Dorothy Swaine Thomas

Dorothy Swaine Thomas was born in Maryland on October 24, 1899, to John Knight Thomas and Sarah (Swaine) Thomas and grew up in Maryland and Virginia. After graduating with a B.A. from Barnard in 1922, where she studied under William F. Ogburn, she went on to the London School of Economics, where she was a student of Arthur L. Bowley. She completed her dissertation in 1924 on the connections between the business cycle and statistical indicators such as marriage, poverty and crime rates. It was published in 1925 as Social Aspects of the Business Cycle by Alfred A. Knopf. Upon graduation, she worked for the Federal Reserve Bank and was awarded a research fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, where she met the renowned sociologist W. I. Thomas in 1926. She became his research assistant and eventual co-author of a book on The Child in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1928). Although W. I. was nearly forty years her senior, they became a couple and eventually married in 1935. Subsequently, Thomas secured teaching appointments at Columbia (1927–30), Yale (1931–39), the University of California, Berkeley (1940–48). In between, she did research at the University of Stockholm and published studies on the declining population of Sweden. ^[1]

Though Thomas had no apparent knowledge or interest in Japan or Japanese Americans, several aspects of her prewar research proved to be relevant in her subsequent JERS research. In his study of JERS, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi points out that through her various prewar projects, she "had extensive exposure to interdisciplinary team research in the social sciences," even calling her "a pioneer this approach." Though trained as a demographer with its focus on hard statistical data, she was influenced by W. I., who was a pioneering figure in the use of life history and letters in sociological research, and she began to incorporate such qualitative data into her 1930s work. JERS fieldworker S. Frank Miyamoto also noted that her business cycle research, which looking at how world events affected individual behavior, had broad similarities to her JERS research. ^[2]

As the policy to forcibly remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast—including Berkeley students—evolved, Thomas and several other faculty members at the University of California saw a unique research opportunity to study a large-scale involuntary migration from a variety of disciplines. Given her prior relationship with Joseph H. Willits, the director of the Social Science Division for the Rockefeller Foundation, Thomas applied to the foundation in March 1942, and quickly secured over $100,000 from the Rockefeller, Columbia, and Giannini Foundations. She also secured the cooperation of the War Relocation Authority . She hired a staff consisting of Nisei graduate and undergraduate students who would conduct field research as they were removed to WRA camps, as well as white graduate students, notably Morton Grodzins , who would do both archival research and fieldwork. The initial focus for the study was to be Tule Lake due to its relative closeness to Berkeley, with a secondary focus on Gila River , though this changed as the fieldworkers moved to other camps. ^[3]

Given their other wartime duties, the other UC faculty dropped out one by one, leaving Thomas in charge of the project. In that role, she largely worked out of her Berkeley office, supervising the work of the two dozen or so fieldworkers and reading and commenting on the thousands of pages of notes, reports, and diaries they produced. With W. I.—who was seventy-eight years old as the project started—she paid brief visits to Tule Lake, Poston , and Gila River and held annual staff conferences. ^[4]

Over the course of the study, several issues emerged. Though formal ethical codes in conducting fieldwork did not yet exist, Thomas ordered fieldworkers not to betray informants or provide information to the WRA. But given the youth and inexperience of the fieldworkers and Thomas's ceaseless demands to produce, lapses did occur. Thomas also agreed to share summaries of the research with the WRA. From the perspective of the fieldworkers, the lack of a theoretical framework or even explicit instructions on what they were do record proved troublesome. S. Frank Miyamoto, a fieldworker at Tule Lake and later an eminent sociologist recalled that she "gave minimal direction to the field research staff, and most were troubled by the lack of more explicit instruction." Robert Spencer , a fieldworker at Gila, told an oral historian Art Hansen, "I received no instruction. I received no statement about the aims and so on of the project. Let's just see how the cookie crumbles, how things are going to go on." Finally, Thomas was stingy with regard to co-authorship with the research staff and with allowing them to publish research gathered as a JERS employee, most notably resulting in a bitter dispute with Morton Grodzins concerning the manuscript that would becomes Americans Betrayed . And in the end, Thomas benefitted professionally while she "paid minimal wages, expropriated the data, and took control of the final analysis as well as the production of formal studies (as products) and their publication," wrote Hirabayashi. Thomas ultimately published two monographs out of the JERS project, The Spoilage (1946), co-authored with Richard Nishimoto, and The Salvage (1952). ^[5]

In 1948, Thomas became the first female professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a key figure at its Population Studies Center. She served as vice-president of the American Statistical Association in 1946, president of the American Sociological Society in 1952, and president of Population Association of America in 1958–59. Everett S. Lee wrote that she "was alternately kind and irascible, always unpredictable" and that "when most of the academic world and its supporting foundations drew back in fright, she fought McCarthy." She remained at Penn until her retirement in 1970. She later taught for four years at Georgetown University. She authored or co-authored six books and seventy-one scholarly articles fro 1922 to 1969. ^[6]

In ill-health and confined to a wheelchair in her last years, she passed away in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 1, 1977, at age seventy-seven. ^[7]

Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo. The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp . Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Ichioka, Yuji. "JERS Revisited: Introduction." In Ichioka, Yuji, ed. Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 3-27.

Miyamoto, S. Frank. "Dorothy Swaine Thomas as Director of JERS: Some Personal Observations." In Ichioka, Yuji, ed. Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 31-63.