Philip Glick

The solicitor general of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the top lawyer of the agency entrusted with the administration of American concentration camps, and later the agency's deputy director. Philip Glick was one of the key figures in the formation of the WRA and was with the agency for most of its life.

Philip Milton Glick was born in Kiev, Russia, in 1905. He graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1930 and found a position as a government lawyer in the Department of the Interior in 1933, moving the following year to the Department of Agriculture, rising to become chief of the Land Policy Division and assistant solicitor under Milton Eisenhower . When Eisenhower left to head the newly formed War Relocation Authority, Glick and other legal staffers went with him.

A close associate of both Eisenhower and his successor Dillon Myer—who also came from the Department of Agriculture—Glick was a key figure in the WRA's creation and largely authored Executive Order 9102 that formed it. As WRA solicitor, Glick headed the WRA's legal team that dealt with various issues related to the running of the concentration camps from rules and regulations to legal issues faced by staff and inmates. In that role, he also supervised the staff of project attorneys assigned to each of the ten main WRA camps. ^[1]

Glick also ended up playing a significant role in the formulation of arguments in the various test cases the federal government faced challenging various aspects of the exclusion and incarceration. His outline of arguments that could be used to defend the WRA program that he authored for Eisenhower was shared with Justice Department lawyers formulating the government defense strategy, and as legal scholar Peter Irons argues, his memo became "a detailed blueprint of the strategy they followed from the trials through the Supreme Court." ^[2] Chief among his arguments was the idea of "precautionary detention," the idea that the WRA could hold Japanese Americans for their own protection and for the protection of the larger WRA program and the idea that Japanese Americans were "much more likely to engage in sabotage and fifth column " activities despite the lack of any concrete evidence. ^[3] Since WRA policy was being formulated by Myer and his staff as Glick was formulating how to defend it, he ended playing an important role in the evolution of that policy, especially the idea of creating a mechanism for allowing loyal citizens to reenter society, which would illustrate the temporary nature of the camps and, he hoped would serve "to appease the courts on the due process issue". ^[4] His top aides included his former law professor Maurice Walk, a liberal who strongly opposed the military's power to hold citizens indefinitely and James McLaughlin, who argued that they should defer to the military during wartime. Glick ultimately believed that the WRA's confinement of loyal citizens was constitutional and that part of his job was to defend it.

He remained with the WRA until October 1944, when he left for a stint in the navy. He returned the following June to become deputy director of the WRA. ^[5] After the closing of the WRA, Glick remained in federal government, holding legal counsel positions for the Federal Public Housing Authority and Public Housing Administration and for two State Department agencies. After a decade in private practice, he ended his career as legal counsel for the Federal Water Resources Council and the National Water Commission until his semi-retirement in 1973. He was among government officials who testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians , where he largely defended the WRA's performance, while also lamenting the "loyalty questionnaire" which he claimed he was unable to stop. ^[6]

He died in Chevy Chase Maryland on January 17, 2004, at the age of 98.