Internment of Japanese Residents in WWII
This is an excerpt from the paper...
During World War II, the United States interned Japanese residents of the Western states in internment camps such as that at Manzanar in California. The reason was indicated in Executive Order 9066, signed in 1942 by President Roosevelt to give authority to the War Department to define military areas in the western states and to exclude anyone who might be seen as threatening the war effort (Houston and Houston xi-xii). Japanese living in the Western states were seen as potential subversives and were summarily removed to camps to prevent this. The camps operated until after the surrender of Japan, though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled at the end of 1944 that loyal citizens could not be held in detention camps against their will (Houston and Houston xii). The United States was wrong to place any Japanese who had not committed any offense into these camps whether they were citizens or not, a fact later admitted by the U.S., which also eventually tried to pay some reparations to those who had been so incarcerated. Ansel Adams was a well-known American photographer, and one of his more interesting studies was long lost to view until it was revived in a book in 1988, with text by John Hersey. This was the photographic study done by Adams of Manzanar, the camp where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II in one of the more shameful episodes in American history. The consignment of Japanese-Americans to these camps started in 1942, and more than 10,000 were placed
. . .
ly because they had been prevented in the past from becoming citizens, and so the internment was a double form of discrimination. After World War I, America faced hard times so that the immigrant became the scapegoat for hard times. A tight national-origins policy was instituted in 1921 as a temporary measure, and total immigration was limited to about 350,000 per year, with immigration from each country in a given year limited to 3 percent of all nationals from the country who were living in the United States during the 1910 census. The system was made permanent with the National Origins Act of 1924, now based on the ethnic composition of the United States as reflected in the 1920 census, with entry limited to 2 percent of the number of people living in the U.S. The law thus reduced the total number of immigrants each year to 150,000. The object of the law was also to favor certain kinds of immigrants and to keep out others. More immigrants were permitted from western Europe and fewer from southern and eastern Europe, and Asians were totally excluded, primarily to prohibit Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos from acquiring U.S. citizenship. These restrictions would not be relaxed until after World War II (Lewis, 1993, 1/4).
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Houston Houston, Armor Wright, Wakatsuki Houston's, II Lewis, Farewell Manzanar, Supreme Court, Origins Act, War America, Ansel Adams, West Coast, ansel adams, world war, houston houston, united wrong, american citizens, world war ii, war ii, jeanne wakatsuki, fresno metropolitan museum, museum art, fresno metropolitan, metropolitan museum, metropolitan museum art, museum art industry, industry science 1984,
Approximate Word count = 1661
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Internment of Japanese Residents in WWII
|