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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

AH: Okay, so during our break you were talking about Paul Robertson, right?

MN: Yes. How did that interview come about? How did you find him, and did he even want to be interviewed?

AH: Well, Paul Robertson, I had heard about him because he was the director of the Leupp Isolation Center in Arizona. He succeeded Raymond Best in that position; he had previously been Best's assistant director. And then he later went to Tule Lake Segregation Center as Best's assistant again. He was the assistant director. So he was kind of involved with areas I was interested in, Moab and Leupp as isolation centers, and then I was also interested in Tule Lake as a segregation center. And of course there was a lot of resistance in each of those places and then Harry Ueno went through all of those and Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Betty Mitson, and I had done that book in 1986 for Cal State Fullerton's Oral History Program, Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno, so that was interesting. And then Harry is probably the one who humanized Paul Robertson for me. Because Paul Robertson lived up in Sacramento and Harry lived up in San Jose. Oddly enough, those guys got to be buddies of sorts well after World War II. Robertson was for a while a lay preacher and then he actually got his degree as a preacher and he was preaching at a Baptist church up in the Sacramento area. And Harry would go up there and then for a while they had some Leupp reunions. And there were other former inmates like Harry from Leupp who came to those reunions, and one of them was Kenji Taguma's Kibei boss at the Nichi Bei Times newspaper in San Francisco.

MN: Umeda?

AH: Yeah, I think so, the Japanese editor at the Nichi Bei. I had heard about reunion deal from Harry Ueno. "Paul Robertson is still alive?" I couldn't believe it, but it was apparently true. And then one of my graduate students, Reagan Bell, was doing a thesis on the military police and he was focusing on Tule Lake. So we had a double reason for interviewing Paul Robertson, so the two of us went up to Sacramento and did the interview with him. That's probably one of the most exciting interviews that I think I've ever been involved in. Not because Paul Robertson was very forthcoming, but because I drew him out. There was a guy who worked as the head of security at Leupp named Francis Frederick. And Francis Frederick had been at Gila River Relocation Center and he'd been the assistant head of security there. And he felt he had been railroaded out of Gila and transferred to Leupp, with a higher rank but at a reduced salary. And because Frederick felt he was being "kicked upstairs" he was really pissed off at the Gila project director, a guy named Leroy Bennett, and Gila's director of internal security, W.E. Williamson, and he was gonna fix their wagons. And one of the people he had known when he was at Gila was Bob Spencer, who was with the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study. And this guy Frederick fancied himself something of a social scientist, too. Not a trained one, but he liked to talk about these things. So Bob Spencer was using him as an informant. So they had this relationship. Then when Frederick went to Leupp, what he did was he immediately said, "I'm gonna fix their ass." He said, "All of these people incarcerated here at Leupp, I'm going to go through their records and find out why they were put into this isolation center as "troublemakers." So he wrote biographies for each one of them. And in almost every case he concluded that there was no good reason to pick these people up. "This isolation center is so highly illegal." And then Robertson was kind of naive. He's a guy who grew up in the South, and when I asked him about segregation there, he had nothing to say about it. I couldn't believe it. But anyway, Robertson was just a real sweet man, a really kind Christian man. And he had the so-called dangerous people in the isolation center babysitting his kids and he and his wife would go somewhere off the site, for a visit or shopping or whatever. And here you had a high-security camp with a great big man-proof fence and you got a whole battalion of soldiers guarding the compound. But Robertson didn't think they were doing anything wrong and this impression was reinforced by these reports that he got from Frederick. And so finally Frederick got Robertson so worked up that he went back to the national War Relocation Authority office in Washington, D.C. And it was said that he was carrying with him, under his arm, this whole sheaf of documents, these biographies that Frederick had written. And that convinced the national WRA office to close Leupp, and they immediately closed Leupp because they were afraid of the repercussions of keeping it open. So Frederick was sort of a resister but nobody had any kind words for him. Because he was a real -- among the people in camp -- he was a bully. It was like "my way or the highway." And Harry Ueno said, "I thought his name was 'Seeme' because he said, 'See me'" so many times. [Laughs] He said, "See me! See me!"

So anyway, through my research at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library, I had access to all those letters that went back and forth between Frederick and Spencer, and Spencer was frightened of Frederick. He said, "This guy has this steely eye that he'll look at you with in this strange sort of way, and you didn't know what it was all about." Spencer said Frederick was kind of an evil person, but he said he was getting all of this data from him. And by that time Spencer had left Gila and he was at U.C. Berkeley, and he was working in the language program for the Far East and Southeast Asia. Because the U.S. thought they were going to be occupying all these countries and they needed these languages, and he was one of the guys that knew Korean as well as Japanese. So Spencer was over there doing that and he'd get these strange letters from "my buddy," "my pal," from Frederick. And so Spencer just kept the letters and then he kept drawing things out from Frederick and he would give the information to Dorothy Swaine Thomas. He passed it along to her. So it then ended up in the archives at the Bancroft Library and then I came across it and I couldn't believe it. It was just a treasure. Then Richard Drinnon came across it, and Drinnon uses those letters in his 1987 study, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism. So I was really anxious to do the interview with Paul Robertson.

When I went up to the Sacramento area, to interview Robertson at his home in Carmichael, he had no knowledge that all of this stuff was going on and these letters between Frederick and Spencer were being written. And here I am on the tape reading aloud large sections of the letters. And Robertson said, "This guy has quite an imagination," or, "he was full of himself, wasn't he?" But that was a real interesting interview. And then at the end I said to Robertson, "I appreciate that you made your testimony." He said, "Oh, I haven't made my testimony yet, I've just given you some information." He said, "If I had given my testimony, you would be falling down on your knees. You'd be making your peace with the Lord." So he had felt that he had a Christian obligation to not just give me information, but to give me faith. But anyway, that was that experience. So we did that interview and I immediately got it transcribed, and it's been published for a long time. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted a lot of attention. It's a really interesting interview.

I had given a paper on this topic of Francis Frederick. One of the projects that I have in mind is, I had mentioned to you last time, is an anthology of articles that I've written. And only two of them will be new ones and that will be one of them. It was over half done, but I'd started it as a paper I gave at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Honolulu in 1991 on a panel with Lane Hirabayashi and Gary Okihiro. But that article is a real tough one. At the beginning of Drinnon's book, what he does -- you've read Drinnon's book, haven't you? Did you review it? Lane did, I remember that, for the San Francisco Chronicle or the Examiner, maybe it was. But in any event, Drinnon dedicates the book to "the people who've said 'no.'" Because half of the book has to do with Dillon Myer and Japanese Americans, because his Keeper of Concentration Camps, relates in part to the concentration camps for Japanese Americans, and then the second half of the book deals with was Native Americans because after the war Myer became the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Anyway, half of the names in Drinnon's dedication are Japanese American ones. He didn't have either Jimmie Omura or Harry Ueno on his dedication list. I was in touch with Drinnon because I wrote to the University of California Press along with other scholars to help make sure that Drinnon's manuscript got accepted for publication. And it did, a pretty big hit, too, in some quarters. In other quarters it didn't. Roger Daniels doesn't like it, I'm pretty sure. What went on after that was... what was I saying here?

MN: You did a paper on Frederick.

AH: Drinnon went to Harry Ueno up in Santa Clara County and he talked to him and then he went to Denver and he talked to Jimmie Omura. And, in fact, he did an interview with Jimmie that's in the collection of materials that I have, so I've listened to this interview. Drinnon and his wife traveled there to Omura's home in Denver and they did this interview. But Drinnon thought that Robertson was just a lamb, that he was so naive. So he didn't see him as a person that really should be counted as any kind of resister. The list that Drinnon used for his book's dedication to Japanese Americans, I would actually alter the list a little bit, of the people who said "no," a little bit more expansively than he did. I think he liked the people who said "no" in a certain kind of way, and I think there are different stripes of resistance. I think that killing 'em with kindness is a type of resistance, too. And I thought that Paul Robertson was a person, even though he was naive, who humanized the people who were considered to be the baddest of the bad. And he did this when he was in a pretty important position: the director of the isolation center at Leupp and then the assistant director at Tule Lake Segregation Center. So I may not applaud Robertson's resistance in the way that I applaud someone else's like Omura's because Omura's resistance had a self-consciousness to it and an awareness, and there wasn't that sort of awareness in the case of Robertson, but there was the resistance.

Another person who's problematic is Karl Yoneda's wife, Elaine Black Yoneda. She was really against Harry Ueno and all of the people who were resisting Fred Tayama at Manzanar, but partially that was because of the politics of her being a Communist, and at that time taking a strategic decision to work with the JACL in a common front to defeat fascism. But she raised enough objections to what actions were going on in the camp that made for improvements in the camp. So she resisted within a certain sphere. So what you have to do is define the type of resistance. So what I've done for all of the interviews that I have in this book I'm doing called Barbed Voices, is I've given a name to each one of the resisters a name that corresponds to their respective genre of resistance. And some of the resisters were resisters who resisted after camp rather than during camp. Sue Embrey did not have a lot of resistance to offer during her camp days at Manzanar, but she had a reservoir of predisposition towards resistance that later came to roost when she was a little bit older. So the resistance that she did was through the Manzanar Pilgrimage. It was kind of a retrospective but still historical resistance, insofar as she was, revising the record. Hannah Takagi Holmes, who was a deaf mute, resisted, too, in her own way. It's just being able to explore the type of resistance. I'm really anxious to get through with this Omura memoir project and get on with that "Barbed Voices" anthology because it's something that I started out doing of my own volition.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.