Type: Exhibition section

Name: Childhood and the Defense of Innocence

Detail: Children at Seabrook Farms lived seemingly normal lives, reminiscent of those in any other American suburban town. They attended school and routinely participated in after-school activities while their parents worked. They often had little knowledge of the hardships associated with internment or of the long hours that their parents endured. Laboring parents did not want their children to develop any sort of resentment. They feared that negative attitudes would leave their children susceptible to accusations of disloyalty, a lingering concern that was part of the trauma of internment. Seabrook Farms was seen as an opportunity to start a new American life, and parents wanted to give their children the best chance possible. Helge T. Kangur, an Estonian refugee who grew up at Seabrook, recalled how she did not even learn about internment until she was much older, as an adult – despite being friends with numerous Nisei children and their families.

Thus, children became active members of their communities, participating in the Boy and Girl Scouts and school sports like softball and basketball. Over the summer, they attended day camps, where children of Japanese, Estonian, Peruvian, and other ancestries intermingled and formed friendships. As Estonian Liina Keerdoja recalls from her childhood at Seabrook, “We learned together, played together, occasionally got into fights together, and in the process came to regard one another’s different cultural and ethnic backgrounds not as something negative, but as the most normal and natural thing in the world.” Children at Seabrook could often be found in the community houses, attending dances, ceremonies and holiday events with their peers and sometimes even their parents. Children who lived at Seabrook Farms were not exempt from agricultural labor. During the busy picking season in the late spring and early summer, children were recruited to help work in the fields.

Type: Exhibition caption

Name: Bridgeton migrant child

Detail: In a 1943 photo from the Farm Security Administration, a small child is shown picking beans in a field. Many migrant workers traveled with their children, and reformers were concerned about working conditions, the loss of schooling hours, and access to healthcare. Although New Jersey had laws regulating child labor, they were often ignored.

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress