FROM INFAMY TO INTERNMENT
December 7, 1941: A quiet morning in Hawaii turned deadly when a squadron of Japanese pilots launched a surprise attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor. The attack and the simultaneous assault on U.S. bases in the Philippines destroyed nearly the entire U.S. Pacific fleet, resulting in the worst loss of life on American soil for nearly six decades. The shock reverberated across the nation, leaving the U.S. Government with the question of how to respond: not only to the Japanese military, but to the thousands of people of Japanese descent who chose to live as Americans and to the wave of nativist backlash and propaganda against them.
A DAY OF INFAMY
They did not wait long to issue a response. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, led to the mass incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. Individuals of Japanese ancestry living in the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California were forcibly relocated to ten camps scattered across the southern and western United States: mostly in desolate areas far from centers of population. This archive is the story of one of these communities: The Granada War Relocation Center, commonly known as the Amache Camp. Located ten miles west of the sugar beet town of Granada, Colorado, Amache was unique in that it was the only internment camp located in close proximity to a town. It was also the smallest of the camps, but was nevertheless the 10th-largest city in Colorado during its years of operation.
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Image Source: Baltimore News-Post, 8 December 1941.
COPING IN CALIFORNIA
Many of the inmates at Amache originated in the farming areas of California’s Central Valley. The Issei (first-generation) and Nisei (second-generation) were integral to the economic life of these areas, having established successful farms and businesses. Many white Americans resented the success of these Japanese-Americans and sought to use the executive order and following government policies as leverage to wrest control of their economic footholds. Still, when encountered with the prospect of evacuation and internment, most of them complied willingly. After all, shortly following the signing of EO 9066, the President himself addressed the country by saying, “We shall give up conveniences and modify the routine of our lives if the country asks us to do so." (Harvey 27)
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Anti-Japanese Protests. Image Source: Metropolitan Museum of New York, http://www.metmuseum.org
AN AMERICAN PATRIOT
Colorado had a reputation of friendliness toward Japanese Americans thanks to its leader at the beginning of World War II: Governor Ralph Lawrence Carr. As the only major political figure of World War II to publicly oppose the policy of Japanese internment, Carr offered Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast the opportunity to relocate to Colorado willingly. Many of them took the offer, concentrating mainly in sparsely-populated areas of eastern Colorado, particularly in Fort Morgan, Greeley, and Alamosa. Carr's proclamation was not greeted kindly by many white Coloradans, who were consumed by anti-Japanese hysteria following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. One Coloradan remarked that Carr's attitude toward the Japanese constituted "a knife in the back of all good Coloradans."(The Amache Experience)
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Gov. Carr delivering remarks to Denver constituents. Image source: Denver Post, 1943.
ACROSS THE SOUTHWEST
The journey for Japanese internees from their homes to the camps began at any of fifteen ‘Assembly Centers’: hastily converted horse tracks and fairgrounds with substandard conditions. The Amache internees were confined at two in particular: those at Merced, approximately 100 miles east of San Jose, and Santa Anita, just north of downtown Los Angeles. These assembly centers provided a holding area during construction of the internment camps, most of which remained unfinished when the first inmates arrived. Indeed, when the first buses of Japanese-Americans arrived in the desolate Colorado high desert in August of 1942, they were forced to construct their barracks themselves: in effect, to build their own prisons.
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Youth Constructing their Barracks. Image Source: Parker, Thomas. The Bancroft Library, University of California. Berkeley, California.
CREATING COMMUNITY
Thousands of people lived under searchlights at Amache for upwards of three years, but it is not always accurate to imagine their imprisonment as merely an experience of misery. Inmate communities made incredible efforts to remain part of American culture and to assert their place within the country and the society that placed them behind barbed wire. This archive explores how the inmates of Amache continued to fuse their ancestral traditions with their American identities while attempting to normalize their experiences of internment. It will investigate the internees’ vital presence in the economy and culture of Southeast Colorado. Finally, it will examine the memories of internees and the effort of the people in Granada who devote their time and resources to ensure that Colorado never forgets what historian Robert Harvey has called "freedom's hypocrisy."
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Homma Family at Amache Internment Camp. Image Source: http://www.discovernikkei.com
Sources:
Harvey, Robert. Amache : the story of Japanese internment in Colorado during World War II. Lanham, Md. : Taylor Trade Pub. : Distributed by National Book Network, 2004.
U.S. Congress. Congressional Record. 65th Cong., 1st sess., 8 April 1924. Rec. 5870-5885.
​Wei, William. Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.