Lillian Baker - Facets: Hatpins, Supporter of WWII American-Japanese Relocation Camps Here

Big-hat hatpins
Resources - Information

We have "Baker's Encyclopedia of Hatpins," Lillian Baker, Schiffer Publishing 1998. She founded the International Club for Collectors of Hatpins (we are members of no hatpin group, yet, perhaps we will at some point)

Lillian Baker was more than that. More facets. See article, "Concentration Camp or Summer Camp," by Robert Ito ://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1998/09/ito.html. She was a writer; historian on her own (not by professional training); and she opposed what was became popular cause: criticism of the US Govt actions in interning Japanese-Americans by blanket sweeps during World War II; and reparations for Japanese interned at those "relocation" camps during the war.

See an overview of the camps and the issues of the process used, and effects, at "The War Relocation Centers of World War II: When Fear Was Stronger Than Justice," at ://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/89manzanar/89manzanar.htm.

She argued military necessity, and was concerned with overlap between Japanese military strategy and effectuators; and Japanese-heritage civilians.

She wrote books with photos of the camps, and photos of the German camps, to show that ours were so much better. Others question her filtering out of the bad pictures, and publishing only the mild. There apparently were incidents of concern in sabotage here, perhaps it is a matter of degree, and magnitude of consequence. Do read the article. She would be called a "revisionist" on that issue - imagine a pendulum. The swing to internment in war, big swing to one side; then, after the war, realization that the net snared too many and in the wrong way, so revise the war tactic and try to correct; then the revisionists to the revisors, we suppose, saying that the internment was correct and appropriate at the time. Gets very complex.

The point here is that Lillian Baker is not just another hatpin collector. Find her papers at ://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf9v19p0gr

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