by Linda Gordon
So why did they hire her if they were so nervous about a photographic record? I have never been able to find any documentation explaining this decision, but my guess is that they thought a photographic record could protect against false allegations of mistreatment and violations of international law. They did not, apparently, register that such a record carried the risk of confirming allegations that were true. A measure of how important it seemed to prevent such an exposure was that the internees in many camps were forbidden to have cameras. One distinguished Japanese American photographer, Toyo Miyatake, smuggled a lens and a ground glass into Manzanar, built a camera box from scrap wood, disguised it as a lunch box, and photographed clandestinely.6 An unknown number of internees did likewise. We owe some of our information about camp life to their initiative and courage.
Lange’s photographs, had they been shown, would have been one of a very few critical voices among the almost unanimous acceptance of the internment by non–Japanese Americans. Writer and editor Carey McWilliams remarked that you could count on your fingers the number of “whites” who spoke publicly against sending Japanese Americans to concentration camps.7 Even the liberal children’s writer Dr. Seuss contributed a racist anti–Japanese American cartoon.8 The Communist newspaper People’s World, representing a group hardly strangers to government repression, called the internment a “ ‘job well-done . . . was dictated by military necessary,’ ” and the Party suspended its Japanese American members for the duration of the war.9 Many of Lange’s friends and colleagues supported internment, and it is a measure of her principles that despite her admiration for the president, despite her antifascism, she did not fall for the government’s assurance that the internment was necessary to achieve victory. A few ministers and rabbis, pacifist groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Friends Service Committee, parts of the ACLU, Socialist party leader Norman Thomas, and African American leaders such as C. L. Dellums and Bayard Rustin expressed opposition. The NAACP newspaper Crisis called the internment racist.10 But fear mongering and hyperpatriotic rhetoric intimidated potential protesters.
Lange’s opposition grew, of course, from her FSA experience, but, then, so did the army’s decision to hire her. Whoever made the decision probably knew nothing about the content of her work, only that an excellent government photographer lived in California and was available.11
The internment photographs need to be seen not only as a passionate protest against racism but also as the first of Lange’s several exercises in war photography. War photography is usually defined as that focused on the battlefield or its immediate consequences, and as a form of photojournalism. In this sense, it was an almost exclusively male activity at this time, requiring speed, physical bravery, physical strength, competitiveness, a taste for hard living, until Margaret Bourke-White, as adventurous a woman as they come, broke the barrier. Documentary photography, by contrast, had a feminine aroma, the scent of empathy, bruised idealism, even sentimentality. Lange’s coverage of the Japanese American internment was both.
The greatest of recent war photographers have been liberals or leftists, motivated by opposition to war. They were often constrained by military as well as civilian censors, aware that images can be vital weapons. Embedded photographers—this is a new word but not a new position—understood also that the “wrong” photographs could undermine the nation’s security. In the embedded situation, censorship is so ordinary that it can become taken for granted, even unnoticeable. Much heroic war imagery results not from intrepid photographers daring the line of fire but from photo ops set up by the military establishment. Lange was embedded in much the same way in the FSA. She accepted the censorship that came with that job because she identified with her employers’ constraints. Her history as an official government photographer makes all the more impressive her resistance when working for the U.S. Army.
IMPERIAL JAPAN’S BOMBING of Pearl Harbor provoked understandable anger, but the internment arose not out of war strategy but out of racial thinking. General DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, wrote, “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted. . . .”12 In other words, what made Japanese Americans untrustworthy was in their genes. The contrasting treatment of German Americans was evident even in photography: The Office of War Information hired an FSA photographer to produce positive images of a largely German American town to head off outbreaks of anti-German sentiment.13
The Western Defense Command was at first reluctant to undertake this massive roundup and imprisonment because of doubts that the army had the human and financial resources to do it. Once evacuation was ordered, that problem of state capacity was solved by delegating the work of organizing and staffing the assembly centers to the Works Progress Administration, the major New Deal relief agency.14 Even more disgusting to Lange must have been the fact that the West Coast FSA office was assigned to organize evacuation.15 Had this remained the plan, Lange’s position would have been even more difficult, given her loyalty to the FSA, but a few weeks later the army created the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to conduct evacuation and run the camps.16 It is a sign of the widespread approval of the internment that programs once at the progressive edge of the New Deal were expected to help run this morally rotten enterprise.
Lange did the job with her usual unmatched intensity, hurrying out of fear that she might be fired at any time. She started to photograph the moment the roundups began on March 22, although she was not on the payroll until April 2. She worked sixteen-hour days, often seven days a week, for four and a half months, all the while living with fears about Dan, her abdominal pain, her muscle aches and fatigue, and the need to maintain a facade of neutrality in her dealings with army brass.
But she needed help now more than ever. She could not drive for hours without rest, as she had frequently done in the 1930s. To work quickly, she sometimes kept four cameras in the car and counted on an assistant to see that each was always loaded with film. Whenever possible she still used a tripod, which had to be unfolded, set up, folded again, and carried. She needed a boost to get on top of her car. On return drives she often slept from exhaustion.17 Rondal Partridge was now in the navy, so Dorothea asked Christina Clausen Page to help her.18 The twenty-two-year-old daughter of one of Lange’s oldest studio-client friends, just graduated from UCB, Christina had recently married aspiring photographer Homer Page. With photography thus surrounding her, Christina jumped at the chance to “apprentice” with Lange, as Partridge had.19
Lange’s job was more stressful yet because of censorship, aimed not at national security, as claimed, but to preclude unflattering images. Concerned to orchestrate news and photographs concerning the internment, the army hired a PR firm20 to manage news releases and appointed loyal journalists as PR officers for the assembly centers. A colonel set out rules: “One thing that is absolutely taboo, pictures of machine guns in the towers. . . . Pictures of forts that bring out our military police in a favorable light, show them to be strong, healthful men, but not Gestapo and that sort of thing. . . . It is a matter of holding down publicity and letting out only that which would be in aid to inform the public of what is happening to bring us the favorable light. . . .” He warned particularly about news that might reach “the Japs” and South America. “As to news going across the water to the enemy . . . that might bring reprisals if it’s not right.” As to South America, “Fact is, we’ve always told them we live by the democratic way that’s the way you should live so don’t play along with the other boys. Now, the thing is about our situation here they will probably wonder.”21
Not only watchtowers but also barbed wire, armed guards, and anything suggesting resistance within the camps were forbidden subjects. Despite credentials from the WRA, Lange was frequently refused access to what she was supposed to photograph. Guards would demand to see her creden
tials repeatedly, making her lose precious time waiting. Tellingly, none of her assistants were ever asked for credentials, putting the lie to any claim that security was the concern. Evidently not everyone in authority wanted photographs to be made at all. The guards threw at her any regulation or security claim they could invent or adapt to stop, slow down, or censor her work, and arbitrarily declared certain spaces off-limits.22 MPs followed her, harassed her, and tried to keep her from talking with internees, roughly enough to frighten her at times.23 Christina suspected that witnessing this made the internees more willing to cooperate with Lange. Army bureaucrats challenged her mileage records, meal and gas receipts, and telephone calls. She was required to turn over all negatives, prints, and undeveloped film from this work and to sign a notarized agreement that she would have no further access to them.24
The internment offered Lange a second opportunity—after An American Exodus—to create a photographic narrative. That narrative never appeared because she lost control of the images, but her photographic strategy can be pieced together. (In the book of these photographs we edited, Impounded, Gary Okihiro and I organized the photographs as we think she intended, telling the story from the point of view of its victims, from life before Pearl Harbor to Manzanar, and in that book I provide a fuller account of her work than is possible here.) She began with a strategy that the WRA never intended, photographing Japanese American life in the context of California’s society and economy before evacuation—that is, establishing their Americanness.25 (In film, these would be called establishing shots.) She was able thereby to demonstrate the respectability, Americanism, work ethic, good citizenship, and achievements of these people now being treated as criminals. She showed children reading American comic books, saluting the flag, playing baseball; housewives who could have been Betty Crocker; teenage boys dressed in the coolest fashion; young men in U.S. army uniforms; beautifully gardened homes both upscale and modest. This was a standard antiracist approach of the time—invoking the melting-pot ideal in which immigrants become identical with all other Americans (and in this denial of difference, it clashes with more recent diversity and multicultural ideals). To demonstrate “Americanness,” she produced several visual vignettes of families, such as the Shibuyas of Mountain View, a town at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. We see them relaxing with a pet dog in front of their white Colonial-style house and working in their fields, which were as meticulously tended and as clear of weeds as their lawn. Captions to portraits detail the achievements of the family: one son attended Stanford Medical School, another graduated from the UC College of Agriculture with a degree in plant pathology; their father “arrived in this country in 1904, with $60 and a basket of clothes,” and now grew prize chrysanthemums for select markets. She ended this caption and many others with the words, “Horticulturists and other evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be given opportunities to follow their callings at War Relocation Authority centers where they will spend the duration.”26 Did she believe this? Did she feel obligated to include it? Or by including it was she trying to hold the government to its promises? One extrapolation seems justified: that the censors might look as much to the words as to the pictures and that she could appease them through captions. It is also possible that she was trying, perhaps not entirely consciously, to influence the army authorities themselves.
19.1. RAPHAEL WEILL SCHOOL, SAN FRANCISCO, 1942
Next she photographed the roundup: registration orders posted on walls and telephone poles, people tagged and issued instructions: bring linen, dishes and utensils, clothing, only what you can carry, but no pets, no camera, no cars. She documented a hurried last harvesting, a last load of laundry, the garage sales, a last-minute wedding to keep sweethearts from being separated.27 Then they waited in lines with their suitcases for buses or trains to take them to temporary assembly camps. In this, her “chapter two,” she wanted the viewer to see the “process of processing.”28 Once the people were lined up for registration, inspection, and evacuation, their previous lives seemed to disappear. A population stratified by class and many other identities, like all populations, was now homogenized. Lange made fewer individual portraits of these people once they had boarded buses and trains, because the MPs would not let her get that close.
Here we meet a motif, both visual and emotional, that runs throughout the internment photographs: waiting in line. It is Lange at her best, creating a visual metaphor for the deindividualization of the prisoners. The Japanese Americans line up for their preliminary registration; they wait in chairs or stand waiting before tables at which officials ask questions, fill out forms, give out instructions. Sometimes soldiers guard them. Then they are tagged: the head of each family receives a number with a tag for each member of the family. Father is 107351A, mother 107351B, children C through F, from oldest to youngest, grandmother 107351G, and so on. (See page 303.) Then they wait for buses or trains to carry them away. Their belongings also form queues on sidewalks and dirt roads. Lange is taking us into a brave new world of rationalization and control, featuring the industrial and technological forms of domination later described most influentially by Foucault. We see now that what is being stolen is not only farms and education and businesses and jobs but also personal identity. Individuals are registered, numbered, inoculated, tagged, categorized, and assigned. They are divided up, segregated, exiled, inspected, billeted, surveilled. They are herded. A curfew is imposed and roll call is held every day at 6:45 A.M. and 6:45 P.M.29 A high barbed-wire fence surrounds them; in every direction they see armed guards and watchtowers; searchlights trace huge illuminated circles all night; camp police patrol night and day.
Even in this condemnation of dehumanization, however, her photographs refuse simple generalizations. “These people came . . . dressed as though they were going to an important event,” she recalled, “but always off in a little group by themselves were the teenage boys. They were the ones that really hurt me the most, the teenage boys who didn’t know what they were. The older people have more of a way of being very dignified in such a situation and not asking questions. But these Americanized boys, they were loud and they were rowdy and they were frightened”—many were just Daniel’s age, dressing like him, covering their anxiety with cockiness as he did.30
Despite being infuriated, she retained her typical restraint, as did her subjects. There are very few tearjerkers, like this girl weeping at the train station (figure 19.2). It is precisely this commitment to the discipline of her craft, not permitting emotion to drown the evidence, that makes the photographs so compelling as a collection. Instead of uniquely painful moments, the photographs document queue after queue, barrack after barrack, interspersed with symbols of internee creativity and resourcefulness. So the impact is from the whole, not from the individual photographs; the repetition proves the point.
“Chapter three” takes place in the temporary assembly centers. The first one she saw—the Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno—left her staggered. She needed to make her own home beautiful, even artful, and she was aware of the same impulse in Japanese Americans. (Fifteen years later, visiting Japan and appreciating its characteristic design elegance, she saw the origin of this sensibility.) Arriving inmates passed through two lines of troops with rifles and fixed bayonets pointed at them as their belongings were searched for contraband. Each family received a broom, a mop, and a bucket to clear away the omnipresent dust, but it returned within hours of being swept away. Thousands suffered irritated eyes from the dust. Each individual received a mattress tick bag, which they filled from a huge straw pile near the grandstand.31 Tanforan resident Jean Kariya’s family of five occupied the stable of one racehorse, she recalled. (Occasionally, very large families got two rooms.) “The place still smelled of hay and horse manure. The stable had been hurriedly swept and spray painted over cobwebs and dust.”32 Parents had no privacy from their children and not much from neighbors, since the thin walls did not extend to the ceiling. Stables were supplemented by barrack
s, averaging from ten to fourteen rooms each, with fourteen or so barracks to a block. Lack of insulation and ventilation made the cubbyholes in which they lived freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. Dust, mud, ugliness surrounded them. Nothing to do. Lines for breakfast, lines for lunch, lines for supper, lines for mail, lines for the canteen, lines for laundry tubs, lines for toilets. The most common activity was waiting.
19.2. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1942
The camps disrupted families. There were no family meals: each block had a mess hall, typically serving meals in two shifts to eight hundred people at a time. The hurried meals eroded good manners and replaced the ritual of Japanese cooking and serving with mere feeding of the body. Strange food—definitely not Japanese—was doled out, sometimes from large garbage cans, onto plates the internees held out as they moved along the line. One month, Jean Kariya remembers, they were served tripe twenty times. The communal laundries (there were no washing machines, only tubs and washboards, and frequently no hot water) and showers were chronically short of soap and hot water, and there was no decent provision for washing diapers. The showers and latrines were communal, a condition that inmates, especially women, found very difficult. The toilets consisted of a bench with several holes, with no partitions between seats; at one camp, the long trough always flushed all at once, so if you were sitting at the low end of the bench, you got splashed; hardly surprisingly, there was widespread constipation.33 Without family privacy, the chief influence on children became peer culture; parental authority diminished, offending many parents. Children lost some of their dependence on parents, who neither fed them nor set the rules. Teenagers ran in packs through the camp.