Paul A. Taylor (1908–1958)

Paul Andrew Taylor was the first administrator at the Jerome Relocation Center, one of the two War Relocation Authority (WRA) incarceration camps located in Arkansas during World War II.

Paul Taylor was born on January 20, 1908, in Watson Chapel (Jefferson County)—a village near Pine Bluff (Jefferson County)—to Croumell Andrew Taylor and Ida Beulah King Taylor. The Taylor family’s financial status is unclear: census records identify Taylor’s father as a farmer with “some education,” and Taylor, like two of his four siblings, is identified as a “farm laborer Home farm” with “education.”

Taylor received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1929 and a master’s degree from Idaho State College in 1932 in disciplines related to agricultural science. From 1935 to 1942, he was a bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Taylor and his wife, Roberta, lived outside Washington DC.

Two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 calling for the confinement of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The War Department was empowered to detain them in temporary assembly centers before transfer to WRA relocation centers for the duration of the war (the WRA was a branch of the Interior Department). Most camps were in the American Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, but two were in Arkansas: Jerome and Rohwer.

Taylor joined the Department of the Interior and served as project director of the Jerome Relocation Center from the summer of 1942 through the end of 1943. Straddling the Drew and Chicot county lines on land formerly owned by the Farm Security Administration, Jerome held a maximum of about 8,000 men, women, and children in family groups before closing in June 1944.

Surrounded by swampland, the camp had a barbed-wire fence encircling about 400 barracks and administrative buildings. Jerome’s small staff (all white and mostly native Arkansans) was well received by the inhabitants of the area, although white locals generally did not think highly of the camp residents.

Taylor enacted labor policies in an effort to make Jerome self-sufficient in terms of fuel for daily needs. But although Taylor wanted to clear the woodlands around the camp, he did not provide the poorly trained work teams with power tools. Nor did he pay them increased wages for the hard work. There were two fatalities and numerous physical injuries on the job, and at least one worker committed suicide.

Wood cutters engaged in a half-day work stoppage in November 1942, followed by a longer strike that went into the spring of 1943. In response, Jerome’s administration introduced new rules clarifying consequences for camp workers who were terminated from their work. Taylor finally acceded to wood cutters’ demands for power tools. During a conference attended by WRA officials in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in February 1943, Taylor referred to these and other problems at Jerome as “near-crises.”

Workers in the motor repair shop went on strike for several weeks in April 1943. A contributing factor may have been tensions with an openly racist white manager from Little Rock, who Taylor eventually replaced with another manager. However, Jerome reportedly had an environment of racial discrimination; during at least one administrative meeting, Taylor referred to the people held at the center as “Japs.”

Finally, low morale led to a call for a camp-wide general strike by wood cutters in October 1943. Although the general strike never materialized, Taylor announced his resignation several weeks later. As he wrote in a report to WRA director Dillon S. Myer in November 1943, his work at Jerome was “by all odds the toughest I have ever undertaken. I feel that the experience gained has been invaluable but I hope that I have the good judgment never to tackle another job just like it.”

Taylor later took a position in the Agriculture Department’s Bureau of the Budget and Finance and served in the armed forces. At some point after the war, Taylor and his family moved to Iowa, and he was a factory manager there during the 1950s. Taylor died of heart disease on January 29, 1958.

For additional information:
Bearden, Russell. “The False Rumor of Tuesday: Arkansas’s Internment of Japanese-Americans.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Winter 1982): 327–339.

Hinnershitz, Stephanie. Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Howard, John. Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

“Jerome.” Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Jerome/ (accessed April 21, 2026).

Paul A. Taylor to Dillon S. Myer. “Jerome Relocation Center, Denson, Arkansas, Weekly Report, November 20, 1943,” [1], Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, 1930–1974 [JAERR], BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder N1.06:2. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/175105?v=pdf (accessed April 21, 2026).

“War Relocation Authority: Project Directors’ Meeting.” Little Rock, Arkansas, February 1–3, 1943, JAERR, BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder G1.03. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/172848?v=pdf (accessed April 21, 2026).

Anthony B. Newkirk
Little Rock, Arkansas