Impassioned prose and beautiful photographs tell ugly story (proeditor's E-Prime Write-Off)
Written: Aug 06 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: striking, atypical Ansel Adams photographs; John Hersey essay; interesting supplemental text
Cons: U.S. tries to forget its embarrassing history, although the book cannot be blamed for that.
The Bottom Line: John Armor and Peter Wright have gathered a fascinating record in words and pictures of the imprisonment during World War II of U.S. citizens by their government.
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| eplovejoy's Full Review: Manzanar |
People in Ansel Adams' photographs in Manzanar gather for church. They attend classes and sing in choirs. They tend farms, feed livestock and chop meat. They meet in their town hall and they work on their newspaper. They come together in their living rooms and sit down together for meals in their kitchens.
And many of these people smile.
People smiling while having their pictures taken may seem unremarkable. But the people in Adams' masterfully composed documentary photographs have little reason to smile. Their government imprisoned them in a camp in a California desert because their Japanese ancestry provoked fear in their fellow citizens during World War II. Adams' photographs preserve images of the Americans jailed at one of the ten camps the U.S. Army established in the western United States to hold more than 114,000 people. His pictures show people locked behind barbed wire fences guarded by armed soldiers, people who committed no crimes.
The Army claimed the Americans and others of Japanese descent were imprisoned "for their own protection." But one inmate asks, "If it was for our protection, why did the guns point inward, rather than outward?"
Only once in the career that brought him international acclaim and lasting fame did Adams turn his cameras away from the scenic beauty of Yosemite National Park and other natural wonders. He went to the U.S. Army's Manzanar War Relocation Center at the invitation of a friend, Ralph Merritt, the camp's second director. Merritt believed that history demanded the preservation of images of life in Manzanar. A resident of the camp, Toyo Miyatake, had made a good reputation as a professional photographer in Los Angeles, but military regulations prohibited people of Japanese ancestry from owning cameras. Merritt waived as many of the restrictions as possible, but for most of his time at Manzanar, Miyatake could do no more than set up his equipment. A Caucasian had to trip the shutter.
So Adams took most of the pictures of life at Manzanar, the most documented of the wartime camps. He published the images in 1944, but his book, Born Free and Equal, met a hostile reception in WWII America. Angry mobs staged public demonstrations in which they burned copies. Disappointed, Adams let his copyright expire. He donated his photographs to the Library of Congress.
John Armor, a constitutional lawyer, and Peter Wright, a news photography editor, gathered the pictures from the Library's archives and collected them in this book, along with a searing essay by John Hersey about America's concentration camps for Japanese-Americans and others of Japanese ancestry. Armor and Wright wrote supplemental text for the book, which Times Books published in 1988.
Manzanar residents formed a government. They ran a high school and held baseball tournaments. They established a cooperative bank and store. And they ran their own Boy Scout troops. Together, the book's photographs and words provide a sense of life in what the authors call "the most American of communities."
The U.S. imprisoned the residents of Manzanar and the other camps because the Army feared they would commit espionage on behalf of Japan. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover criticized the military's "hysteria and lack of judgment," but President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the Army to take any "reasonable" steps. Military officers directed by General John L. DeWitt (who infamously said, "A Jap is a Jap") rounded up tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, people the military euphemistically called "non-aliens."
Given as little as 24 hours to pack only the belongings they could carry, many prisoners lost their homes, farms and other businesses. When the Army set them free after the war, many of the camps' inmates returned to where they had lived only to discover no place remained for them. Twice the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of imprisoning Japanese-Americans. When the U.S. apologized more than 40 years after the war ended, survivors of the camp received $20,000 each.
The first residents of Manzanar, 28 Japanese-Americans, arrived voluntarily on March 21, 1942. After the Army made relocation mandatory for Japanese living along the West Coast, Manzanar's population swelled to 10,271. When the camp closed in September 1945, many inmates had lived there for three and a half years.
Manzanar occupied land that once yielded magnificent crops of fruits and vegetables. The camp's name comes from the Spanish word for "apple orchard." But the region turned arid when authorities diverted its water for Los Angeles. When the prisoners of war arrived, they found only desert. They were forced to grow their own food in ground hostile to farming in a region that blistered with heat whenever bitter cold relaxed its grip. Camp residents endured the harsh weather in tarpaper shacks that measured 20 feet by 25 feet for a family of four.
In his essay about Manzanar entitled "A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions," John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, writes powerfully about the events that led the U.S. to establish prison camps not unlike those one associates with Adolf Hitler's Germany or Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. He quotes DeWitt's efforts to establish "military necessity" for imprisoning people of Japanese ancestry: "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken." Hersey adds, "Here was logic worthy of Orwell's Animal Farm: Proof that all ethnic Japanese were 'ready for concerted action' lay in their not having taken it yet."
Armor and Wright conclude their text in Manzanar by noting the U.S. Army's plans, formulated in January 1947, to repeat the imprisonment of "suspect civilian populations" during future wars. The authors end their invaluable contribution to preserving the history of U.S. prison camps with the hope that we can "learn from these harsh events, and having learned, never repeat them."
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NOT TO BE
I accepted proeditor's challenge and submitted this entry for her E-Prime Write-Off.* Reviews in the Write-Off do not contain the "to be" verbs, a discipline known as E-Prime, except in some cases in passages quoted from other sources. Participants strove to enliven their writing and increase its precision by using exactly the right verbs instead of the tried and true (but ordinary) "to be's".
The "to be" family includes be, is, am, are, was, were, been, being, and contractions - 'm, 's, and 're. If you found any in the parts of this review not taken from other sources, please leave me a comment.
And please read the contributions of the other participants:
NFP (the write-off celebrates Nick's 50th birthday);
proeditor (host), infoscott (webmaster), tlimjoco,
GinaHill, rich2003dm, Epicure, wovengold, pageclot,
hhassell99, teskue, magenta321, LEDOMAINE, lernerj, DrDad,
Howard_U, jankp, nylawgirl, amykhar, mike24, zzJulia,
and dequebec.
infoscott created the Write-Off's terrific Web page, which is at:
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* This entry did not meet the deadline. Fairness demands I disclose that the extra time allowed me to find and eliminate a pesky "were" that had sneaked past me.
Recommended:
Yes
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