US 395, Part 4: Detour to Manzanar

On US 395 north of Lone Pine, we come to the Manzanar National Historic Site. Manzanar is of such significance in our recent history in the United States that I've decided to allocate an entire Part to the national historic site all by itself. As it is a deeply emotional issue to people of Japanese-American descent, I have sought the opinions of several Japanese friends and acquaintances on this entry and have attempted to incorporate their thoughtful commentary as best as possible into my retelling of Manzanar's backstory. ありがとう ございました。

Manzanar, today the Manzanar National Historic Site and maintained by the National Park Service, occupies a sorrowful chapter in the Second World War as one of the camps established by the US Army Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA) and later the first centre operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). These camps, often termed as "America's concentration camps," were established specifically as holding pens for persons of particular descent or citizenship that came under suspicion during the throes of World War II, mostly Japanese. The Manzanar camp, the first of these "internment centres" and built in March 1942, was established on territory then owned by the city of Los Angeles for water rights (purchased 1920). Manzanar was originally a small farming community that lay between Lone Pine and Independence (to the north, in Part 5) during the dawn of the 20th century, named after a corruption of the Spanish word for apple ('manzana') referring to the local apple groves. As mentioned in Part 3, agriculture faded during Los Angeles' diversion of the water supply for points south and the site was largely uninhabited when the WCCA was searching for land; the WCCA found the site optimal for their purposes, especially because its isolation virtually guaranteed minimal escape risk, and leased Manzanar from the city of Los Angeles for around $75,000 over the three years it operated. The first 82 of an eventual 10,046 residents would be interned there the same month it was constructed; the overwhelming majority were from Los Angeles itself, with the remainder mostly from northern California. The famous archival picture at right, taken 3 June 1942 by photographer Dorothea Lange, probably best shows the bleak conditions faced by the interned as they entered the camp they would call home for a long, interminable period of limbo.

Manzanar became the first of ten such camps in the United States. To say they were controversial is a tremendous understatement, and many called them outright illegal; it should be pointed out that there were no proven instances of any person of Japanese descent then inhabiting the United States as a citizen or legal alien acting as an agent of Japan, and many in fact would later serve honourably in the war effort against the country of their ancestry. Nevertheless, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order #9066 (and subsequently #9122) on 19 February 1942 authorizing Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command to ultimately round up and transport 70,000 American citizens of Japanese descent and another 42,000 Japanese resident aliens living in designated zones of the Pacific coast states and Arizona into the war camps. Similar actions would be taken under the same order(s) against peoples of Italian and especially German descent -- about 11,000 were arrested and some 5,000 ultimately interned, of particular issue to me with my German heritage -- but the action against the Japanese was the largest and most far-ranging. As with the other nationalities targetted, they were ordered to forfeit their properties and homes, bringing only "that which can be carried by the individual or family group," and placed on trains for their final destinations. Ten camps total would be built: Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Minidoka in Idaho, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Granada (Amache) in Colorado and Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. During its existence, Manzanar became the subject of a photoessay by Ansel Adams; these photographs, now the property of the Library of Congress, show a typical if propagandized view of the camp such as the 1943 photograph at left of internees at work in the fields with Mt. Williamson in the background. Reaching its peak population short months later, Manzanar would gradually dwindle to 5,300 by March of 1945 as security relaxed in the waning days of the war. With the surrender of Japan, the last of the interned would be released in November 1945 to return to their old communities, many to find that there was nothing for them to return to.

After the war, the lease with Los Angeles stipulated that the camp was to be returned to its former condition and most of the buildings were razed or auctioned off; what remained of the camp rotted in exile as a no-man's-land until it was identified by the National Park Service as the best preserved of the ten such encampments, becoming a national landmark in 1985, and accepted as a historic site in 1992 (now the property of the federal government as of 1997, no longer Los Angeles) on the 50th anniversary of original Executive Order #9066. Gradual restoration processes continue in the present day, facilitated by several citizen groups including the Manzanar Committee. It is accessible with free admission daily along US 395.