Infamy: The Shocking Story of Japanese American Internment in WW2

Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II by Richard Reeves
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richard Reeve’s Infamy is a useful contribution to the study of one of the darkest periods for civil liberties in US history, namely the treatment of West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during the Second World War. The myriad stories of families ripped apart, dreams destroyed, confidence dashed and even lives lost makes for difficult reading at times. Over and over again each individual anecdote causes one to pause, shakes one’s head and continue reading in a desire to become a witness to this hitherto hidden and painful history.

While Jan Jarboe Russell’s recent book focuses specifically on the Crystal City, Texas federal detention center in her excellent book, The Train to Crystal City, Reeves’s book covers not only the detention centers but also the assembly centers in various states across the Western US. These were places where internees were originally sent before more ‘permanent’ accommodation could be made available. It is astonishing to realize just how many centers there were and how little of their history is yet to be fully explored. Yet what little Reeves has uncovered is enough to get a glimpse of the deprivation; places full of dust, dried animal excrement and despair greeted those rounded up with no charge. The conditions within, Reeves notes, were well below the acceptable standard for even the most violent of criminals housed in federal penitentiaries of the time.

Whereas Crystal City is more measured in its look at the actions of members of the administration, Infamy does not hold back, printing damning racist quotes from President FDR and similar statements from various people in charge like the infamous General “A Jap is a Jap” DeWitt. Reeves even goes so far as to imply that civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, President of the ACLU at the time, was too busy pandering to FDR to take up Japanese internment cases, which is based more on opinion than fact. Undoubtedly his sources for a specific quote here and there are impeccable, but Reeves misses an opportunity to give these characters the depth they deserve and delve deeper into the very real fear that was felt by the vast majority of Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor to discover motives which extended well beyond simple racism.

Having said that, one character of the book who does come out very well is attorney Wayne Collins who represented the nearly 2,000 US citizens, many children, who were deported to Japan in the aftermath of internment in a gross violation of their constitutional rights. The determination of Collins to see justice done is incredibly moving. He seems to have had no other motive than seeing that the rights of these citizens were adhered to and he wins citizenship back for many.

Finally, Reeves enlightens readers about the sacrifices made by the young men who volunteered straight out of the camps, while in many cases their families remained interned, to fight in the famed all Japanese American 442nd in Europe, the most decorated regiment per capita of any in the history of US warfare. Those who survived went on to be US representatives, actors and artists. Those that didn’t clearly changed the tide of US opinion of Japanese Americans through their ultimate sacrifice, becoming posthumous heroes in cities and small towns across a forever changed United States.