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H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series
American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II
When the U.S. government forced 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps in 1942, it created administrative tribunals to pass judgment on who was loyal and who was disloyal. In American Inquisition , Eric Muller relates the untold story of exactly how military and civilian bureaucrats judged these tens of thousands of American citizens during wartime.
Some citizens were deemed loyal and were freed, but one in four was declared disloyal to America and condemned to repressive segregation in the camps or barred from war-related jobs. Using cultural and religious affiliations as indicators of Americans' loyalties, the far-reaching bureaucratic decisions often reflected the agendas of the agencies that performed them rather than the actual allegiances or threats posed by the citizens being judged, Muller explains.
American Inquisition is the only study of the Japanese American internment to examine the complex inner workings of the most draconian system of loyalty screening that the American government has ever deployed against its own citizens. At a time when our nation again finds itself beset by worries about an "enemy within" considered identifiable by race or religion, this volume offers crucial lessons from a recent and disastrous history.
Some citizens were deemed loyal and were freed, but one in four was declared disloyal to America and condemned to repressive segregation in the camps or barred from war-related jobs. Using cultural and religious affiliations as indicators of Americans' loyalties, the far-reaching bureaucratic decisions often reflected the agendas of the agencies that performed them rather than the actual allegiances or threats posed by the citizens being judged, Muller explains.
American Inquisition is the only study of the Japanese American internment to examine the complex inner workings of the most draconian system of loyalty screening that the American government has ever deployed against its own citizens. At a time when our nation again finds itself beset by worries about an "enemy within" considered identifiable by race or religion, this volume offers crucial lessons from a recent and disastrous history.
- GenresHistoryWorld War II
214 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2007
About the author
Eric L. Muller
9 books3 followersEric L. Muller is Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law and director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Faculty Excellence. He is editor of Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II and author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 16, 2018
The book isn't written particularly well but it is bearable. I would have given it a 4 but I'm reading the audiobook version and the reader is atrocious and makes it very difficult to remain interested. Worth a read if you're researching this sort of thing but if you read as a hobby like me then I'm hesitant to recommend.
January 24, 2016
Many other books on the internment go into how the persons of Japanese Ancestry were either arrested right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or were gathered up from the West Coast and put into assembly centers and then into internment camps away from the West Coast.
This book goes into the greatest detail of that process of any book I have read on the subject. It starts out with how the Japanese were looked at before the war and then moves onto the various presumptions of loyalty or disloyalty and attempts were made to come up with some kind of system that would make it easy to tell who was which way.
It was a process that was almost impossible from the start and a process that led to major problems in the camps and even violence at Tule Lake. A whole chapter is given to the infamous questionnaire and questions 27 and 28. That was one problem that could have easily been prevented if the people making up the questionnaire would have bothered to learn something about Japanese culture.
The book goes into the various groups that tried to determine loyalty including the Japanese American Joint Board, the Provost Marshall General Office, the War Relocation Authority and the Western Defense Command, along with the various arguments between the four groups.
This also led up to some interesting questions. If the persons of Japanese ancestry were presumed to be disloyal and put into internment camps then why were the very same persons released later to resettle in other places in the United States? Why were these potentially dangerous persons allowed to leave the camps to harvest crops? Why were they asked to join the American military?
Why were they drafted to join the military? The whole thing does not make any sense at all.
The book also goes into various trials and then explores the history of the United States and how things like this (but never to this degree) had occurred previously.
This is a very detailed and very necessary book to read if you want to learn what was going on behind the decisions being made about internment.
This book goes into the greatest detail of that process of any book I have read on the subject. It starts out with how the Japanese were looked at before the war and then moves onto the various presumptions of loyalty or disloyalty and attempts were made to come up with some kind of system that would make it easy to tell who was which way.
It was a process that was almost impossible from the start and a process that led to major problems in the camps and even violence at Tule Lake. A whole chapter is given to the infamous questionnaire and questions 27 and 28. That was one problem that could have easily been prevented if the people making up the questionnaire would have bothered to learn something about Japanese culture.
The book goes into the various groups that tried to determine loyalty including the Japanese American Joint Board, the Provost Marshall General Office, the War Relocation Authority and the Western Defense Command, along with the various arguments between the four groups.
This also led up to some interesting questions. If the persons of Japanese ancestry were presumed to be disloyal and put into internment camps then why were the very same persons released later to resettle in other places in the United States? Why were these potentially dangerous persons allowed to leave the camps to harvest crops? Why were they asked to join the American military?
Why were they drafted to join the military? The whole thing does not make any sense at all.
The book also goes into various trials and then explores the history of the United States and how things like this (but never to this degree) had occurred previously.
This is a very detailed and very necessary book to read if you want to learn what was going on behind the decisions being made about internment.
February 9, 2013
The book was written as a text book. I listened to an audio book and was disappointed by the reader's poor pronunciation of some words, like Oregon, Tule and other local terminology. I have read other books on the subject and talked with a couple of people that were interred. I didn't realize the Army was behind the movement to put the Japanese behind barbed wire. I think it was one of the big mistakes by President Roosevelt. I liked two other books much better. Stubborn Twig, Snow Falling on Cedars and the Hotel on Bitter and Sweet were put into a personal narrative.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews