TOPAZ -- There is a monument marking what used to be the entrance to what was officially the Central Utah Relocation Center and was unofficially named "Topaz," after the mountain peak to the west.
But at high noon on a perfect 70-degree April day, my imagination was not up to the task.No way could I envision the sprawling barracks city of nearly 8,500 residents that once stood at my feet.
No way could I imagine what was once Utah's fifth largest city, made up entirely of Japanese-Americans.
No way could I conjure up the barbed wire and the guard towers from half a century ago.
Maybe if a wind had kicked up. A wind of war.
No offense to the nearby farming communities of Delta and Abraham and Hinckley and Deseret -- but why on earth did they pick here?
The answer, of course, is they didn't pick here.
Nobody in their right mind moved to Topaz because they wanted to.
It was an order.
Specifically, Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself, specifying that 110,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast of America had to relocate on account of the people who had just bombed Pearl Harbor looked just like them.
The president and his generals didn't want any misplaced Japanese loyalists guiding the Japanese fleet into San Francisco Bay.
If they had someplace to go and work, if they had relatives in, say, Cincinnati or Denver, then fine.
If they didn't, then they could move into one of the government's 10 inland internment camps, of which Topaz was one, and they could make $19 a month wages, same as a private in the Army.
It was wartime, soldier. Everyone did their part.
Over the years it has become fashionable to trash the very idea of a Topaz, to lump it in there with what the Huns did, and the white man. To revise it as just another period of oppressive racist history. Wounded Knee, Selma, Topaz.
I went to a "brown bag" luncheon lecture last Thursday given by Sandra Taylor, a college professor who has written a book about Topaz, and for about an hour Ms. Taylor really let Roosevelt and his executive order have it.
"Topaz was a terrible mistake," she said.
"It all stemmed from racism."
Well, yeah, that and those bombs over Hawaii.
The best day of the spring and Sandra Taylor piqued my interest, so this past Monday I drove south.
I cleared the orange cones of the Wasatch Front and steered west around Utah Lake, through the mining town of Eureka, through a town named Lynndyl (so small I think the speed limit signs actually increase), through Delta, made a wrong turn, backtracked through Hinckley, and finally to the desert floor that from 1942 to 1945 used to be Topaz.
Nothing.
Except for that monument and a plaque that sounds like it was written by Sandra Taylor:
". . . Site of internment camp complete with barbed wire fence and armed sentries for 8,000 of the 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, who for no justifiable reason were uprooted from their homes and interned by their own government. They were the victims of wartime hysteria, racial animosity, and a serious aberration of American jurisprudence."
Next to the plaque was a picture of what Topaz looked like in its prime, barracks sprawling everywhere, a hospital, huge water tanks.
There was also a grainy black-and-white photo of the third-grade class of the Desert View Elementary School, featuring 27 of the cutest Japanese-American kids you ever saw, all of them smiling.
Hard to imagine. Hard to believe.
Send e-mail to benson@desnews.com, fax 801-237-2527. Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.