Allegiance

Theodore Roosevelt's great great grandson illuminates a less than admirable episode of American history in his novel Allegiance (#526).  Cash Harrison, the privileged scion of a leading Philadelphia family, is finishing up at Columbia Law School when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.  Along with the rest of his classmates, Cash is gung-ho to enlist, only to fail his physical.  Instead of going off to war, he is offered a position clerking for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, which he somewhat reluctantly accepts. 

Once Cash arrives at Court and begins to settle in, he senses that things are going on all around him below the surface, but he cannot make out exactly what is happening.  One of the other clerks takes Cash under his wing after Cash is followed and his apartment broken into.  Gene Gressman is convinced that any tampering has to do with boring commercial cases - a classic "Follow the money" assumption, while Cash thinks it might be War or Justice Department interference with Japanese detention and renunciation programs. When he and Gene seem to begin unraveling some of the threads influencing the outcome of certain cases, Gene dies under mysterious circumstances.   With his investigation going nowhere, Cash's clerkship year is up, and he transfers to the Justice Department.  Here again, some puppet master seems to be pulling the strings behind Japanese citizenship and detention cases.  The more Cash pokes into the tangled web, the more uncomfortable he finds himself with the Government's position.  Things reach a head when agents of the mysterious puppet master attempt to kill Cash at the Tule Lake Detention Camp, and he must finally take a moral stand for what he believes to be justice.

This is not exactly an action novel.  It's told from the perspective of law, government policy and the manipulation of both by greedy and unscrupulous men with no regard for the consequences to others except for how the outcome will benefit them.  Here are many of the familiar names of the time: Franklin Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, Justice Felix Frankfurter and Francis Biddle, portrayed in a way that sheds new light on their actions (or inactions!).  If you are not "One of Us", you are the enemy, and that enemy does not turn out to be who Cash thinks it is at all.  The pacing of this novel is ponderous, but it's still worth taking the time to read about one aspect of what was happening on the homefront during World War II.