Manzanar Camp Designated as Historic Site

Fifty years ago, amid wartime paranoia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order that transformed 500 desolate acres in eastern California into an internment camp, ringed by barbed wire and occupied by Japanese-Americans who were feared as possible traitors.

Marking the anniversary Wednesday, the House voted 400 to 13 to approve a bill designating the Manzanar camp in the Owens Valley as a national historic site, clearing the way for possible reconstruction of the camp’s buildings. The measure was previously endorsed by the Senate.

The legislation authorizes construction of a visitors center at the site of a former auditorium built by internees during their encampment at the Manzanar War Relocation Center from 1942 to 1945. Only a guard shack remains of the original complex, which housed about 10,000 Japanese-Americans in blocks of wooden barracks.

The bill also authorizes a comprehensive study of options for development of the Manzanar site, near Lone Pine, and nine other internment camps and related sites in the United States that housed 120,000 Japanese-Americans rounded up during World War II.

“Americans of Japanese ancestry had an abiding faith that our nation would ultimately redress the injustices of the internment,” said Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose) before the House vote. Mineta, who was interned at Manzanar as a child, said the bill lifted “the stigma of shame” experienced by citizens who were unjustly placed in such camps.

Waldo Heinrichs, a history professor at San Diego State, said that then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson acknowledged in his diary that the forced relocation of American citizens selected by race in the name of national security would leave “a hole in the Constitution.”

“The idea was to move them away from the coastal states because of the fear of sabotage,” said Heinrichs. “There were mounting pressures to remove the Japanese from the California coastline and eliminate the panic after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.”

The congressional action directs the Interior Department to conduct the study and consult with Japanese-American citizens groups, scholars of Japanese-American history and historic preservationists.

Before any construction at Manzanar can begin, the 500-acre site, which lies in the middle of a vast water farm, must be purchased from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The city also owns the 250,000 acres surrounding the site.