The stain on American honor
It began 77 years ago yesterday.
February 19, 1942.
The day when the United States began rounding up and locking up more than 100,000 men, women and children who had committed no crime except to arouse the fears of their neighbors.
Men, women and children who, in the majority of cases, were citizens of the United States.
Men, women and children of Japanese descent.
It was Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 77 years ago yesterday, that began that shameful episode, later described by President Reagan as a stain on American honor:
Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage …;
Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, … to prescribe military areas …, from which any or all persons may be excluded…. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, ….1
With those words began the internment — the rounding up and locking up — of innocents.
Not because there was evidence that they posed any kind of a threat.
But because of fear that they might.
You can read Executive Order 9066 on the National Archives website here.
And you can witness the aftermath in some of the most powerful photographs ever taken.
Dorothea Lange was a photographer employed by the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s. “(W)hile working on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) during World War II, Lange photographed the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans in camps. Her photos captured life in the internment camps and the often raw emotions displayed by the people who were uprooted from their homes and forced to live in the camps.”2
The fastest way to find Lange’s photos online is to head to the National Archives Catalog and the advanced search page there. Enter Dorothea Lange as the search term and 210 for the Record Group Number (that’s the Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority).
That will produce the more than 800 images digitized and available online at the National Archives. Here’s just a sampler:
“Mountain View, California. Four sisters in the Mitarai family. Their father operated an industrialized farm in Santa Clara County, prior to evacuation. Farmers and other evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be given opportunities to follow their callings in War Relocation Authority centers where they will spend the duration.”
“Hayward, California. Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags are used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township. He raised snapdragons and sweet peas. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration.”
“San Francisco, California. Flag of allegiance pledge at Raphael Weill Public School, Geary and Buchanan Streets. Children in families of Japanese ancestry were evacuated with their parents and will be housed for the duration in War Relocation Authority centers where facilities will be provided for them to continue their education.”
“Florin, Sacramento County, California. A soldier and his mother in a strawberry field. The soldier, age 23, volunteered July 10, 1941, and is stationed at Camp Leonard Wood, Missouri. He was furloughed to help his mother and family prepare for their evacuation. He is the youngest of six years children, two of them volunteers in United States Army. The mother, age 53, came from Japan 37 years ago. Her husband died 21 years ago, leaving her to raise six children. She worked in a strawbery basket factory until last year when her her children leased three acres of strawberries “so she wouldn’t have to work for somebody else”. The family is Buddhist. This is her youngest son. Her second son is in the army stationed at Fort Bliss. 453 families are to be evacuated from this area.”
Seventy-seven years ago yesterday.
A stain on American honor.
One we must never forget.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Reprise: remembering the internees,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 20 Feb 2019). (An earlier version of this post was published in 2017.)
SOURCES
- “Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942),” Our Documents, U.S. National Archives (https://ourdocuments.gov/ : accessed 19 Feb 2019). ↩
- Kerri Lawrence, “Correcting the Record on Dorothea Lange’s Japanese Internment Photos,” National Archives News (https://www.archives.gov/news : accessed 19 Feb 2018). ↩
Has your post broken NARA? I keep getting a message that there are no records for “Dorothea Lange”. Did I mean “Dorothy Large”? And then there is the upiquitous message: Something went wrong. Please contact 1-86-NARA-NARA……
Just checked and it works fine in Chrome so this may be a connection issue or a browser issue. But yeah… it also still asks me if I mean Dorothy Large too, but it does show 874 hits with most of them showing the thumbnail photo.
More than 50 years ago, as a student at Johns Hopkins, I had a dinner conversation with the university president, Milton S. Eisenhower. Dr. Eisenhower, Ike’s brother, was a solid Republican in a style that we could only wish for today. One of his earliest government roles had been with the Roosevelt administration (he had many more, often well in the background)when appointed as Director of the War Relocation Authority. On that evening, long before the cause of the internees became a popular topic, he was very clear to me that, of everything he had done in his very full career, that was the single situation for which he was truly regretful and ashamed.
Would that we had such statesmen today whose understanding of these events was informed by experience…
Like many others, the father and grandfather of a friend of mine were interred here in Colorado along with their family.
The Granada War Relocation Center, southeast Colorado, now on the National Register of Historic Places and a National Historic Landmark. The camp’s unofficial name is Camp Amache. It was surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, with eight machine-gun towers located all around the camp. The relations with local people and Coloradans during and after internment were mixed. Some good things happened there, but it was still a sinister time.
About 25 years after WWII ended, some of the previously classified historical documents began to be released. At that time, I was taking a course on WWII and we got to read some of the internal memos relating to the internment. It became apparent to me that reason given by the Roosevelt administration for the removal and internment — to prevent espionage and sabotage — was a pretext. The government was satisfied it was able to handle such problems among the population of Japanese heritage the same way as they handled it among the populations of German and Italian heritage on the east coast.
The real danger they were actually worried about was that the American neighbors of the ethnic Japanese residents of the west coast, many of whom still viewed all Asians as the “Yellow Peril” and were whipping up virulents fires of hatred, looked as if they were headed in the direction of race rioting that would require the use of the national guard to quell and tie up substantial numbers of national guard troops in California and other places up and down the Pacific Coast for the duration of the war, for the sole purpose of keeping the peace and protecting the residents of Japanese heritage from their American neighbors. These troops were badly needed elsewhere to fight America’s real enemies, as opposed to enemies imagined in the fevered minds of xenophobes. They thought internment was the most expedient solution to that problem. Of course, they couldn’t say any of this in public at the time, so they lied and used a pretext to try to justify what they were doing.
The biggest shame of all, in my opinion, is that even after the war was over, it took so long to acknowledge the wrong done to so many innocent people, and offer them compensation for all they were deprived of by this action.
And 5 days later, in Canada: On 24 February 1942, the federal Cabinet of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King issued Order-in-Council P.C. 1486. They lost so much – their fishing boats, their land, their houses & belongings…
I can’t comment without getting emotional, but I can say thank you, Judy.
I’ve shared it with my Facebook Group “Genealogy for Asian Canadians.”
This certainly was an issue in Canada during WWII as well.