"When she arrived in Pasadena on Sept. 12, Esther was greeted enthusiastically by the Anderson family, along with the editor of the school newspaper and members of the Student Christian Assn.
She moved into the Andersons’ two-story home with a swooped roof on Roosevelt Avenue in Altadena and was the guest of honor that night at the Eagle Rock residence of E.C. Farnham, executive director of the Church Federation of Los Angeles.
The warm welcome was short-lived. The next morning, newspapers tipped off by the editor of the campus newspaper published articles about her arrival — including the address of Anderson’s home. The story was picked up by Stars and Stripes and published in papers around the world.
Local nativist groups began whipping up a froth. Menacing letters started piling up in the Andersons’ mailbox.
“The only kind of a Jap the people of Cal. trust is a dead one,” an anonymous correspondent from Los Angeles wrote.
Others railed against Anderson as being un-American.
'I have a son in the service who has just recently been discharged.' a Mrs. J.H. Wilson wrote. 'The boys wonder what they are fighting for when the government tells them to kill them and our citizens take them into their homes.'”
It seems appropriate to recount this tale now as the president and his henchmen (why is Stephen Miller still allowed to be working the White House?!) abuse legitimate and legal asylum seekers. The details are a bit different, but this is a racist policy that intentionally and cruelly treats innocent human beings. At least back after Pearl Harbor, in the pre-civil rights era, one can sort of understand how people might believe there were Japanese spies among the Japanese-American communities of the west coast. But, of course, no similar program was set up for the German-American citizens. And a number of white neighbors were able to profit from the rush sales internees were forced to have before being taken to camps.
I would also note, that I first learned about the internment camps in 1956, when I transferred to a new elementary school and YF was in my new class. And in junior and senior high there were a number of other Japanese-American students who had been born in internment camps at the end of the war.
And as I write this I'm on Bainbridge Island and I've visited several times at the memorial to the Bainbridge Island residents who were shipped off to internment camps. And I've seen the movie, The Empty Chair, about the how the valedictorian of a Juneau high school's chair was placed on the stage, empty, after he was interned before graduation. I know that there were whites who essentially stole the property of interned Japanese and there were whites who kept their property safe and returned it to them when they got out.
But this is the first time I've heard about groups of white Americans fighting against the interment camps.
Fortunately, today, there is a lot more opposition to the internment camps and family separations (which was not part of theWWII policy) that we have now. Yet that doesn't seem to be ending the practice.
And today we still have rabid haters who know nothing but their own anger projected out onto suffering people in support of the president.
We can't send too many emails and letters, or make too many calls to our legislators. You are right if you think one call doesn't matter. But 50 people making one call on a topic does. Particularly in a small population state like Alaska. At the very least, you can show your grandchildren copies of what you sent and tell them you did what you could.
This is Thanksgiving weekend. It's a good time to try to make amends for what Americans have done to the people who helped them survive those first winters in Massachusetts. (A number of the refugees are indigenous peoples of Central America.)
I first learned about internment camps when I was about 7 years old through a young adult book called "Nisei Daughter." Nonfiction, by a girl who was interned with her family. I was surprised in later life when the rest of the U.S. learned about this -- didn't everybody know this from second grade on??
ReplyDeleteThere was internment of German civilians too, although not on the scale of the Japanese. A well-received book, "The Train to Crystal City," published in 2015, described this. I found it fascinating as history but dull as reading and I never finished the book, sorry to admit, so I can't tell you anything more about it.
Thank you for correcting the point about German-Americans. I thought that only German national were datained, and while that's mostly true, this Wikipedia post says some German-Americans were as well - but only after due process.
Delete"By the time of WWII, the United States had a large population of ethnic Germans. Among residents of the United States in 1940, more than 1.2 million persons had been born in Germany, 5 million had two native-German parents, and 6 million had one native-German parent. Many more had distant German ancestry. During WWII, the United States detained at least 11,000 ethnic Germans, overwhelmingly German nationals.[3] The government examined the cases of German nationals individually, and detained relatively few in internment camps run by the Department of Justice, as related to its responsibilities under the Alien and Sedition Acts. To a much lesser extent, some ethnic German US citizens were classified as suspect after due process and also detained. Similarly, a small proportion of Italian nationals and Italian Americans were interned in relation to their total population in the US."
BTW, when WWII broke out, my mother was classified as an enemy alien. She'd only gotten to the US in late 1939 at 17. But as a Jewish refugee, she wasn't considered a spy I guess.
PS we visited Manzanar in 2001, before it was fixed up by the Parks Service. Along with other internment camps, this one was razed to the ground shortly after the war as the government realized what an embarrassment this whole project had been. You could see where the streets had been, and a few features such as a rock garden remained.
ReplyDeleteThe cemetery had not been disturbed and people still visited it. Mementoes and stones were left on some of the gravestones. It was one of the most moving places I've ever visited.
Now apparently they have fixed it up with a fancy visitors center, etc. I think I'm happy we visited in its previous state. Much like Ellis Island -- way more impressive when we visited it in ruins than now with the Disneyland treatment.