CA -- Independence -- Manzanar NHS:
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- Description of Pictures: Manzanar is still a work in progress. The site was established in Owens Valley (see next item) in 1992 to protect and interpret the Manzanar War Relocation Center, the first of ten permanent internment camps that were set up out west to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II. On February 19, 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR signed an executive order which forced more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans residing on the West Coast to sell almost all of their possessions and move into camps. Of this number, 60 percent were American citizens.
At its peak, Manzanar held 10,000 internees, housed in 576 one-story 20-by-100 foot barracks. Entire families were put in 20-by-20-foot or 20-by-24-foot rooms in these barracks. The camp, situated in the middle of a desert, also had a laundry, mess hall, showers, latrines, and a gymnasium. Around it was barbed wire and manned guard towers. For most of the war, it was not known by the internees whether they would ever be allowed to leave the camps. Believe it or not, the closest town to Manzanar is a town named "Independence".
The internment episode is usually cited as one of the worst things this nation's government ever did to its people. In 1988, Congress approved and President Reagan signed legislation apologizing for it and providing all of $20,000 per person for each individual interned at one of these camps. (This is often cited by interest groups who want reparations for slavery although, it should be pointed out, the payments were only made to people who were actually interned, not their descendants.)
After the war, the barracks were demolished and the wood was sold for scrap. The only structures remaining at Manzanar are the gymnasium, a police post, and a sentry post. There are also two camp cemeteries that you can visit, one for people and the other for their pets.
I came by the camp two years ago on my cross-country trip. Afterward, I went to the opening of the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II in Washington DC. That memorial has two sections, one of which honors the Japanese-Americans held in internment camps, and the other which honors those who fought and died fighting for the US during World War II, usually in the European theater. It's odd to think of soldiers being praised for gallantry to the country while their relatives were being held in desert camps on the suspicion that they might be traitors. I met a woman from Seattle Washington at the ceremony who had been in that situation and whose husband had died in combat in Europe. I've written to her periodically since, sending her pictures and other things.
When I went through the camp this year, little seems to have changed. The signage has been improved -- stencilled signs have given way to engraved ones -- and the literature is better. They're working on restoring the gymnasium as the visitor center and I'm told that the historic site will open for real in 2003. I'm sure I'll be back there to check it out.
Interestingly, one of Bill Clinton's last acts as President was to create eight new national monuments. Included in these was the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. Bush II and the Western Republicans complained bitterly about most of the new monuments. Property rights, blah, blah, blah. I hope they were diplomatically quiet about Minidoka given that Bush's new Secretary of the Department Transportation, Norman Mineta, had been interned there as a child.
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- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Wikipedia Description: Manzanar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945. Although it had over 10,000 inmates at its peak, it was one of the smaller internment camps. The largest was the Tule Lake internment camp, located in northern California with a population of over 18,000 inmates. The smallest was Amanche, located southeastern Colorado, with over 7,000 inmates. It is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California's Owens Valley, between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar means "apple orchard" in Spanish. The Manzanar National Historic Site, which preserves and interprets the legacy of Japanese American incarceration in the United States, was identified by the United States National Park Service as the best-preserved of the ten former camp sites.
The first Japanese Americans arrived at Manzanar in March of 1942, just one month after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, to build the camp their families would be staying in. Manzanar was in operation as an internment camp from 1942 until 1945. Since the last of those incarcerated left in 1945, former detainees and others have worked to protect Manzanar and to establish it as a National Historic Site to ensure that the history of the site, along with the stories of those who were incarcerated there, is recorded for current and future generations. The primary focus is the Japanese American incarceration era, as specified in the legislation that created the Manzanar National Historic Site. The site also interprets the former town of Manzanar, the ranch days, the settlement by the Owens Valley Paiute, and the role that water played in shaping the history of the Owens Valley.
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