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BN: I guess we left off, you returned to UCLA, you'd been invited back. If I understood you correctly, while you were in Platteville, that you had continued to do some research in the summers on the Japanese American topic.

RD: Yeah, and I read. I read in the library alone and I continued to read. And things were beginning to come out, and I had to read everything that came out.

BN: And then after you arrived at UCLA, you also started to do the work on the Bonus March.

RD: That's right, or what became the Bonus March. And that was finished before I left.

BN: Now when you were talking about the origins of Politics of Prejudice, you'd mentioned that you'd gone back and looked at a lot of the prior literature and felt like there wasn't a lot that had been done that was...

RD: Oh, I knew that. And in fact, while I was doing research for The Politics of Prejudice, I also was doing research for the book on Concentration Camps USA, in fact, that was constant. I always had that in mind, I always knew that that's what I had wanted to do. And it's a very fortunate thing, by the way, that there was the twenty-five year rule in one way, and that's because if I had not done the earlier piece, I would not have understood the roots of what happened better. So that was really a very fortunate happenstance, although I did not think so at the time. I remember being, I remember I really got into it. I was really very annoyed that I was having to do this thing that really did not interest me that much. Then, of course, the work I did on that was so important for the other work I did in immigration history and came my approach to immigration history. I had a family background, I'm a child of immigrants. Nevertheless, that put a twist, a turn, an always present point of view about the difference between race and ethnicity as it worked in American immigration. So that having done The Politics of Prejudice, was really, if you're going to chart it, the base from which both arms of the things I do, almost everything I have done... not quite, but almost everything I have done, stems from some aspect of something that I worked on in my dissertation. Now, you could say that, well, Franklin Delano Roosevelt really doesn't come out of that. And I was interested in Roosevelt long before I was interested in Japanese and Japanese Americans. I can remember being in conversation with my best friend of the first two years in graduate school, John Tazikas, long discussion of ours in which I'd said that I wanted to write, sometime when I was about seventy years old and retired, I'd want to do a big book about the New Deal or about Roosevelt. And my timing was a little off and I had no idea, no expectation of having an active professional life, or an active life, or a life, at eighty-six. Because if you want to predict a person's normal life expectancy, apart from the regular tables, the first thing you do is you look at the life expectancy of his mother and father. And my father didn't get to be fifty and my mother didn't get to be sixty. So I had no reason to expect that I would have a strenuous longevity. But all of it comes from that first work. That's the special tree from which everything else has branched out.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.