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Abstract
The dislocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast during the first part of 1942 was a spectacular World War Two event. More than 120,000 people were forcibly removed to ten relocation centers in the interior west in the name of national security. Photographers documented this prolonged event. Dorothea Lange followed the act of removal; she and Ansel Adams visited the largest of these domestic concentration camps, Manzanar. The War Relocation Authority enlisted these images into wartime patriotism. Another government agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, depicted everyday life in the camps on Bureau land, employing a view of settlement embedded in American ideology. Both these agencies tried to contain contradictions: that an act of patriotism masked a violation of basic constitutional rights and that pioneer settlement could be engaged in from west to east. This essay explores these images and their contradictory messages, concentrating on Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center.
Abstract
The dislocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast during the first part of 1942 was a spectacular World War Two event. More than 120,000 people were forcibly removed to ten relocation centers in the interior west in the name of national security. Photographers documented this prolonged event. Dorothea Lange followed the act of removal; she and Ansel Adams visited the largest of these domestic concentration camps, Manzanar. The War Relocation Authority enlisted these images into wartime patriotism. Another government agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, depicted everyday life in the camps on Bureau land, employing a view of settlement embedded in American ideology. Both these agencies tried to contain contradictions: that an act of patriotism masked a violation of basic constitutional rights and that pioneer settlement could be engaged in from west to east. This essay explores these images and their contradictory messages, concentrating on Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center.