FDR SITE PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON JAPANESE INTERNMENT
More than 200 images on display at new exhibit
HYDE PARK, N.Y. >> A little girl, perched on a suitcase, clutching a tiny purse and a half-eaten apple, a look of uncertainty etched on her face.
A woman wiping tears from her eyes as she peers out the window of a train that is taking her from her California home.
A young Japanese-American man in American military uniform posing for a photograph with his mother, who is confined in one of the federal government’s “relocation centers.”
These are but some of the more than 200 images that visitors will encounter when touring “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II,” a photographic exhibit of the internment of nearly 200,000 Japanese Americans, now on display at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
The exhibit opened on Feb. 19 to mark the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the forced removal of 120,000 people of Japanese descent — including roughly 80,000 American citizens — from their homes on the West Coast and their confinement in 10 camps that dotted the West and South. Those of Japanese heritage living in Hawaii, the U.S. interior and East Coast were not affected by the order.
Roosevelt issued the order in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and a number of other U.S. military defeats in the Pacific and amid growing fears of new attacks and suspicion of anyone of Japanese descent, said Herman Eberhardt, supervisory museum curator for the FDR Library and Museum.
Eberhardt said the photographs on display were culled from more than 15,000 taken during the three-year internment period by renown photographers Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers, Francis Stewart and Hikaru Iwasaki, who were hired by the federal War Relocation Authority to photograph the relocation. There are also photos in the collection that were taken by Ansel Adams, who was granted access to Manzanar War Relocation Center in California in 1943.
The photographs “really document all the different
stages of the internment,” said Eberhardt.
Walking through the exhibit is to follow the path taken by the Japanese immigrants who came to American to build a life for themselves and their children who would be born American citizens, but found themselves instead strangers in their own land, eyed with suspicion, fear and even hatred.
In the weeks leading up to the issuance of Executive Order 9066, California Attorney General Earl Warren, who would later become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared there was no way to distinguish loyal and disloyal Japanese-Americans, and CBS Newsman Edward R. Murrow claimed in early 1942: “I think it’s probable that, if Seattle ever does get bombed, you will be able to look up and see some University of Washington sweaters on the boys doing the bombing!”
A Dr. Seuss cartoon on display drawn by Theodor Seuss Geisel on the day before the order was issued depicts a seemingly neverending throng of smiling Asians lining up along the west coast to pick up blocks of TNT from a warehouse labeled “Honorable 5th Column.” On the roof, another Asian peers through a telescope searching for the “signal from home.”
In reality, there was no serious evidence supporting any instances of sabotage or espionage, said Eberhardt.
Through the stark and sometimes discomforting images taken for the War Relocation Authority visitors can see how the order was carried out, where the interned were forced to live and how they attempted against all odds to create some sort of normalcy out of a life behind barbed wire.
Photos show men and women, all their worldly possessions in suitcases and bags, waiting on lines for buses, piled in the back of trucks or loaded onto trains, their faces etched with pain and confusion.
“The order said you could only take with you what you could carry, so people had to sell their homes and businesses on very short notice,” Eberhardt said.
In the camps, Eberhardt said, people who had once lived very normal lives found themselves living in a regimented society, forced to live in small, overcrowded and sparsely furnished barracks and standing in line for everything — even to use the latrine.
“The shock to the system of the people who were living in their private homes then found themselves in this environment was profound,” said Eberhardt.
Eberhardt said that despite the dismal, and often harsh conditions — detainees described the camps
as hot in the summer, cold in the winter, with a wind that seemed to never stop — those being held tried to develop some sort of normalcy to life, and one section of the exhibit offers photographs of children attending school, of people playing sports, participating in scouting activities, and even gardening — efforts, Eberhardt said “to maintain some sort of family life and normalcy in what was an abnormal situation.”
One section of the exhibit also provides a glimpse into the irony of the order and the impact on the families. It is a display of JapaneseAmerican men, in U.S. military uniform, posing with their parents and other family members who were confined in the internment camps.
Peppered throughout the exhibit are quotes taken from oral histories given by some of those who had been interned.
Grace Shinoda Nakamura, speaking about first
seeing the camps where they would live, recalled: “When everyone saw that tarpaper city, it was just silence.”
“The daily life in Manzanar (one of the internment camps) was just like any other life. Except we didn’t have any freedom and we didn’t have any privacy,” said Mas Okui, one of the detainees in an oral history.
“The worst memory is that we were prisoners,” said another former detainee.
The exhibit seemed to evoke for some recent visitors images of current events with threatened deportations, anti-Muslim sentiments, and the Trump administration’s travel ban on individuals from seven Muslim countries.
“It’s pretty sad and I’m afraid we’re going to make the same mistake again to a lot of good people,” said Tony DeMeo, of Poughkeepsie.
Gavin and Nicole Law,
who were visiting the exhibit from Utica, said they found Roosevelt’s order to be a great “contradiction between all the great things FDR did and this scar.”
They, too, said they saw a lot of similarities between Roosevelt’s action and those being taken now by the Trump administration.
George Marshall, who came from Connecticut to see the exhibit, said he too is concerned that we might be heading back down what he called “that dark path.”
“It seems to me that this is exactly what this (Trump) administration is trying to do again,” he said.
“I don’t understand it. We have all of this right here in front of us. How can we not learn from history?” he asked.
“Images of Internment” is the second in a series of four exhibits designed to highlight specific events leading up to and during World War II.
The exhibit runs through Dec. 31.