A Utopia for Captive Labor: Seabrook Farms and Paroled Japanese American Internees
agribusiness in southern New Jersey that presented itself as a utopia and site of social
rehabilitation for Japanese Americans and immigrants (Nisei and Issei) stripped of civil liberties
and incarcerated in internment camps. C.F. Seabrook, the company's founder and chief
executive, contracted Issei and Nisei as part of a supervised parole program, and hired them as
agricultural laborers at below market wage rates. Between 1943 and 1945, Seabrook hired more
than 2,500 released internees, making it the single largest recipient of parolees who passed the
government-issued “loyalty questionnaire” and qualified for work release. Seabrook marketed
his town as a safe place where the company’s control over all aspects of community and
economic life – as landlord, organizer of public education, and social and health services
provider – ensured that Nisei and Issei families would be protected from discrimination and
harassment that made many hesitant to pursue parole.
Urban’s paper focuses on how World War II-era liberalism, and the efforts of “sympathetic”
whites such as Seabrook to provide safe spaces for Issei and Nisei detainees denied rights,
encompassed multiple agendas. This paper seeks to challenge the existing hagiography of
Seabrook Farms as a utopic bastion of pluralism effectively sealed off from racism. Examining
the extensive collection of official company photographs documenting work and social life at
Seabrook, and oral histories produced by grown Nisei children relocated to New Jersey, Urban
approaches these archival sources as midcentury liberal propaganda. By understanding how this
intentional community intersected with wartime labor demand and the alleviation of worker
scarcities that were the biggest impediment to capitalist growth in this period, Urban’s paper
unpacks how liberal social projects were also projects of political economy.