writting

23Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

DOLORES FLAMIANO

This article analyzes published photographs of Japanese Americans interned in World War II by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), Ansel Adams (1902-84), and Carl Mydans (1907-2004) in Survey Graphic, U.S. Camera, and Life respectively. Although their work was constrained by the economic and ideological realities of the war’s photojournalism, they transcended the medium to provide historians with valuable insights into a controversial chapter in our national his- tory when the government felt it was necessary to curtail civil liberties. In addition to reconsidering the existing scholarship on Lange and Adams, this article explores new ground by analyzing the photojournalism of Mydans. This fresh perspective reveals how photojournalism contributed to the visual construction of race, citizenship, and gender.

DOLORES FLAMIANO is an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University. She is completing a book, A Good Picture Is Hard to Kill: Hansel Mieth and Social Re- form Photojournalism, 1934-1955, that examines the life and work of the pioneer- ing female photojournalist.

After the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II and anti-Japanese hysteria gripped the home front. Then, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the War Department to exclude any group of people from military areas for the duration of the war. This was the legal basis for the evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans from the west coast. Many were forced to sell their homes and businesses, often suffering huge financial losses, and educations, careers, and lives were disrupted, sometimes irrevocably.1

Mainstream American newspapers and magazines portrayed the incarceration of Japanese Americans as a military necessity, adopting the euphemisms “relocation and internment,” which was consistent with government propaganda, for the forced evacuation

and confinement. In 1993, Walt Stromer recalled that the media “remained largely silent in 1942 on the issue of the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans.”2 This research suggests, how- ever, that mainstream magazines strongly supported internment, and dissenting opinions were limited to liberal publications.3 Karin Becker Ohrn observed in 1977 that “the picture magazines steered clear of the Japanese-American internment” as much as possible, and when they did cover it, they took pains not to “plead a cause.”4 Nonetheless, this study found significant magazine coverage of Manzanar and Tule Lake, two camps in California.5 As for “plead- ing a cause,” this research indicates that magazine articles support- ed internment as a required curtailment of civil liberties during wartime.6

Magazine articles gave two main justifications for the intern- ment of Japanese Americans: military necessity and the Japanese assimilation problem. The media seemed to take its cue from Gen. John Lesesne DeWitt, who was responsible for implementing Ex- ecutive Order 9066 and who cited these reasons as justifications for the internment. The Japanese American population was concen- trated along the west coast, including areas designated as “strategic military areas” after Pearl Harbor. Several articles asserted that the evacuation order was an unquestioned military necessity because officials feared that disloyal Japanese Americans, who leased large tracts of land, could turn them “into a landing field for [Japanese] bombers in an hour or two.”7

Race, Citizenship, and Gender in World War II Photojournalism Japanese American Internment in Popular Magazines

Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)24

As a result of such fears, anti-Japanese sentiment was pervasive in the mainstream press. A strident proponent of internment was the newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst.8 Henry McLemore, a syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers, wrote on January 29, 1942: “I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands.” This type of opinion extended to the Washington Post, where respected columnist Walter Lippmann wrote on February 12, 1942: “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without. . . . The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone . . . and nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there. There is plenty of room else- where for him to exercise his rights.”9

Despite this propaganda, govern- ment investigators found no evidence of Japanese sabotage. In February 1942, Gen. DeWitt reported to President Roosevelt that no sabotage by Japanese Americans had yet been confirmed and then jumped to the illogical conclusion that this proved “a disturbing and con- firming indication that such action will be taken.”10 In the absence of evidence, magazines and newspapers sometimes resorted to innuendo. For instance, a March 1942 Life article featured a pho- tograph of a deserted Buddhist temple, with the following caption: “From this Jap temple at Salinas [California], FBI agents took three Buddhist priests who smile courteously while being arrested. They possessed maps, a spotlight and a mimeograph machine.”11 The accusation was implicit yet clear: these contraband objects were proof that the priests were sending signals to Japanese ships off the Pacific coast. This article also per- petuated the common wartime stereotype of Japanese Americans as inscrutable and duplicitous: bent on America’s destruction yet politely smiling all the while.

The “Japanese assimilation problem” also was invoked as a jus- tification for internment. The Japanese, unlike many other immi- grants, maintained their native customs and tended not to marry white Americans. Thus, they were presumed to be loyal to Japan simply because of their race. In May 1942, the Saturday Evening Post quoted a government sociologist, who claimed that the “Japa- nese were never Americans in California,” and then followed that by predicting internment would help them to assimilate: “This may be their great chance to become Americans.”12 The Nation ob- served in March 1942: “Federal and local officials feel incapable of distinguishing between loyal and disloyal persons of Japanese de- scent.”13 California governor Culbert L. Olson expressed this senti- ment more directly in February 1942: “You know, when I look out at a group of Americans of German or Italian descent, I can tell whether they’re loyal or not. . . . But it is impossible for me to do this with the inscrutable Orientals, and particularly the Japanese.”14 The underlying racism of these arguments was officially sanctioned and rarely questioned. These articles failed to mention the racist laws that were a major barrier to assimilation. For example, all Asian immigrants to the United States were considered “aliens inel-

igible to citizenship” until 1952. In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered Japanese Americans to attend a segregated “Oriental School” with Chinese and other Asian Americans, and the Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited Asian immigrants from purchasing land.15

Internment photography emerged in the 1970s as a topic of scholarly analysis with a strong focus on the Manzanar pho-tographs of Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and Ansel Adams (1902-84). However, scholars have neglected magazine photogra- phy in favor of studying what has appeared in books and museum

exhibitions and is in government ar- chives. This article starts to fill this gap by focusing on magazine photojournalism by Lange, Adams, and Life photographer Carl Mydans (1907-2004), whose in- ternment images were shaped by the eco- nomic and ideological constraints of the magazines in which they were published. Nonetheless, they transcended photo- journalism, and their images and words provide historians with valuable insights into a painful chapter in our national his- tory. Their photographs have contributed to the construction of a revisionist history of internment that, according to historian David Yoo in 1996, “highlights an under- side of U.S. history, illustrating how race relations at home stood in stark contrast to the fight for democracy abroad.”16

Wartime internment stories were rife with racial slurs and stereotypes, which most readers apparently accepted or at least tolerated. “Jap,” for example, was commonplace in popular magazines such

as Life, although more high-minded publications such as the New York Times Magazine eschewed the term. Other magazines were crassly inventive in their derogatory names for Japanese Americans. In March 1942, American Magazine labeled them “yellow bellies,” while in 1944, U.S. Camera called them “condescending little gremlins.”17 In September 1942, American Magazine perpetuated the enigmatic, unfeeling stereotype: “Japs usually hide their senti- ments. Sometimes you wonder if they have any.”18 The same article declared them unable to fit into American life and implied that they were less than human: “America has never assimilated them. During business hours they associated with white Americans, but after dark they lived in huddled colonies. When they moved into a district, whether in a city or a countryside, Caucasians moved away. Their neighbors were other Orientals or dark-skinned peoples.”19

Wartime narratives of internment in national magazines fo- cused on Manzanar and Tule Lake in California while ignoring the eight camps in more remote areas as far east as Arkansas. Life’s April 1942 article, “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain Camp,” paint- ed a muddled picture; its glowing optimism was punctured once or twice by stark realism. For example, the internees were described as “enchanted by scenic surroundings” and yet they called Man- zanar a “concentration camp.”20 The story emphasized the moun- tain scenery with several photographs of the “spectacular Sierras” looming in the background, dwarfing the people and the barracks. The camp was labeled “a scenic spot of lonely loveliness” where the “Japs gasped when they saw Mt. Whitney, highest peak in the

“Wartime internment stories were rife with racial slurs and stereotypes, which most readers apparently accepted or at least

tolerated. ‘Jap,’ for example,

was commonplace in popular magazines such as Life,

although more high-minded publications such as

the New York Times Magazine eschewed the term.”

25Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

U.S., shrugging its white shoulder above lesser ranges just 13 miles away.”21 The theme of scenic beauty reached an apotheosis in the work of Adams, whose U.S. Camera article contained eight pho- tographs, including three landscapes. He saw Manzanar as a rustic boot camp—tough but ultimately beneficial—with the mountain range acting as a purifying crucible: “I believe the acrid splendor of the desert, ringed with towering mountains, has strengthened the people of Manzanar.”22

Not all observers shared Adams’ sanguine vision, but most stories showed internment camp life as reasonably adequate and humane. For instance, Life reported in April 1942 that Manzanar residents “were settled comfortably last week, prepared to wait out the war in willing and not unprofitable internment.”23 Other sto- ries echoed these themes of contentment and gainful employment. For instance, a New York Times Magazine article in June 1942 fo- cused on the planned reclamation of Manzanar’s arid wasteland by Japanese American agricultural workers, though it admitted find- ing enough work for the evacuees was a “chief problem.”24 Simi- larly, Collier’s showed a young man in August 1942 with survey- ing equipment in the fields, and the caption noted “opportunity is here for anyone who wants to work.”25 In fact, work was hard to find, and most internees were ruined financially. The government paid unskilled laborers $12 a month, while doctors and other pro- fessionals earned $19. Furthermore, the racial disparity in camp pay scales was staggering. For example, a pediatrician at the Heart Mountain Hospital was paid $228 per year while Caucasian nurses working at the same hospital made $1,800 per year.26

Some wartime narratives symbolically linked the internment to another hard time in American history: the nineteenth-century westward expansion. These stories compared the in- ternees to pioneer settlers and the camps to the old West. With no apparent irony, magazine articles called the internment camps “boom towns” and “pioneer colonies” and described the internees as “pilgrims.”27 In August 1942, Collier’s told the story in rapturous rhetoric: “A dozen new war-born communities have risen almost magically in the open spaces of the Far West.”28 In 1944, U.S. Cam- era juxtaposed Lange’s flag salute photograph with text that com- pared evacuation and internment to a family camping trip: “Whole families packed up their belongings, loaded them on trucks, and joined the caravan inland to internment camps—American style— where they established themselves.”29 Contrary to this implication that families moved all their belongings to the camps, they were allowed to take only what they could carry in their hands.

These examples confirm that internment photographs, as Syl- via E. Danovitch and Elena Tajima Creef noted in 1980 and 2004 respectively, excluded the harshness or inconvenience of the camps’ daily living conditions.30 Moreover, some articles featured people (usually women) happily engaged in domestic production. In Au- gust 1942, Survey Graphic and Collier’s published photographs of the same two young women posed in their room at Manzanar with checkered curtains at the windows. Collier’s offered this image as evidence that life goes on as normal with families and appropriate gender roles intact: “Nisei girls in one of their Manzanar apart-

Ansel Adams (top) and Carl Mydans had their Japanese intern- ment photography in World War II shaped by the economic and idealogical constraints of the magazines in which they were published. However, they transcended photojournalism, their images and words provided valuable insights into a painful chapter in United States history.

Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)26

ments. The women went to great effort to make their homes as at- tractive as possible.”31 Such images fostered a myth that the camps were, according to Marita Sturken in 1997, “a kind of summer camp, with craft classes and group activities.” These “hyperdomes- tic” images of homemaking and recreation also revealed the gen- dered discourse of internment stories that “feminize the camps and emasculate the Japanese men within them.”32 By simultaneously highlighting the familiar domesticity of internment camp life and rendering Japanese men powerless, these narratives diminished an alleged threat to American national security.

Meanwhile, the best-known internment photographs empha- sized Japanese American loyalty and pa- triotism.

When the progressive monthly so- cial reform journal Survey Graphic asked University of California economist Paul Taylor to write about the internment, Lange’s War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographs were chosen to illustrate the story. They had collaborated on a 1939 book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, which documented the dustbowl migration to California. Dur- ing the depression, many of Lange’s Farm Security Administration photographs, including her famous “Migrant Mother,” had appeared in Survey Graphic. Accord- ing to Linda Gordon in 2008, Taylor’s and Lange’s internment story was sched- uled to appear in April 1942 but was postponed until September because of military censorship.33

The September 1942 issue of Survey Graphic contained a six-page article by Taylor, “Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus.” The cover featured a pre-evacuation photograph by Lange of San Francisco children in a schoolyard saluting the American flag, and the article included seven photographs attributed to “Dorothea Lange and Frances Stewart for War Relocation Authority.”34 Unlike photographic es- says in Life, which built a story around photographs, this essay used photographs to illustrate the story. Taylor’s text could stand alone and did not refer directly to the individuals or activities in the photographs. The first photograph showed a group of Japa- nese Americans registering for evacuation in San Francisco, and three pages of text explained evacuation policies and procedures. Next, a two-page photographic spread, “The Japanese Exodus— from Coastal Homes to the Hinterland,” told a simple narrative in pictures: an evacuation order taped to a vacant store, a child getting a shot, evacuees arriving by train, farmers working at Tule Lake, two young women in their “quarters at Manzanar,” and a young woman playing table tennis.35

Unlike the mass circulation magazines, Survey Graphic es-chewed racial slurs, emotional rants, or clever headlines. Written both for professional social workers and for a gen- eral audience interested in broader social issues, it was more influ- ential than its circulation of 25,000 would suggest. According to Cara Finnegan in 2003, the guiding principles of Survey Graphic were “progressive, modernist modes of thinking that believed in the authority of the expert, valued social invention, and possessed an interest in the communicative potential of visual explanation.”36

In the midst of media-circulated racist hysteria, the journal’s edi- tors framed the issue thoughtfully: “In essence [Taylor] asks us as Americans to take a really good look at what we are holding in our hands—not so much what military necessity required and what it didn’t; but what’s to be done now to fend against irreparable dam- age we are likely to do ourselves—damage internally, damage with our allies and potential allies, damage to our own children and their chance of survival.”37

The accompanying images and captions by Lange told a story of government humanity and efficiency and Japanese American orderliness and good cheer. The first image in the Survey Graphic

article, for instance, showed three well- dressed, middle-aged, spectacled Japanese (two men and one woman) standing at a desk and being helped by a seated man and woman. The encounter appeared as routine, calm, and orderly as a visit to the tax collector. This sense was ampli- fied by the caption, which was written by Lange: “A corps of specially trained teams from civilian agencies aided the Japanese, aliens and American-born alike, when they reported at the stations of the Wartime Civil Control Admin- istration. These teams helped them in completing individual preparations and in making disposition of their homes and property. They supervised health and as- sisted in innumerable problems of per- sonal adjustment.”38 The images and text focused on the government’s efficiency and benevolence. Such images “fit per- fectly with the official presentation of the internment as humane, orderly, and even

beneficial to the internees,” wrote Judith Fryer Davidov in 1996.39 While her words described Adams’ Manzanar photographs, they also could apply to Lange’s images of evacuation published in Sur- vey Graphic.

Lange’s image of children saluting the American flag is a good example of flag iconography in World War II photojournal- ism. Sixty-five years after it was shot, the most famous example of the flag as an icon is still “Raising the flag on Mount Surib- achi,” a 1945 photograph by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.40 Her photograph, like Rosenthal’s image of Marines on Iwo Jima, displayed Americans rallying around the flag during wartime. She showed a San Francisco schoolyard where minority students outnumbered whites and an Asian boy led the flag salute. This image seemed to reassure viewers that American principles prevailed despite the harsh realities of internment and the apparent suspension of civil liberties. Ironically, this image highlighted racial equality when it was about to receive a crushing blow. The title of the image, “Americans All,” reflected and amplified the themes of patriotism and equality.

A better-known flag salute photograph by Lange was published in U.S. Camera in 1944 under the title “Oath of Allegiance.” U.S. Camera, which began publication in 1935 under the editorship of former advertising executive Tom Maloney and was inspired by European photographic yearbooks, was a book-length compilation of the year’s outstanding photographs in high-quality reproduc- tions. It emphasized individual photographs selected by Edward Steichen, who gained fame in the 1950s as the curator of “The

“Unlike the mass circulation magazines, Survey Graphic

eschewed racial slurs, emotional rants, or clever headlines.

Written both for professional social workers

and for a general audience interested in broader social

issues, it was more influential than its circulation

of 25,000 would suggest.”

27Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Under his direction, U.S. Camera was an im- mediate success with a circulation of 35,000 in 1937.41 According to a former editor, it tried to appeal to a wide audience with a “mix of corn, nudes, news and art.” As part of this mass appeal formula, editors in the 1940s sometimes used photographs out of context and without explana- tion, distorting their meaning with “glib contrasts and quick visual puns.”42 In 1944 and 1945, U.S. Camera devoted its pages to war photography, reflecting both the na- tional preoccupation with war and Commander Steichen’s position as chief of naval combat photography. The 1944 edition contained scenes of life on the home front, including Lange’s “Oath of Allegiance,” which was the book’s only internment-re- lated image.

“Oath of Allegiance” featured a multicultural group of girls with a Japanese girl in the foreground, all with their eyes uplifted and hands over their hearts. The American flag was located off-camera, above and behind the photographer. Much of the emotional power of this image came from Lange’s proximity to these earnest young people. Their faces showed that this was no meaningless ritual but a heartfelt expression of allegiance, and indeed, some of them appeared on the verge of tears, an understandable reaction for residents of coastal California in 1942. Amidst the turmoil, the Japanese American girl in the foreground provided a comforting visual anchor with her calm stoicism.

Like the Survey Graphic article by Taylor and Lange, the cap- tion in U.S. Camera fixed the photograph’s meaning to emphasize American citizenship and the efficiency of the WRA:

The scene is an American schoolyard, at the opening of the day’s session. A Japanese-American child is leading her fifth grade classmates in a salute to the American flag. It took place just a few days before she and more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from the Pacific Coast.

Following Pearl Harbor the tremendous job of rounding up en- emy aliens and those of Japanese descent from the vulnerable coastal areas was undertaken by the War Relocation Authority. Whole fami- lies packed up their belongings, loaded them on trucks, and joined the caravan inland to internment camps—American style—where they es- tablished themselves.43

This caption was written not by Lange but by the editors of U.S. Camera. The first paragraph used “American” three times and the second paragraph seemed to equate “American style” with be- nevolent. This, of course, glossed over the gross injustice of intern- ment. Lange’s own caption to this image, which was not published but it available in the Online Digital Archive of California, echoed

the language and promises of the American government, minus the hyperpatriotism: “Flag of allegiance pledge at Raphael Weill Public School, Geary and Buchanan Streets. Children of families of Japanese ancestry were evacuated with their parents and will be housed for the duration in War Relocation Authority centers where facilities will be provided for them to continue their education.”44

As these examples of Lange’s photography illustrate, the American flag emerged as a potent symbol in published photo- graphs of internment. In Survey Graphic, the flag symbolized free- dom, equality, and diversity, which were all temporarily suspended by the “Japanese Exodus.” In U.S. Camera, the flag symbolically reconciled the contradictions between Japanese American incar- ceration and the rights of citizenship protected under the U.S. Constitution. In both cases, the juxtaposition of the flag and fresh- faced young Americans represented patriotism, diversity, youth, and hope for the future.

Lange’s published photographs and captions conveyed mes- sages of Japanese patriotism and American benevolence, which were at odds with her well known opposition to internment. Un- fortunately, there is little evidence of her response to the treatment of her photographs in Survey Graphic and U.S. Camera. Ohrn, however, has noted her ambivalent relationship with magazine publishing. Lange created four photographic essays for Life but published only two. According to Ohrn, “throughout her career she had resisted being characterized as a news photographer” yet “the photo essays she did for the picture magazines are evidence of her ability to adapt to some extent to the constraints of magazine photojournalism.” She concluded that “Lange’s insistence on the autonomy of her work—her desire to see each assignment through

Dorothea Lange’s photograph of children saluting the American flag is a good example of flag iconography in World War II photojournalism. The “Oath of Allegiance,” taken in a San Francisco schoolyard, seemed to reassure viewers that American principles prevailed.

Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)28

to its final layout design and copy—would not have conformed to the practice of turning photographs over to editors for these crucial steps of constructing a photo essay.”45

Adams shared Lange’s desire for autonomy, but his relation-ship with magazines was even more problematic. When he was invited by camp director Ralph Merritt to photograph Manzanar in 1943, he eagerly accepted, seeing it as an opportu- nity to make a vital contribution to the war effort. He was too old to serve in combat and was dissatisfied teaching photography to naval officers. He called his Manzanar work “the most impor- tant job I have done this year.”46 Previous studies have focused on his book, Born Free and Equal, which contained 104 photographs. This study has a much narrower focus: the eight images in “Manza- nar,” a photographic essay which was published in U.S. Camera in November 1944. This feature represented a distillation of his book, showing the formal constraints that he faced in adapting his work to a magazine format as well as the ideological constraints of U.S. Camera. The magazine was an offshoot of the U.S. Camera annual and shared the same patriotic editorial perspective.

Five of Adams’ photographs in U.S. Camera were portraits and the remaining three were landscapes. The first page of the photo- graphic essay showcased his prodigious talent as a landscape pho- tographer with a dramatic half-page photograph of the Inyo moun- tain range. A smaller photograph showed the entrance to the camp with a rustic wooden sign (“Manzanar War Relocation Center”) in the foreground and the imposing mountains in the background. Historian Gerald Robinson described the sign as “benign and handsome . . . like one might see upon entering a National Park.”47 The essay’s main caption in U.S. Camera echoed the benevolent narrative: “The acrid splendor of the desert, ringed with towering mountains, is part of the life of the people at Manzanar Relocation Center. In the spring of 1942, some 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were placed in protective custody.”48

The second page included a portrait of a Christian divinity student standing in front of the Manzanar Christian Church sign, written in English and Japanese. Although half of the residents were Buddhist, none were shown in Adams’ photographs. There was also a close-up of a Women’s Army Corps private in dress uniform and a wide angle view of a planted field where Manzanar residents used experimental methods to extract rubber from plants, presumably to support the war effort. The final page of photographs showed two young boys, a U.S Navy cadet nurse in dress uniform and a headshot of a policeman. The overrepresentation of Japanese Amer- icans in uniform highlighted both their loyalty and their assimila- tion into the American military and law enforcement institutions. Adams used what Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride called in 2000 “the purest symbol of patriotic loyalty at the time, the uniform of the armed forces,” to show that the Japanese people were not synonymous with the enemy.49 The essay unambiguously depicted the internees as gainfully employed good citizens. According to the caption, the WAC private, as well as others like her, were “serv- ing with pride. They will probably help more than anyone else in making others feel that Japanese-Americans are good Americans.”50 While the portraits reinforced stereotypes of Japanese docility and good cheer, the emphasis on people in uniform and the exclusion of people engaged in Japanese cultural and religious activities pro- vided powerful counter-narratives to dominant stories of Japanese difference and disloyalty.

The subtitle of Adams’ article clearly stated his intent to por- tray “loyal Japanese-Americans.” A letter from him to Nancy Ne-

whall, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, provided insight into his delicate balancing act as well as the highly charged political environment of World War II. He wanted his photographs to fight racist hysteria, and yet he refused to risk having his own patriotism called into question.

The object of the pictures is to clarify the distinction of the loyal citizens of Japanese ancestry, and the dis-loyal Japanese citizens and aliens (I might say Japanese-loyal aliens) that are stationed mostly in in- ternment camps. There is great opposition out here to all Japanese, citi- zens or not, loyal or otherwise, chiefly coming from reactionary groups with racial phobias and commercial interests. . . .

But you can understand how important it is to have everything completely in hand—to allow no opportunity for anyone to accuse us of any production detrimental to the war effort. Hence, the distinction between the loyal and dis-loyal elements must be made crystal-clear, and the emphasis on the Constitutional rights of loyal minorities placed thereon to support one of the things for which this war is all about. The War Relocation Authority is doing a magnificent job, and is firm and ruthless in their definitions of true loyalty. In effect these pictures imply a test of true Americanism, and suggest an approach to treatments of other minority groups.51

Adams’ photographs both reinforced and contradicted the vi- sual narratives that dominated internment photojournalism. They also introduced the natural environment as a visual metaphor for freedom. Because landscape photography was his forte, it is not surprising that his beloved Sierra Nevadas, which loomed dramati- cally at Manzanar, figured prominently in his photography of the internment camp. His text clearly articulated the deeply personal meaning of this harsh but spectacular natural landscape, which “strengthened the spirit of the people of Manzanar,” symbolically reconciling the contradictions between internment and American values of freedom and equality. For him, these landscapes “symbol- ize the immensity and opportunity of America—perhaps a vital re- assurance following the experiences of enforced exodus.”52 Gordon offered a diametrically opposed perspective on the mountainous landscape, a common feature of the internment camps: “Manzanar needed no high barbed-wire fence or guards—as with Alcatraz, ge- ography formed the prison walls.”53

The numerous close-up portraits of smiling, attractive men, women, and children bolstered the notion of Japanese American docility and cheerfulness. Photography historians have questioned

Ansel Adams photograph of the entrance to the Manzanar camp.

29Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

the meaning of these smiling faces, which seem to belie the dis- comforts and deprivations of camp life. In 2005, Jasmine Alinder suggested a solution to the conundrum: “Intensely aware of how the dominant media and the government were portraying them as criminals, many Japanese Americans apparently went out of their way to counter such images and to salvage whatever shred of dig- nity was permitted to them by dressing in their finest clothes and putting the best face on a situation that was fundamentally hu- miliating and degrading.”54 Anne Hammond provided a different perspective a year later on the smiling faces, suggesting that they reflected the friendly relationships that Adams had developed with Japanese Americans during his four vis- its to Manzanar in 1943 and 1944. Ac- cording to her, “Adams made friends of many of the Japanese Americans there. . . . He was remembered by the internees as friendly, gregarious, and happy to give away portraits.”55

Adams was not pleased with the Manzanar article in U.S. Camera. Pri- vately, he expressed frustration and dis- satisfaction with photography magazines, including U.S. Camera, and with editors, including Steichen. Despite Steichen’s reputation as the pre-eminent commer- cial photographer of the twentieth cen- tury, he had little respect for him. World War II and U.S. Camera’s focus on war photography fueled Adams’ belief that Steichen lacked intellectual and ethical depth as he noted in a 1944 letter:

U.S. Camera and the other trade journals are certainly on the skids. I am about finished with them. The 1945 U.S. Camera arrived. The same old Steichen showmanship. A series of tragic observations of a tragic war. Almost nothing beyond Observation; nothing to indicate what we are fighting for, the purpose of the war. That is what is need- ed—to reveal the power of the Purpose. A moment’s thought would bring to light the fact that such pictures could be made of our enemies as well; human sacrifice is universal.56

It is worth noting that the 1945 annual contained no photo- graphs shot in the United States, and thus none were by Adams. His critiques, however, apparently were not motivated by self inter- est; instead, they reflected his uneasy relationship with commercial magazine publishing. He deplored the aesthetic, artistic, and moral sacrifices he was forced to make in adapting his work to a magazine format, as he expressed in a 1944 letter to his friend and mentor, the eminent photographer Alfred Stieglitz: “My experience has been constantly depressing; I feel I am constantly prostituting myself for the glory of a trade journal.”57 Adams’ internment photographs were the work of a full-time professional artist, who occasionally dabbled in magazine photography.

The internment photographs of professional magazine photojournalist Mydans told a different but equally com-pelling story of commitment and compromise during World War II.

The popular weekly Life magazine was founded in 1936 and came of age during the war. It remained a mixed bag of features, cheesecake, and news, but according to Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie in 1990, during the war it “matured into the prestigious re-

flector of the cataclysmic events that transformed the United States and the world.”58 According to James Baughman in 2001, “Life’s coverage of World War II appears to have won a special place in the hearts of Americans. . . . [C]irculation rose from 2.86 million in 1940 to 5.5 million eight years later.”59 The magazine’s popular- ity and prestige soared partly because of the outstanding work of twenty photographers dispatched to war zones around the world, including Mydans, W. Eugene Smith, and Steichen. As Erika Doss noted in 2001, some of these photographers “aimed for wartime images with more of a sense of moral outrage about epidemic hu- man violence,” and all “shared a conviction in the deeper sym-

bolic authority of photography.”60 The magazine also assumed a higher profile with publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 edito- rial manifesto, “The American Century,” which, Doss pointed out, extolled “na- tionalism, capitalism, and classlessness, a sense of confidence, optimism, and exceptionalism, and the sure belief that the American way was the way of the world.”61

The internment photographic essay by Mydans should be seen in the context of virulent anti-Japanese ideology that prevailed elsewhere in Life. Photographic essays were the most carefully planned and aesthetically pleasing features in the magazine. They were surrounded by news stories, features, and numerous advertise- ments, some tastefully done but many mediocre, sensational, and even crude. A recurring feature in wartime issues of Life

was anti-Japanese propaganda. Scholars have noted that one of the most blatant examples of Life’s racism ran shortly after Pearl Har- bor—“How to tell Japs from the Chinese”—purportedly to protect innocent Chinese victims of righteous American anger against the Japanese. The article featured a chart detailing visual differences between Chinese and Japanese facial features, skin tones, and ex- pressions: “Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists. Japs, like General Tojo, show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics.”62 The article revealed a naïve belief in the truth-value of images as well as the visibility of racial categories.

In contrast to this gratuitous feature, Life’s combat photog- raphy included brutal, even sadistic, examples of anti-Japanese imagery. A famous 1943 photograph by Ralph Morse showed a Japanese soldier’s skull atop a tank, where it reportedly had been placed by U.S. troops, with charred skin and bared teeth.63 Readers wrote to complain that this image was “malicious, revolting, sav- age, and vulgar” and “the most terrible picture I have ever seen.” After one advised, “You better leave that kind of stuff to Hitler and Tojo,” Life’s editors responded, “War is unpleasant, cruel and inhu- man. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders.”64 This reply, of course, ignored the writer’s implica- tion that such a display was un-American, and more suited to the notoriously brutal enemies. The magazine’s decision to publish this image in the midst of wartime anti-Japanese propaganda was not surprising. More shocking, however, was the fact that Steichen se- lected Morse’s photograph for Memorable Life Photographs, a 1951 book published by Time Inc. and the Museum of Modern Art.65

As World War II dragged on, stories of Japanese atrocities, including Japanese suicide missions and the beheading of Allied

“Life’s combat photography included brutal, even sadistic,

examples of anti-Japanese imagery. A famous 1943

photograph by Ralph Morse showed a Japanese soldier’s skull atop a tank, where it reportedly had been placed

by U.S. troops, with charred skin and bared teeth.”

Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)30

soldiers, circulated in the American media, feeding anti-Japanese hysteria. On April 3, 1944, Life published a two-page spread with gruesome images of mutilated Japanese suicide victims on the is- land of Attu.66 Like the skull photograph, this story provoked let- ters to the editor. One reader called it “revolting and unnecessary” while another wrote, “If the men who are fighting can actually see it, smell it and hear it, why can’t we stand to just see the pic- tures?”67

The most bizarre example of anti-Japanese imagery in Life was selected as the “Picture of the Week” in May 1944: a full-page pho- tograph showed an attractive twenty-year-old woman with a pen in her hand, pensively gazing upon a human skull on the table in front of her. The text revealed the story behind this memento: the skull was a gift from the “big, handsome Navy lieutenant” who had “promised her a Jap” when he left for the war two years ear-

lier. The trophy had been autographed by him and thirteen of his friends and bore the inscription: “This is a good Jap—a dead one picked up on the New Guinea Beach.” The woman was reportedly surprised at the gift, which she named Tojo.68 Readers called this feature “revolting and horrible” and potent material for “anti-allied propaganda” by the enemy. A thoughtful writer commented, “Let us reverse the situation and imagine that one of the most promi- nent magazines of Tokyo published the picture of a young Japanese girl in such a pose, gazing at the skull of one of our sons who died for his country—the storm of protest at such savagery would sweep America and it would most certainly be held up to us as an example of the hopeless depravity of Japanese youth.”69

Anti-Japanese racist ideology also prevailed in the editorial offices of Life. Managing editor John Shaw Billings was a self- proclaimed xenophobe, who hated Indians, Jews, Negroes, and

Carl Mydans’ 1944 photograph of five Japanese at the Tule Lake internment camp was deliberately shot low on a diagonal angle to give the men a dominant, off-balance, and menacing appearance. The text described them as “fanatically loyal to Japan.”

31Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

other minorities.70 He was not alone in his prejudices, judging by an incident that Life photographer Hansel Mieth described in an interview with John Loengard. Picture editor Wilson Hicks “did some terrible stuff. When war was declared, he said his assistant, Peggy Matsui [the wife of Life photographer John Philips], could not work any longer in the picture department because she was half Japanese. Hicks knew she was absolutely loyal, to the point where she would have given her life for everybody there. That he could fire her a few days after the war started, was awful.”71 Worse still was the fact that Matsui, devastated by this callous mistreatment, died soon afterwards.72 These examples provide a glimpse into the racial ideologies and practices that prevailed at Life, both editori- ally and institutionally, during World War II. They also provide a context for the remarkable photographs by Mydans.

He is best known for his World War II photographs, including a famous image of General Douglas MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines in January 1945. Earlier he had covered the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Japanese invasion of China, and later he photographed wars in Korea and Vietnam. He received a hero’s welcome when he returned to the Time Inc. offices in New York in November 1943 after twenty-two months in a prisoner of war camp in Manila. Billings normally had little time for photogra- phers, but in his diary he noted Mydans’ return: “Hicks brought in Carl and Shelley Mydans who [had] just landed. . . . They have been in Jap hands since fall of Manila. Carl looks like a midget he’s lost so much weight. It was good to see them back—like someone from the dead.”73

In addition to his stellar war reporting credentials, Mydans was a versatile photographer whose skills extended far beyond combat pictures. He was among a handful of photographers at the magazine with formal journalistic training, having graduated from Boston University in 1930 with a degree in journalism. He began his career photographing cotton farms in the South and small- town life in New England for the Farm Security Administration, and consistent with his early training, he was a thoughtful photog- rapher with a social conscience. When asked why he photographed war so much, he replied, “War is not my delight. War was the event of my years.”74

Mydans’ Tule Lake essay was remarkable because of the unique journalistic angle: a role reversal in which the former American prisoner in a Japanese camp lived for a week among Japanese prisoners in an American camp. The article was also significant because of Tule Lake’s status as a segregation center, where disloyal Japanese were separated from the loyal Japa- nese in other camps. The disloyal label was applied to those who gave negative or uncertain responses to a loyalty questionnaire (for example, refusing to be drafted into the Army) or who requested to be repatriated to Japan. In addition, the article challenged domi- nant media depictions of Japanese men. Finally, Mydans exercised a high degree of autonomy for a Life photojournalist. Not only was he both the reporter and the photographer of the Tule Lake story, but the managing editor consulted him during the photograph se- lection process.

“Tule Lake: At This Segregation Center Are 18,000 Japanese Considered Disloyal to U.S.” was an in-depth photographic essay. With eleven pages and twenty-nine photographs, it was longer and more complex than Lange’s and Adams’. It contained a group por- trait of five Tule Lake “troublemakers;” two pages of outdoor camp scenes; two pages with various scenes of family life, community organizations, and business cooperatives; a portrait of a prisoner;

and two contrasting shots of young women. All of this provided a noteworthy counter-narrative to domi-

nant images of Japanese docility. The essay appeared in 1944 when there was scarce coverage of the internment in American magazines, and public support for internment was waning. Yet anti-Japanese feeling was still running strong partly because of media coverage of Japanese war atrocities. Mydans’ story focused on a group of Japanese Americans who were neither docile nor duplicitous but openly resistant to the United States. Most of the men profiled in the story were sent to Tule Lake because they refused to pledge loy- alty to the U.S. government and/or refused to go to war in the U.S. military. According to Ronald Takaki in 1989, 4,600 or 22 percent of the 21,000 Nisei (American-born) males eligible to register for the draft answered “no,” a qualified answer, or no response. Some used the loyalty pledge to protest internment.75

Visually, this photographic essay was unique because it fea- tured close-up portraits of defiant Japanese men, who were the antithesis of the docile, cooperative, smiling Japanese in other pub- lished internment photographs. The opening photograph was shot low on a diagonal angle, giving the five Japanese men a dominant, off-balance, and menacing appearance. According to the caption, “These five Japs are among the trouble makers imprisoned in the stockade within the Tule Lake Segregation Center.” The text de- scribed them as “fanatically loyal to Japan” and “ringleaders in the November riots which the U.S. Army . . . finally had to quell.”76 The lieutenant colonel who led the Army, who was shown in a

One of Life’s photographs at Tule Lake in 1944 showed a young man playing the guitar while sitting on his bunk. This showed Carl Mydans’ empathizing with a Japanese American.

Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)32

small headshot, appeared quite harmless and even comical in com- parison to the five Japanese men.

In another dramatic departure from other journalistic accounts of the internment, Mydans identified with a Japanese American man and invited Life’s readers to do the same. A full-page portrait featured a grim young man strumming a guitar while sitting on his bunk. According to the caption:

What it feels like to be a prisoner is shown in [the] expression of this young Japanese “pressure boy,” in [the] stockade. He was singing “Home on the Range” when Mydans entered [the] stockade barracks. Reports Mydans: “He sang it like an American. There was no Japa- nese accent. He looked at me the same way I guess I looked at a Japanese official when he came to check on me at Camp Santo Tomas in Manila. At the back of my mind was the thought, “Come on, get it over and get out. Leave me alone.” This boy felt the same way. He was just killing time.77

Thus, not only did Mydans empa- thize with a Japanese American, but he claimed to understand the feelings of a disloyal Japanese prisoner confined to the stockade in what he labeled “the worst of all civilian detention camps in U.S.”78 The young man’s song choice, the nine- teenth-century “Home on the Range,” seemed to be a deliberately ironic touch. The state song of Kansas and the unofficial anthem of the Ameri- can West, this familiar tune evokes freedom and opportunity, two things he clearly lacked. Mydans’s description of his singing (“like an American”) was also ironic; he was, in fact, an American.

Visual details amplified the message of American citizenship. For instance, the young man had a pompadour hairstyle favored by zoot suiters, a teenage subculture famous for its subversive activi- ties (and appearance) in Mexican-American communities in Los Angeles in the 1940s. The zoot suiters, like the Japanese “pressure boys” at Tule Lake, gained fame for rioting against the U.S. mili- tary. Another visual symbol appeared on the wall behind the man: an assortment of All-American pin-up girls, some of which prob- ably were torn from Life. Such pin-ups, which were a prominent part of 1940s print culture, transcended the magazine medium; they were plastered on the walls of Army barracks and painted in large-scale reproductions on fighter planes. These images symbol- ized American femininity and heterosexual masculinity during wartime. In Robert B. Westbrook’s 1990 analysis, women such as Betty Grable also served as “icons of the private interests and obli- gations for which soldiers were fighting, . . . a symbol of the kind of woman for whom American men—especially American working- class men—were fighting.”79 Combined with the other visual and textual information in Mydans’ picture, the pin-ups marked this young prisoner as a red-blooded American teenage male.

Ultimately, Mydans provided a contradictory account of Tule Lake prisoners. “Textual slippages,” wrote Wendy Kozol in 1994, “between identifying the prisoners as Japanese and acknowledging their citizenship . . . create an ambivalent and confusing portrait.”80 Caroline Chung Simpson echoed this analysis in 2002, noting that Mydans’ Tule Lake essay served “to disturb further rather than to settle the reader’s confidence in the process and outcome of the internment.”81 Mydans’ essay, according to Simpson, marked a key

transition to postwar America.

Life’s article on Tule Lake may be read as a defining moment, when the confrontation with the specific situation of internment as a form of Japanese American memory of the war almost unavoidably turned to a critique of the terms and conditions of American democ- racy in the postwar period. Mydans’s article is neither a celebration of Japanese Americans’ struggle to prove their loyalty nor a ringing en- dorsement of America’s handling of the internment. Instead, the report mixes his personal reflection on the cruelties of his own incarceration in a Japanese POW camp with his muted liberal critique of the denial

of citizens’ rights in a manner that seems to mourn the internment as marking the death of “an American way.”82

Mydans’ status as a heroic war re- porter gave him unprecedented influ- ence at Life. Managing editor Billings, a curmudgeon who looked down on photographers, selected and laid out photographs for the Tule Lake story and then asked him if he had omitted any especially good ones. Mydans responded that he had: “the one of the man playing the guitar.” Surprisingly, Billings quickly pulled that picture out of the reject pile and put it in the layout.83

In a 1977 article about internment photography, which was one of the first scholarly studies on the subject, Ohrn

noted that “Lange’s work received less attention than Adams’ dur- ing the war, and few of her photographs were published.”84 Surpris- ingly, she did not mention that Manzanar photographs by Lange and Adams were published in Survey Graphic and U.S. Camera, two small-circulation yet influential magazines. Instead, she fo- cused on a comparison of Lange’s unpublished photographs and Adams’ photographs in the book Born Free and Equal, contending that Lange “worked from an antagonist position” while Adams “be- came the apologist, intent on showing the success of internment.”85 Ohrn concluded, “Adams emphasized the grandeur of the place, while Lange presented its brutality.”86 This analysis influenced the direction and focus of subsequent studies of internment photog- raphy.

Researchers continue to compare Adams and Lange. In 2008, Gordon’s Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment valorized Lange’s “mastery of compo- sition and of visual condensation of human feelings and relation- ships” and concluded that her images “unequivocally denounce” the internment. 87 By comparison, she found that Adams opposed racism but avoided “identification with the opposition to intern- ment.” His photographs, meanwhile, sent a mixed message, with their focus on “the internees’ stoic, polite, even cheerful” attitude in the face of imprisonment.88

The purpose of this article is not to extend the Lange vs. Adams debate but to expand the history and theory of in-ternment photography into new areas of inquiry. As Kevin Barnhurst noted in 1994, “histories of photography often recite a story of technology pushed forward by ‘great men’ who respond- ed to their social milieu. However, pictures also wield ideological power, convey myths, and affect their subjects.”89 This article was motivated by a desire to understand the ideological power of pho-

“Ultimately, Mydans provided a contradictory account

of Tule Lake prisoners. ‘Textual slippages,’ wrote Wendy Kozol in 1994, ‘between identifying the prisoners as Japanese and

acknowledging their citizenship . . . create an ambivalent and confusing portrait.’”

33Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

tojournalism. Several scholars of internment photography have focused

on Lange’s opposition to internment, which led her to portray the Japanese Americans as tragic victims.90 Such images (some of which were impounded by the government) are cited as evidence of her sympathy and solidarity with the internees. Her published photographs, however, told a different story. Survey Graphic im- ages echoed the dominant discourses of internment, emphasizing Japanese cheerful docility and American benevolent efficiency. Meanwhile, her flag salute photographs in U.S. Camera and Sur- vey Graphic emphasized Japanese American loyalty and patriotism. These magazines used her flag iconogra- phy to symbolically reconcile the con- tradiction between internment and the myth of America as a beacon of freedom to the world. Previous studies have ana- lyzed her internment photography in the context of her political convictions and her personal struggles with WRA admin- istrators. By analyzing instead how her work was selected, arranged, and cap- tioned by magazine editors, this study provides insight into the construction and amplification of meaning in differ- ent photographic discourses.

Photography scholars Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride also focused on Ad- ams’ book, Born Free and Equal, con- cluding that his photographs highlighted the Americanness of Japanese Americans and portrayed them as loyal heroes.91 But the U.S. Camera article differed from the book in two respects. First, the book was titled Born Free and Equal while the ar- ticle was simply “Manzanar.” Thus, the book staked out a clear ideological position while the article was more neutral. Second, the smallest section of the book (portraits of Japanese in the mili- tary) accounted for a large section of the article. Three of the five portraits in U.S. Camera feature people in uniform, amplifying Ad- ams’ effort “to integrate the Manzanar experience into the broader national experience of the war effort” and refute “the link between people of Japanese heritage and the enemy.”92 These editorial choic- es further diluted Adams’ already cautious criticism of internment and highlighted military uniforms as patriotic symbols, which was consistent with U.S. Camera’s wartime ideology.

By shifting the focus to magazine photojournalism, this study provides fresh perspectives on internment photography. Contrary to previous scholarship, this research found that Lange’s published photographs in wartime magazines bore little witness to her well- known opposition to internment. Although she made hundreds of photographs that showed the injustice and suffering of internment, these images were not published during World War II; instead, edi- tors selected images that supported the dominant view of intern- ment as decent and humane. Her iconic flag salute showed young schoolgirls as non-threatening symbols of Japanese submission and loyalty, thereby mediating the apparent conflict between citizen- ship and internment. In U.S. Camera, the photograph’s potential irony is effectively defused by upbeat text that extols youthful pa- triotism, American benevolence, and the resilience of the Japanese- American family.

Both Lange and Adams featured fresh-faced schoolgirls as sym-

bols of innocence, obedience, and patriotism. Many of his portraits also featured Japanese American men and women in U.S. mili- tary uniform. These images were both positive and negative. On the one hand, they showed individual heroism and proud citizen- ship, but they also defined loyalty in narrow terms as willing and cheerful submission to internment. Such visual narratives helped to construct a “model minority” myth in which Japanese Ameri- cans were ostensibly strengthened and assimilated into American life through internment. He sent ambiguous messages that both reinforced dominant narratives of Japanese cheerful docility and challenged notions of Japanese disloyalty. This research shows that

he was more effective than most scholars have previously acknowledged in show- ing the humanity of Japanese Americans and challenging dominant discourses.

Finally, this article explored new ground by analyzing Mydans’ Tule Lake photographs in Life. As Doss observed, “For all its iconicity and influence, Life has been surprisingly unstudied, especial- ly from its context as a popular weekly picture magazine and visual resource.”93 This article attempted to fill this gap in journalism history. These images and the stories behind them provided a glimpse beyond Manzanar, the camp most often covered by the media. Mydans’ opening image of five Tule Lake “troublemak- ers” potentially transcended and even subverted Life’s wartime message about the danger of these men. According to Luis Alvarez in 2008, these powerful men “seem to have mobilized their own bodies to claim a sense of dignity amidst

the dehumanizing and humiliating experience of incarceration.”94 Such images demonstrate how World War II photojournalism both reinforced and challenged dominant ideologies of gender, race, and nationality.

What do these images mean and why are they important? According to Davidov, photographs are “artifacts with a continuing life,” contributing to revisionist histories, including those from the Japanese-American perspective. For ex- ample, Manzanar images by Adams and other photographers “have been used by formerly incarcerated people in projects of what might be called counter-memory: that is, efforts to recollect and represent the past in a manner that contradicts or is at odds with official narratives.”95 Such projects can bring closure to the victims of internment. They also contribute to a more complete and ac- curate historical record.

A recent example of such a counter-memory project is Life’s online gallery, “WWII: Internment in the USA,” which opens with a poignant scene of evacuation by Lange, who is the dominant photographer with six of fourteen photographs. Ironically, she worked for the government and not for Life. Even more ironic is the gallery’s focus on emotional shots that the magazine rejected during wartime. Also included are photographs published in Life, including Mydans’ young man with a guitar. The online caption emphasizes the camp’s humanity: “Young internees at Tule Lake (shown in March 1944) are allowed hobbies and recreation.” In a classic slice of Life, it also includes a bit of celebrity trivia to

“By shifting the focus to magazine photojournalism,

this study provides fresh perspectives on internment

photography. Contrary to previous scholarship, this research found that

Lange’s published photographs in wartime magazines bore

little witness to her well-known opposition to internment.”

Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)34

draw in twentieth-first century audiences: “One Tule Lake child (not shown) will grow up to be ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Heroes’ star George Takei.”96

These uses of internment photographs confirm Alinder’s ob- servation: “Uncovering how photographs were made and how they were read by contemporaries can help us understand photography not simply as a tool of the powerful but perhaps more productively as a medium in which different representational strategies vied to define the experience of incarceration, both in the present and for posterity.”97

NOTES

1 Gary Mukai, “Teaching about Japanese-American Internment,” ERIC Di- gest, December 2000, at http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/japanese.htm (accessed on Feb. 18, 2010).

2 Walt Stromer, “Why I Went Along: 1942 and the Invisible Evacuees,” Co- lumbia Journalism Review, January-February 1993, 15-17.

3 Two magazines that consistently published critical views of the internment were The Nation and the Christian Century, and an early and consistent critic of internment was columnist and author Carey McWilliams. A reviewer of his book, Prejudice—Japanese-Americans: Symbols of Racial Intolerance, wrote: “It may be difficult for some to realize the close relationship between the wartime Japanese- American situation, the so-called Negro problem and all other forms of race hatred. It will not be difficult once one has read McWilliams’s thorough-going expose of the West Coast situation.” See “California’s ‘Undeclared War,’” Newsweek, Oct. 16, 1944, 96.

4 Karin Becker Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get: Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams at Manzanar,” Journalism History 4 (Spring 1977): 15, 18.

5 Magazines indeed steered clear of the eight other internment camps in Colo- rado, Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah. Local newspapers covered the camps, but there are few published studies. For a scholarly analysis of the Wyoming camp, including local press coverage, see Douglas W. Nelson, Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976).

6 Japanese Americans were not the only minority group suspected of disloyalty during the war. For example, the government considered indicting black newspaper publishers for their criticism of the war effort. See Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

7 See “Eastward Ho,” Time, March 16, 1942, 14; Frank J. Taylor, “The People Nobody Wants,” Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1942, 24, 67; and Jim Marshall, “The Problem People,” Collier’s, Aug. 15, 1942, 52.

8 The flagship Hearst newspaper was the San Francisco Examiner. Other papers in the chain included the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Los Angeles Examiner, and the New York Morning Journal.

9 Quoted in Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 388. See also, Gary Y. Okihiro and Julie Sly, “The Press, Japanese Americans, and the Concentration Camps,” Phylon 44 (First Quarter 1983): 66-69.

10 David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000), 151.

11 “Japanese Carry War to California Coast,” Life, March 9, 1942, 24. 12 C.L. Dedrick, quoted in Taylor, “The People Nobody Wants,” 67. 13 Ernest K. Lindley, “Problems of Japanese Migration,” The Nation, March

30, 1942, 26. 14 John Campbell, ed., The Experience of World War II (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1989), 170. 15 Mukai, “Teaching About Japanese-American Internment.” 16 David Yoo, “Captivating Memories: Museology, Concentration Camps,

and Japanese American History,” American Quarterly 48 (December 1996): 681. 17 See D.H. Eddy, “What Shall We Do with Our 150,000 Japs?” American

Magazine, March 1942, 14-15, 100-02; and “The U.S.A. at War,” U.S. Camera An- nual, 1944 (New York: U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., 1944), 9.

18 William Robinson, “Outcast Americans,” American Magazine, September 1942, 30.

19 Ibid., 32. 20 “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain Camp,” Life, April 6, 1942, 17. 21 “Coast Japs,” Life, April 6, 1942, 15. 22 Ansel Adams, “Manzanar: Photographs of Loyal Japanese Americans at Re-

location Center,” U.S. Camera, November 1944, 16. 23 “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain Camp,” 15. 24 Lawrence E. Davies, “Japanese at Work for the U.S.,” New York Times Maga-

zine, June 21, 1942, 14, 37. 25 Jim Marshall, “The Problem People,” Collier’s, Aug. 15, 1942, 50. 26 Mike Mackey, A Brief History of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and

the Japanese American Experience, at http://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/history.htm (accessed on July 2, 2004).

27 See Marshall, “The Problem People,” 50; Davies, “Japanese at Work for the U.S.,” 14; and “Coast Japs,” 17.

28 Marshall, “The Problem People,” 50. 29 Dorothea Lange, “Oath of Allegiance” (photograph), U.S. Camera Annual,

1944, 156. 30 See Sylvia E. Danovitch, “The Past Recaptured? The Photographic Record

of the Internment of Japanese-Americans,” Prologue, Summer 1980), 91-103; and Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizen- ship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press), 2004.

31 Marshall, “The Problem People,” 51. 32 Marita Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting

the Japanese Internment,” positions 5 (Winter 1997): 695. 33 Linda Gordon, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japa-

nese American Internment (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 23. 34 The WRA listed the photographer as Francis Stewart, and Karin Becker

Ohrn referred to Frank Stewart. See War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japa- nese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945, Online Digital Archive of California, at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf596nb4h0 (accessed on Aug. 17, 2009); and Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 254, 25 n.

35 Paul S. Taylor, “Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus,” Survey Graphic, Sep- tember 1942, 372-78, 396.

36 Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Wash- ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 62.

37 Taylor, “Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus,” 373. 38 Ibid., 372. 39 Judith Fryer Davidov, “‘The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes’: Pho-

tographs of the Japanese-American Internment by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9 (Fall 1996): 233.

40 For a discussion of this iconic photograph and the role of visual icons in constructing civic identity, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Perform- ing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quar- terly Journal of Speech 88 (November 2002): 363-92. For an analysis of other iconic photographs, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

41 John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photog- raphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 94.

42 Julia Scully, “45 Years Later, Photography Has Come a Long Way in Terms of Art. But Is It Avoiding Social Reality?” Modern Photography, August 1985, 5.

43 Dorothea Lange (photographer), “Oath of Allegiance,” U.S. Camera An- nual, 1944, 156.

44 “San Francisco, Calif.—Flag of Allegiance Pledge at Raphael Weill Public School,” War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945, Online Digital Archive of California (accessed on Aug. 17, 2009).

45 Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 164. 46 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, n.d. (Fall 1943?), Ansel Adams Archive,

Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. 47 Gerald Robinson, Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar (Nevada

City, Calif.: Carl Mautz, 2002), 27. 48 Ansel Adams, “Manzanar: Photographs of Loyal Japanese-Americans at In-

ternment Camp,” U.S. Camera, November 1944, 16. 49 Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out: Photo Docu-

mentation of the Japanese Wartime Incarceration,” in Stephanie Barron, Sheri

35Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)

Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University of California Press, 2000), 36.

50 Adams, “Manzanar,” 17. 51 Adams to Newhall, n.d. (Fall 1943?), 1, 6, Ansel Adams Archive, Center for

Creative Photography, University of Arizona. 52 Adams, “Manzanar, 16. 53 Gordon, Impounded, 32. 54 Jasmine Alinder, “Displaced Smiles: Photography and the Incarceration of

Japanese Americans During World War II,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies (New York: B. Franklin, 2005), 521.

55 Anne Hammond, “Ansel Adams at Manzanar,” Honolulu Academy of Arts Exhibit Catalog, 2006, 3, Ansel Adams Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

56 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, Dec. 24, 1944, 1-2, Ansel Adams Ar- chive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

57 Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, Dec. 25, 1944, Ansel Adams Archive, Cen- ter for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

58 Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, American Mass-Market Magazines (West- port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 209.

59 James Baughman, “Who Reads Life?” in Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 43-44.

60 Doss, Looking at Life Magazine, 13. 61 Ibid., 11. 62 “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, Dec. 22, 1941, 81-82. 63 Ralph Morse, “Dead Jap,” Life, Feb. 1, 1943, 27. 64 “Letters to the Editor,” Life, Feb. 22, 1943, 8. 65 Edward Steichen, Memorable LIFE Photographs (New York: Museum of

Modern Art, 1951), np. For an interesting perspective on the “fraternity of Ameri- can war photographers,” including Morse and Mydans, see George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 92-95.

66 “Jap Suicides on Attu,” Life, April 3, 1944, 36-37. 67 “Letters to the Editor,” Life, April 24, 1944, 6. 68 “Picture of the Week,” Life, May 22, 1944, 34-35. 69 “Letters to the Editors,” Life, June 12, 1944, 6. 70 For instance, after meeting with M.F. Agha, an art director who Life was

trying to lure away from Condé Nast, Billings wrote, “Agha is a Turk and gives me the creeps. . . . He’s a different breed from our crowd—& I’m a xenophobe.” See John Shaw Billings, diary, June 29, 1938, Billings Manuscript Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Elsewhere in the di- ary, he expressed contempt for other minorities.

71 John Loengard, “Hansel Mieth,” LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1998), 78.

72 After Matsui was fired by Hicks, she refused to transfer to another depart- ment of the magazine. According to her husband, Life photographer John Philips,

Peggy “resigned, came home and never went out of the house after that.” She died of septicemia a few months later. See ibid., 78.

73 John Shaw Billings, diary, Dec. 1, 1943, Billings Manuscript Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.

74 Christopher Reed, “Carl Mydans,” The Guardian, Aug. 20, 2004. 75 Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 397. 76 Carl Mydans, “Tule Lake: At This Segregation Center Are 18,000 Japanese

Considered Disloyal to U.S.,” Life, March 20, 1944, 25. 77 Ibid., 31. 78 Ibid., 25. 79 Robert B. Westbrook, “‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl, That Married

Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 596.

80 Wendy Kozol, LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournal- ism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 64.

81 Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 39.

82 Ibid., 23. 83 Maitland Edey, Great Photographic Essays from LIFE (Boston: New York

Graphic Society, 1978), 9-10. 84 Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get,” 22. 85 Edey, Great Photographic Essays, 19. 86 Ibid., 21. 87 Gordon, Impounded, 6. 88 Ibid., 34. 89 Kevin Barnhurst, Seeing the Newspaper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994),

xiv. 90 See Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get;” Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and

the Documentary Tradition; Davidov, “‘The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes’”; Robinson, Elusive Truth; Danovitch, “The Past Recaptured?”; Creef, Imag- ing Japanese America; Higa and Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out;” Gordon, Im- pounded; and Alinder, “Displaced Smiles.” See also Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Maisie Conrat and Richard Conrat, Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (Los Angeles: California Historical So- ciety, 1972)

91 Higa and Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out,” 333. 92 Ibid., 326. 93 Doss, Looking at Life Magazine, 4. 94 Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During

World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 78. 95 Alinder, “Displaced Smiles,” 533. 96 Davidov, “The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes,” 240. 97 “WWII: Internment in the USA,” at http://www.life.com/image/50693609/

in-gallery/23021/wwii-internment-in-the-usa (accessed on April 15, 2009).

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