The Magazine

Second-Guessing FDR

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Nov 12, 2001, Vol. 7, No. 09 • By KEN MASUGI
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By Order of the President
FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans
by Greg Robinson
Harvard University Press, 336 pp., $27.95

Free to Die for Their Country
The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II
by Eric L. Muller
University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., $27.50

AMONG THOSE WORRIED that the United States may react to the slaughter of September 11 by turning against Arab Americans, frequent reference is made to the relocation of 110,000 ethnic Japanese (among them my parents and other relatives) from the West Coast a few months following Pearl Harbor.

A pair of recent books unwittingly aid in understanding that widely condemned action: Greg Robinson's "By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans" and Eric L. Muller's "Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II." Muller, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, interviewed Japanese Americans who turned against their country in time of war and resisted the draft (an uncle of mine was among these). Robinson, a historian at the University of Quebec, notes the translation of Roosevelt's suspicions of Japan into virtual dismissal of Japanese-American loyalty.

These are scholarly contributions in a field where publication is dominated by popularizers and ambulance chasers, but they aim merely to confirm what has become conventional wisdom: Few actions of the Supreme Court have occasioned so much criticism as the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, which legitimized the relocation.

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