Allegiance (53 page)

The loyalty questionnaire I describe was actually administered to detainees, with the results I recount. The Leupp Isolation Center did exist, and had the problems I describe with the inadequacy of records in support of detention. The draft did apply to Japanese Americans detained in the camps, and some refused to register. Most of those who refused were convicted, but Judge Louis Goodman, assisted by his law clerk Eleanor Jackson Piel, did preside over a trial in Eureka in which he found some innocent.

The legal world in which Cash operates is thus drawn largely from fact. Most of the things he does were actually done by Justice Department lawyers. In his work at the Alien Enemy Control unit, which was in fact headed by Edward Ennis, Cash takes over some of James Rowe's functions. The real James Rowe stayed at Justice until he volunteered for military service in 1943. Cash also takes over some of the functions of John Burling, a special assistant to Attorney General Francis Biddle, who participated in the litigation of the internment cases and wrote the
Korematsu
brief.

As in the book, there was significant division among the government lawyers who worked on these cases. Ennis, Rowe, and Burling all opposed the evacuation and detention program and expressed doubt about its constitutionality. As in the book, they clashed with War Department lawyers over the briefs filed on behalf of the United States, including the dispute over the footnote about the Final Report. The alteration of the Final Report that I describe is also historical fact, though it was not discovered until years later. The definitive source on this intergovernmental struggle is Peter Irons,
Justice at War.

In his work after leaving Justice, Cash takes over the functions of a private lawyer, Wayne Collins. As I relate in the book, more than five thousand
Japanese Americans renounced their citizenship during the war, under circumstances much as I describe. After the denaturalization law was passed, Edward Ennis and John Burling went to Tule Lake to explain the consequences of renunciation. As Cash does in the book, Burling later returned in an attempt to slow the pace of renunciation and administered a test of Japanese culture to determine which renunciations were voluntary; like Cash, he seized and removed members of the Hoshidan in hopes of calming the loyal detainees. As I describe, the government put the renunciants on boats after the war and was on the point of shipping them to Japan when Wayne Collins filed suit to stop it. As in the book, Judge Louis Goodman presided over that litigation and found the renunciations invalid. The government appealed, the litigation dragged on for years, and Wayne Collins worked the cases almost entirely alone. In the end, he prevailed and the renunciations were voided. Collins also participated in the representation of Fred Korematsu.

In my description of Supreme Court Justices and Court personnel, I have tried to stay close to the historical record and to portray the Justices as they did or might plausibly have been supposed to act and speak. I have relied for this purpose on biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and correspondence. To the extent that the Justices, particularly Frankfurter, get involved with the conspiracy plot, however, they obviously depart from historical reality. (Frankfurter was certainly a schemer who tried to influence the other Justices, so here again I have attempted to portray him as he might plausibly have acted in such circumstances. The Happy Hot Dogs are a real group of Frankfurter acolytes, given that name at the time, though their duties did not extend to following suspicious clerks.)

Last, Cash's fellow clerks are fictional, although in some cases, biographical similarities exist between them and real people. Philip Haynes is entirely fictional. The real Murphy clerk for the time the novel takes place was named Gene Gressman; like my Gene, he served for several years and was considered very influential. He was not murdered but went on to a career in appellate litigation and law teaching. And he did, as the clerks joke in the novel, write an outstanding book on Supreme Court practice. Clara Watson arrives at the Supreme Court the same year as the actual first female clerk, Lucile Lomen. Like Clara, Lucile Lomen clerked for Justice Douglas and hailed
from the state of Washington. She spent the year living at the YWCA. She was not fired; her clerkship was, by all accounts, a success.

In all of this, I have sought to take facts from the past—facts that often offer striking parallels to the present—and to supplement them with fictional devices highlighting the same themes. The story of America is a story of trying to live up to our ideals, of falling short, and of trying again. Thinking about the past is one way we may hope to do better next time.

This book has been a long time in the making, and many people helped along the way. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Larry Hardesty, whose belief in the project never wavered and who read what must have seemed an unending stream of drafts with unflagging patience and keen insights. Too many other people read it over the years for me to name them all, but I must mention Alexis Hughes, Tina Hsu, Alisa Melekhina, Jade Palomino, Andrew Rosen, Meredith Ruggles, Rebecca Sivitz, and Hugh Taft-Morales. Louis Bayard and Garrett Epps, both fabulous novelists from whom I have learned a lot, gave me some much-needed expert advice about structure and pacing. Charlotte Haldeman took me out to the Merion Cricket Club and let me look around to gather details about the place that looms so large in Cash's life. And Suzanne Skinner made a contribution to the Penn Law School's Equal Justice Fund in exchange for the naming of a character in her honor—it is a testament to the book's long gestation that by the time it came out she had married and is now Suzanne S. Forster.

I also owe thanks to the authors and scholars whose work helped me re-create the world of the 1940s in the diverse settings of wartime Washington, Philadelphia and the Main Line, and the internment camps. I read more books than I can list in researching those places but must single out David Brinkley's
Washington Goes to War
as especially valuable.

Despite all the help in the writing process, the book would never have been published without the support and enthusiasm of my agent, Victoria Skurnick, and Judith Regan. To them, and to all the staff at Regan Arts, I say a special thank-you.

65 Bleecker Street

New York, NY 10012

Copyright © 2015 by Kermit Roosevelt

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Regan Arts Subsidiary Rights Department, 65 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogue, except for incidental references to real persons, products or places, are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events is coincidental and is not intended to refer to any actual persons, products or places.

First Regan Arts hardcover edition, August 2015.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955549

ISBN 978-1-941393-30-7

eISBN 978-1-941393-90-1

Interior design by PagnozziCreative

Front jacket photographs: Barbed wire fence © Associated Press; Exclusion order poster by Dorothea Lange; Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library; Manzanar war relocation center (guard tower) © Macduff Everton/National Geographic Creative/Corbis; Children behind barbed wire fence from the Toyo Miyatake Manzanar Collection; Aerial view of internment camp courtesy of National Archives

Jacket design by Richard Ljoenes

Interior photographs: pages
5
,
6
–7 by Dorothea Lange/US National Archives and Records Administration; pages
166
–167 by Clem Albers/US National Archives and Records Administration; pages
308
–309 by Francis Stewart/US National Archives and Records Administration