James Edmiston, Sr.

Born in Dayton, Washington (then a U.S. territory), the son of Francis (Frank) Lee Edmiston, a carpenter from Arkansas, and his wife Mary "Molly" Akin, James Ewen Edmonton grew up in Lewiston, Idaho. His father died when he was only 15. As a young man he lived in Yakima, Washington, where he worked as a newspaper reporter, and then in Idaho, where he worked as a journalist. During this period, he founded and coached a few semipro baseball teams, and even served for a time as president of the Coeur d'Alene League. During this time, he met a local Idaho woman, Florence Edna Edmiston, and the couple married on March 25, 1911. (The pair joked that their romance was based on their shared family name).

In the first years following their marriage, the Edmistons lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and worked as farmers. James E. Edmiston then took up journalism, at least on a part-time basis. He worked for the Petaluma Daily Morning Courier , then was hired as a local reporter by the San Francisco Chronicle . In the next three years, the Edmistons had three children, James, Mary, and Florence. In addition to his newspaper work, in 1916 Edmiston became secretary of the Central Marin Chamber of Commerce and led work as a booster to support civic affairs and public infrastructure building projects. In April 1917, after the United States entered World War I, he took a leave from the Chamber of Commerce. While rejected for military service, he led the local publicity committee for the nationwide Liberty Loans war bond drive.

In 1919, following the end of World War I, Edmiston purchased the "Silverwood" Orchard, a large piece of property in Sams Valley, Jackson County, Oregon. In addition to his agricultural production on the ranch, he took a lead in local grower organizations. He served as commercial secretary of the Oregon growers cooperative and president of the Jackson County Farm Bureau. He soon settled in Medford, Oregon.

In early 1922, Edmiston joined the Medford branch of the Ku Klux Klan. He later explained that he had been one of a number of local business and professional men who had been recruited by the Invisible Empire, whose leaders presented a statement of principles he considered worthy of support: (1) maintenance of white supremacy; (2) separation of church and state; and (3) law and order enforcement. It is most plausible that, like other up-and-coming businessmen of the period, he joined the Klan for fraternal reasons, to meet like-minded men and attract customers. By his own later account, Edmiston was inactive in the Medford Klan branch, which lends credence to the idea that he joined it for self-interested motives. However, in 1922, when a group of Klansmen kidnapped and terrorized a local African American whom they accused of attacking white women, Edmonton was outraged. In a letter published in the Medford Mail-Tribune , he admitted to Klan membership and described the circumstances of his joining. He stated that after he had learned of the outrage, he had believed the official denials of Klan involvement, but that when he asked his fellow Klansmen to disavow and punish the marauders, they had refused. As a result, Edmiston announced, he was leaving the Klan. That summer, he testified before a grand jury about the lynching and the following year, he served as a witness for the state at the trials of three nightriders (who were nonetheless acquitted by an all-white jury). Because of his testimony in favor of the rule of law, Edmiston was ostracized by local business and fraternal groups.

Despite his involvement in controversies over the Klan, Edmiston's businesses prospered. In 1927 he was listed as the secretary and treasurer of the C&E Fruit company in Medford, which distributed apples for his own and other orchards. In 1928 he bought a large tract of land, the Meridien Orchard. During the Great Depression, in April 1933, after the Roosevelt administration announced its intention to do away with prohibition, Edmiston formed a new company, Oregon Breweries and Hopyards, intending to produce "near beer" (under 3.2% alcohol) from locally-grown hops. It is not clear whether the project was ever realized. In 1935 he was listed in a directory as president of the Tristate Neon Company. By 1940, Edmonton was listed as living in San Francisco and worked as the manager of a bedding company.

In 1942, following the outbreak of the Pacific War, Edmonton joined the newly formed War Relocation Authority . The nature of his wartime employment with the agency is not clear. However, he took a much more public role towards the end of the war, once Japanese Americans began returning to the West Coast. In March 1945, after a terrorist attack on a family of Japanese American returnees, the WRA established a San Jose relocation office, with the mission of helping those in Santa Clara and San Joaquin counties. Edmiston was engaged to direct it.

Once installed in his new job, Edmiston reached out to local groups to secure allies and supporters. For example, he participated in a forum at San Mateo Junior College titled "A Challenge to Democracy," with local WRA Area Supervisor Russell T. Robinson. By June 1945, Edmiston had arranged for the return of some 711 persons of Japanese ancestry to Santa Clara county, and helped find them housing and employment. He even went to the Palo Alto train station in June to greet and escort a trainload of former locals returning to their homes. As a historical survey later found, Edmiston and his staff resorted to the "Fuller brush man" technique of calling from house to house and from farm to farm, asking employers to hire returning Japanese Americans.

As the returnees took up their new lives in the area, expressions of racism against them grew more common, and Edmiston himself, as local WRA head, faced harassment as well. The terror campaign climaxed in late June, when unidentified armed persons fired a shot through the breakfast room window of Edmiston's house. Although Edmiston was working outside in the garden at the time of the shooting, he heard shots fired while his wife, daughter and two grandchildren were in the house and discovered the bullet and a shattered glass window in the breakfast room the next morning. Hostile local police, ignoring ballistic evidence, described the shooting as "accidental." R.B. Cozzens, assistant director of WRA in San Francisco denounced the shooting as "a deliberate attempt to intimidate a government agent during the performance of his duty."

Despite the intimidation, the WRA relocation office's work continued. In November 1945, Edmiston told a meeting of the Schoolmen's Club that "Nisei and their parents, returning to ordinary life from relocation centers, have been better received here than anywhere else." Downplaying the harassment that he and the returnees had faced, he put a positive face on things, telling the Peninsula Times Tribune , "Santa Clara County enjoys the best reputation in the nation for being the most receptive area in regard to the retuning Japanese. Palo Alto has taken the lead from the start in welcoming back the Japanese who had been confined in relocation centers during the war and not a single incident has taken place there to mar the record."

James Edmiston ran the San Jose office until the WRA closed it in May 1946. Once the office closed, Edmiston was offered a position as part of the US occupation of Japan, but declined. Instead, he and his wife spent considerable time in the next years caring for their teenage grandson Mike Starrett, who was stricken with polio. The 1950 census listed him as living on Palo Alto and processing claims for the US government.

In 1955, upon the publication of his son's book Home Again , James Edmiston's support of returning Issei and Nisei after World War II was again publicized. That year, he was honored by the Palo Alto Fair Play Council. In 1960, the government of Japan awarded Edmiston a citation for his humanitarian work with the WRA. He was invited to Japan to receive the award, but declined on account of old age.

James Edmiston spent his later years working as an income tax preparer. After his wife's death in 1967, Edmiston moved to Monmouth, Oregon, where he died on September 27, 1973, at the age of 87.

Robinson, Greg. " The Strange Case of James Edmiston and… James Edmiston " (Part 1). Discover Nikkei , Nov. 13, 2022

San Jose Commission on the Internment of Local Japanese Americans "…With Liberty and Justice For All," pamphlet, 1985.