Clayton E. Triggs

A manager of relief and service organizations for most of his career, Clayton E. Triggs was also the first manager of the Owens Valley/Manzanar Reception Center during the period when it was administered by the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA).

Clayton Eugene Triggs was born on March 13, 1902, in Bloomfield Township, Fillmore County, Minnesota, about two miles out of Spring Valley. Educated at Dubuque College in Iowa, Triggs moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s, where be became the quartermaster of Black-Foxe Military Institute, a private military boy's school in Hollywood, in 1929. In that same year, he married Judith C. Helgeson. ^[1]

Starting in 1933, Triggs worked as an administrator for unemployment relief programs at the county, state and federal levels, holding at various times positions with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) based in Salt Lake City and Washington, DC, as director of the Los Angeles County Relief Administration, and as the assistant California state relief director based in San Francisco. In 1940, he was appointed as the acting WPA administrator for Southern California, overseeing a caseload of nearly 40,000 people. In March 1941, H. Russell Amory—later the manager of the Santa Anita Assembly Center and a protege of a prominent local politcian—took over that position, with Triggs serving as his deputy. Triggs moved to another position as the assistant to the assistant regional director of the WPA in July. ^[2]

Triggs was one of many WPA staffers who took on managerial roles in the administration of the " assembly centers " and "reception centers" run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA). Assigned as the first manager of the Owens Valley Reception Center in March 1942, the first camp built to hold Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their West Coast homes under the auspices of Executive Order 9066 , Triggs, over his two month tenure, oversaw the transition of Owens Valley/Manzanar from a "reception center" viewed as a temporary stop before excluded Japanese Americans could move themselves inland to a concentration camp where incarcerees were held behind a barbed wire fence under armed guard. He was assisted by a core of other former WPA staffers, including Ellis Pulliam and Harry L. Black, both of whom later managed other assembly centers, Fresno and Merced , respectively. ^[3]

Among the key developments that took place under his watch was the establishment of the first camp newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press , initially against the wishes of the WCCA. All of the subsequent WCCA and War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps would have such newspapers . Triggs also worked to build good relationships with the local community, though those relationships would be strained under his successor, Roy Nash. But perhaps his largest long-term impact came from statements he made regarding wages that Japanese American workers were to be paid. Initially stating the Nikkei workers would be paid wages comparable to that paid by the WPA, e.g. $50 to $90 per month, many Japanese Americans "volunteered" to go to Owens Valley with that understanding. But word of these wages led to an outcry by veterans groups and others, who pointed out that American solders were paid as little as $21 per month. As a result, the WCCA set wages at $8 a month for unskilled, $12 for semi-skilled, and $16 for skilled workers. (The WRA wages were slightly higher at $12/$16/$19, but still pointedly below the $21 mark.) Japanese Americans who had been promised the higher wages were understandably furious. The aftermath of Triggs's early wage promises were an important factor in later unrest at Manzanar . ^[4]

Though the WRA didn't officially take over Manzanar until June 1, the first WRA director of Manzanar, Roy Nash, was introduced on May 17. Triggs was reassigned to the Pomona Assembly Center , leaving on May 21. Though Pomona had opened only two weeks prior, it was more or less fully populated when Triggs arrived. He remained there until the camp's closing on August 24, around three months. ^[5]

As he was closing up operations at Pomona, Triggs announced that he would be leaving Los Angeles to become the director of the Red Cross in Iceland. He remained there for approximately eight months before taking a position with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Italy where he worked on the resettlement of some 200,000 people who had been displaced by the war. He returned to Los Angeles in July of 1946. In the 1950s, he served as the executive director of the Los Angeles USO. He left the USO in April of 1957 to enter private industry, as the president and general manager of South Pasadena based Microdot, Inc., a defense contractor. He died suddenly a year-and-a-half later, on November 30, 1958 at the age of fifty-six. ^[6]