<Begin Segment 36>

TI: But it sounds like what you've, you developed is a, is a combination. I mean, it's, it's talking to people to -- I think you said earlier -- to get the flesh on the, on the facts, but you still need those, those documents, the facts.

RM: Oh, you have to have them.

TI: And, and to really have both to, to help.

RM: Yeah, and if they, if they don't agree -- and believe it or not, quite often the person is right, and the document is wrong. Deliberately wrong. They, they're fabricated to make the person writing them look good, or to make 'em pass the superior Caucasian officer in the social service section, there's a lot of that. And, and to get at the very truth is... you know, if this is the conclusion if it, I look at history as building blocks. I had my chance, I put as many blocks together as I could. Now, somebody else is gonna come behind me, and they're going to look at those building blocks, they're going to see the errors and the problems that I faced with it. But they're going build on that, and we're going to have a better, fuller record as we go through. They're further away, they have much more perspective on what's happening than, than I do. I talk to the people who were there, who went through it, who experienced it, and, and parts of it are missing. And so there, they will come, and they will put more pieces of it together, and hopefully, someday, we'll have a good study, understanding of this terrible event of internment.

I, the last interview I want to talk about, I interviewed a German longshoreman who was interned in World War I, and sent to a fort in Utah, on a, on a special train with other German nationals. World War I, and he wound up down there, and he could not return during the war, he was interned. Nobody ever told that story until a fellow named Poston wrote about it, Aliens and Sedition. And, and so it was totally forgotten. I look at what we're doing as a social cause on the internment. We don't want to have that happen again, and yet we have the tendency to let it happen again. And history should show that if you destroy it for one, or a group, you're going to destroy it for all. Civil liberties hang by a thread, and the loss, they can be lost easily. So I do have a social agenda. Thank you.

TI: Well, no, thank you. That's a wonderful way to end the interview. And thank you so much. This was, this was wonderful.

RM: Oh, my pleasure.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.