On October 28, 1943, photographer Ansel Adams drove through the front gate of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Set in the inhospitable desert of Owens Valley, California, Manzanar housed 10,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry forcibly “evacuated” from the western states after Pearl Harbor and interned at Manzanar. Barbed-wire fences enclosed the 814-acre camp, and the rifles in the guard towers were pointing in.
Over the next two months, Adams—known then as now for dramatic black and white landscape images—photographed the camp’s residents. In 1944, he published Born Free and Equal, a book about Manzanar. In its pages, Adams tacitly offered a perspective opposed to the anti-Japanese hysteria that had brought on the internment of loyal Americans. He celebrated the resiliency of the men, women, and children who endured this unwarranted hardship. Born Free and Equal, which never attained the stature of Adams’s many other books, demonstrated his great humanistic spirit and willingness to stand with the disenfranchised during a time of severe national stress.
BESIDES PLUNGING THE UNITED STATES into World War II, Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor crystallized hostility against the Japanese abroad and at home. As shocked West Coast residents were reading and hearing initial news reports about the sneak attack, California deputy sheriffs and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were already rounding up “Japanese suspected of subversive activities.”
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to designate geographical areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Suspect individuals would be “evacuated” to residential camps where they were to receive “food, shelter, and other accommodation”—and be kept under guard. The order, a mandate separate from those stipulating controls on foreign enemy aliens, who also were to be interned, specified no nationality, but there was no doubt about its target. Anti-Japanese hysteria had exploded, fed by rumors starring insurgents and saboteurs. Investigators testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities claimed that on the West Coast Japanese agents were strapping cameras
