Still in SF, keeping it brief. Still pimping the The Commons over at Flickr.
Americans, working in hot sun in what barely even looks like soil, at the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1942 or 43. Tule Lake was one of ten concentration camps operated by United States during World War II. Tule Lake was the camp where American citizens of Japanese ancestry were sent when they deliberately or accidentally checked the wrong boxes on their “loyalty questionnaire.”
Point of interest/disgust – Some internees at Tule Lake weren’t released until 1946 – nearly a year after the war was over.
At Top: Japanese-American camp, war emergency evacuation, [Tule Lake Relocation Center, Newell, Calif.] Photographer: Russell Lee?
Technorati Tags: Flickr, The Commons, Library of Congress, photography, WWII, World War II, Internment Camp, Tule Lake, FSA, Farm Security Administration, Japanese Americans, prisoners, labor, farming, concentration camp
My understanding is that the Tule Lake Camp housed the more difficult internees: from those not willing to renounce their allegiance to the emperor (and thereby be without a country) to those who engaged in any kind of nefarious activity in the other camps. I’m guessing that some of those held past the end of the war engaged in criminal activity (like petty theft) that would qualify them for 25-years-to-life under California current three-strikes law. So much for progress.
Over simplifying the nature of the camp by describing the prisoners as “difficult” really glosses over the nature of what were essentially concentration camps.
I know of no pattern of felony behavior (the three-strikes law is about felonies, not misdemeanors like petty theft) that took place at Tule Lake, or any other WWII era internment camp. The prisoners at Tule Lake were probably some of the best behaved political prisoners in history. To make an argument that the camp prisoners were likely engaged in criminal activity based upon a “guess” is truly ridiculous.
I know of no record of active resistance carried out by the prisoners at Tule Lake – people who would have been within their rights to resist as violently as possible, in my opinion. Don’t forget that these are prisoners who are being persecuted and punished for their racial background. The “nefarious activity” that got prisoners transferred to Tule Lake was refusing to participate in the “loyalty questionnaire” program in an acceptable manner. No answers to questions 26 & 27, or simply failing to answer those questions, or refusing to fill out the questionnaire out of principle was what got one moved to Tule Lake.
Most of those held beyond the end of the war were held because they renounced their citizenship in protest, or for other means. Citizenship was later restored to those who renounced it in 1971.
damn… you’ve really been rifling through the LOC’s database. tragic historical context aside, this is one remarkable image…
It’s worth rifling through. I’m being blown away on a minute to minute basis when I’m tagging and searching through them.
What’s staggering about going through the images is seeing just how much there is out there that’s unknown and that could benefit from a Wikipedia like interaction with the public. The 1940′s in Color collection is just the tip of the iceberg – the Library’s FSA collection has 171,000 additional black and white photographs that aren’t on Flickr, and the 1500 images from News in the 1910s are just a tiny portion of the 40,000 images in that collection alone.