World War Two - Japanese-American Internment
Japanese-American Internment Film Clips
These assorted color photographs of the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, California helped to illustrate this 1942 Collier's Magazine article by Jim Marshall as to what Manzanar was and was not, who was there and how it operated:
"All we can do here is prove that we are good sports and good Americans, and hope that people will respect us and our problems." "Economically, the departure of the [Japanese-Americans] presented no particular problem in the cities... But it was different in the country. [They] had owned or controlled 11,030 farms valued at $70,000,000. They had produced virtually all the artichokes, early cantaloupes, green peppers and late tomatoes, and most of the early asparagus. They owned or controlled the majority of wholesale produce markets and thousand of retail vegetable stands. When they disappeared, the flow of vegetables stopped. Retail prices went up. Many vegetables vanished entirely. There were rumors of a food shortage." In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted to play (very politically) both sides of the street, implying on the one hand that the creation of the Japanese-American internment camps seemed a reasonable measure in wartime; but the reader doesn't have to have a degree in psychology to recognize that she believed otherwise.
A 1944 report by the War Relocation Authority regarding the population of the Japanese-American Relocation Camp located at Tule Lake, California. The attached chart will allow the reader to understand the numbers within the population of that camp who were foreign born, U.S. born, their age and their gender.
From Amazon: The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II
Attached is a eye-witness account of the Los Angeles Issie and Nisei populations after having been removed from their homes and detained at Santa Anita racetrack prior to their transfer and subsequent incarceration at Manzanar, California. "There are more than 6,000 Japanese housed in the stables which once accommodated 2,000 horses...Each stall has had a room built on in front with doors and windows and the floors have been covered with a layer of asphaltum which seems to have killed the odors."
This article, laced throughout with subtle undertones of condemnation, was written by a Hollywood screenwriter named Alfred Cohn (1880 - 1951) who is largely remembered today for having written the adaptation for the Al Jolson movie "The Jazz Singer" (1929). That administering government agency charged with the management of the Japanese-American internment camps was the War Relocation Authority , which was an arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Much to their credit, in 1944, this bureaucracy saw fit to published a small booklet containing the letters of many outraged American servicemen who vented their anger on the subject that their fellow Americans were being singled-out for persecution:
"...I'm putting it mildly when I say that it makes my blood boil...We shall fight this injustice, intolerance and un-Americanism at home! We will not break faith with those who died...We have fought the Japanese and are recuperating to fight again. We can endure the hell of battle, but we are resolved not to be sold out at home."
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