"Wherever I go I will be a loyal American": democracy and dissonance in the lives of Seattle's Nisei

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Washington School in Seattle, Washington, the site of a Deweyan experiment in intercultural democracy, dealt with the challenge to its experiment by the news of the incarceration of its Japanese American, Nisei, students. The following questions, based on a historical investigation of primary evidence, frame my research study: What ideas of democracy, Americanization, and citizenship were expressed in the writings by Japanese American and non-Japanese American students from 1941--1942? How and in what ways did students and school officials cope with a federal policy calling for the imprisonment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast in light of citizenship education based on toleration? How did Japanese American and non-Japanese American students make sense of the contradictions between the citizenship education they received in school, on the one hand, and the prospect of the incarceration on the other? These questions serve as the basis for conducting a historical analysis of primary evidence based on students' writings, archival documents, and oral history interviews of Nisei who attended Washington School.