The Internment of Japanese Americans during World War II & the Role of Attorneys at the Relocation Centers

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In this episode, we're going to discuss the story of the mass removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the story of the white American attorneys who worked at the internment camps. As we've discussed on this podcast before, discrimination against people of Asian descent, has a long history in the United States, especially on the west coast, where, for instance, alien land laws, enacted in the early 20th century in California, prohibited land ownership by Asian Americans and even by American born children of Asian immigrant parents. The December 7, 1941 attack on the Pearl Harbor Naval Base by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, stoked those fears and prejudices. Despite investigations showing that Japanese Americans were not a threat to national security, Lieutenant General John L. De Witt advised representatives of the Department of Justice and the army in January, 1942, that the large number of what he called "enemy aliens" on the west coast, was a cause for concern, as they could be planning espionage and sabotage. As DeWitt noted, "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken." It wasn't only fear at play. White west coast farmers resented the success of Japanese American farmers. By 1940, 45% of Japanese Americans who were employed on the west coast worked as farmers, and Japanese American farmers were growing half of California's cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, garlic, and artichokes. The relocation of Japanese Americans away from their farms removed them as competition. As Austin E. Anson, the managing secretary of the Salinas Valley Vegetable Grower Shipper Association, told Frank J. Taylor, of the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. And we don't want them back when the war ends either." On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the use of force to remove anyone deemed a threat to national security from the west coast, further inland into detention centers. A month later, on March 18, 1942, Roosevelt established the War Relocation Authority, the government agency tasked with relocating around 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, the majority of whom were United States citizens, from military zones in California, Washington, and Oregon, and interning them in tent camps. The original director of the War Relocation Authority, Milton Eisenhower, the younger brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower, had argued for interning only adult men, but he lost that battle, and whole families were uprooted. Not everyone went along willingly. 23 year old Japanese American Fred Korematsu went into hiding in Oakland, California, changing his name and even undergoing plastic surgery to avoid detection. He was still found though, and arrested in May, 1942. Korematsu's case was appealed all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in a six-three decision that later scholars have called one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time, that Executive Order 9066 was constitutional. As Justice Hugo Black argued, in the majority opinion, "Korematsu was not excluded from the military area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire; because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our west coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures; because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the west coast temporarily; and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders, as inevitably it must, determined that they should have the power to do just this." Why Japanese Americans were considered a threat, when neither German Americans nor Italian Americans were, was not addressed. 10 sites, many of them on tribal lands, were selected for the prison camps, two each in California, Arizona and Arkansas, and one each in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Each camp was essentially a small town, with housing barracks, communal dining halls, schools, stores, post offices, and farmland. The prisoners worked for minimal pay, in a variety of occupations, including factories within the camps, and the children went to WRA schools. The towns though were surrounded by barbed wire, and armed guards. In charge of each camp was a civilian project director who oversaw the whole operation. Also on staff at each relocation center was a project attorney who was in the difficult position of both advising the project director and running a legal aid clinic for the prisoners of the camp. I'll speak more with today's guest about the many types of legal situations in which they were called to advise. On December 18, 1944, the same day that Korematsu v United States was decided, the Supreme Court also decided Ex Parte Endo, a case brought by Mitsuye Endo, a second generation Japanese American woman who had never been to Japan and did not even speak Japanese, who had been detained against her will in an internment camp. In a unanimous ruling, the court decided that loyal United States citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity, should not be detained without cause. A day earlier, knowing that the ruling was coming, the Roosevelt administration issued Public Proclamation Number 21, ending the exclusion order and allowing Japanese Americans to return to the west coast in early 1945. They were given $25 and a train ticket to wherever they wanted to go; but many Japanese Americans had nothing to return to, having lost their homes during their incarceration. After a decade long campaign by the Japanese American community, the United States government finally offered a formal apology for the detention of Japanese Americans, when President Ronald Reagan signed into law, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which also granted redress of $20,000 to each surviving United States citizen or legal resident immigrant of Japanese ancestry who had been incarcerated during World War II. Joining me now, to help us dive into the story of the lawyers who worked at the Japanese internment camps is legal historian Eric L. Muller, the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor of Law in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and the author of, "Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America's World War II Concentration Camps."

Hi, Eric, thanks so much for joining me today.

Eric L. Muller  11:08  
Thank you so much, Kelly, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:11  
Yes, I have a million questions for you. But I'm going to start by asking how you came to write this book. You've written several books about Japanese Americans and relocation camps. But how did you come to write this book about the lawyers,

Eric L. Muller  11:24  
I first was exposed to the story of Japanese American incarceration all the way back in the mid 1990s, when I started my academic career at the University of Wyoming. I knew nothing about the subject at that time, but I was teaching Constitutional Law at the University of Wyoming College of Law, and one of the core cases that students study is the Korematsu case from World War II, which was a challenge to the removal of Japanese Americans by Fred Korematsu. I learned that one of the 10 concentration camps run by the federal government was actually in Wyoming, so I began to inform myself about that camp, just so that I could kind of bring it into the classroom. And I grew more and more fascinated by the larger subject, in part because of my own family history. So I am both the son and son in law of Austrian and German Jewish refugees from the Nazis, and so grew up very exquisitely aware of the story of persecution of a racially identified internal scapegoated minority group. And, you know, began to realize that part of my interest in this topic, even though I'm not Japanese American, was driven by some of the similarities between what happened to Japanese Americans in the United States, and what happened to Jews and others in Europe. That interest in the Holocaust story led me to involvement with an organization that studies the responsibility of professionals in Germany in the 30s, for basically the complicity of the professions in the development of the Nazi state. And so these things began to come together for me when I learned that the lawyers in the Japanese American camps, all left behind hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of correspondence, documenting often in very personal terms, what it was they were doing to help run these camps out in these hinterlands of Wyoming and Arizona and California and the other western states. And so really, I guess, it was really, in a sense, sort of a combination of my interests in the professional culpability of Holocaust participants, and my own knowledge and interest in the story of Japanese Americans and the camps in which they were incarcerated, that kind of blended together and led me to pursue this project.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:49  
Yeah, so can we talk a little bit about the camps themselves? I think, you know, there's a tendency among Americans who know more about the Holocaust story to think of the camps as you know, the camps that the Nazi Germans ran, but that's not exactly what we're talking about here. So what what were these camps?

Eric L. Muller  14:10  
It's not These camps were, I use the term concentration camps because that's what pretty much everybody called them at the time. Obviously, after the horrors of places like Treblinka and Auschwitz, became known to the world, the term particularly in American vernacular English, the term concentration camp, came to take on a connotation of a, of a death camp, a place that like, like, like Auschwitz Birkenau that was created for the purpose of murder. And I don't mean at all to suggest that the Japanese American camps in the United States were those kinds of camps. But they were camps where 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, non citizens and citizens alike. were removed to between 1942 and 1945, and kept in very, very spartan, bleak, challenging conditions of incarceration, behind barbed wire fences, living in tarpaper barracks, in places like, you know, Cody, Wyoming where the temperature in the winter would drop to 17, 20, 25 below, and the wind was, as is always true in Wyoming all year long, just absolutely blowing fiercely. Families were forced to live in very small quarters where they were given basically, a bed frame and a mattress and a light bulb dangling from the ceiling. They were not allowed to leave these places without specific explicit permission from the government that ran the agency that ran the camps and from the military as well, which patrolled the borders of the camps. So these were places of, of mass racial confinement. Now, the central difference, I would say, and I think this is relevant to the story that stories that I tell in the book, the central difference between anything that we might have seen in Europe and these camps in the United States, is that the camps in the United States were run by a civilian agency that was created expressly for the purpose of building and running these camps. It was called The War Relocation Authority, or WRA, and the WRA was a New Deal agency. This is the thing that I think is so stunning, when you begin to think deeply about these camps. They were run by progressives. These were not camps that were run by the hard core of the US Army. These were camps that were run by people who had come over to this new agency, from the Department of Agriculture, you know, like sort of the central, the central New Deal agency of the New Deal in a certain way, or one of them. Part of the, a major part of the leadership also came from what was then called the Office of Indian Affairs, which we obviously would think of as being an essentially colonialist and patriarchal kind of enterprise, which it was; but from 1934, to about 1949 or 1950, this was this brief moment in the history of the Office of Indian Affairs, under the what was called the Indian New Deal in which, in the context of American Indian policy, this was a period of positive enlightenment in the sense that this was the agency was in the hands of people whose interests were in respecting, rebuilding, acknowledging, supporting indigenous cultures, indigenous property ownership structures, indigenous, tribal governments, indigenous, indigenous languages and religions. So you had this agency that was a jailer, but that was also a progressive body that did not believe in the rightness of the very project that they were running. That is to say, the WRA, unlike the military, knew that these camps were really not necessary. They knew that the Japanese Americans who were confined in them were overwhelmingly safe, overwhelmingly posed no security risk, were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States. And so you have this paradox that you have these camps, which are bleak places that are being run by an agency that's trying in its in its still somewhat colonialist and patriarchal way, to support the imprisoned community rather than to repress it. And that's what's I think, so interesting about the lawyers that I write about, because these were guys, these were white government lawyers, who were out in the field. These were not people in the Justice Department, they were not in Washington, they were out in these bleak, barren places. And they were simultaneously government lawyers who were advising the the camp administrators, but they were also expected to be providing legal services for the prisoners, and helping them helping them with protecting their property interests back in California, helping them set up community organizations, community stores, helping them with, you know, divorces, child custody problems, their taxes, all sorts of things that, you know, small town lawyers do. So they occupied this very weird space between the prisoners and the jail and the jailers, which is, I think, what makes them such a fascinating study.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:34  
And can you talk about some of the tensions that that creates, right, you know, like, you're talking about this in the book, like, who is their client? Is their client the US government? Is their client these Japanese American citizens that they are dealing with? Like, you know, what, what happens and what happens when those two things are in conflict?

Eric L. Muller  19:53  
Yeah, so I mean, the average day for these for these guys was one in which they would move back and forth sort of seamlessly from, you know, advising the director of the camp on the best strategies to quell a labor strike that the Japanese American prisoners were were cooking up, or were in the midst of. Moving from that, to turning around and having a session with a with a, with a Japanese American family that was being fleeced of its property back in California by rapacious white Californians who were, you know, just going after Japanese American property wherever they could, and advising them on steps they could take to protect their property interest, writing angry letters, to bankers and lawyers and real estate agents out in California, threatening legal action on behalf of the prisoners to protect their property. So they were constantly bouncing back and forth from a position of protection and advocacy for Japanese Americans to a position of suspicious control of Japanese Americans. And what what the book does is it tracks three lawyers in particular, so the first year at three of the camps. And the reason I selected these three camps and these three individuals is because they approached their jobs so differently from one another. These were three guys. They all occupied the same job, same job description, such as it was, same problems presented and that you know, the same kinds of issues. These are three truly parallel stories in which, because of the backgrounds, the temperaments, the sensitivities, or lack of sensitivities of these individual lawyers, they get the same problems, and they resolve them often in very strikingly different ways. With the most sympathetic of them, a guy named Ted Haas, who worked at the Poston relocation center in Arizona, being extraordinarily sympathetic to the prisoners, really working very hard to imagine himself into their shoes, and resolving pretty much every judgment call that he could, in a way that was protective of Japanese Americans as he understood their interests to be on the one hand; and then just down the road a couple of 100 miles, a guy named Jim Terry, at the Gila River Camp in Arizona, who was a tough as nails, former federal prosecutor, former partner at a Wall Street law firm, who in most instances, took a very, very jaundiced view of the loyalties and interests of the Japanese Americans  you know, whose lives he was managing effectively. So you get this very stark contrast of how different individuals exercised their discretion in their jobs in very different ways. And Kelly, that, in a sense, is the thing that the book is most interested in. It recognizes that, you know, not just lawyers, but all professionals have discretion in how they do their jobs. Nobody is doing it, no lawyer, no doctor, no journalist, no business person is sitting there, just ticking off boxes on a checklist of exactly how they're to do their jobs, exactly how they're to interact with their clients or with their adversaries. People have discretion in how they carry out their their tasks and how people choose to exercise that discretion is a fascinating subject. It's been much studied in the context of Nazi perpetrators. I mean, there's this, you probably know, there's a voluminous literature on all of the kinds of factors that motivated Nazi lawyers or Nazi doctors to do what they did. We don't really have a literature like that, looking at American perpetrators. But everything that can be said about the discretion that a lawyer in Berlin, in 1934, would have had in trying to develop Jewish policy, you know, there were similar pockets of discretion that American lawyers had in developing, whether it be policy concerning Japanese Americans or Jim Crow at the implementation of Jim Crow laws, or any one of any number of Native American policies. These issues are common across, I think, all people who do professional work. And this book I think, gives us really in some ways, one of the few glimpses inside the heads of American perpetrators, perpetrators of a different kind from those in Nazi Germany, but perpetrators nonetheless.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:54  
So you mentioned earlier, the written record that they left and you have this incredible archive to work with. Can you talk a little bit about that, how we have this record of their interior? 

Eric L. Muller  24:55  
Yeah, so one of the ways in which this was a classic New Deal agency is that the guy the main lawyer, a guy named Philip Glick, who was the solicitor to the agency in Washington DC, came over from the Department of Agriculture and continued the ubiquitous WRA practice, or the I should say New Deal practice of documenting everything, you know, having everybody out in the field constantly describing what they were doing. There were the WRA hired anthropologists to come in and study what it itself was doing. There was this very kind of typical New Deal kind of understanding. So he told his lawyers out in the field that he wanted them writing back to the main office every two weeks, and providing not just numbers of wills drafted and you know, numbers of community organizations assisted. But he wanted narrative letters that were describing what the lawyers not just were doing, but what they were seeing, what they were encountering, unique problems that they were perceiving, innovative methods of solving those problems. And they were to do this every two weeks, and most of them did it every two weeks, or nearly so. So what that means is that across the space of whatever the you know, the full three or three and a half years of this program, there are literally 1000s of pages of single spaced letters, from lawyers at all of these 10 camps, explaining all manner of things about not just the specific work they were doing, but what they were encountering, what their experiences of their clients were. And some of the lawyers really were quite, one might say confessional in the way they handled this correspondence. They really poured their whole selves and not just their lawyer selves into these letters. Ted Haas, who I mentioned before, in particular at Poston, was a very emotionally sensitive person, very emotionally sensitive man. And he was really unabashed about pouring, not just his head, but his heart into these letters and describing situations of great pathos in that he was encountering in the lives of the Japanese Americans that he was touching. So what that means is that I had this unusually personal trove of an extraordinary volume of letters. And I feel like that was what enabled me to take the risk of presenting this narrative in a more fictionalized, but not fictional way, right? So these, the book presents narratives, these are like they read, like short stories. People are talking to each other, and they're moving through landscapes. All of the events that I'm narrating are things that actually happened. But I'm taking liberties that I, that a conventional academic history would not take in the sense of imagining dialogue and imagining settings and so on.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:56  
You've mentioned these three sort of main actors that you're talking about, but there's a fourth one who's working, so he's somebody who's incarcerated in one of these camps, but is himself a Japanese American lawyer and ends up working in the office along with the project attorney. Can you talk a little bit about him because that story is so interesting?

Eric L. Muller  28:16  
It's fascinating. His name was Thomas Masuda. He was, so there was, by the time of Pearl Harbor, there was a fairly small, professional class of Japanese Americans, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and so on. It was a small group. By and large Japanese Americans were in service industries and farming and those sorts of things. But there were Japanese American lawyers. And so when Japanese American lawyers were uprooted along with everybody else and placed into these camps, many of them chose to work for the lawyers' offices, the government lawyer offices in the camps, the project attorneys' offices, as they were called. Thomas Masuda was one of those. He was from Seattle, he had had a very, very rocky time period before before his incarceration in the Poston Relocation Center. And that is because he had in his pre war life, represented some Japanese associations, Japanese business interests. He'd done a little bit of work for the Japanese consulate in Seattle, entirely innocent work because we were not at war with Japan. But nonetheless, when war began, he was immediately arrested by the FBI and charged ultimately, with the crime of doing being an unregistered agent for the Japanese government, which is a pretty serious charge when we're a few weeks into the war with Japan. So he was locked up by the FBI and tried in federal court in Seattle, before being removed from the coast. And astonishingly, for the time an all white jury in Seattle acquitted him of the charge of being an unregistered agent of Japan. So he wins this astonishing victory. But his prize for winning that is that he gets, you know, put on a train and sent off to an American concentration camp because he's Japanese American, not because he's done anything wrong. He joins the projects attorney's office in Poston, and really becomes an intimate professional associate of the project attorney there, Ted Haas, so much so that when Ted Haas takes ill, and has to leave the camp for several months, in early 1943, to go to Los Angeles for a protracted set of medical operations, Ted Haas lobbies for Thomas Masuda, the Japanese American lawyer to become the project attorney at the camp, to replace him as project attorney, and somewhat grudgingly the WRA accepts him. So for several months, the lead lawyer at one of these Japanese American concentration camps, is a Japanese American attorney. So he's in this, I mean, if you think about the position of the white lawyers as being conflicted in some way, I mean, take that and cube it, and that's what you've got for a Japanese American lawyer who is in this position of being a lawyer, both for the government and for his own fellow Japanese Americans in the camp. He leaves behind a much smaller number of letters, maybe between, I don't know, half a dozen and 10 letters that he writes back to the boss in Washington while Ted Haas is away sick. So the the, the documentary evidence for his interior life was much, much thinner than what I had for the white lawyers. And for that reason, I try to get for that reason and others, I try to get inside his head, a lot less than I do the white lawyers. And I do that partly because the documentary record is so thin, but also because I think it's just a lot easier for me to understand and identify with the position of the white lawyers in those camps. I'm not Japanese American, it's virtually impossible for me to imagine the the excruciating conflicts that Thomas Masuda must have felt in the position that he was in. So he is a significant character in the book. But he's not, he's not somebody that I'm, I have the audacity to try to try to imagine. You know, if viewed through one lens, he was a kind of collaborator, you know, but viewed through another lens, he was a kind of hero. I mean, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's easily as complicated the story as the white lawyers. And actually, I think much moreso. I think that he and the others like him at the other camps deserve their own study. But I don't think it was, I don't think this is the book that was the right one to really delve deeply into what his interior life might have been like.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:08  
So you talk in the introduction about someone had warned you that, you know, you might humanize these subjects, which of course, you can't help but do, because they are human beings. But one of the interesting humanizing elements is that two of them are married and and Thomas Masuda is married as well. And this job, it seems like takes such a toll on them as people. You talked about Haas, you know, getting being hospitalized, which is really, you know, sort of a result of the stress of the job. Can you talk a little bit about that element about them as, as people in addition to being, you know, lawyers?

Eric L. Muller  33:47  
Yeah. So, you know, each of them, each of them brought their whole selves to the job. Those whole selves were very different people, though. As I've said before, Ted Haas was, you know, a very, very, you know, he was sort of emerged from that Lower East Side, Jewish intellectual tradition, very much a champion, a selfconscious, champion of what he understood to be the rights of minority groups in that context in his time. And was, you know, I candidly, I mean, I'm no physician, and I'm certainly no historical physician, but I suspect that he had bipolar disorder. I mean, you know, just looking at the fact that he's pounding out letters at 3:15 in the morning and, you know, running on two or three hours of sleep and sort of this manic quality, but also a very kind of melancholy lens that he looks at things through. The toll on him was enormous. I mean, he he, as you say, he ends up, he ends up in the hospital for a period of several months in Los Angeles, and he struggles, I'll just say that he struggles emotionally later in his life as well after this experience is over. Jim Terry brings his whole self to the job. What that means is that he takes his workaholic ways of the United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the law firm, the white shoe law firm in Manhattan, and brings that workaholic intensity and combativeness to the job. And he displays that combativeness on behalf of the Japanese Americans when he sees their especially their property interests as being threatened by racist whites on the outside. But he's also extremely aggressive towards Japanese Americans in situations where it's his job to try to suss out whether they are loyal to the United States or whether they're disloyal. So he deals with things in the Jim Terry way by being sort of an aggressive SOB, and that's how he describes himself. This is not me, he presents himself that way in the letters. He's very self aware in that regard of what a prickly SOB he actually is. Jerry Housel is the third of them. He's the lawyer at the Heart Mountain Camp. He's the youngest of the group, the least experienced. He is a westerner, through and through, sort of a Marlboro Man kind of guy. He's also the son in law of one of the the mayor of the local town, a mayor of a local town, which is extremely suspicious of and hostile towards Japanese Americans. And he's also a guy who's going to be building his own professional career right in that very place, where he is working, in the Heart Mountain Camp. So he is, I would say, the most sort of bureaucratic, the most rule bound, the one likeliest to try to understand in a very precise and narrow way exactly what he's supposed to be doing, and then trying to do that, but also not willing to go out on a limb to advance the interests of Japanese Americans. Because in some ways, I think it was against his own self interest. You know, he would have anything that the this camp did that was perceived by locals as being friendly to or supportive of the Japanese American prisoners, he would hear about it over dinner at the Sunday night dinner table from his father in law, the mayor. And he also knew that he was going to have to go out after the war and practice law with all of the local lawyers who were so suspicious of what this camp was doing. So he brought his whole self too, but it was sort of a it was a it was a bureaucratic and something of a worried self. He became convinced that Heart Mountain was heading towards a major riot, a major upheaval. And I think his desire not to be there, when that happened, ultimately led him to flee. And I know that I'll note Kelly that one reason I feel confident saying that is that he is the only one of these men that I actually ever met. By the time I started studying this stuff in the late 1990s, the other lawyers that I ultimately have ended up writing about, were long gone. But Jerry Housel, was still alive. And I met him and interviewed him in 1997. And he told me, he told me very clearly that he, he wanted to get out of the camp, and he went into this, he went into the navy, so that he could kind of get out and leave, and that he sort of wishes that he had actually quit even sooner because he thought, what the government was doing to Japanese Americans, what he in a sense was doing to Japanese Americans, was really a bad deal.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:33  
Yeah, you asked that question at the beginning and come back to it at the end of the book, you know, should they have quit? What should they have done? And I think it's such I mean, it gets at the heart of what we're talking about this, this whole tension this complicity. I, you know, I think I end your book, thinking they shouldn't have quit, they were doing important work. Somebody needed to be there representing their interests. But I understand the argument the other way, too. I mean, can you talk to that a little bit?

Eric L. Muller  38:58  
Right, this is the tragedy, right? That systems of injustice work. They, they, they both come into being and then day to day operate, not on the backs of moral monsters, but very ordinary people, people who have a very plausible story to tell themselves about the good that they're actually doing in the job. These guys did good. And they also did bad, and that's why they're so that's why they're so interesting. And I think that's why they're also so representative of dilemmas that not just lawyers in Japanese American concentration camps faced, but that all of us in some ways face. We're all implicated to greater or lesser extents in, in systems that we know are unjust, that we know are racist, or that we know are sexist, or that we know are transphobic, or whatever it might be. So I think that it's it's my initial reaction, of course, upon learning of these lawyers was like, "That's monstrous! How dare they? These places couldn't have run without their labors. How dare they do participate in the system that they knew was unjust?" But I came to see the problem as much more nuanced than that. I think that the real story of this book, as I referenced, I believe, earlier in our conversation, the real story of this book is about the discretion that people have in their daily lives, to resolve difficult problems, to be aware of the difficulty of the problems to practice self awareness. And then to push their discretion to or towards the limits that it might have to do good, to try to resolve things in ways that are beneficent, rather than maleficent, and, and to try to see what they can do to help short of getting fired. Obviously, everybody has to go into a job like that with lines that they know they will not cross. I think Jerry Housel thought that he was approaching a line that he didn't want to cross. If there had been mass violence at Heart Mountain, he was going to have to do things that I think he knew he was not going to want to do. So he left. So in the final analysis, I think it's too simple minded to say that people should simply walk away from any system that they know, is in some way unjust. I think that there is value to staying in a system like that. But to doing it in a way that is very much steered towards the good as you understand it, and to constantly be trying to recognize the good that you have the flexibility to do, and to do it every time, to be risking getting fired, but trying to figure out how to stay in the job without actually getting fired. That's I think the most that we can hope of people with the understanding that that if that whatever their personal lives are that where their professional responsibilities will take them into action that is unconscionable for them that that's the moment when they'll say no more and that they'll quit.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:08  
Yeah, well, the book is an incredible read. Can you tell people how to get a copy?

Eric L. Muller  42:13  
You can get a copy at all of the usual suspects. So obviously, you can order it from the UNC press itself. So if you go to UNCpress.org, you can order the book there. You can order it at all of the online booksellers. The one that I like to mention, of course, is bookshop.org, which is a supporter of independent booksellers, but it's available at at the bookstore, the book, the online booksellers that shall not be named as well. And, and it's also available as an audiobook I should mention as well. And it's available on Kindle. And so you can find it wherever quality books are sold, as they like to say.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:51  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Eric L. Muller  42:53  
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess there is one other thing. So I think that the so the novelist, Julie Otsuka, who wrote, "The Buddha in the Attic," and "The Swimmers," and "When the Emperor Was Divine," she did a blurb for the book in which she calls it an important contribution to the literature of on moral witness. And I think that that's true. But I also think that this is a kind of contribution to the literature on Japanese American incarceration as well. And that's because we're seeing it through the kinds of matters that would pass across a lawyer's desk. Most of the evidence that we have about how these camps ran and how they were experienced by the people who were held in them, are from oral histories that Japanese American prisoners have left behind. Those are extraordinarily valuable testamentaries of this, testimonies about this experience. But most people who sit down for oral histories, when asked about their lives in camp, don't say, "Oh, yeah, I committed adultery." You know, most people don't say, "Oh, right. Yeah, I was. I was prosecuted by the camp tribunal for pilfering somebody's wallet in the latrine." Most people don't talk about, you know, the struggles that they encountered, the property loss that they endured. But that's what these lawyers were seeing. They were lawyers, they were doing, they were like small town law offices. So this book, through the eyes, of course, of these white lawyers, so it's a it's a it's a, it's coming from a particular perspective, but it is telling stories about the lives of Japanese Americans in the camps that we don't typically hear, but that I think are very important in humanizing, not the lawyers, but humanizing the prisoners, and recognizing parts of the strain and repression that they were experiencing, that manifested in in ways that were deeply hurtful and challenging in their lives. That they were resilient and got themselves through, but that were painful in a way that we don't usually have direct evidence about from their own stories. And so in that sense, I think the book really, it doesn't paint a more accurate picture of these camps. But it adds another color, I guess, to the to the images that we have of these unjust sites of confinement.

Kelly Therese Pollock  45:26  
Well, Eric, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really, really appreciated this book and it's been just great to talk with you.

Eric L. Muller  45:33  
Well, I really appreciate your interest and it was a it was a really enjoyable interview. Thank you.

Teddy  46:02  
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