Japanese-American Internment Film Clips
Color Photographs of Manzanar (Collier's Magazine, 1942)
These assorted color photographs of the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, California helped to illustrate this 1943 COLLIER'S MAGAZINE article by Jim Marshall as to what Manzanar was and was not, who was there and how it operated:
"In the past few months a dozen new war-born communities have risen almost magically in the open spaces of the Far West...Altogether, their population is about 115,000, but only a few hundred of theses are [for] Whites. The others are Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Although peopled and largely operated by members of an Asian race, these communities are as American as San Francisco or Topeka. They hold elections, have traffic problems, go to the movies, read newspapers, stage fund drives and proceed with life as much as any other town." "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."
| Eleanor Roosevelt on Japanese-American Internment (Collier's, 1943)
In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted (very politically) to play 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 Japanese is always a Japanese' is an easily accepted phrase and it has taken hold quite naturally on the West Coast because of some reasonable or unreasonable fear back of it, but it leads nowhere and solves nothing. Japanese-Americans may be no more Japanese than a German-American is German...All of these people, including the Japanese-Americans, have men who are fighting today for the preservation of the democratic way of life and the ideas around which our nation was built."
| Los Angeles Nisei at Santa Anita Racetrack (Script, 1942)
An eye-witness account of the Los Angeles Issei and Nisei population 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).
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