‘Seen and Unseen’ Ties to 1942

Review by Bill Doughty

This award-winning book about the federal government’s incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II has remarkable ties to what is happening today in the United States:

“Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration” by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki (Chronicle Books, 2022).

After Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and other military sites in Hawaii, FDR called for the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens, including children.

The government’s Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration ordered evacuation of whole areas and required disposal of property, including family farms. Families were assigned a number and were no longer known by their proper name. 

Author Elizabeth Partridge shows how prisoners were shamed and ostracized.

When first arrested, detained, and forced on trains and buses to the camps, families, including American citizens, had been treated like prisoners of war, allowed to keep only what they could carry.

Upon first reporting to at least one of the camps, they had been forced to fill bags with hay and sleep in horse stables that smelled of horse manure and urine.

“Seen and Unseen” is filled with distinctive art by Lauren Tamaki augmenting the photos.

Partridge is the goddaughter of Dorothea Lange. Her dad was a Navy veteran who served in World War II and later became a photographer and assistant to Lange after the war.

With the help of Lauren Tamaki’s distinctive and provocative art, Partridge introduces readers to the work of three photographers. Most of the photography is from within the Manzanar concentration camp in eastern California near the border of Nevada.

The first photographer featured is Lange (above), who became famous for her iconic photography during the Great Depression. The U.S. government hired her to take propaganda photos of what they called “internment” of Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese immigrants.

Lange tried to show everyday life of her subjects who were forced to leave their homes and travel in secrecy to faraway camps under armed guard.

Many of Lange’s photographs were impounded because they were deemed to show captivity in a negative light. She was forbidden from taking photos of barbed wire, machine guns, searchlight towers, or crowded conditions with little or no privacy.

“Dorothea wanted to show how hard the Japanese and Japanese Americans wanted to make their situation bearable,” Partridge writes. Resilient captives created furniture from scraps of wood. They cleared sagebrush to start vegetable gardens. And they continued to conduct school studies despite no desks and limited supplies.

One of her most powerful photos was of farmer Torazo Sakawye with grandson Walter (below).

Ten months after the photo was taken, Torazo died in the camp.

“All Dorothea could do was hope her photographs carried a strong message. ‘This is what we did,’ she said. ‘ How did it happen? How could we?’”

Next, Partridge introduces readers to Toyo Miyatake, a professional photographer whose family was incarcerated at Manzanar through the entire war.

At first, Miyatake surreptitiously took photos using an ingenious box camera disguised as a lunchbox. Eventually he was allowed to take photos but at first was told only caucasian helpers were allowed to push the shutter button.

The third photographer whose work Partridge showcases is Ansel Adams, who was attracted to the stark beauty of the desert and mountain terrain surrounding Manzanar. Adams focused on the “hardworking, cheerful, and resilient people.”

According to Partridge, “Ansel believed the faces of earnest, young Japanese Americans would convince other Americans how trustworthy and patriotic they were.”

Most of Adams's photos show smiling faces of young people.

"Everything in a picture is not necessarily true."

– Taira Fukushima, Manzanar, Block 5

Adams was on hand to capture some departures from Manzanar in 1945. Prisoners were given a change ticket and $25. A generation later those who had been incarcerated –– and were still alive –– were awarded reparations of $20,000 each under the Civil Liberties Act.

“The money was a small fraction of what they had lost,” Partridge observes.

“At least the federal government acknowledged that the incarceration had been a profound injustice, but it could not erase the heavy emotional and physical cost to the prisoners of what had been done.”

Readers might wish for more of the photographers’ work. Fortunately many of their photos are easily found online. And the National Archives has many incarceration photographs available –– at least for now –– including previously “impounded” images.

Those who are inspired to learn more won’t be disappointed if they read this book cover to cover. Among the treasures are the back pages of essays, commentary, notes, footnotes, photo credits, and biographies of each photographer, and more. This book is rich with primary sources, critical thinking, and documentation of censorship and history.

One of the essays in the back is titled “Civil Liberties and the Constitution.” The essay addresses one of the four cases brought by Japanese Americans that went before the Supreme Court: Korematsu v United States. In 1944 the Court ruled in favor of the government, but a generation later a federal court overturned that ruling when new evidence was uncovered that the military had lied about the need for incarceration,

“However, In 2018, several Supreme Court justices wrote about the Korematsu case in what are called ‘dicta’ –– statements made in written court opinions that do not affect the outcome of the case being heard. In a ruling restricting travel and immigration to the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, ‘The forcible relocation of US citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful. ... Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear has no place in law under the Constitution. (He referred back to Justice Robert H. Jackson's dissent in the 1944 Korematsu Supreme Court case and quoted Jackson's words.)

Justice Sonia Sotomayor went one step further than Justice Roberts. ‘Today, the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu,’ she wrote, denouncing it as 'gravely wrong the day it was decided.’

Despite the dicta, Korematsu v. United States still stands, a painful symbol of our country's racial prejudice. And how can we be sure it will never be looked upon favorably in the future and used to violate the rights of another group of American citizens?”

Another essay/commentary is “Keeping Our Democracy Strong.” The keyword is “our.”

“As important as our leaders and our institutions are in our democracy, it depends on all of us to keep it safe. Even in the United States, built on strong democratic ideals, deliberate violations of people's civil rights can and do occur. No matter what kinds of inaccurate words are used to hide these violations, we can name them for what they are, and speak out against them, loud and clear. We can bear witness to old injustices, learn from them, and do our best to ensure they never happen again.

In the 194os, taking photographs was complicated.

Cameras could be cumbersome, film expensive, and developing and printing photographs a complex process. Today, we can use our cell phone cameras to capture injustice when we see it, and quickly let others know. These images cannot be marked

‘impounded’ and left hidden in a filing cabinet.

We each have in our pocket a tool for social justice that earlier generations never could have dreamed of.”

Photo by Toyo Mayatake

Cameras –– bulky and rare then, handy and pervasive now –– are one of the remarkable ties to history. Images, and now video, are compelling evidence of the crimes of violence against people who are targets or who practice their First Amendment rights to protest. Witness the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this month in Minneapolis.

Among other ties to history:

• Then (and now), migrants and immigrant families were targeted by race.
• U.S. citizens were also arrested, detained, or worse.
• Officials used (and use) propaganda to lie about processes, procedures, and outcomes of a massive operation.
• People were required to show their “papers.”
• Uniformed law enforcement used chemical agents against protesters.
• Fear was a weapon.
• Those who protested often faced beatings, arrests, and even shootings.
• Families were often separated and given no information about the whereabouts of their loved ones.
• Fort Sill, used for past incarcerations of Native Americans and then Japanese Americans is now used again by the Trump Administration to incarcerate immigrants from Central America.
• Other sites, such as Fort Bliss and Terminal Center, once used as concentration camps for  Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, are now used to incarcerate hispanic immigrants.
• White supremacists and Christian nationalists supported “law and order” despite violations of the rule of law, Constitution, morality, and civil liberties.
• Some military service members and law enforcement personnel followed illegal orders.
• There was no accountability or justice for victims for decades.
• The negative impact on families lasted for generations.
• Then as now, officials covered up facts and prevented investigations.

"My question is always, why was I, a child, put into a

concentration camp? I was a citizen. 

That's against the Constitution."

– Joyce Yuki Nakamura Okazaki

This book and others came onto Navy Reads reading list after listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast production “Burn Order,” a story about how some leaders in the military justified racist persecution of people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II, while others, including a Navy intelligence officer told the truth. Maddow documents heroic efforts by a woman and a lawyer to uncover the true reason for the illegal incarceration.

A key takeaway from then and now: Each person has the opportunity to make a difference.

Villains & Heroes – Places in History

Review by Bill Doughty

In her books and other productions, Rachel Maddow presents strong profiles of people who find their places in history as either villains or heroes. In past works she compares felon Spiro Agnew with principled Elliott Richardson (“Bag Man”); oil tycoons with environmentalists (“Blow Out”); and America First fascists with supporters of democracy (“Ultra/Prequel”).

In her latest work, “Burn Order,” Maddow examines the incarceration of Japanese people and Americans of Japanese ancestry in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor that began America’s participation in the Second World War. Once again, she cuts through both-sides-ism and whitewashing to reveal who are the bad guys and the good people in historic eras.

Maddow’s revelations start with the heroic efforts of Navy intelligence officer then-Lt. Cmdr. Kenneth Ringle. Ringle determined and reported that people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States presented no threat to the war effort against Imperial Japan

History proved him right.

During the war, U.S. Navy Captain Ringle (pictured above) commanding the USS Wasatch (AGC-9) in the South Pacific in 1945 during World War II. He was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral upon his retirement. His path before, during, and after the war is a brilliant example of patriotism.

On the other side of the ledger, Maddow’s “Burn Order” continues with the misguided work of Army officers Lt. Gen. John DeWitt and Maj. Robin Bendetsen, who ignored Ringle’s report and carried out cruel and harmful incarceration of families at various concentration camps mostly in western states.

Bendetsen is revealed as the brains behind DeWitt’s “jittery” strategy and tactics that bordered on paranoid fantasies and fear of sabotage. DeWitt harbored and promoted bizarre conspiracy theories publicly and within his chain of command.

DeWitt (above) testified to members of Congress in April 1943, warning no Japanese Americans could be trusted because “a Jap’s a Jap.” He told San Francisco officials he thought it might be a good thing if San Francisco got bombed by Japan, in order to “awaken this city.”

Both DeWitt and his Stephen Miller-like advisor Bendetsen earned their places in history even though both escaped personal accountability.

Some white Americans protected the property of their Japanese neighbors who were incarcerated. Sadly, other white Americans were not as heroic and greedily took over belongings, businesses, and farmland.

As evidence, Maddow provides numerous newspaper clips, letters, and photographs on the MS NOW site for “Burn Order.”

An inspirational heart of Maddow’s story is the dedicated efforts of one individual, in particular: Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga.

Aiko (above) spent countless hours at the National Archives researching records of the government’s incarceration. She eventually discovered documents that revealed the Army based their actions on racism while ignoring evidence contrary to their scheme and then trying to cover up their crimes against the Constitution.

In 1981, Lawyer and researcher Peter Irons uncovered key U.S. government memos revealing the suppression of evidence and destruction of documents related to the 1940s policy of mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. He partnered with Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga to bring about justice for people unlawfully rounded up and put in concentration camps.

When President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to acknowledge federal wrongdoing, it was an official apology for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the 1940s. Reagan described the incarceration as a “grave wrong” against the Constitution.

Listening to the “Burn Order” podcast prompted further exploration of the heroes, villains, and victims of this era in American history and their own places in history.

New on our Navy Reads to-read list now are books such as “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration,” edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung (Penguin Classics, 2024),“Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration” by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki (Chronicle Books, 2022), and “Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases” by Peter Irons (Oxford University Press, 1983).

Speaking of places in history ... Yesterday, Maddow headed a two-hour special about public testimony by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith regarding the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt by Donald Trump and his supporters. Clear in his testimony: Capitol Police and other uniformed personnel, along with those on the side of law, order, and accountability are on the right side of the ledger.

'Americas' First?

Review by Bill Doughty

In the days following Trump’s military attack on Venezuela, he threatened Colombia and its president, described Cuba as “ready to fall,” and saber-rattled about our southernmost neighbor: “You have to do something with Mexico,” Trump said. “We’re going to have to do something." He also restated his desire to take control of Greenland. Canada is still on his wish-list, as well.

Has "America First" become The Americas first?

The current commander-in-chief who promised an “America First” non-interventionist foreign policy started in Venezuela what he calls the biggest military intervention since the Second World War:

On Jan. 3, 2026, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump said, “This is big stuff. We appreciate you being here. Late last night and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power, air, land, and sea was used to launch a spectacular assault, and it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II.”

In less than one full year in office Trump has bombed Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela. And he has deployed the military into U.S. cities, something the founders and framers of the Constitution, not to mention historians, would call an abuse of power.

Trump’s military action against Venezuela wipes away attention and scrutiny of some big issues. Among them: the Tariff economy, J6 five-year anniversary (today), the Jack Smith testimony, ICE violence, failure to achieve peace in Ukraine, healthcare costs, lowest presidential poll numbers, crypto-corruption, and Epstein-gate.

Heady with what seems like an easy win against Venezuela thanks to the skill of the military, Trump sees his power only growing, especially his power over the armed forces.

“Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” by Rachel Maddow (Crown Random House, 2012) examines a history of military interventions including in Vietnam, Central and South America, and the Middle East. Maddow outlines the views of founders who foresaw the misuse and abuse of the military by power-hungry or misguided leaders.

For example, the book opens with an excerpt by James Madison, who warned against war because it leads to more debts, taxes, “inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud,” and “degeneracy.”

This is from Madison’s “Political Observations” of April 20, 1795:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Those truths are well established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to a more arbitrary government, or the transition from a popular government to an aristocracy or a monarchy."

Maddow presents the views of various framers of the Constitution as well as the words of seminal American leaders such as President Lincoln. Maddow writes:

“The framers had been voluble in their rationale for and in their defense of Article 1, Section 8. ‘The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates,’ wrote James Madison, ‘that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.' Even that suspected monarchist Alexander Hamilton saw the wisdom of keeping the power to declare war out of the hands of a single executive. Madison, Hamilton, and their fellow framers were building structural barriers against what they saw as the darker aspects of human nature. The lures to war –– personal hatreds, political glory, material spoils, and the simple atavistic enthusiasm for violence –– might be too enticing for one man to resist, and might be too easy to promote ‘by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory,’ as a later congressman, Abraham Lincoln, put it, ‘that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood –– that serpent's eye that charms to destroy.’”

“Drift” spotlights the Executive branch’s circumvention of the Constitution and Congress by Presidents Johnson, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 1 and Bush 2, among others. This never-more-relevant book includes the history of the murky “unified executive theory,” which ostensibly gives the president unfettered power –– the theory Reagan employed in his arms-for-hostages scheme in the Iran-Contra scandal.

We read about misadventures in Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan and circumstances where military service members are put in positions of carrying out unlawful orders or otherwise violating international rules of law and rules of war.

Maddow wrote the book three years before Trump first declared his candidacy for the presidency, so there is no mention of the 45th and 47th commander in chief.

U.S. Marine Barracks, Beirut

There is, however, a prescient quote about Reagan by then-Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, who pushed Congress to invoke the War Powers Act that forced the troops to leave Grenada after 60 days without congressional approval.

O’Neill recognized that Reagan went to war in Grenada as a stain-remover in the post-Vietnam era and in the wake of the October 23, 1983, suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon (which killed 241 service members, mostly Marines and Navy Corpsmen).

O’Neill decried Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. “You can’t justify any government, whether it’s Russia or the United States, trampling on another nation,” he said to New York Times reporter Scotty Reston. “I’m worried about the effects of this.”

Maddow then captures more of what Tip O’Neill told Reston about Reagan:

“And that was just on policy; then O'Neill got personal: ‘He only works three and a half hours a day. He doesn't do his homework. He doesn't read his briefing papers. It's sinful that this man is President of the United States. He lacks the knowledge that he should have, on every sphere, whether it's the domestic or whether it's the international sphere.’ It was time for Reagan to pack it in and take Nancy back home where she could be the ‘Queen of Beverly Hills,’ he told Reston. Damn.”

O’Neill was angry that Reagan acted unilaterally and against the Constitution. The War Powers Resolution compels the president to consult Congress and “secure specific statutory authority for the war” unless there is a “national emergency created by an attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

Wyoming Representative at the time, Dick Cheney, former chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and future future VP to President George W. Bush, defended Reagan’s use of executive power (including in Lebanon), as did other republicans –– just as republicans in Congress publicly defend most of Trump’s actions and criticize the Biden Administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan and loss of 13 U.S. service members.

Rachel Maddow interviews International Security Assistance Force Command Sgt. Maj. Michael T. Hall on "The Rachel Maddow Show," July 8, 2010. (DVIDS)

Trump ridiculed the Bush administration’s decision to not claim Iraq’s oil reserves after the administration removed Saddam Hussein from power. He did the same after Obama attacked Libya and deposed Gaddafi. Now, Trump claims Venezuela’s oil and says he, himself, runs the South American country and will support rebuilding the oil infrastructure there for American oil corporations.

Maddow’s epilogue in “Drift” is titled “You Build It, You Own It,” a variant of the Powell Doctrine and Pottery Barn adage, “you break it, you buy it.’”

In the epilogue Maddow presents 8 points as recommendations, such as recognizing the cost of war, ensuring Congress is made aware of military actions, deploying the military for military operations only, and shrinking the nuclear infrastructure to fit a realistic nuclear mission.

But the key point is saved for last:

“And finally, there's the Gordian knot of executive power. It needs a sword something fierce. The glory of war success will always attach itself to the president, so presidents are always going to be prey to the temptation to make war. That's a generic truth of power, and all the more reason to take decision making about war out of the hands of the executive. It is not one man's responsibility. The ‘imperial presidency’ malarkey that was invented to save Ronald Reagan's neck in Iran-Contra, and that played as high art throughout the career of Richard Cheney, is a radical departure from previous views of presidential power, and it should be taught and understood that way. This isn't a partisan thing –– constitutionalists left and right have equal reason to worry over the lost constraint on the executive. Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives on war and peace. It would make a difference and help reel us back toward balance and normalcy.”

Maddow writes, “None of this is impossible. This isn't bigger than us. Decisions about national security are ours to make.”

She concludes, “We just need to revive that old idea of America as a deliberately peaceable nation. That's not simply our inheritance, it's our responsibility.” We have a right and need and freedom to speak –– and then vote. It’s literally in the Constitution as the preeminent amendment.

Americans’ "First."