Why the US photographed its own WWII concentration camps

[Behind the Aegis]

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 — two months after Japan’s bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor. It empowered the US army to designate strategic “military areas” from which any and all people deemed a threat could be forcibly removed. This began a process of placing 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

To control the narrative around the removal, the government created a new department, the War Relocation Authority, and hired photographers to document the process. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange, who had become famous during the 1930s for her Great Depression photographs for the Farm Security Administration.

Her images featured Japanese American people in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to their incarceration in the camps, and captured expressions of dignity, resolve, and fear.

Most of Lange’s candid photos of the removal process weren’t approved for publication by the War Relocation Authority and were “impounded” for the duration of the war. They weren’t seen widely until 1972, when her former assistant pulled them from the National Archives for a museum exhibit about the incarceration of Japanese Americans, called “Executive Order 9066.”

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Even you don't bother to read the article, check out: https://densho.org/terminology/

[Solly Mack]

1. Thank you for this.

[fierywoman]

2. Germans in the US were also incarcerated.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. Some Italian-Americans were also held, but not in the numbers like the Japanese-Americans.

[Igel]

5. And previously, in Canada,

Ukrainians.

Reduces "American Exceptionalism" a tad.

[fierywoman]

8. Yup. For sure.

[appalachiablue]

3. Very informative, thanks for posting the reality of

this hard episode in American history.

[Igel]

6. Here's a question.

Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans were mostly, but not entirely, on the West coast.

Were those *not* on the West Coast similarly incarcerated?

[Behind the Aegis]

7. Not sure.

Seems most Japanese-Americans lived in the West Coast, but the camps went as far as the Mississippi River.



I also found:

Military zones were created in California, Washington and Oregon—states with a large population of Japanese Americans. Then Roosevelt’s executive order forcibly removed Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Executive Order 9066 affected the lives about 120,000 people—the majority of whom were American citizens.

Canada soon followed suit, forcibly removing 21,000 of its residents of Japanese descent from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.
source

And there is this: Japanese Internment at Ellis Island

Appears the vast majority lived on the West Coast: