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But then I got to Washington and began to do research in the archives, and that was my first research in the National Archives. There was not much in Washington for me. There were some things there that I could have used in The Politics of Prejudice, but that was a book that could be done in California, which meant I didn't have to do that travel. The one real travel was to Berkeley. I went to other places, I went to a number of small public libraries. I didn't cite 'em all, but most of them had... because librarians are funny, they're always more liberal than the communities they live in. And most of these libraries then still had materials that they'd saved about Japanese Americans, nasty posters, this sort of thing. And several of them didn't want them publicized, so I didn't cite any of 'em. Didn't have 'em on display, but if you go into a library -- and I found out about it by accident from a professional librarian. So I did this in a number of small towns particularly in the valley. And they didn't want any publicity but they had the materials, they'd saved them and they saved stuff. And a lot of public libraries still do that.

BN: This is like anti-Japanese materials from the pre-'24 period?

RD: No, there wasn't much of that, but there was a lot of World War II material. And I'm doing research for the Concentration Camps book and for post-1924 book all the time while I'm doing research here. I mean, that's my main thing, but you keep your eyes open and you get other things. Well, the article turned out to be one of the longer books that I've written, a book called The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression. So that's how that came to be. That was one of my first, that was really my only essay in what I call "unplanned authorhood." Most of my books come about after I've written the table of contents, something I've been thinking about for a while, after I've written a table of contents. Very rarely has the resulting text varied very much. The FDR book is one of the prime exceptions because that was originally supposed to be a book of maybe 125, 150,000 words, and it's almost 700,000 words. So it's going to come out in two volumes, it's not at all clear when. And as we speak, the contracts haven't been signed. There's a contact in the hands of my agent, Tom knows this story. I had a great deal of trouble placing The Bonus March by the way. And I'd had no trouble placing The Politics of Prejudice, it was very simple. I finished the day after the exam, Theodore Saloutos -- that's the way things worked in those days -- took it over to the UC Press representative who was in L.A., they couldn't do anything. They talked to people, and they sent it up there to Berkeley, and they sent it out to Oscar Handlin, who was an outstanding historian of immigration. And Oscar and I have had some intellectual differences, he was a tremendous force. And I am told -- I never saw it -- but I was told that his Reader's Report, you know what Reader's Reports are like, pages... "this is the best thing on this topic. Publish it." And they did. And it was accepted almost immediately. And then there were two problems. Number one, they gave it to a copyeditor who'd done incredible things, including throwing out one whole section I had about the Constitution, because, he says, "The word 'immigration' is not in the Constitution," and that's absolutely correct, it isn't. But nevertheless, it still pertains. What is in the Constitution is to mandate the Congress provide or create a uniform system of naturalization. And I just was going crazy, and I finally wrote a letter to the director of the press that I'd have to do it, and with evidence. So that was settled, and they got a decent one.

And then they wanted to censor some of my remarks about materials in the possession of the University of California, from the JERS project, which I didn't mention by name. It was a footnote. It said something like, "See if you can get access" -- "see," comma, this was a footnote to some things I said about the incarceration, which I probably called the evacuation at that time. "See, if you can get access to the following sets of papers." And the Press didn't like that, because it suggested, correctly, the University of California was sitting on some stuff, and they were. I eventually found them, and eventually the Bancroft got hold of them. But they were hidden -- do you know the Berkeley campus? Well, they were hidden in the attic of one of the buildings, the name of which I forget at the moment. And I had inquired on one of the persons from that project about where such papers were, and he didn't know. California Hall, I think, was the name of it. But a person writing a dissertation at Cal, a dissertation that was never published, and a dissertation that I came about because I looked at all their dissertations in modern twentieth century history, it was very good, and I couldn't find the author. And the author was a woman, couldn't find her. And if you look at a dissertation, you find out who wrote it. And one of the people on the committee, not her mentor, was John D. Hicks, who was then dean of the graduate school there, and incidentally, the mentor of my mentor, Theodore Saloutos, so I had access to him. And I asked him, "You know where so-and-so is?" He said, "Oh, yeah. You can't find her here, her name is Waldron now because she got married." Women do that, and some of them take their husband's names. So when I asked her, she said, "Oh, yeah. Those papers that I cited... I cited those papers." Said, "Where were they?" She said, "Well, I had a hard time finding them, but Professor Barnhart took me to them in the attic of California Hall." Barnhart being the man who told me he didn't know where they were. I never got hold of them, but I told Julia McCloud, the woman who ran the Bancroft Library -- she was not its director, but she was the most important person there as far as I was concerned, and I think that's a good summation. Had wonderful control, knew everybody, knew where things were, and she was just delighted. And eventually, I discovered that she got those papers, but I never saw them. I don't know how we got on this subject.

TI: What was contained in these papers? What was being...

RD: I think why they were, the people who... that project, which I'll talk about, the woman who ran that project, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, had made her reputation about it. It's not the reputation it should have been. She and her associates made a Faustian pact with John J. McCloy and the army. They wanted to study -- this is right when the war's going on, right at the start -- they want to study it. And they get a big grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to do so, I mean, big. It was, I think, a million dollars, but I'm not sure. They would get access to material, but no one connected with the project would make any public statements of any kind about what the government was doing until after the war, and I find that reprehensible. And when they published after the war, they did not make it clear that this was the case. So that they didn't want a lot of publicity. The other thing was that Barnhart, who with two other people, one junior and one senior, but the senior person was blind, who was responsible for putting it together. When he found material in a document that he wanted to quote, he cut it out with scissors and pasted it into the copy. So you had all these mutilated documents, or so I am told. I saw some of them actually, eventually.

BN: So what was the resolution of the issue with wanting to censor the footnote?

RD: I damn near withdrew it from UC, and my wife gave me the good advice that it was true that you shouldn't accept such things. But this'll answer one of your earlier questions. She said, "You ought to consider that we don't really want to stay here very long, and getting that book published" -- and it seemed to me she also said, and she was a doctoral candidate by this time herself, she knew her stuff. She also said that, "After all, it's only tangential to the subject of the book. It doesn't affect your text. This is a footnote where you're showing off how smart you are. And they'll see how smart you are, so let 'em grumble, curse 'em if you want, but let 'em publish it. They'll do a good job. It'll do a good job for you," and that turned out to be the case. As I said, her advice was always good advice. I mean, I'd thought about that, of course, but I was really, I was really... well, let's say I was pissed off.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.