Seattle Post-Intelligencer collection: Museum of History and Industry Photographs

 

"American citizens of Japanese origin were not even handled like aliens of the other enemy nationalities -- Germans and Italians -- on a selective basis, but as untouchables, a group who could not be trusted and had to be shut up only because they were of Japanese descent..."

~ Francis Biddle, Attorney General, Postwar memoirs
 
 


The barracks in which the interned families lived at Manzinar.
The Journal of San Diego History Spring 1972, Volume 18, Number 2

 

"...My friends in the War Relocation Authority, like Secretary Ickes, are deeply distressed over the effects of the entire evacuation and relocation program upon the Japanese-Americans, particularly upon the young citizen group. Persons in this group find themselves living in an atmosphere for which their public school and democratic teachings have not prepared them. It is hard for them to escape a conviction that their plight is due more to racial discrimination, economic motivations, and wartime prejudices than to any real necessity from the military point of view for evacuation from the West Coast. Life in a relocation center cannot possibly be pleasant. The evacuees are surrounded by barbed wire fences under the eyes of armed military police. ..."

~ Milton S. Eisenhower, National Director of the WRA. To Roosevelt, April 22, 1943
 
 


Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

 

"I have made a lot of mistakes in my life... One is my part in the evacuation of the Japanese from California in 1942... I don't think that served any purpose at all... We picked them up and put them in concentration camps. That's the truth of the matter. And as I look back on it -- although at the time I argued the case -- I am amazed that the Supreme Court ever approved it."

~ Tom Clark, After retiring as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, 1966

 

Source: Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy, Morrow Quill Paperbacks, New York, ©1976. Japanese American Internment
 
 

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