World War Two - Japanese-American Internment
Japanese-American Internment Film Clips
The mass arrests of Japanese Americans began the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack:
"As the arrests began last night, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that FDR had authorized him to apprehend as 'alien enemies', Japanese aliens considered dangerous 'to the peace and security of the U.S.A. He said that at least 1,000 Japanese nationals would be affected, but there would be 'a fair hearing for all persons apprehended.' " Signed by President Roosevelt on December 7, 1941, Proclamation 2525 enabled the U.S. government to relocate anyone it chose from all areas believed to be of military value.
"...the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies."
An optimistic article from 1942 that asks us to look for the sunny side of the Japanese American internment camps - after all, they never had it so good! 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.
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