This book begins with an overview of the situation Nisei were in prior to and during World War II, their parents inability to become citizens, the lack of employment opportunity for themselves, their faith in the United States and the cultural characteristics that enabled them to endure hardship. It continues with the roles and actions of Lt. Gen. DeWitt, columnist Henry McLemore, Milton Eisenhower and Dillon Myer of the WRA, JACL leaders and others.

Eric L. Muller
Photo courtesy of Densho

This is all thoroughly plowed ground but now told through stories of individuals and families who were to figure prominently in resistance to what they felt was an infringement of their constitutional rights. Some of these people were from Seattle. The author discussed in some detail the government's changing position on Nisei already in the army, accepting Nisei as volunteers and their draft status. He also considers the "loyalty questionnaire" and its impact on Japanese citizens, U.S. citizens, and families of both.

What Muller adds to the literature about the camps is a legal scholar's eye for the law, the Constitution, and legal procedures. In discussing trials of draft resisters from Heart Mountain, Minidoka and Tule Lake in federal courts in Wyoming, Idaho and California respectively, his research on judges, juries and trial customs is telling. He describes Judge T. Blake Kennedy in Wyoming, who sentenced 63 resisters to prison, as "a racist, an anti-Semite, and a xenophobe." Also discussed is Judge Chase A. Clark, who as Governor of Idaho in 1942 had refused to accept West Coast Nikkei except "under armed guard and confined in concentration camps," and Judge Louis E. Goodman of Northern California, who came to a very different analysis and conclusion of the cases presented to him than the other judges. He dismissed the charges against the 26 Tule Lake resisters in his court on due process grounds.

Muller has deftly woven his thorough research, sensitive interviews of resisters and impressive legal background into a readable study of a long suppressed subject.

Eric Muller is George R. Ward Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Free to Die For Their Country: The Story of Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II, The University of Chicago Press, 2001, available in paperback.