FOR THE DURATION

Images By Dorothea Lange

February 26, 2018

A soldier and his mother in a strawberry field. This soldier, age 23, volunteered July 10, 1941 [5 months before Pearl Harbor], and is stationed at Camp Leonard Wood, Missouri. He was furloughed to help his mother and family prepare for their evacuation. He is the youngest of six children, two of them volunteers in the U.S. Army. The mother, age 52, came from Japan 37 years ago. Her husband died 21 years ago, leaving her to raise six children. She worked in a strawberry basket factory until last year when her children leased three acres of strawberries, “so she wouldn’t have to work for somebody else.” The family is Buddhist. This is her youngest son. Her second son is in the army stationed at Ft. Bliss. 453 families are to be evacuated from this area. No: [G2]A-585 – Dorothea Lange  

_____________________________________________________________________

On February 19, 1942, Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed and issued Presidential Executive Order 9066. This order would authorize the Secretary of War to establish military zones across the Western United States, with the largest in California, Colorado, and Wyoming. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, frenzied with bipartisan zeal, the United States Government incarcerated a majority of American Citizens with Japanese ancestry for the singular crime of having "a single drop of Japanese blood."

In April and May of 1942, a massive “evacuation” from Oakland, San Francisco, and the surrounding counties took place. Similar exoduses were occuring across the country, where tens of thousands of Americans were forced out of their homes, businesses, and lives. Similar in fashion to the "evacuations" taking place in Europe, with the Army’s Exclusion Order No. 20, California institutionalized the anti-Japanese sentiment that had been boiling for more than a half-century.

For most of these Californians, opposition to the Japanese was based upon fears where were largely non rational - It is instructive to note that these non rational fears were nowhere more persistent than in the minds of those middle-class leaders whom we have come to call progressive."                                                                                         - Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, p. 107

Experienced government photographer Dorothea Lange documented the activities leading up to, during, and after the evacuation in the wider Bay Area. Lange had worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s, documenting agricultural practices and conditions during the Dust Bowl that ravaged much of the country. Lange captured the iconic image Migrant Mother, an image that would codify the tenacity of the American migrant farmer of the 1930s for all time. 

Lange had a particularly sensitive approach when documenting people, capturing only what the subject was inclined to offer. As Milton Meltzer writes in his biography of Lange:

“She would never intrude her camera upon anyone’s privacy… If nothing was said but she felt unwelcome, she would fool around with her equipment or just go sit down in a corner and let them look her over. She was aware that some people withdrew because they felt she did not belong with them.

Tactfully then she would speak to them about who she was and what her family was like, where she came from, what she represented, so that she told them much about herself, and truthfully. Then if she asked questions, it was a fair exchange.”                                                                                             - Milton Meltzer Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, p. 97

This approach sharply contrasted that of Lange’s famous contemporary, Margret Bourke-White. American author and art critic William Stott wrote of Bourke-White that she “made her subjects’ faces and gestures say what she wanted them to. And what she wanted to say [was] blatant on every page.” Bourke-White's famous World’s Highest Standard of Living demonstrates her tendency toward the manipulation of her subjects in order to elicit a specific reaction. Where Bourke-White saw each subject as a means to her end, Lange built a practice around a genuine rapport with those she hoped to document. This allowed Lange to see a deeper and more authentic sense of what was, without inserting a preordained narrative.  

The following images are public records of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the government agency tasked with overseeing the evacuation orders. These records, and millions of others, are housed at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, accessible to anyone with an afternoon at their disposal.

The following government records honestly depict an act that it willingly and energetically committed. I am thankful that an artist as compassionate, sensitive, and seeing as Dorothea Lange was there to honestly and accurately capture a tragic chapter of our shared history. 

Lest we make the same mistakes again.