Recently I reviewed anti-Asian bigotries that led to (among other atrocities) the Amache internment camp near Granada, Colorado. Here I discuss Robert Harvey’s “Amache: The Story of Japanese Internment in Colorado During World War II,” which came out in its third edition last year.

Harvey summarizes, “Over ten thousand people passed through the gates of Amache during the war. . . . Within its gates, children were born; fathers and mothers died. Within its gates, citizens of America were housed because of fear, greed, and prejudice. Amache, like the other internment centers, became a stain on the fabric of America’s liberty.”

Shigeko Hirano, the daughter of Japanese immigrants and a U.S. citizen, came home from Delano Joint Union High School in California in 1942 to find federal agents questioning her parents and rifling through her home, Harvey reviews in his opening chapter.

A strength of Harvey’s work, which first came out in 2003, is that it is substantially based on interviews with people forced into Amache. For example, he interviewed Hirano, sent to the camp, in 2001.

Predating Pearl Harbor

The Japanese military had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But the harassment of people of Japanese heritage in the U.S. had far deeper roots. “The scene Hirano and thousands of other Japanese Americans were witnessing had been borne of racial and economic suppression and exclusion . . . begun decades before,” Harvey writes.

In the 1870s, thousands of Japanese moved to Hawaii, then filtered into the West-coast states and further east, including Colorado. Harvey writes, “Within just a few decades, these immigrants became a thriving aspect of West Coast American culture.” But this success generated “resentment from surrounding Anglo-American communities.” Some sought “ways of ridding themselves of this rivalry—this so-called immigrant problem,” continues Harvey.

Bigotry toward Japanese immigrants discouraged their settlement in Denver and elsewhere in Colorado. Leaning on earlier historical work of Russel Endo, Harvey notes “segregation ran rampant in cities along the West Coast,” affecting Hirano and many others. Moreover, Japanese immigrants such as Hirano’s parents were declared “ineligible for citizenship” under racist exclusion laws, and “alien land acts” prohibited land sales to them. Finally, in 1924, the U.S. government outright banned new Asian immigration.

Still, writes Harvey, Japanese immigrants and their children, through innovation and hard work, generally thrived. They reached for their slice of the American Dream despite the efforts of racists to snatch it from them.

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came martial law for Hawaii and arbitrary government actions against people there of Japanese ancestry. Such actions soon spread to the West Coast states. Hirano’s father was taken captive and eventually shipped to Camp Amache.

Harvey also quotes Art Yorimoto, interviewed by Harvey in 2000: “I worked as a supervisor for a wholesale produce market. . . . I heard a voice behind me yell, ‘What the hell are you doing there, boy?’ After telling him that I worked there, the man said: ‘You don’t anymore.'”

Conspiracy mongering became rampant. Harvey recounts, “The Seattle Post Intelligencer claimed enemy aliens wishing to direct Japanese aircraft toward Seattle were setting arrow-shaped grass fires in fields south of the city. Although Washington’s assistant governor later reported that the fires were the result of Anglo farmers clearing brush from their fields and were merely ‘coincidental,’ widespread panic still ensued.”

Racism merged with paranoia within the military to spark severe oppression of people of Japanese ancestry. Lieutenant General John DeWitt, a flagrant racist who complained about “colored” soldiers and “black-skinned” residents, with his colleagues sent a recommendation on December 19, 1941, to “collect all alien subjects fourteen years of age and over, of enemy nationals and remove them to the zone of the interior,” Harvey quotes. No proof that someone was an “enemy” was required.

Shamefully, some in the media were only too happy to fan the flames of racial hatred. As Harvey quotes, Hearst columnist Henry McLemor, after falsely claiming local people of Japanese ancestry had “risen to aid the attackers,” called for “the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast. . . . Herd ’em up, pack ’em off. . . . Personally, I hate Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

The Colorado connection

A group organized to keep the “Japs out of Colorado,” Harvey writes. Thankfully, not everyone was horrible toward Japanese immigrants. A Delta woman by the name of Harding sponsored the family of her old friend, Henry Sumikawa, facilitating the family’s “voluntary” relocation, Harvey writes. In her 1999 interview with Harvey, Ruth Yamauchi recognized Governor Ralph Carr in helping to make Colorado relatively welcoming to the transplants. Such efforts saved some people from the concentration camps.

In March, 1942, the federal government turned to forced relocation under military dictate and the War Relocation Authority. The first leader of the WRA, Milton Eisenhower (brother of Dwight), later blamed “some underlying and latent dislike for Japanese . . . that provided fuel for ignorance, intolerance, and bigotry to spread like fire” (quoted by Harvey). “Many lost their homes, their businesses, and their savings,” Eisenhower lamented. He asked, “How could such a tragedy have occurred in a democratic society that prides itself on individual rights and freedoms?” How indeed.

Although Carr, a Republican, “remained leery of fifth column activities” and accepted internment camps out of “patriotic duty,” writes Harvey, at least Carr spoke out for Coloradans of German, Italian, and Japanese ancestry. Such people “must not suffer for the activities and animosities of others,” Carr said; “They are as loyal to American institutions as you and I. Many of them have been born here, are American citizens.” (See the newspaper article that Harvey quotes.)

Meanwhile, some local journalists fear mongered against those of Japanese ancestry who “voluntarily” relocated. An article from the Alamosa Daily Courier quoted by Harvey complained, “Once here, the aliens will never be taken away, the result will be crowding out of citizen labor, ever increasing percentages of foreign students in schools, and a lowering of wage and price standards.” (Sound familiar?)

Incidentally, the Japanese forcibly moved to Colorado were not the only victims of the scheme. Harvey points out that the WRA condemned lands to force “farmers to sell their land at fire-sale prices to the government.”

One detail I learned from Harvey’s book is how the camp came to be named. Amache (or Walking Woman) was Cheyenne, the daughter of chief Lone Bear (or Ochinee) who married local rancher John Wesley Prowers (for whom Prowers County is named). Colonel John Chivington and his troops murdered Amache’s father and many others on November 29, 1864, in the Sand Creek Massacre.

Harvey writes that naming the internment camp after Amache was “a rather dubious honor, considering the treatment Amache’s Cheyenne family had received at the hands of the militia forces in 1864.” Thus are two of the most shameful episodes in Colorado’s history linked.

Harvey writes toward the end of his book: “Camps like Amache are clear reminders of how even a government built on principles of democracy can fall prey to economic greed and racial injustice. If we are to maintain a government based on equality, we must remember the voices of the past.”

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.