Ansel Adams (40 page)

For one week in late January 1944, Ansel mounted an exhibition of these photographs right at Manzanar for those whom he believed should be their first audience, the internees themselves.
46
When he arrived in New York in the spring of 1944, he carried with him sequenced photographs mounted on boards, with his own accompanying words. Not permitted to show the watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, or guns, Ansel was forced to tell the grimmest parts of the story in words. At MoMA, Nancy received the project with great enthusiasm and within a day and a half scheduled and planned an exhibition that turned out to be neither fast nor easy to open. Twice the museum canceled it and the trustees insisted that Ansel remove the panel quoting the Fourteenth Amendment that guarantees due process for every citizen. They also required he change the title from
Born Free and Equal
to
Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of Loyal Japanese at the American Relocation Center
.
47

Ansel also presented this to his recent critic Maloney, who agreed to publish it as a book.
Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans
was issued in late 1944 at a price of one dollar. Due to wartime exigencies, the softcover book was poorly printed on cheap paper, but the power of Ansel’s message came through loud and clear. (See plate 7, second photograph insert.)

Ansel trod an extremely fine line. He believed it was essential to cloak himself in righteousness by clearly defining the victims as “loyal” Japanese Americans and steeping it in the writings of the unimpeachable (Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman).
Born Free and Equal
is a story that wends its way from the brutal beginnings of relocation through the blossoming of democratic civilization not to be denied at the mature Manzanar. Wherever Ansel photographed, his core beliefs were reaffirmed, even at such a place as Manzanar, where human dignity rose above disaster under the Sierra’s potent benevolence.

Ansel composed most of the book’s text, an objective description of a horrible situation coupled with an impassioned plea for his country to right this heinous wrong. Ansel explained his purpose on the final page of text.

You have now met some of the people at Manzanar, seen a small part of their daily life and work. I hope you have become aware of their tragic problem.

As I write this men are dying and destruction roars in almost every part of the globe. The end is not yet in sight.

What is the true enemy the democratic peoples are fighting? Collectively, the enemy is every nation and every individual of predatory instincts and actions. We fight to assure a cooperative civilization in opposition to the predatory Nazi-Fascist-Militarist methods and ideologies of government. We must prosecute this war with all the ruthless efficiency, stern realism, and clarity of purpose that is at our command. We must not compromise or appease. We must assure our people that there will be no further human catastrophies [
sic
] such as the destruction of Rotterdam, the annihilation of Lidice, the rape of Nanking, or the decimation of the Jews.

We must be certain that, as the rights of the individual are the most sacred elements of our society, we will not allow passion, vengeance, hatred, and racial antagonism to cloud the principles of universal justice and mercy. We may well close with these words of Dillon S. Myer:

“If we are to succumb to the flames of race hate, which spread with fury to every markedly different group within a nation, we will be destroyed spiritually as a democracy, and lose the war even though we win every battle.”

To thee old cause!

Thou peerless, passionate, good cause.

Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea,

Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands,

After a strange sad war, great war for thee . . .

—
Walt Whitman
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The exhibit, meanwhile, foundered in rough waters. Ten days before its scheduled opening in November 1944, the museum administration notified Nancy that the show was not acceptable, that it was more propaganda than art. But the background mutterings overheard were that
Born Free and Equal
provided succor to the enemy. After bitter wrangling, with hard negotiating by Nancy and cross-country telephone calls by Ansel, the exhibition of sixty-one prints was allowed to open in a basement display space, under the following conditions: the show’s title must be changed to simply
Manzanar
, and the Fourteenth Amendment, Lincoln’s statement, and the information on the many Japanese Americans who were serving their country with valor must all be removed.
49

Both the book and the exhibition were favorably received by the press, with articles appearing in major newspapers coast to coast. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote in her newspaper column of the book, “It is one of the publications designed to temper one of our prejudices, and I think it does it very successfully.”
50
Born Free and Equal
was on the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s bestseller list throughout March and April 1945, at one point making it to the number-three spot for nonfiction.

But copies were hard to come by. Ansel wrote to Maloney in December 1944 to complain that there was not one
Born Free and Equal
to be purchased on the West Coast.
51
Both to Nancy and Ralph Merritt he grumbled that
U.S. Camera
had got cold feet at the last minute and refused to promote the book. Maloney was never forthcoming on where the books were; eventually, the story spread that thousands of copies had been burned publicly or in secret by either the Army or
U.S. Camera.
52
There is no evidence for this.
53
For one thing, the government knew all about the book, and the WRA authorized its publication; moreover, Harold Ickes himself, then still the secretary of the interior, wrote the foreword. It has been impossible to ferret out exactly where this tale began, but all trails seem to lead to Ansel, who told me such stories more than once.
54
The most likely scenario is that, with paper hard to get, Maloney simply did not print enough books and was too embarrassed to admit his error.
Born Free and Equal
also suffered the double whammy of being published only days before Christmas, losing most of the holiday season, the best time for book sales, and not given publicity.
55

Born Free and Equal
was not embraced by all. Ansel found he was shunned by many of the military who lived in Yosemite. The Ahwahnee Naval convalescent hospital sheltered patients who had been wounded while fighting the Japanese, and many were still convinced that all Japanese were evil.
56

Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who had been imprisoned at Manzanar, held a very different view: “Like the faces that gazed before his camera at Manzanar—confident, steadfast and determined in their love of country and promise of America . . . Adams stood in defense of the United States constitution, and the 14th Amendment, while those elected to uphold it ignored it.
57

Ansel and Dorothea engaged in a lifelong argument. She thought that photographs should be made with clear social intent to benefit humanity, while Ansel believed that a photographer could not place such restrictions on his or her work without weakening it. Art should be made for art’s sake, he felt, and then if it could be used for a good cause, all the better.
58

When she saw
Born Free and Equal
in early 1945, Dorothea was appalled. Her own photographs of Manzanar directly mirrored her anger at the situation, communicating misery first and foremost. For her, doing anything less was being soft, and she dismissed Ansel’s work there as “shameful.”
59
It angered her that he could find beauty in such an immoral setting. For his part, Ansel believed that the landscape surrounding Manzanar, with the spectacular Sierra to the west and the Inyo Range to the east, provided the internees with crucial emotional sustenance.

One critic charged that “Adams’ documentation was used to advocate internment as essential to the safety and well-being of all Americans, including those of Japanese descent.”
60
That is bunk.
Born Free and Equal
was a courageous undertaking in 1944, and nearly all the condemnation voiced would be stilled if the book itself were read cover to cover. Ansel’s goal was to convince Mr. and Mrs. America that the very same freedom for which their sons and daughters were fighting was being violated here at home.

In a startling turn of events, after it ordered the camps to close by the date of April 29, 1945, the government had a difficult time persuading a number of internees to leave Manzanar. Over the past few years, prisoners had been “furloughed” to harvest crops in various Western states where they experienced hate-filled prejudice and grave threats. Many returned to Manzanar convinced that it was unsafe outside the camp. Here, they had built a community with their own backs and brains in less than three years, and some had found greater happiness there than at their former homes, where they lived largely segregated from their neighbors.
61
The 1945 Manzanar High School year book,
Valediction
, opened with four pages with four photographs likely made by Toyo Miyatake. First came Mount Williamson. Next is seen the tar-paper camp buildings surmounted by the snow-dusted Sierra Nevada viewed through the iron wheels of rusting farm equipment. The third image is of a hand holding a wire cutter just as it breaks through the barbed wire, a guardhouse looming in the background. And the fourth picture shows a young, neatly dressed couple, a suitcase in the man’s hand, both smiling as they walk past the camp entrance and back into the world. Immediately following these evocative and provocative pictures appears the warm farewell by Ralph Merritt, who identified himself benignly as Project Director.

The future—your future and that of this country is brighter because of your patience, your faithfulness to your family and to your ideals and because of your loyalty as citizens of a great democracy which is fighting for its life in a tragic war and earnestly trying to understand itself and to accomplish the final step of tolerance guaranteed by its Constitution.

For your part in all this, by going calmly on with your education, for your part in helping to make a better world, may you reap the rich reward of being and understanding America.
62

Manzanar finally ceased functionally to exist on November 21, 1945.
63

Years later, Ansel concluded about
Born Free and Equal
that “from the social point of view [it was] the most important thing I’ve done or can do.”
64
Nancy regretted that neither the book nor the exhibition did justice to his efforts.
65
Ansel gave most of the negatives he made of Manzanar to the Library of Congress, while Dorothea’s work showing the relocation can be found at the National Archives.

In 1990, nearly half a century later, survivors of the camps were paid twenty thousand dollars apiece in reparations, although a great many died before this apology was offered. The elements have obscured much of what was briefly Manzanar, but in 1991 California senator Alan Cranston introduced legislation to preserve it as a national historic site so that “we will at least symbolically remove some of the tarnish left on our Constitution by the forced internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans.”
66
The National Park Service took control of the Manzanar site on April 29, 1995, fifty years to the day after the official closing of the camps. Today visitors are welcome to explore its 814 acres all year long.
67

Divorced from his text, most of the photographs Ansel made at Manzanar cannot stand individually. One negative that he did not donate with the others from Manzanar was
Winter Sunrise
,
The Sierra Nevada
,
from Lone Pine
, an image that projects the nurturing elements he clearly saw in the landscape.
68
Probably made during his second visit to the camp, at Christmastime 1943,
Winter Sunrise
has become one of his most famous photographs.

One very cold morning, before dawn, Virginia and Ansel arose from their cots at Manzanar, grabbed a thermos of coffee, and drove ten miles south to the northern outskirts of the small town of Lone Pine. Ansel had been photographing the Sierra from this general area for the past four years, but he had yet to get the picture he wanted. His earlier efforts had all been quite literal, with the summertime Sierra and nearby Alabama Hills in full light, without benefit of winter’s more dramatic conditions.
69
Ansel knew when he arrived at his chosen location that this was the day for the picture.

In the darkness he climbed up on the car’s camera platform and set up his favorite equipment, the eight-by-ten-inch view camera with the twenty-three-inch component of his Cooke lens, Wratten no. 15 (G) filter, on a heavy tripod.
70
Shivering, he jumped back into the car and sipped the steaming coffee that Virginia poured as they waited together for the light.