Infamy (49 page)

Army reserve officer Karl Bendetsen (left) was assigned to General DeWitt and conceived the legal strategy to hold the American Japanese for more than three years without charges.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson (left) opposed the evacuation, but as “a president’s man” he accepted his duties. His deputy John J. McCloy said, “Why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

California attorney general Earl Warren pushed for the evacuation, claiming that the California Japanese had moved near airports and factories to commit sabotage—not mentioning that the Japanese had lived there long before those were built.

Walter Lippmann wrote in his influential column, which was published in more than 250 newspapers across the country, “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without.”

Theodor Geisel, the editorial cartoonist of
PM
, published a drawing showing hordes of buck-toothed American Japanese collecting dynamite. He signed the cartoon under his well-known pseudonym, Dr. Seuss.

Wayne Collins, a fiery civil liberties attorney, spent more than thirty years representing thousands of Japanese Americans threatened with deportation—sometimes literally pulling them off ships headed for Tokyo.

This photograph of Fred Korematsu (center) at his family’s plant nursery before the war now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Struggle for Justice” section. Represented by Wayne Collins, Korematsu was one of four Japanese American dissenters whose cases reached the Supreme Court.

The photographer Dorothea Lange, standing behind a crowd of evacuees, worked for the WRA after becoming famous for her photographs of migrant workers during the Great Depression.

The renowned photographer Ansel Adams sought to generate opposition to the camps, but he became frustrated when the incarcerated insisted on showing only the best side of their lives in camp.

Isamu Noguchi, the celebrated Japanese American sculptor, lived in New York and thus did not face evacuation. He volunteered to be interned and teach art to his fellow evacuees.

An Ansel Adams photo of Manzanar, taken from a guard tower. The landscape was harsh, but incarcerated farmers and gardeners were able to make the desert bloom.

The barbed wire and guard towers of Manzanar were secretly photographed by a well-known Los Angeles photographer, Toyo Miyatake, who built a camera hidden inside what appeared to be a lunchbox.