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CHAPTER 3 Loyalty and Resistance Life was going its calm and orderly, if somewhat unnatural, way in Topaz, Utah, on the afternoon of January 28, 1943. . . . The teletype stuffed away in a corner of the telephone exchange room in administration building “A” began to clatter out a message. A few moments later, the operator laid a message before Mr. Hughes, who studied its wording carefully. Then suddenly he began to act. Telephone bells jangled in the offices of the division chiefs. It was as though an electric current on the loose was flashing through Topaz. —Russell A. Bankson, WRA community analyst at Topaz T HE TELETYPE MESSAGE that set off a flurry of activity in Topaz on January 28, 1943, came from Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who announced that the War Department had created a combat unit exclusively for the Nisei. Nisei volunteers could enlist for military service during a loyalty registration program. War Department representatives would come to Topaz in two weeks to begin the process. Shortly after Stimson’s announcement , the War Relocation Authority (WRA) announced that it would conduct its own loyalty registration program for all Nikkei ages seventeen and older. The War Department and the WRA hoped their registration programs would work in tandem to accelerate efforts to clear detainees for relocation and to hasten the eventual closure of the camps. The Nikkei detained at Topaz organized resistance to those aspects of registration that most threatened their citizenship rights. Issei leaders successfully persuaded the War Department to revise the loyalty registration questionnaire in a way that would not force them to choose between loyalty to the United States and their Japanese citizenship. The Nisei were less successful. At the heart of Nisei resistance to registration was resistance to the War Department’s efforts to recruit Nisei men into a segregated combat team before their citizenship rights had first been restored. Issei demands could be met by revising the registration form itself. Nisei were asking for changes that were far more substantive. Debate over Nisei registration at Topaz marked the beginning of broad-based resistance against what would become a full restoration of Selective Service for Nisei without a full restoration of their citizenship rights. The registration process itself 82 CHAPTER 3 represented a continuation of War Department efforts to force Nisei to resolve questions about their dual citizenship and to profess undivided loyalty to the United States before making them eligible for military service. This chapter focuses on Topaz for two reasons. First, resistance against registration took place in all the camps, but to different degrees. The most studied examples are Manzanar and Tule Lake; few if any historical studies even mention resistance at Topaz. Yet during registration, some observers believed that resistance at Topaz was the most serious of all the camps. This might indicate that efforts to suppress dissent at Topaz ended up being more successful in the long run than the resistance itself. The fact that resistance to registration at Topaz has all but faded from historical memory makes the analysis of the event in this chapter important on its own terms. The second reason Topaz is important to this particular narrative is because only seven men resisted the draft from this camp (and only four of the seven served prison sentences for their resistance). In a camp that exhibited such spirited resistance against a segregated military just one year before, this small number of draft resisters serves as one example of how successful the government and private individuals were in suppressing dissent in this case. By contrast, even though residents of Amache questioned registration and voiced their concerns, they did not organize any broad-based resistance efforts until the draft was reinstated the following year. Amache is the principle topic of Chapter 5, “The Obligations of Citizenship.” Together, Topaz and Amache serve as striking examples of the variety of forces that government and civilians used to quiet dissent and to encourage overt patriotism in the face of civil rights abuses and a diminishing civil society.1 THE BROADER CONTEXT OF WARTIME CITIZENSHIP During World War I and World War II, the government filed complaints against individuals who had obtained citizenship through fraudulent means and stripped them of their citizenship. The Supreme Court upheld this practice as constitutional, as those who held reservations in their hearts at the time they naturalized as U.S. citizens had obtained their citizenship through what it called “fraud” and “deceit.” The numbers of those who lost...

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