Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — Hoover Library & Archives has acquired the papers of Caroline Bailey Pratt, who as a child during World War II was detained along with her family in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in the Philippines. The camp, also known as the Manila Internment Camp, was the largest of several camps in the Philippines in which the Japanese interned enemy civilians, mostly Americans, during World War II. The campus of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila was utilized for the camp, which housed more than 3,000 internees from January 1942 until February 1945. Conditions for the internees deteriorated during the war, and by the time of the liberation of the camp by the U.S. Army, many of the internees were near death from lack of food.
Mrs. Pratt's collection, which consists of artwork, correspondence, documents, and research materials, provides a unique eyewitness account of one of the most infamous civilian internment camps run by the Japanese in the Pacific theater of World War II. The material in Mrs. Pratt's collection complements other significant collections at Hoover that document Santo Tomas, including the Santo Tomas Internment Camp Internee Executive Committee issuances and the papers of Cliff Forster, William Henry Hastings, and Marie Adams.
Caroline Bailey Pratt was born on June 21, 1932, in Manila, Philippine Islands, to Fay Cook and Althea Paul Bailey. Mrs. Pratt's father worked for National City Bank of New York in a position that frequently required that he and his family live abroad. Mrs. Pratt's parents were close friends of General Douglas MacArthur and his wife Jean and their nanny (amah) Ah Cheu, and the collection contains a great deal of correspondence between the two households. The Bailey family lived comfortably in the expatriate community of the Philippines until the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Along with other American families, the Baileys were soon forced into internment by the occupying Japanese army, where they suffered through poor conditions and food scarcity. During this period, Mrs. Bailey created many drawings of life in the camp, which are included in her archival collection. Mrs. Bailey's father secretly kept one of only three known diaries from Santo Tomas, which is now housed at Cornell University. The family was liberated from the camp on February 23, 1945.
Hoover is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Caroline Bailey Pratt papers on June 21, 2025, in honor of Mrs. Pratt's ninety-fourth birthday.
