Born Free and Equal: Ansel Adams and Japanese Americans

Part I

"112,000 Japanese of the total 127,500 lived on the West Coast. Originally they were much needed on ranches, and on large truck and fruit farms, but as they came in greater numbers, people began to discover that they were not only convenient workers, they were competitors in the labor field, and the people of California began to be afraid of their own importation, so the Exclusion Act was passed in 1917. No people of the Oriental race could become citizens of the United States, and no quota was given to the Oriental nations in the Pacific. They were marked as different from other races and they were not treated on an equal basis. This happened because in one part of our country they were feared as competitors, and the rest of our country knew them so little and cared so little about them that they did not even think about the principle that we in this country believe in — that of equal rights for all human beings."

Eleanor Roosevelt

It's enough to fill the heart of any liberal cynic with a surge of patriotism, a group of anonymous but obviously clean-cut Asian Americans at a New England style town-hall meeting. Behind them is an American flag, which, in a sense, is another individual in the room, the spirit of democracy summed up in some red, white and blue cloth. Even downsized and compressed for the web, the photo's technical perfection is startling. The entire range of greytones, from the blown out white of the sun coming into in through the windows to the almost pitch black floor underneath the chairman's feet, is in perfect harmony. The light gray parts stand out crisply and smartly from the black hair on the mens' heads. A brown leather jacket is perfectly distinct from a light-gray shirt, which, in turn, stands out from a navy sport coat. Even though it's a black and white photo, the American flag seems as colorful and dramatic as though it had been shot in Fuji Velvia. But you also notice a few other things. It isn't quite perfect. The photo is a scan, not of a negative but of a print, and the scene has been "printed up," transferred onto archival paper few shades lighter than the original negative. The men, and one woman, all seem to be Asian, and yet one or two seems to have light-brown hair, almost as if they were white. The blown out white coming through the windows is very blown out indeed and the flag looks a bit bleached, as if it had been run through the laundry one too many times. There's obviously a bit of deterioration in the print and some of the whites are faded but it's also obvious that the faded whites are faded in perfect proportion to the faded darker grays. Anybody who's familiar with the book The Negative by Ansel Adams would recognize that the photographer was a master of the "zone system," a method of developing and printing black and white film that divides all greytones into 9 zones ranging from dark black to colorless white, and expresses them in relation to one another, as if they were notes in a musical score of a Beethoven piano soneta.

Part II

The day I was at Gila there was no butter and no sugar on the tables. The food was rice and fish and greens. There was some milk for the children and some kind of pudding on the table. Neither in the stock-rooms, or on the tables did I notice any kind of extravagance. Except for the head doctor in the hospital who was an American, the other doctors are Japanese. One had been a surgeon and had had a large Caucasian practice, he is now earning $19.00 a month, the standard pay for all work except for those who are working under Army or Navy contracts. Ingenuity has been used in the schools. The class in typing only had two typewriters, so they worked out a key-board of card board with holes for the keys and on this the class practiced. The typewriters were rationed, ten minutes use a day to each member of the class.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The above photo was taken in the Manzanar Internment camp in 1944 by Ansel Adams for his book Born Free and Equal.

To get an idea of what it really signifies, try to imagine it as follows. Each of the men in the photo has gone through the equivalent of having his house burn down and losing all of his property. His books and heirlooms are gone. His china, furniture, clothing, childrens' toys, gardening tools, his documents, his childrens' birth certificates, deeds, bills, bank records, and notes to his wife have gone up in smoke. Of course he's escaped but, upon emerging from his burned out house, lungs full of soot, trying to breath, he doesn't meet up with a group of firemen and paramedics or sympathetic neighbors waiting to help. What he finds is an angry racist mob that roughs him up, takes his wallet and whatever money he has left and who hand him over to the police who instead of arresting is attackers put him in prison where he's kept for 5 years without being charged with any crime since he's already been found guilty of having the wrong color skin.

Indeed, while the typical American is quite well aware of Executive Order 9066 and is probably willing to say that putting over 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps for the duration of the war simply based on the fact that they were Japanese Americans was a great injustice, most Americans are also unaware of the amount of property confiscation that took place using the evacuations to the camps as a cover. Most of us would simply assume that the Japanese American in California from 1941 to 1945 suffered a disruption in his life, not the end of his life as he knew it, that he could pretty much pick up in 1946 where he left off in 1941, go back to his home and his farm, take up his old job and resume pretty much as a returning veteran would.

While the Roosevelt Administration even in the wildest dreams of the most dogmatically leftist America hater couldn't be compared to the Nazis, while, in theory, all of the property of the Japanese detainees was supposed to have been catalogued and stored safely in warehouses, shipped to him free of charge at the camp if he requested it, while his liquid assets were supposed to have been deposited in the bank for him to claim at the end of the war, things are never that simple. According to the usually reliable "Wikopedia" "some estimate that by the time the last relocation camps (except Tule Lake) closed on December 1st, 1945, the Japanese Americans had lost homes and businesses estimated to be worth, in 1999 values, 4 to 5 billion dollars."

That's 4 to 5 billion dollars.

And in another nasty little twist, we also learn that most of the concentration camps for the Japanese Americans interred during the war was taken from native Americans. That's right, the camps were built on Indian reservations and the Indians were never compensated. "Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were not compensated, nor consulted about. The Native Americans consoled themselves that they might at least get the improvements made to the land, but at the end of the duration such buildings, and gardens were bulldozed or sold by the government instead."

Roosevelt, to his credit, never referred to the camps as anything other than "Concentration Camps." He was also perfectly willing to let liberals like Adams and his wife and Harold Ickes criticize the internments and even allow them to do it while living on government money (all through the period where he was writing "Born Free and Equal," Adams was employed by the parks department) There was no attempt to sanitize the language or hide what was going on. What's more, the conditions in the Internment camps bore very little resemblance to the camps the Nazis built in Poland. According to Wikopedia, "the relocation camps also had the highest live-birth rate and the lowest death rate in the US during the wartime period." If you looked at the concentric circles of totalitarian hell in 1945 according to the scheme laid out in Dante's "Inferno," Bergen Belson and Triblinka would be somewhere in the Malbolgia,with its inmates receiving all sorts of horrific physical punishment and Manzanar might be up in Circle one where the virtuous pagans were lodged, not punished in any way other than being deprived of any hope of seeing God. Indeed, the only punishment the Japanese Americans received was the loss of their freedom and the knowledge that some (white) American citizens were more equal than other (yellow) Americans.

Their only punishment was the realization that he Constitution was meaningless, that all that talk about all men being created equal was a a lie.

So how do you atone for pissing on the Constitution?

Michael Lerner the editor of Tikkun drives conservative Jews into a murderous rage when he suggests that Jews should "atone on Yom Kippur for violence done against Palestinians the way they do in his synagogue in San Francisco. For Lerner, being one of "God's chosen people" doesn't mean you're "chosen to receive some great privilege." It means you're "chosen to bear some great responsibility," in this case, chosen to defend some abstract sense of justice for everybody, and that would include Palestinians. Lerner has a good idea and all Americans should follow his lead. Let's take Lerner's suggestion and apply it to the United States as a whole. Instead of saying the "Pledge of Alliance," schoolchildren in every classroom in the United States should simply be required to recite the following names and numbers every morning:

Topaz: 10,000
Poston: 20,000
Gila River:15,000
Granada: 8,000
Heart Mountain: 12,000
Jerome: 10,000
Manzanar: 10,000
Minidoka: 10,000
Rohwer: 10,000
Tule Lake: 16,000

You could certainly leave in the words "under God" but, then again, you'd have to take out "with liberty and justice for all." Then maybe we could take the names of every lynching victim in the South, everybody denied employment because of his race, every Vietnamese citizen killed by the American military, chose ten each day, and have them read aloud instead of the "Pledge of Allegiance." You would have enough name to allow the ritual to outlive the United States by centuries.

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