Santa Anita: No internment camp

So many people refer casually and incorrectly to Santa Anita Park having been used as an internment camp during World War II for Japanese-Americans (the American part of the hyphenate notable since these were American citizens rounded up by the U.S. Government and taken from their homes).

I thought the same thing until some years ago when I learned that the race track was, in fact, never an internment camp and only housed Japanese-Americans temporarily for a period of less than 6 months of the more than three years that the facility was taken over by the U.S. Government during the war.

Internment camp; Assembly Center. Three years; five months. This may seem like semantics and minor distinctions to some, but Ken Burns’ 2007 PBS miniseries “The War” made the effort to get it right and it is a distinction that makes me feel much better about what went on in my adopted home town of Arcadia and at the iconic Santa Anita.

I was also pleased to recently notice for the first time a historic marker explaining all of this, remarkably candidly. It’s in a fairly prominent position in the popular public paddock area of the race track (top photo).

The marker was dedicated on May 15, 2001. Ironically, that was less than four months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, after which some Americans felt we should round up Muslim Americans as we did Japanese-Americans during World War II.

It is particularly pleasing to see this marker — and the public needs to be made more aware of it — since it was suggested several years ago during a public Q&A session at The Grove of developer Rick Caruso that such a marker be created and placed at the proposed Shops at Santa Anita.

In addition to being incorrect, the words “internment camp” create a perception for some, no matter how mistaken, of a place where conditions were not far from the horrible atrocities that were taking place in Nazi concentration camps in Europe during the same period that we were forcing Japanese-Americans to be imprisoned in “camps” in this country. (continued)

20,000 people “processed” at the assembly center at Santa Anita were positioned there for only days, weeks or not more than a few months before being quickly shipped off away from the coasts to a more permanent internment camp in states in the middle of the country from Texas and New Mexico north to Montana and North Dakota.

Mind you, this in no way minimizes my feeling of how wrong any of this procedure was for even one innocent victim uprooted from their home and sometimes separated from their family with no more justification than fear, and it does not lessen my sympathy for the suffering and anguish of those who were positioned at Santa Anita for any length of time, some of whom are living in Arcadia to this day.

Santa Anita was taken over by the government for more than three years from early 1942, shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, until mid-1945, during which the facility was turned into a “Camp Santa Anita” Army base weapons training center (see photos above and at right) for the entire time except for that period of less than six months in 1942 when Japanese-Americans were shuttled in and out of the hastily built termporary housing of the Assembly Center.

Nov. 19 update:
In late 2009 / early 2010, the Arcadia Historical Museum created an exhibit about the assembly center at Santa Anita Park and had invited several people who were housed at other similar assembly centers to speak during the opening reception. They spoke about the conditions and their experiences and remembrances, some of which was captured in the video below along with images from the exhibit:

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