretary of the federation, Selvoy J. Boyer, suggested that Japanese nationals from the West Coast and local unemployed Japanese could be accepted as farm labor if the state and the army supplied adequate "special policing."15 Most Utahns adopted a wait-and-see attitude. When voluntary evacuees arrived early in March 1942, the Japanese American Citizens' League, a Nisei organization founded in 1930, attempted to provide some assistance to those who could not immediately find work. The organization voluntarily registered the refugees and worked with the Utah Welfare Commission to provide assistance. 16 But even this group was wary, lest hostility toward the newcomers jeopardize its own precarious position in the communities of Salt Lake and Ogden. When in the succeeding weeks more Japanese entered Zion the JACL became even more active. Its u Leslie S. Raty, Undn Wasatch Skies: A History of Wasatch County,l858-1900 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1954), pp. 30-32; Wasatch Couny Daughters of Utah Pioneers, How Beautiful upon the Mountains (Salt Lake City: Deseret New Press, 1963), pp. 1109-16. 14 Arrington, "Utah's Ambiguous Reception." 1s Deseret News, March 3, 1942. 16 Deseret News, March 6, 1942. |
