Dutch Leonard

Hubert Benjamin "Dutch" Leonard was born on April 16, 1892, in Birmingham, Ohio. As a young child, Leonard's parents moved from Ohio to Fresno, California, in 1901. After graduating from Fresno High School in 1910, Leonard played baseball for Saint Mary's College in Oakland, California. In 1912, Leonard was drafted by the Denver Grizzlies. ^[1]

In 1913, Leonard officially began his Major League Baseball career with the Boston Red Sox as a pitcher. Between 1913 and 1918, Leonard took the Red Sox to the 1915 and 1916 World Series.

In 1914, he achieved the modern-era record for lowest single-season earned run average (ERA) of all time at 0.96—a record that he still holds to this day. He led the Red Sox to World Series championships twice, first against the Philadelphia Phillies in 1915, and then the following year against the Brooklyn Robins (ancestors of today's Los Angeles Dodgers).

He later played with the Detroit Tigers for a total of four seasons, where his famous feud with Tigers star player and manager Ty Cobb reached a fever pitch. After the 1925 season, Leonard accused Cobb and another star player, Tris Speaker, of "fixing" games with gamblers. Cobb responded by charging that Leonard was a Bolshevik. The feud resulted in Leonard's departure from baseball. Shortly thereafter, he moved back to Fresno where he opened a vineyard in nearby Sanger.

Before Japanese American farmers were taken away to camp, Leonard worried his Japanese American neighbors would lose their farms to unscrupulous buyers in the days before forced removal. In the weeks prior to Executive Order 9066 , Leonard offered to manage the farms of Japanese Americans from Sanger in their absence and promised to pay them a percentage of the proceeds of the harvest.

Following the ruling of Ex parte Endo , Japanese Americans slowly returned to the West Coast . In Fresno, however, Japanese Americans faced pushback from locals. Mayor Z.S. Leymel declared in December 1944 that the arrival of Japanese Americans to Fresno would create "a headache" for the city. In the nearby towns of Reedley, Selma, and Orosi, locals shot at the homes of several Japanese American families . In Selma, locals burned down the home of returning incarceree Robert Morishige. On January 22, 1945, a group of ranchers in Orosi gave an ultimatum to the city's Japanese American families to leave the city by the end of the month. The deadline passed with no incidents reported.

Local readers sent vitriolic letters to the editor of the Fresno Bee calling for the government to keep Japanese Americans out of California. In one headline from April 9, 1945, the Bee proclaimed "Japanese return is seen as threat to coast security." The nastiness of the commentary provoked several letters to the editor in defense of Japanese Americans, most of which cited the record of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team . Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes expressed outrage at California state officials for sitting on their hands.

Government officials also responded negatively to the return of Japanese Americans. The Fresno County branch of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration withheld benefits from Japanese Americans who did not furnish proof of renouncing dual citizenship. The County Board of Supervisors refused to provide welfare funds for families, and local prosecutors refused to evict families who occupied the former homes of Japanese Americans. One official proposed reusing the Fresno County Fairgrounds—the former site of the Fresno Assembly Center —as temporary housing.

It is in this context that Dutch Leonard emerged as among the few advocates in support of Japanese Americans. When Japanese Americans who leased their property to Leonard returned to Fresno, Leonard proved true to his word. He handed back the land and paid the Japanese Americans farmers $20,000 in profits accrued during their imprisonment.

On April 6, 1945, the Yuta Nippo reported that Dutch Leonard had employed up to 75 former incarcerees on his ranches north of Fresno. The paper stated that Leonard is unshaken by the spate of recent attacks against Japanese Americans. The same article was also printed in the June 9, 1945, issue of the Pacific Citizen . The article also included a quote from Leon Anderson, the head of the WRA's Fresno office.

Meanwhile, Leonard contacted all the camps to offer jobs on his vineyard to Japanese American men and housing for their families. Leonard's brother and business partner, Edward H. Leonard, travelled to Manzanar , Gila River , and Amache to recruit workers. War Relocation Authority Director Dillon Myer met with Dutch Leonard about his proposal, and described him as "a friend of the evacuee" who stood for the principles of the WRA. Supposedly, famed Japanese American ballplayer Kenichi Zenimura was among the group to work as a grape picker in Leonard's vineyards. Several groups from Poston , Rohwer , and Amache accepted jobs on the farm, and by June 1945, the Leonard Bros. employed over 300 Japanese Americans, to whom he paid eighty cents an hour, supplied free housing, and paid a harvest bonus. ^[2]

Several individuals, such as fellow Yankee pitcher and civil rights activist Harry Kingman, praised Leonard for his courageous deeds. Kingman, the director of the West Coast Fair Employment Practice Commission, worked alongside civil rights leaders such as NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell Jr. to combat racial discrimination on the West Coast. The JACL's organ The Pacific Citizen applauded Leonard's efforts in the face of several incidents of domestic terrorism. In Bradford Smith's 1948 study Americans from Japan , Smith claimed that Leonard was among the first to employ Japanese Americans in California: "First to employ Japanese, even before V-J Day, was 'Dutch' Leonard, former baseball star and owner of 1600 acres of vineyard near Sanger." ^[3]

In the years following the war, Leonard maintained a friendly relationship with Fresno's Japanese American community. A fanatical lover of classical music, Leonard hired Maybelle Nakamura of Sanger to catalogue and file his 24,000 classical music tapes. Shortly before his death, the Fresno Bee published a photo showing Leonard and Nakamura cataloguing his collection his study. Hubert "Dutch" Leonard died of a sudden stroke on July 11, 1952.

Reeves, Richard. Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment During World War II. Henry Holt and Co., 2015.

Smith, Bradford. Americans from Japan. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1948.

van Harmelen, Jonathan. " Dutch Leonard—The Ballplayer who challenged Fresno's racism. " Discover Nikkei, March 6, 2023.