Chapter 10

Gordon Hirabayashi continued to wage his own quiet war on behalf of his principles. Early on the morning of February 12, 1943, he walked out of the King County Jail and onto Seattle’s bustling Third Avenue. His attorneys had taken his case to the Supreme Court and organized bail so he could live in Spokane while waiting for a ruling on his case.

Gordon found lodgings in Spokane with some fellow Quakers, then went to meet his principal mentor, Floyd Schmoe—a Quaker activist as well as an accomplished mountaineer and marine biologist.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Schmoe resigned from a faculty position at the University of Washington to devote his time to championing the rights of incarcerated Issei and Nisei. From the beginning, he had been one of Gordon’s fiercest defenders and advocates.

Schmoe’s daughter, Esther, a nursing student and a Quaker activist like her father, was a vibrant young woman with blond curls, a sprinkle of freckles, and luminous blue eyes. She was also intelligent, sociable, and brimming over with youthful hope and idealism.

Esther visited Gordon weekly while he was in jail, first in the company of her father and then increasingly by herself—just her and Gordon sitting on cold metal benches, talking through the bars, sharing their ideas about life and religion, and falling in love.

Now Gordon helped Esther and her father set up the new American Friends Service Committee office, and the three went to work trying to ease the burdens of Japanese American families in the Pacific Northwest—both those in the camps and those outside the exclusion zone.

One day, Esther was in a Spokane laundry, inquiring about possible jobs for people she was trying to help. Gordon waited for her in the car. At first, all went well. The owner had several positions and was ready to hire—until he found out that Esther was representing Japanese Americans. He exploded. “Hell no! We don’t want to take a chance hiring Japanese!”[32]

When Esther got back to the car, she wept for five minutes straight. Until then, she had not quite realized what she was up against. Gordon, comforting her, hadn’t realized how different the world looked through her eyes.

For him, that kind of treatment was nothing new. Just recently, he’d been traveling with a white friend in Idaho when they decided to stop at a restaurant in a dusty little farm town called Caldwell. They failed to notice the sign in the front window—No Japs.

A waitress came over and took their order, but half an hour went by, and no food appeared. Finally, the waitress edged back to the table and asked Gordon, “Are you Japanese?”

“No, I’m American. I’m of Japanese ancestry, but I’m American.”

“Oh, well, if you’re of Japanese ancestry, we can’t serve you.”

Gordon asked to speak to the manager. The man seemed nervous, almost apologetic. “I’m forced to do it,” he said. “If I don’t, I’ll have people boycotting me, walking out.”

Gordon didn’t get angry, and he didn’t argue. Instead, he proposed an experiment. “Well, you have an empty table right near the entrance. Let me test whether you’re correct or not . . . If anybody comes in, sees me, and leaves, I’ll pay for an average meal so that you wouldn’t have lost that.”

The man hesitated. Gordon persisted, logically and patiently making his case. “I want to test this,” he said. “I’m curious myself.”

The manager agreed warily to the deal, but only if Gordon sat at the counter, not near the door. Gordon and his friend ate as slowly as they could and managed to run another hour off the clock. Nothing happened. No one got up and left. No one seemed to even notice. Gordon paid up, and they left. A few weeks later, Gordon’s friend wrote to him from Idaho. “Say, that guy took that sign off.”[33]

For weeks, Gordon had been growing more impatient to know that his case had been resolved by the Supreme Court. He had no doubt that he would win. The racial rationale behind the curfew was so obvious, the lack of due process leading to the incarcerations so apparent, that neither could possibly fit within the framework of the Constitution.

When the court finally rendered its opinion in Hirabayashi v. United States, on June 21, Gordon only learned of it from the newspapers. What he read there was crushing. The justices, acting unanimously, backed the government’s assertion that wartime conditions justified the racist policy. Gordon couldn’t believe it. He later wrote, “I thought that the raison d’être for the Supreme Court was to uphold the Constitution. I didn’t realize the extent to which World War II hysteria had swept up everyone.”[34]

Now all he could do was keep busy working with his Quaker colleagues and wait for someone to show up and take him back to jail.

It wasn’t until September that a big black sedan pulled up and an FBI agent approached Gordon and asked him if he knew where Gordon Hirabayashi was.

“I am he,” Gordon replied. “What took you so long?”[35]

When Gordon arrived downtown, there was a hitch. He had agreed to accept a longer sentence—ninety days rather than sixty—so he’d be eligible to do his time in a federal work camp rather than in another crowded jail. That way, he figured, he’d at least be outdoors and doing something productive.

The FBI agents told him that wasn’t going to work. The closest work camp was Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, well within the exclusion zone, which legally Gordon could not enter. The next closest was in Tucson, Arizona, and the government wasn’t about to pay to send him there. He’d have to serve his time in the Spokane County Jail.

Gordon unleashed his customary firm, implacable logic. He pointed out that the government was violating its agreement with him. If they couldn’t afford to send him to Tucson, that wasn’t his fault. Why not let him get himself to Arizona? Supposing he just hitchhiked?

The agent in charge was surprised by the proposal, but Gordon wore him down with his calm but relentless manner of arguing. Finally the agent shrugged and approved the idea, and Gordon set out for Arizona.

Traveling first to Idaho and then through eastern Oregon into Utah and Nevada, he trudged for endless miles alongside remote highways, his thumb stuck out, as cars and trucks sped by. Sometimes drivers slowed down, saw that he was Asian, and sped up again. Occasionally, someone took him a few miles down the road.

A farmer driving a truck picked Gordon up, studied him for a while out of the corner of his eye as he drove, and finally said, “You’re a Chinese, right?”

“No, I’m an American.”

“I know that, but you’re a Chinese American, aren’t you?”

“My parents came from Japan.”

The farmer chewed on that for a few moments, then replied, “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have picked you up.”

Gordon offered to get out of the truck, but the man grudgingly kept driving. After a long silence, they began to chat, then to talk in earnest. Gordon explained why he was on his way to prison, what he believed in, how proud he was to be an American, and what the Constitution meant to him. The farmer ended up inviting Gordon to his home, drawing him a warm bath, feeding him dinner, and then driving him to a well-traveled road so he could continue on his way.

When Gordon finally got to Tucson, he walked into the office of the local federal marshal. The marshal was perplexed by the sudden appearance of this strange young man. At first, he tried to get rid of him. “What’s your name? We don’t have any orders to take you in, so you might as well go home.”

Gordon wasn’t having any of that. “It took me a couple of weeks to get down here, and I’d go home, but you’d probably find those orders and I would have to do this all again.”[36] He suggested the marshal make some phone calls.

The marshal told him to come back that evening, and Gordon wandered outside into the blistering heat. He found an air-conditioned movie theater and settled in to watch a show. By the time he returned, the marshal had made the calls, decided Gordon was in fact a legitimate lawbreaker, and agreed to incarcerate him.

A deputy drove Gordon out into the foothills and delivered him to the Catalina Federal Honor Camp. There, inside the gates, standing silently among scraggly pines, mesquite trees, and rock formations aglow in an Arizona sunset, stood a small contingent of inmates who had heard that the famous Gordon Hirabayashi was coming. They wanted to welcome him personally.