<Begin Segment 18>

TI: Yeah, I wanted to go back. Because you started the research and some of the writing when you were at UCLA, and continued when you were at Wyoming. I wanted to talk about the influence of being in Wyoming, close to Heart Mountain, and how that influenced the book.

RD: Well, it influenced it tremendously. Had I stayed at UCLA... as a matter of fact, my plan was to talk about one camp in particular. I talk about all of them with the focus on one camp. It's a short book, it's limited in scope, it wasn't all the camps. I couldn't do that. I had all sorts of things to cover. But once I was at Wyoming, I hadn't started the writing yet, where they had a full run of the Heart Mountain Sentinel and other things, and where I had a graduate student who I could suggest and he agreed very quickly, brilliant student named Douglas Nelson, who wrote a master's thesis which became a very well-used and popular book, not a lot of sales, but significant sales. He wrote a history of Heart Mountain itself, and as I say, we explored Heart Mountain together. But the draft resistance came as a shock. None of the histories that had been published up to that time, including books by Bill Hosokawa, including the one he wrote with one of my former colleagues, senior colleagues at UCLA, a historian of Japan, none of them mentioned this. Bill Hosokawa knew all about it. He'd written editorials against the first of the resister movements, and we talked about this. He thought it was not good for the Japanese American image, and that's what he was promoting. He was much more interested in that than in writing an accurate history, although most of what he's written is accurate. And he didn't say draft resistance didn't happen, he just refused to acknowledge it. And nobody else knew anything about it, and nobody had said very much about it. So I discovered that. And before that, the only talk about resistance had to do with things like the protests at Manzanar. And those were protests, but they weren't organized resistance. And it's importance that this resistance took place, and it's important that people knew about it. It wasn't just Gordon and Min and Fred and Mitsuye, who were tremendously courageous in 1942. But here are these guys, not doing the normal thing, but protesting. The geography of the protest is very interesting.

TI: Geography? Explain that.

RD: Well, some of the camps had almost no draft resistance at all, and several camps had a lot. The Heart Mountain case was the first, and the trial that took place in Cheyenne -- that's the picture that's in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin -- is still the largest trial for draft resistance in American history.

TI: I didn't know that.

RD: Well, there was practically no draft resistance in the Second World War. At the end of the war, we had an army in the millions. There were fifteen thousand cases of persons whose sentences were considered by a Presidential Pardon Commission. The Pardon Commission decided -- and this is in the administration of Harry Truman, fairly close to the war. It would have been better if they'd waited a while. But they decided only to grant pardons to two kinds of people. The first set of pardons were to people who went on to serve in the army after being convicted. The next set of pardons, and the last, was to prisoners of conscience. But the largest number of those who conscientiously resisted the draft, were Jehovah's Witnesses. The difference between Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious protesters was that Jehovah's Witnesses insisted that everyone who was a Jehovah's Witness was in fact a minister, and thus entitled to automatic, and the government refused to grant this and refused to grant pardons to those people. And I suggest in the book that's coming out in November, that one of the reasons no one paid much attention to the fact that Truman had pardoned the several hundred Nisei draft resisters was that all the fuss was about the non-pardons to the Jehovah's Witnesses. And the media can usually focus on one aspect of a subject at a time, and that's the aspect that people like the American Friends Service Committee pushed, Clarence Pickett pushed that. It got nowhere, but that was the only thing. And Truman did not explicitly comment on the fact that Nisei had been done. He did a lot explicitly about Japanese Americans, as you know, but he did not say anything there. In fact, I've had to call it to the attention of the Truman Library, and I've suggested that they change their website to include this and one other action of his that was somewhat less favorable. He also signed an order which enabled the government to begin sending renunciants back to Japan, so there's one more positive and one negative thing to add to Truman's list. But the reaction from the historical community has been very favorable.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.