Densho Digital Repository - Roger Daniels Interview I (Densho ID: ddr-densho-414-6)

<Begin Segment 6>

BN: So maybe we should go back to UCLA. So just to clarify, you said about the end of '57 you had kind of come up with this idea. What that your first semester at UCLA?

RD: Yeah.

BN: And then so can you talk a little bit about the research that you did that led to Politics of Prejudice and what were the key things that you looked at, or the key documents or key archives that you looked at?

RD: The most useful -- two single archives apart from the public record -- were the papers of two California progressive Republican politicians, Hiram Johnson and Chester Rowell. And slightly less important, the papers of James Duval Phelan who was a virulently anti-Japanese and anti-Asian Democratic politician. I was working at Bancroft Library, and when a green graduate student comes to a place like the Bancroft Library, they get treated like what they are, peons. The people in charge are nervous that they're going to do something foolish or use a pen and make an ink blot. They don't quite search you... maybe they do now with the Homeland Security procedures. I worked there most of the calendar year... well, let's say the academic year. I went up there in the summer of 1959, and I had a year's fellowship at the university, a regents fellowship, which was almost enough to live on. My GI money had run out by then, but I had saved some.

BN: You were single at that time?

RD: Yeah.

BN: When did you finish your coursework?

RD: Well, they had it rigged -- I wanted to get a master's degree, because there's always the problem that you're done with your coursework and you're writing your dissertation and you've only got a bachelor's degree, nobody's gonna hire you. If you're an ABD but have a master's degree, somebody will. And the rules that UCLA had seemed to provide, making sure that anybody who was a graduate assistant -- and I had a graduate assistantship at UCLA -- would have to take two years to get an MA. However, I had been an army bureaucrat, and one of the things I learned as an army bureaucrat is the first thing you've got to do is read the rules. And I read the graduate regulations, they weren't very much. And I discovered that there was an obscure paragraph that said that with permission, the instructor and the department involved, as many of nine hours of upper division work applied toward a graduate degree could be taken by examination, because as a graduate assistant you could only take so many hours. So I said, "Oh, ho." And I looked around and there were some very narrow courses taught by various people, one was Saloutos, that I could take and sit in on the lectures and then take the exam, and I'm a pretty good exam taker. So I was able to get my MA early in my second year. And before the second year was over, I passed my doctoral qualifying examinations so that for the third year at UCLA, I had no teaching obligations and had the fellowship. And I did the research, wrote the dissertation, finished it on the first of July. I think on the first of July I got the copy back from the typist. It was all ready to go, but my advisor, Theodore Saloutos, was in Europe on a Fulbright Fellowship and would not be back 'til the end of the summer, which meant that he could not approve the exam and set up my doctoral committee, my doctoral examination, until early in the fall semester, which meant that I could not get a degree in 1960, that my degree would be 1961. And I had no teaching job, and my money ran out, my stipend ran out on July 1st. And I applied for jobs and didn't get any. Had some interviews. I also began to have a social life, met the woman who became my wife. We decided to get married in the first week of August. My mother was horrified, so we didn't do anything. We had what we thought was a very long engagement, and we never got married until the second of October. By that time Saloutos had come back, I had no jobs at all, and he went to work.