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LB: This is Lori Bannai conducting the interview now. When we broke last, you were talking about the move from Boston to San Diego. But at some point in time prior to your move, you had started thinking about writing the book, Justice at War. Can you tell us how that came about?

PI: That's a very funny story, because I had not intended to write that book when I started. After I finished the book that was published first, called The New Deal Lawyers, I really enjoyed writing that book. And I sort of decided, I don't know how, but I decided I liked writing books rather than shorter articles. And what I had wanted to do was to move, stay in that general time period, the first half of the 20th Century. I'd done a lot of work on that in graduate school, and it was sort of my field in American history. And of course, I'd also been very interested in the FBI because of my own case and just learning about how the FBI operated. And somebody had told me -- and I still don't remember who -- that the National Archives in Washington where I'd done most of the research for my first book, had just gotten a hold of 5,000 rolls of microfilm of all of the FBI's records, the original FBI records from the period before J. Edgar Hoover became director in the mid-1920s. So this was a period from roughly 1910, when the bureau was first started in the Justice Department, it was just called the Bureau of Investigation, until Hoover took over. And during that time, of course, particularly the First World War, there were all kinds of, of activities, strikes, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the formation of the Communist Party also in 1919. The FBI was investigating virtually every radical. They'd had a big roundup of radicals, deported many of them during World War I. And so I thought that there would, could be a really good book out of this, either one or more of these episodes or just how the FBI first started as, focusing on compiling lists and files on radicals in this country.

So I decided to go down to Washington. In fact, I got a small grant from a foundation to go down to Washington and the archives and start looking through this material. So I went down, and I discovered, this was in the, the summer of 1981, and I discovered shortly after I got there that this was an unmanageable project. There were 5,000 rolls of microfilm, and they had fascinating material on them, but there was no index at all to this material, no way of finding, connecting one file or one document to another. They had all just been piled together, photocopied on microfilm. And there were probably well over a million pages of material. And for anybody to go through all of that, sort it out, would be, take years. And I didn't want to spend years just getting prepared to write something. So I was, I had a sort of dilemma in Washington. Do I continue with this project, turn it into a who-knows-how-long, many year project, or do I find something else to do? Do I go back to Boston and give up on this project, or do I stay in Washington and try to find some use for the time I'd put aside, couple of weeks, to work in the archives?

So while I was thinking about this, I went up to the little library inside the National Archives. It's just basically one room with a bunch of reference books. And I sat down. I knew that I wanted to do something dealing with civil rights or civil liberties during this period really of the first half of the 20th Century. I also knew since I had done a whole book about the New Deal period, the Roosevelt administration, that this was a very, I knew a lot about that period, and I wanted to focus on the civil rights aspect of that historical period. And I knew that there'd been a lot of civil rights activism, the anti-lynching movement, things like that. So I sat down, and there was a reference book, sort of American constitutional history, in this little library. And I started thumbing through it just literally page-by-page looking for inspiration, looking for something that would say, here's a potential book or a project that I can work on to keep me going for another couple of weeks in Washington.

And as I was thumbing through this book, I suddenly noticed the internment cases, Korematsu and Hirabayashi. And, of course, I recalled studying them in law school and realizing that they were a tremendous civil liberties disaster, civil rights disaster. And at that very moment, I thought, "Well, maybe there's something in the archives that I could use at least to see if there's enough to put together a book on these cases." And the whole idea would be, how did the Supreme Court make such terrible decisions in these cases? Try to understand from looking into how the cases began, how the lawyers worked on them, how the justices dealt with these cases, strictly as an academic project. Now, the first thing I had to figure out was, was I going to duplicate somebody else's work? Had there already been books written about this and I didn't know that? There weren't any citations in this history book I was looking at, so I decided to go to the Library of Congress. In Washington the National Archives is about a mile from the Library of Congress, go up Capitol, Pennsylvania Avenue, Capitol Hill. It was in August. It was really, really hot. And I remember going out of the National Archives and almost jogging up the hill to the Nat- to the Library of Congress. And at that time the Library of Congress had the world's largest file, I mean -- what do you call them? You pull out the drawers and look at the...

LB: Card catalog.

PI: ...card catalog. There were millions of cards in the card catalog. And so I found what I thought was the right entry, Japanese Americans, and went through all these cards of which were probably a hundred or more, looking for something that had dealt with the internment from a legal perspective. I found one book, and it was a book that had been written right after the war by three men, Jacobus tenBroek and two others, Edward Barnhart and I forget the third -- Floyd Matson, I think, was, although that may be wrong -- about the legal issues coming out of the internment. And I took a quick look at that in the archive, in the Library of Congress and discovered that it really wasn't a study of the internment cases. It had discussed them in a very general kind of way. So I went back down to the National Archives and tried to find if there was material there about these cases. And I had a friend who worked in the archives who had done a lot of, given me a lot of help on my first book, a woman named Mary Walton Livingston. And she had been at the archives longer than anybody else at the very beginning of the 1930s. She knew where everything was located. So I went to see Mary Walton, and I said, "I'd like to just see what there is about the internment, particularly the legal issues." And she said, "Well, there was an agency, it was called the War Relocation Agency, and we have their records here in the archives." And they had a legal section she looked up in one of their catalogs, the solicitor's office. And I said, "Well, let me take a look, and I'll get started."

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.