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TI: So I'm curious, as a historian, it would seem to me that using terms like "oppressor" and "oppressed" in these kind of works would be criticized. That you're taking a point of view, that you're not being an objective historian.

RD: Oh, yes. I have read that criticism, sometimes in book reviews of my work. But this is such a blatant case that there's not as much as there would be if we were writing about Democrats and Republicans. I think as a historian that this is the appropriate way to view these things. I think the historians need to have a moral compass. If they don't, their work is not useless, but not particularly valuable. Because it's very nice to know, for instance, all of the biographical details of Abraham Lincoln, what he had for breakfast and this sort of thing. But the really important thing to know about Abraham Lincoln is to understand his moral authority, how he exercised that positively, and, under certain circumstances, negatively. No human being ever lives up to all of his or her own moral standards, and certainly no politician does. In the large work I've just completed about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that becomes very, very clear.

TI: Well, that's what I was going to ask. So the World War II incarceration came under the administration of FDR, and I'm thinking in terms of, how could this happen? I mean, more than it being simply as the oppressed and the oppressor, FDR, I don't think of necessarily, I would ever use the term "oppressor" with him. And so what were the...

RD: In that particular instance he was. And he was the architect of a particular oppression, an oppression that is now generally recognized, which was not true when I started the work. Which is now generally recognized as a common charge -- I don't put it this way ever in my own words -- as "the worst violation of civil rights since slavery." It's a different kind of thing, and in many ways it's worse. I'm not saying it's worse than slavery, but in a moral sense you can say it's worse, because by the time this is done, we know more about what human rights ought to be than the founding fathers did. They knew a lot, they understood what tyranny was; that's why they put in some of the business about that we're trying to defend about the rights of the accused. The only crime mentioned in the Constitution is treason. The founding fathers put in, and they knew what treason was, they'd all committed it. And they wanted to make sure -- they committed it eventually -- but they had been accused of it when they weren't treasonable, but just somewhat dissatisfied members of the British Empire. They didn't start out wanting to separate. That was forced upon them by their position and the other people's position. They got there, and they committee treason, no two ways about it. But they wanted to make sure that you couldn't just charge treason.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.