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Oakland, Calif., Mar. 1942. A large sign reading "I am an American" placed in the window of a store, at 13th and Franklin streets, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed following orders to persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas. The owner, a University of California graduate, will be housed with hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration of the war
Summary
Photograph shows the Wanto Co. store located at 401 - 403 Eighth and Franklin Streets in Oakland, California. The business was owned by the Matsuda family. Tatsuro Matsuda, a University of California graduate, commissioned and installed the "I am an American" sign. (Source: researcher R. Yee, Oakland Museum of California, 2017)
Original caption misidentified location of store as being at "13th and Franklin streets". Business directories, order forms and telephone directories list address of Wanto Co. store as 401 - 403 Eighth and Franklin Streets. (Source: researcher R. Yee, Oakland Museum of California, 2017)
No. A-35.
Original negative is at the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA # 210-G-A35.
Forms part of: Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collection (Library of Congress).
Published in: Dorothea Lange : American photographs / Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, John Szarkowski. San Francisco : San Francisco Museum of Modern Art : Chronicle Books, c1994, plate 87.
Published in: Executive order 9066: the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans [by] Maisie & Richard Conrat. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press for the California Historical Society [1972]
Print not found in FSA-OWI J7647 or LOT 1801, 2004.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange contracted polio as a young girl. She learned professional photography skills while working in New York in her early 20s, and then landed in San Francisco where she ran a portrait business catering to the city's wealthy elite. Her second husband, Paul Taylor, helped her to get out into the fields with the destitute pickers, who she'd treat like portrait subjects with empathy and identification with her subjects. When the Depression hit, she captured crowded breadlines. In the late 1930s Dorothea Lange had been hired by the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration - to photograph Dust Bowl refugees escaped into California from the Midwest and her images went far beyond bureaucratic reportage. A skilled portraitist, Lange might not have been able to change government policies, but her images for the FSA were picked up by newspapers across the country. John Steinbeck used them for inspiration in his 1939 Dust Bowl tale "The Grapes of Wrath."
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