The pro-internment recommendations of General John L. DeWitt (head of the Western Defense Command) were embarrassing for Governor Olson. On February 2, 1942, the Governor, following a meeting with Dewitt, said that mass evacuation would not be necessary; DeWitt pursued his plans regardless of Olson's disagreement. However, despite his preference for excluding Japanese Americans only from "coastal California", and allowing adult men to work in labor camps as an alternative to incarceration, Olson wholeheartedly supported the eviction. A long-time supporter of nearly every Roosevelt position on economics, politics and foreign policy, on March 6, 1942, he testified before a U.S. House committee on the danger of allowing Japanese Americans to remain free: "Because of the extreme difficulty in distinguishing between loyal Japanese Americans, and there are many who are loyal to this country, and those other Japanese whose loyalty is to the Mikado. I believe in the wholesale evacuation of the Japanese people from coastal California."