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Free to Die for Their Country
By Eric L. Muller |
ORDER -- Item #2993, Price $27.50
Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of the men who rejected the government's demands. Based on years of research and personal interviews with the resisters, their families, and their supporters and detractors, Eric L. Muller's work recreates the welter of emotions and events that followed the arrival of the draft notices in 1944; the untenable situation of the Japanese American men caught between national loyalty and personal indignation; the hypocrisy of the government in asking men to die for their country when it had denied them their rights as citizens; the shoddy trials of the protesters that produced convictions and imprisonment; and the treatment of the resisters by the .Japanese American community, who looked upon them as pariahs who were hindering progress toward assimilation.
Muller looks behind the horrible story of the internment camps to find a tale less well known and even more troubling, illuminating a dark corner of American history during World War II. Affecting and clear eyed, Free to Die for Their Country reveals, in almost cinematic fashion, an untold chapter of our recent past.
"In a beautifully written, gripping account, Eric Muller tells the astonishing and little-known story of how, in the liberal, humane administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States government herded Japanese American citizens into concentration camps, then ordered them to report for induction into the armed services in World War II, and, when they resisted, threw them into prison. It is an appalling tale, but Muller shows that from the perspective of the law, it is not so easy to sort good from evil."
Book Description from the Front Cover Flap
IN THE SPRING OF 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, after stripping them of their livelihoods, liberty, and dignity the government demanded even more by drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these American citizens grudgingly complied with the draft, but several hundred refused and practiced a different sort of American, patriotism-the patriotism of protest.
Comment from the Forward
"The period covered by the experience of the men whose stories are told in this moving account constitutes one of the darkest moments in the history of the United States.... This was a period when 120,000 people were rounded up to be incarcerated in ten concentration camps located in some of the most desolate areas of our country. They were incarcerated because they were Japanese. ... In this climate of hate, many felt the necessity of stepping forward to volunteer for service in the military to prove their loyalty to the United States. These men for the most part carried out their military obligations with much courage and valor' However, in this climate of hate, I believe that it took just as much courage and valor and patriotism to stand up to our government and say 'you are-wrong.'"
—Senator Daniel K. Inouye
Comments from Back Cover
"In this splendid contribution to the history of World War II, Free to Die for Their Country reveals, through the voices of Japanese American draft resisters, the diverse expressions of patriotism and the sometimes competing claims of liberty and fairness in the law."
—Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II
—William E. Leuchtenburg, author of In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Bill Clinton
Background on Eric L. Muller
Eric L. Muller is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Copyright © 2004 by AACP, Inc.
Most recent revision June 27, 2004