Loyalty in question
by Mark Derewicz
A wartime witch hunt.
American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II. By Eric Muller. UNC Press, 182 pages, $27.50.
Spouse not of Japanese descent—good. Registered voter—really good. Traveled to Japan since 1935—not good. American bureaucrats were making these judgments in the name of national security in 1943, and it led to a civil-rights nightmare.
In his latest book, American Inquisition,
Eric Muller shows how the United States set up a four-agency bureaucracy to determine the loyalty of seventy thousand Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps during World War II. Bureaucrats forced internees to fill out a loyalty questionnaire, and then used the answers to determine who might be a threat to the United States even though, as Muller points out, the questions were poorly designed and the interpretations of answers were subjective.
One question asked if internees would renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan, a loyalty that the vast majority of internees had never sworn in the first place because they were citizens of the United States, not Japan.
“Most of the internees who were American citizens had never even been to Japan and could barely speak Japanese,” Muller says. “They found that question insulting.”
Another question asked whether internees would be willing to enlist in the U.S. Army—in essence, asking wrongly jailed citizens to fight for other people’s freedom while family members remained incarcerated. Muller says that almost all internees agreed to enlist and renounce their supposed allegiance to the Emperor because they wanted so badly to prove their loyalty. But other questions—about club affiliations, parents, occupations, and magazine subscriptions—demanded more than yes/no answers.
For each question, bureaucrats used a point system to convert answers into number values so that each internee would have a loyalty score.
“The point systems were absurdly oversimplified and depended on cultural assumptions,” Muller says. “Practicing judo earned a negative score, while playing little league baseball earned a positive. Buddhism was a negative; Shintoism was really negative. Christianity was a positive.”
Some people were deemed loyal to the United States and were allowed to leave the camps, but they weren’t allowed back to their homes along the West Coast; they had to relocate to the interior of the country. About 25 percent of interned Japanese Americans were deemed disloyal, and sent to harsher camps or denied access to certain jobs. Others were not allowed to return to their homes in the western United States even after the war.
Muller says that Japanese American internment is not just a sad story during a trying time; it’s about the government using loose accusations and cultural assumptions to determine who’s a threat to national security. He says something similar could happen again, especially in our post-9/11 world.
“When there’s another domestic terrorist attack, if any of the people involved turn out to be U.S. citizens of Arab ancestry or Muslim faith, I expect that some people will call for measures against U.S. citizens,” Muller says. “If this book does one thing, it documents pretty clearly that such an effort will be a civil-rights disaster.”
Eric Muller is the George R. Ward Professor of Law in the School of Law.
Learn more:
- american inquisition
- past Endeavors article by muller
- muller on the radio
- browse our archive for more Endeavors stories in law
