Dillon Seymour Myer

Dillon Seymour Myer (September 4, 1891 – October 21, 1982) was a United States government official who served as Director of the War Relocation Authority during World War II, Director of the Federal Public Housing Authority, and Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 1950s. He also served as President of the Institute of Inter-American Affairs.

Early life and education Myer was born September 4, 1891, in Hebron, Ohio. He earned a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University in 1914 and an M.A. in education from Columbia University in 1926.

War Relocation Authority On June 17, 1942, Myer was appointed to lead the War Relocation Authority, and ran it until its dissolution in 1946. He replaced Milton S. Eisenhower, who had opposed the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and resigned after 90 days. Myer would eventually come to agree that the internment was a mistake, but believed that the resettlement efforts he headed toward the end of the war worked toward correcting it.

In one of his first actions as WRA Director, Myer established a formal leave program to allow citizen Nisei (second generation ethnic Japanese Americans) to exit camps for work outside the exclusion zone. (Kibei, United States citizens who had spent considerable time in Japan and were viewed by the WRA with suspicion, and non-citizen Issei were prohibited from leaving the camps.) Myer himself told an ACLU conference in 1944 that "super-patriotic organizations and individuals" and Hearst newspapers on the West Coast were hindering the resettlement of tens of thousands of "harmless" detainees who were eligible to leave the camps.

In July 1943, Myer was called to testify before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Under Myer's administration of the WRA, the agency pushed for assimilation among Nisei resettlers. Early in 1943 Myer had established WRA field offices in Chicago and Salt Lake City, two cities that received a significant number of those released on work leave. The offices provided support to Japanese Americans, helping them find employment and housing in communities where discrimination was widespread. Following Myer's directive, WRA workers also encouraged Nisei to "blend in" by avoiding speaking Japanese or spending time with other Japanese Americans. The policy was to disperse the former internees in order to avoid large congregations of Japanese American communities or reestablishment of the pre-war Japantowns. (Those were largely the result of discriminatory policies of many cities where Japanese immigrants settled, including prohibiting their ownership of land.)

Myer continued to work with an advisory council established by his predecessor and headed by Japanese American Citizens League leader Mike Masaoka (also a controversial figure). Together the WRA and JACL emphasized hyper-patriotism and assimilation with white Americans as the primary means for Japanese Americans to achieve success. Additionally, while Myer was supportive of the "good" Nisei who were eligible for leave clearance, those who were seen as "troublemakers" – mostly protestors and those who failed the so-called "loyalty questionnaire" – were removed from the general population and sent to segregated maximum security camps.

Bureau of Indian Affairs Myer led the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of Interior from May 1950 until President Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted his resignation in March 1953, as part of the change in administration following his election. It was typical of high-level political appointees to be replaced by new presidents. Early in Myer's tenure, Oliver La Farge, then President of the Association on American Indian Affairs, expressed optimism based on Myer's record that he and new Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman would offer tribes more assistance and less paternalism.

Instead, Myer accelerated the termination policy begun in the 1940s to withdraw the federal government from Indian affairs and liquidate Indian property. This was ultimately considered to be an "abject failure." Myer supported termination so avidly that a year into his tenure at BIA, Harold Ickes (then United States Secretary of Interior and a key figure in implementing the New Deal), called Myer "a Hitler and Mussolini rolled into one."

Ultimately, Myer faced "vigorous" criticism from the AAIA, Despite comparing Bureau policy under Myer to the Japanese internment, "designed to reduce Indians to the condition of prisoners of the bureau," Felix S. Cohen told the House Interior Committee that he believed Myer to be "a man of the highest integrity."

Indian termination policy From the time Myer joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he "felt very strongly that the Bureau of Indian Affairs should get out of business as quickly as possible but that the job must be done with honor." Myer later attributed Collier's negative opinion to an inadvertent dispute in 1942 over the future of Japanese internees at the Poston War Relocation Center, located on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, when Collier was BIA commissioner and Myer headed the War Relocation Authority.

Serious controversy arose when Myer drafted and the Department of the Interior promulgated proposed regulations that would allow Myer to veto contracts for legal representation between tribes and attorneys. The move to control tribal legal representation grew out of frustration by Democratic members of Congress with lawsuits brought on behalf of tribes by a few particular lawyers, especially Felix S. Cohen, architect of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and author of the Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Myer viewed Cohen, counsel for the Association on American Indian Affairs; and James E. Curry, counsel for the National Congress of American Indians, as examples of lawyers who deliberately misled Indian tribes and the public. He believed they were using Indian organizations as fronts to advance their own financial interests in tribal representation contracts and consulting fees. and much of the legal profession, including the American Bar Association.