Washington, DC
The Territory of Alaska had been suggested as a possible refuge for German Jews as early as November 1938. A bill was introduced in 1940, pitched as an effort toward development: Refugee workers — allowed outside of standing federal immigration quotas — would further the project of resource extraction, processing gold and timber, manufacturing products from reindeer hides.
The bill died in subcommittee, having been staunchly opposed by Alaska delegate Anthony Dimond. What the territory needed for development, he argued, was roads, not refugees, and by letting in those otherwise barred entry to the States, Alaska would become a kind of concentration camp. Plus, Alaskans, on the whole, hadn’t welcomed the proposal. They had concerns about assimilation.
A second measure, early ’41, was similarly opposed. In letters collected by Dimond, Alaska residents expressed a wish for “white Americans of worthy stock.” It is hard enough to pioneer without having to combat hordes of aliens.
At the time, white “pioneers” comprised only half the population.
Dimond would be honored with a major boulevard in Anchorage and a high school in his name. The shopping mall, I think, got its name from the road. It had an indoor ice rink and was where I saw my dentist as a kid.
My peers, the theater boys who sang the “Dreidel Song” at me — they didn’t know enough Jews to form a stereotype.
Who, Hitler asked, remembers the Red Indians? He meant this inspirationally.
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Mars
Noguchi, as a young man, took a job as tutor to Lincoln Borglum, son of sculptor Gutzon Borglum and namesake of the president whose likeness was his father’s specialty. Father and son would eventually work together, carving a sixty-foot version of Abraham Lincoln’s face into the face of the mountain known to the Lakota as Six Grandfathers.
Noguchi would claim he learned nothing from Borglum of sculpture, though he posed for a Borglum statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding general in the Indian Wars. He carved his own head of Lincoln and lost it.
Although today they aren’t as central to his legacy, Noguchi sculpted many heads. In the early years, they made up the greater part of his practice. That practice, over his lifetime, was diverse, encompassing many large public commissions; industrial design (a coffee table that’s still, or again, in production — one sits in my sister’s Rochester living room); and set designs for Martha Graham, the first of them in 1935 for her Frontier — a length of fence and two stretched ropes. He also made two heads of Martha Graham. Berenice Abbott. Gladys Bentley. And one of Ginger Rogers — pink Georgia marble — completed in 1942. The sculptor was in Arizona at the time, interned at Poston War Relocation Center.
Noguchi had, in the days following Pearl Harbor, traveled to Washington, DC. There he met John Collier, commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Perhaps, Collier suggested, Noguchi might bring creative vision to an internment camp which was under his direction, located as it was on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. Noguchi picked up his car in California and drove to the desert to help.
But when the internees arrived, he became, at once, one of them. Naturally. So I was stuck there and couldn’t get out for seven months.
Still, he made plans for a park, a recreation area. To make the place a park-like place. Also a cemetery, with chapel, crematory, columbarium.
The trouble was that what Collier wanted and what the War Relocation Authority would countenance were two different things. Collier wanted to make it into — What the Mojave Indians couldn’t do, he thought the Japanese could do: make the place blossom.
Noguchi developed an interest in Native American earthen mounds, evident in his 1947 design for the unrealized Sculpture to be Seen from Mars — giant mounds in the form of a face, to be built in the desert somewhere, the nose a mile long. Future-minded, he’d initially titled it Memorial to Man.
We only have photos of the model in sand. You can see them in Long Island City at the Noguchi Museum, founded by the artist himself. I walked there with my friend, over the bridge, on a day when we were feeling very sad, and when, if I’m remembering correctly, admission was free. And we sat in the garden, sun on the stones and on our clothes. There is a time passage to stone not unlike our own.
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“Washington, DC” and “Mars” are included in Rachel Mannheimer’s first book, Earth Room (April, 2022). The work appears here with the permission of Changes Press / www.changes.press.