Densho Digital Repository - Roger Daniels Interview I

Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Roger Daniels Interview I
Narrator: Roger Daniels
Interviewers: Brian Niiya (primary); Tom Ikeda (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: April 22, 2013
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-414

<Begin Segment 1>

[Ed note: Due to technical difficulties, the first thirty seconds of this interview is cut off.]

TI: Today is April 22nd, Tuesday, we're in Seattle. Doing the primary interviewer will be Brian Niiya, and secondary interviewer will be me, Tom Ikeda. We're interviewing Roger Daniels, and on camera is Dana Hoshide. And because this is going to be the first of several interviews, we're taking advantage of Brian's presence in Seattle to really sort of dive into Roger's -- especially in the '60s -- his time at UCLA and his start of graduate studies. And we'll pick up some of these other things, so we may be a little bit out of sequence with this first one, but we'll pick it up later. So with that, Brian, I'm going to turn it over and let you start.

BN: Okay, great. Yeah, as Tom mentioned, kind of wanted to talk about the origins of your interest in Japanese American studies and history, and maybe starting with what eventually became Politics of Prejudice. Maybe to back up, maybe to start with what brought you to UCLA in the first place, and also where the interest on studying Japanese Americans, what the origin of that was.

RD: Why don't we switch those two things around?

BN: Yeah, sure.

RD: Because I can date the first fairly precisely. Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, which was the first of December, 1944, I met, I think, the first Japanese American person I ever saw knowingly. This was in New York City at a party. I was introduced to this young man who was a young Nisei lawyer -- I didn't know the word, of course -- at a New York law firm. I knew someone who was slightly senior to him in that law firm but still a young lawyer. And he described, my friend wanted him to talk to everybody about this, and he talked a little bit about the camp he was in. If he mentioned the name of the camp, I have no memory of it because the individual camps, of course, meant nothing to me. And I got a chance to speak to him personally. I asked him where in Japan he had been born, and he said with some indignation that he hadn't been born in Japan. And I said, "Well, if you weren't born in Japan, what were you doing in a concentration camp?" Or whatever word I used, and I don't know that I used that particular term, or that he did. And he explained it to me, and I must say, I was dubious.

And sometime shortly thereafter, I think that week, or if it was a weekend party, the following week, I got myself to the New York Public Library at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, and went up to the Research Questions room and I asked did they have anything? And they had a little pamphlet by Carey McWilliams, his book wasn't out yet. And sure enough, that confirmed that there were citizens there. And I just thought -- I was no scholar, high school dropout, I was in the merchant marines at the time on a sort of voyage to voyage basis. Lied about my age, and nobody cared much if you were big enough, etcetera. And I knew that it was wrong, and I knew that it was against the Constitution, and was astounded that everybody in America wasn't. It did not become at that time a burning ambition to do something about it, although I looked for further information. I saw a few things in the newspapers about the end of exclusion. I think I read them after I heard about this. But the way they wrote those stories, you never saw, it wasn't rubbed in or stressed in the press that these were United States citizens; that term didn't come up very often. I did a number of things before I decided that I wanted to be a historian. And without a high school degree, just had to take an entrance exam, which was no problem.

TI: I'm sorry, Roger, just to interrupt, did you ever see that person again, that Nisei?

RD: No.

BN: Do you know who it was?

RD: No. No, I have no idea what his name was, no clear memory of what he looked like.

TI: But with a New York law firm?

RD: With a New York law firm. Hines, Rearick, Dorr & Hammond. I don't know where I dredged that up from, but that's the law firm. Not because he was a member, because that's with whom my friend was connected.

BN: And that was the same law firm?

RD: Yeah.

TI: That would be interesting to see if we can dig up that name. That person, there probably weren't very many lawyers in that...

RD: In 1957, or let's say 1956/'57, when I was preparing to graduate from college, University of Houston, I knew what I wanted to study, and I knew where I wanted to study. And what I wanted to study, not only was history, but what I wanted to specialize in, and I had my eye on a PhD right from the start of my entry into college, which was interrupted by service in the Korean War. I wanted to work on twentieth century African American civil rights, and I wanted to work with a distinguished historian named C. Vann Woodward -- "Vann" is spelled with two Ns -- at Johns Hopkins. I got accepted at Johns Hopkins and discovered before I accepted the acceptance that Woodward was resigning from Johns Hopkins, was going to go to Yale, but had a two year fellowship he was going to spend before that, and I hadn't applied to Yale anyway. So one of my safety schools was UCLA.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Going back to Woodward, why did you want to study with Woodward?

RD: Oh, because he was the outstanding historian of... and about the only historian of any stature who was writing about civil rights. John Hope Franklin had begun to write, but was not a well-known historian at that time, although he became a very good friend of mine. Got to UCLA and had my first interview with the man with whom I eventually worked. He asked me what I wanted to do for my dissertation, and I told him that I had some notion, I had a pretty exact notion. He said, "Gee, that's a great topic." But looking down at my vitae, because this was our first serious conversation, he said -- this was September 1957 -- he says, "In December you're going to be thirty years old. Your contemporaries are about to get -- and some of them who are very bright -- are already getting tenure. You're behind the curve. You've got to, if you want to succeed in a professional career, you've got to get started soon because people don't like to hire middle aged assistant professors. Therefore, you're going to have to do your coursework fast." I'd already explained to him, because he asked me about my preparation, that I was prepared to do that, that I could pass, he viewed this comment that's coming up with some skepticism I remember: "I'm prepared to pass my French and German reading examinations almost immediately." They were done in October. And he apologized to me for having questioned me in a joking sort of way. "And you need to pick a topic on which you can do work while you're doing your coursework, which means that you're not going to have very much of a social life." Well, I hadn't expected to have very much of a social life.

And he was a historian of immigration, and he said, "You might want to do something about immigrants because you're interested in twentieth century history and there are a lot of immigrants." And I said that I was really interested in doing, or I might be really interested, I thought for a while... I'm not sure this was in the same conversation, but I think it was. "Maybe I could do something about what they did to the Japanese in the Second World War." I'm sure I said it in just that way, or pretty close. He said, "Well, that'd be a good topic; that was a terrible thing. But there's a twenty-five year rule on most confidential documents, and I'm sure those are at least confidential. So that means that you can't get any non-public information until about 1970." And he thought for a while and we talked about other things, he says, "Why don't you go to the library and see how much work there's been done on Chinese and Japanese immigrants here on the West Coast? I'm sure we and USC and up in San Francisco at the Bancroft Library" -- I'm not sure he said the Bancroft Library, he might have said Berkeley rather than San Francisco -- "There's a lot of information here and I don't think there's very much good work being done on that topic." So I went to the library and that's where I spent my nights and part of the days from then until just before Christmas break.

And I came back and said, "Professor Saloutos, you're absolutely right." His name was Theodore Saloutos, S-A-L-O-U-T-O-S. He had a dual specialty: American immigration with a subspecialty within that of Greek Americans, he's of Greek ethnicity, and he was also a historian of American agriculture. "You were absolutely correct, there's no good work of a historical nature on either of those groups that I see, in my judgment. But that's just too much for a dissertation." The fact is, I eventually wrote that book. It was in 1988, it's called Asian America. I think that there ought to be enough information... and I listed some of the things I'd found and some of the manuscript collections at Berkeley that I'd found, and there were even a few at UCLA, although it did not have at that time a great manuscript library, about what was done to Japanese Americans -- I'm sure I said that -- in that way at that time, up to 1924, and starting with their initial coming here just after the Civil War. He said, "That early?" His eyebrows went up, "That early?" I said, "Yes, that early." And I had a long bibliography that I submitted to him of books and of archival sites I wanted to visit and he said, "Well, that sounds pretty good. Now get it done and get to work on other things." At that time, my assumption was I'd do the dissertation and get it published. I've never been wanting in self-confidence. And I knew that I wanted to do a second book sometime after 1970 on the wartime incarceration. And that would be it, because I was going to be essentially a historian of the politics of the New Deal. That was my December 1957 career plan.

TI: So these two pieces would really work together. You'd have first the immigration up through 1924, and then the second one would pretty much cover that prewar time and the war.

RD: Yeah. And that one, actually, the first chapter of that goes back and just touches base with some of that stuff. So that, yeah, this was already, this was at that time already seen as one continuous project, and, of course, then that was the end of it. Well, that didn't work out as we'll develop later. It seemed to me at the time that my lack of any significant knowledge of Asian languages, I had a horseback command of working-class Korean, because at certain times in my service in Korea I had a batch of Koreans I was responsible for who were not the KATUSAs who were the sort of well-trained or at least partially trained. Those were Koreans attached to the United States Army, but these were members of what they called the Korean Service Corps, who were people lacking in either the physical and/or moral capability to be in the Korean army. And that's not a very high reach at that time. A lot of these guys, even though they were doing engineering work, had only one hand, and that, of course, was because they had been caught stealing or thought to be caught stealing and had a hand chopped off. And they were a pretty rough bunch.

<Begin Segment 3>

But I eventually found out that the vast majority of Asian first generation -- pardon me, Asian second generation, first generation Americans -- like most immigrant groups, had very little command of serious Japanese; they could talk to Grandma. Or in some cases their mothers, but more likely Grandma, and that's about it. But if they had to do anything serious, they were absolutely at sea. They might be able to do the family name in a sort of sloppy brush stroke, but not much more. So that was not inhibitive. But even so, even if I had... well, if I'd had Asian languages, I don't know what might have happened, but I didn't, and I thought that that wouldn't stop me from doing significant further work. Because I was really, in The Politics of Prejudice, not writing about the Japanese, but writing about the oppressors of the Japanese. And the same is true -- to a lesser degree -- of the Concentration Camps USA book. This is what was done to them, although they begin to take a role. And as my work has progressed more and more, I'm focusing on Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals.

And in the book I've just finished, for instance, which deals with the Japanese American cases, which I dealt with in Concentration Camps USA, but in this book, I'm dealing with them not from the point of view of the government, but from the point of view of four Japanese American plaintiffs whose names you all know. And in the book I'm contemplating, to be done with Barbara Takei, one of the things I'm doing right now is looking for particular individuals, both oppressed and oppressors, to hang things on. Because I want to write not about a system -- although I'll write about a system -- the book is about... not focuses on Tule Lake, will be about Tule Lake. I've got one page, a one-page outline for the book. It's all fairly clear in my head of what I want to find out, but I haven't found it all out yet. Barbara knows more about it, I think, than any single person today, and to get her to work with me on it was... and it'll be, like Daniels and Takano, it'll be Daniels and Takei. Always pick a name in the first of the alphabet when you're in the army. Some of us sat around and said, "We're going to change our names to Aab, A-A-B," so we'll be first.

TI: Or Z-Z-Z so you'll never get volunteered.

RD: No, but none of my friends would ever volunteer for anything. [Laughs]

TI: But is fair to characterize -- so your early works, Politics of Prejudice and Concentration [Camps] USA, was really focusing more on the government action. And you're saying your later works you are looking at it from both sides a little bit more. Is that kind of what you're... to summarize what you were just talking about?

RD: I think that's true. I wouldn't... I think of it still more personally, I think of it in terms of oppressors and the oppressed, perpetrators and victims, in that sort of way. Because you're talking about both sides, that sort of assumes a kind of parity, a kind of equilibrium, well this is etcetera, etcetera, Republicans and Democrats, no, it's not like that. This is another country altogether.

<Begin Segment 4>

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.

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: But in the same way, so in FDR's time, it was much more evolved in terms of what you'd expect in terms of human rights. During FDR's time, there was a lot of racism.

RD: That's right.

TI: And so looking back now seventy-five years, I mean, that has evolved a lot. And so --

RD: Yeah, but he didn't believe in it; he was against it.

TI: Against the what?

RD: He was against most forms of racism and discrimination, very certainly was. And he put up with this for reasons that he never explained, never tried to explain it. He didn't live long enough. And I don't think that most of the explanations that are around are appropriate.

TI: So it was like a blind spot? When you say his views on racism were...

RD: My view -- and I will write this out in great detail in the book -- what was Roosevelt thinking in February 1942? He was not tremendously concerned about losing the war with Japan. He was not even concerned terribly about losing the war with Germany, which was a much more formidable opponent. He had incredible confidence, but he understood the power, the potential power of the United States and was now pretty well organized. Even at that early date he was terribly concerned about winning the peace. And what he remembered, and never let it slip out of his mind, that the man who became his political idol, Woodrow Wilson, had lost the peace because he had lost the Congress in the election of 1918. And he's thinking about -- he doesn't know when the war's going to be over, he knows it's not going to be over in 1942, and his plan was -- and it's not clear that it was planned yet, but he was already thinking about offensive action. And the North African invasion was originally planned, he pushed the army to have it early. He wanted it to happen before election, and it surely would have given a bounce before election. He had on his desk before him -- or he'd gotten before him -- he knew what was going on on the West Coast. He'd had a document, I described it in Concentration Camps in 1970, signed by every member of Congress from the three West Coast states and Republican, Democrat representatives and senators insisting on that. And it was clear that if the liberty of the West Coast Nikkei was continued, as it should have been, he might lose some seats and he didn't want to do that. So he went along with 9066, and if you read the thing very carefully, of course -- you both know this -- doesn't say anything about Japanese Americans, doesn't say anything about anybody, and it says absolutely nothing about incarceration; he talks about removal. And nobody knew that they were going to do. And he created the WRA -- I mean, we'll talk about this maybe in more detail later. But the real clincher for me... I'd thought for a long time that this was the case. That the real clincher for me came when I began to read the reports -- the man was then dead -- of the cardiologist who had been assigned to him full time after his heart condition, Dr. Bruenn, developed, was observed during the war. He'd had it before the war, but I don't want to get into his medical health too much. But Dr. Bruenn says that the worst blood pressure reading he ever had, and Roosevelt's blood pressure went up and down. It was never good, and sometimes very alarming. The absolute worst came not at a crucial time in the war, not in a crucial time in his health, when he was on a cruise, it was a wartime cruise -- nothing was better for his health than to be at sea, he just loved it. When he walked out of the -- and they always had first run movies. There was a movie made during the war called Wilson, which was one of the most political movies Hollywood ever made, and it was just Henry Cabot Lodge and those others, and Roosevelt stormed out of there -- he's being pushed in a wheelchair, so that's probably not an accurate term -- but he came out of there in a stormy mood muttering about, "They'll never do that to me, I've taken care of that," or some such words. And that's when the blood pressure, coming out of a movie in the evening, should have been reasonably low, but that's the worst reading he ever got. So that was perhaps his worst wartime fear; not losing the war, not that one of his four sons was engaged in combat, would be killed, not that millions, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be killed, but that the United States would win the war and retreat back into a kind of isolationist position, which was a political position that serious politicians had, and that's what he was concerned about. And I'm convinced -- I can't prove it because he never explained it -- but I do point out in ways that, in this book, that no other historian has stressed, the evidences, or what I think are evidences, of this particular fact. And I do, I have put together a series of statements that he made.

This was in my talk, you guys went, yesterday. Press conference on October 29, 1942. He's talking about what became the Bracero Program, and if you read his press conferences, they're under different rules than they are today. You couldn't quote him without his permission. So he really expanded, he really educated, or tried to educate, reporters. And he says... he's talking about that and he says, "Even right now, we've got Japanese working in the beet fields of Montana." They were also working in the beet fields of Utah, but he didn't say that. But that's what he said. He went on to say something else and somebody said, somebody asked him, first question obviously came from a Californian reporter, or a reporter who knew about California, but I'm sure it's a California reporter from a California paper. And asked him if, "these Mexicans are gonna replace the Japanese Americans and Japanese" -- he wouldn't say "Japanese Americans" -- "the Japanese in the California labor force." And he said, "I don't know that now." And then a little later a somebody yells -- obviously not a Californian and didn't know what was going on -- "Where did those Japanese come from, Mr. President?" Two word answer: "concentration camps." Boom. And then there are things he says after the Endo decision has been written but before it's released, and after the 1944 election. Another press conference, "Is it true that those people are going to be turned loose?" because the WRA was talking about that. Roosevelt said something to the effect of -- and this got in the papers -- "There are a lot of lawyers," he says, "who think we haven't got a right to hold citizens." And this was when the decision was already being made because Endo was being held up by the Supreme Court at the convenience of the War Department, which I talked about but didn't connect it to Roosevelt directly in Concentration Camps. Anyway, that's a long digression.

TI: But I think the point you're making is, so for Roosevelt to win the peace, he needed Congressional support. And here he had all of the western states, at least the coastal state congressional delegation all lined up wanting Japanese Americans to be removed from the West Coast, and feeling that need to keep them sort of on his side or at least, maybe not his side, but in a position where they would be helpful in terms of winning the peace in the future.

RD: That's the choice he took. He could have done something else. He could have embarked on an education program, could have said something about it. He was a powerful man. There were certain people he wouldn't have satisfied, but among those it was Hiram Johnson who couldn't be satisfied on the subject of international affairs by anybody. He was a dyed in the wool isolationist. He died on VJ Day, so he had no say anyway. But that's what I think, but we don't know, he never explained. What he would have said if he wrote the book, if he wrote the book that he said he was gonna write, he'd have a lot of help with that, or some kind of farewell address and this sort of thing, that's something else again. He might well have dealt with it and tried to explain himself and this sort of thing, but that eventuality never came about.

<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.

<Begin Segment 7>

TI: So, Roger, let me summarize this to make sure I have this straight. So July 1, 1960, is when you were finished with your dissertation.

RD: That's right.

TI: But your advisor was traveling. And it was August 1960 where you decided to marry Judith?

RD: Well, I think we decided to marry each other. [Laughs]

TI: And you waited until, you said October? Two more months you waited.

RD: Well, we waited, and actually, it got very complicated. Once we waited, they wanted to have a big fancy wedding and on and on, we were going crazy. And I said, "Listen. We either got to get Cecil B. DeMille to run this thing or get rid of it." Her mother had this stack of invitations all printed and everything else. Used them as bridge scores for years. But they hadn't gone out. So we got married in their living room with her mother, her father, her brother, their maid, the rabbi, the rabbi's wife, and Judith and I. And a chuppah, we had a portable chuppah. Do you know what a chuppah is?

TI: No.

RD: A chuppah is a, in this case, a portable stand with a top on it, and the couple is supposed to be standing under that for some reason or another when they exchange their... so that was done.

BN: And where was this?

RD: In Los Angeles on Holman Avenue if you know where that is. It's very close to UCLA.

BN: Was she also a student?

RD: She was a graduate student, but we never had classes together and we met... I wasn't a TA but I was to finance, as a university scholar they let me keep my desk. And she came to see someone there, she had been, she was doing her undergraduate work at Barnard and got ill and came up and finished at UCLA and had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in history, and was studying. And she came to see somebody, and we met and had our first date just after the Fourth of July. So it wasn't a whirlwind romance, but it was pretty quick. And "marry in haste, repent at leisure." Well, we've had now fifty-three years to repent and haven't yet, but you know, repentance will come maybe someday.

BN: It seems, I mean, if my math is right, you seemed like you completed your whole PhD program in basically three years.

RD: Less than three years.

BN: And then got married fairly...

RD: I got married, I got an MA, a completed dissertation but not approved, and a fiance in less than three years. But I had some advantages that most doctoral students don't have. I was older, I had been a professional writer, I knew how to write, and I was a fairly quick organizer and writer. The current book, for instance, which is some ninety thousand words, was actually begun last January and completed in November. No, I'm sorry, it was completed in early December, which is pretty quick. Now, most of that was based on research I'd done a long time ago, but there was new material all over the place, and I was able to discover all kinds of oral history materials, some of which were associated, I got at Densho. I'll never forget the video of Gordon's that you sprang at that meeting for the coram nobis thing. It was just...

BN: Did you charge him the fees for that?

RD: No, we don't charge each other. We take each other to dinner, etcetera.

<Begin Segment 8>

BN: The other question I was going to ask, actually, is you had alluded to your advisor noting that you were a little older. And I'm wondering if in your own mind you felt an additional urgency to get, both professionally and personally, to really get going on things.

RD: Oh, yeah. When you approach thirty and you haven't really gotten anywhere, you concentrate your mind wonderfully if you have any serious ambitions, and I'm a reasonably ambitious person. Not ambitious for necessarily the same things that everybody's ambitious for, but I was ambitious for a chance to have my say about certain matters.

So anyway, I'll tell you something about the relationship I had with my mentor. He came back, got the dissertation, got it back to me annotated and approved, except he wanted a final summary. I said I didn't need it, he agreed I didn't need it and said, "Do it anyway." So I did it, and that was approved. And he told me... classes were about, this was about two or three weeks before classes started. And he said, "Be in my office," at such and such a time. And this was the end of the week, either a Thursday or a Friday, I think it was a Thursday, before classes started. And I'm sitting there, well, I didn't know what he wanted. I'd find out. I sat there and he says, I came in and we talked a little bit, he says, "Sit there a minute," and he got the phone. And he called up University Extension and he said, "You know that class I'm scheduled to teach downtown? I suddenly discovered that I have professional duties and I can't possibly teach it." There was some kind of noise on the other end of the phone. He says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. However, I think I can find a graduate student who's already completed his dissertation who might be willing to take that course if you are interested. Well, I'll see if I can round him up. I'll call you later." And he put it down, we talked about the dissertation a little bit, and he explained to me that he'd been pushing people in the department and pushing various things, and that he'd arranged for me to have a half-time position as an administrative assistant in the Institute of Industrial Relations, what the hell that was about I didn't have the foggiest idea. And in addition, one of the members of my committee, a historian named Page Smith, was friendly with the novelist Irving Stone, who was having trouble understanding American puritanism and John and Abigail Adams about whom he was about to write a book, or was in the process of writing a book, and needed somebody to go through the Adams papers which were on microfilm out at the Huntington Library but they could get them from me. And then I met with him and worked out the other details. So that was two jobs, then later he called back and said, well, he'll do that. "I'll send him over to sign a contract tomorrow," or the next day or this sort of thing. So I had three part-time jobs. I eventually got a job the next year at a small public college in Wisconsin, and I took a pay cut. However, given the differences between the cost of living in Los Angeles, Judith and I had an apartment in Santa Monica... we couldn't get anywhere near Westwood. You probably don't know what the rent district is like at Westwood.

TI: Santa Monica is pretty expensive, too.

RD: Not then. Santa Monica was much less expensive. If you were very close to the beach -- we were on Eleventh Street, one block off Santa Monica, perfect for the bus, etcetera. So that was, so I took a pay cut the following year. But the cost of living in Platteville, Wisconsin, was significantly less than the cost of living in Los Angeles.

TI: We're an hour into it, why don't we take a short break?

RD: I want to finish what I'm saying here about this to give you an idea of what it was like in a town like Platteville. And Grant County, which I studied a little because I lived there for two years, was so economically depressed that it ranked second of all the counties in the United States in terms of the percentage of the total personal income that came from social security. The highest was in St. Petersburg, Florida. And when I walked into the bank, I was informed that as a college professor with a munificent salary -- it was five thousand and something dollars -- that I had an automatic 250 dollar overdraft. I have never before or since had an overdraft at a bank or wanted one, and I never used it. But it's sort of an indication of the difference that one with a five thousand dollar income in 1960, right on the eve of John F. Kennedy... let me strike that. Kennedy was already President by the time I got there.

<Begin Segment 9>

BN: And then to go back to UCLA and to California, one thing I was wondering about is if you got to know or were involved at all with what were now, what was a significant Japanese American population in California, either southern or northern during the time that you were there.

RD: Well, when I came back, one of the first things that happened was I went around to see the people I knew before, and to put it back, I got hired back as an assistant professor of history.

BN: Well, actually I meant when you first, from your grad student time.

RD: Well, I had no significant contact with Japanese Americans until I went up to San Francisco and started interviewing people I could discover who were community leaders and old enough to know some things. And the initial reception was, to say the least, cool. Not in its current sense, but cool as in frigid. And the breakthrough came when I went to see the elder Abiko at the Nichi Bei and he was quizzing me to see what I knew about Japanese American things. Asked me about the Gentlemen's Agreement and I knew about that. He knew some things that weren't true. And then he started talking about the 1924 business and I said, "Yes," and I talked about what I knew about Secretary of State Hughes and the Japanese ambassador Hanihara, and he said, "That's not his name, his name is such-and-such." I said, "No, Sir, I'm afraid it was Hanihara," and I spelled it. "No, no, no." And I said, "Yes." So he said, "I'll show you." He went over and he picked up a book, then he looked at another book, and I think he looked at a third book, and they all said, apparently, Hanihara. And he came back and was very apologetic and hollered out something. A few minutes later, somebody came in with tea. I figured I was in. And he gave me, he told me who to see, and he talked to them, and that helped a great deal.

I began to get a feel for Issei. I'd had some briefings from people. The historian of Japan there, Robert Wilson, who later collaborated on a book with Bill Hosokawa, had given me some things to say about dealing with community leaders. And I knew full well why they weren't necessarily thrilled to see me, and they were people that didn't want to talk about it. But most of the community people I talked to were... but there were no, there was one Japanese American graduate student. Matter of fact, we were fellow teaching assistants with Saloutos although he was a specialist in Japan. This was Masakazu Iwata who was a lifelong friend. And I don't know if you know anything about his background; he didn't like to talk about it. He was not a long-term Kibei, but he was trapped in Japan and wound up in the Japanese army. So he was very much an older person. And I don't know what he did, and he didn't want to talk about it. I suspect that he was involved in some kind of intelligence work in Tokyo, which meant if a bomb didn't fall on him he was reasonably safe and reasonably sheltered, and until very, very late in the war, reasonably fed. So if you had to be in Japan, I guess that would have been better to be, say, down south somewhere. But I don't know that any of this is true. It's clear he didn't want to talk about it, and I wasn't going to press him about it. He later developed this interest in Japanese agriculture. His family had been agricultural and wrote that two-volume history. But his major thesis, which was a published book from his doctoral dissertation, was a biography of Okubo, the man who's called the "Bismarck of Japan," a Meiji-era figure of some substance. I've read it. I have no qualifications to evaluate it, but it seems to be a substantial, well-respected work.

But I had very little contact with Japanese, and there weren't that many around. They were beginning to come. When I came back... let me make sure I'm right here. Academic '61, '62 and '63, I'm teaching in Platteville, Wisconsin. Then I come to UCLA, so I'm coming back to UCLA three years later, but four years since I've been in a classroom. And the Nisei presence is much, much greater at that time, although there'd always been Nisei at UCLA, many, many more so than Berkeley. And when we talk about teaching at UCLA if we do, I'll talk about experience with Japanese American students.

<Begin Segment 10>

RD: But the first Japanese American person I would call my friend was Harry Kitano. And when I returned to UCLA in the fall of 1963, I went around to see the people I'd seen before and I went over to the Institute of Industrial Relations and saw Irving Bernstein, a senior political scientist, but really a historian. He's written the best history of labor during the Second World War in the United States. There's a new book now that may be as good, but certainly in his time he was the outstanding historian. And he said that there was a new young man, a professor from Berkeley named Harry Kitano that I ought to meet. So we met and very quickly got along. He knew my work and I knew his. There weren't that many books on Japanese Americans published in the early 1960s. Maybe of the ones that have survived and are still significant, Harry and I wrote one way or another, but not together.

TI: At this point -- I'm not familiar with Harry's writing. So what at this point had he written?

RD: One book, his doctoral dissertation. Japanese Americans... something about culture.

BN: You're talking about the Evolution of a Subculture book?

RD: Yeah. Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, there we go. With help I can remember anything, even some things that never happened. [Laughs] So I liked his stuff and he liked mine, we became very friendly.

BN: Now you're talking about, this is when you came back?

RD: This is in '63. This is '63 post. And we eventually agreed to try to write a book together. And my wife has been a tremendous support in everything I did, and gave me always very good and sensible advice. This is the one thing that she was wrong about. "Roger," she says, "you shouldn't do that. You're two very, very different people. Your personalities are entirely different; you're gonna clash, you're never gonna get to agree on a book, and you'll waste time and lose a friend." And I told her that I didn't think that was the case. And it's the only thing that I can think of, of a major decision, that Judith was on the wrong side of. Because Harry and I wrote four books together, one of which went through several editions, one of which the first was a massive bestseller. It was the first academic book written for paperback that could be used in classes anywhere that had the word "racism" in it. And it was really a book about California, and I forget what our title was, but it had California in it. And Prentice Hall, without changing the contents -- and we did say a couple things about national stuff -- said, "No, we're gonna call this American Racism." They said, "Look, we understand marketing, Professor. Don't worry about it." And they used to give us printouts of this thing. One of the things that always stunned me, I found out about it later, why later. But one of the greatest places for that book, quarter after quarter after quarter, was Anchorage, Alaska. Well, there was one big course in Anchorage, Alaska -- in the Anchorage College, which was a community college, not a university -- that everybody had to take, that was about... I don't know what they called it, and they probably didn't call it this, but it was about the varieties of ethnicity, not just in Alaska but in the United States. And they used it. I mean, I imagine they papered walls with it eventually, but they were selling hundreds of copies every semester because that's how many students. And it went down -- although they continued to use the book because there were a lot secondhand -- but it was intellectually a fruitful and successful proposition. And we each continued to do our own works. And the only thing we ever disagreed about was baseball.

TI: How'd you disagree on baseball? Different teams?

RD: Yeah, he was a Dodger fan by adaptation, you know, the Dodgers came to L.A. And I was a Giants fan by natural means. [Laughs] Based in New York, I had very little use for the move to San Francisco. But as long as Willie Mays was playing, that was my team. And I could never have any affection for the Dodgers under any circumstances no matter where they moved.

BN: I won't ask you about Willie Mays on the Mets.

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: Wanted to go back a little bit. I'm sure we'll get back to other collaborations with Harry Kitano later. But before we broke, you started talking a little bit about you first faculty position in Platteville. So wonder if we could go back there and talk about how that came about, and whether... curious about your wife's reaction to leaving L.A. to go to someplace like that also.

RD: Well, she was prepared to go anywhere. But it was culture shock for her more than me. Judith was born in -- actually born in New York City, but her people lived in New Jersey. Her father was a lawyer there and they moved to L.A. after the war. So she was an L.A. girl and that's what she remembered. But she'd flown back and forth to Barnard a number of times on family trips. And as we traveled in a car from Santa Monica to Platteville -- I don't know if you know where Platteville is, but it's down in the corner where Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin come together, and close to the Mississippi River. Somewhere in Nebraska, she looked at me and she said, "You know, Roger, you're right. This is a big country." We weren't doing... and then when we got there, my goodness. When people found out we were Jewish, a number of people in town wanted to know if we knew the other Jew, who was a scrap dealer. And we never met him. His daughter was, his daughter became Miss Wisconsin. But they didn't like in Platteville, it wasn't Jews, but Catholics. Catholic faculty members there had felt it. There had apparently never been a Jew on the faculty there. It's now Platteville State University, but it was then the State College and Institute of Technology, it was largely a mining school. And it sent a lot of engineers to California because you had to have a degree to work and to do all these jobs, and that looked like big money to anybody who was in Platteville. But the economics there were so great that if you wanted gas -- we lived short of, out of town on Magazine Street, that's where there used to be a military magazine for the storage of arms. Much of the lead that got fired south during the Civil War was mined in the Galena Platteville area, more down in Galena, which is in Illinois, but just across the border. I don't think I mentioned Illinois, 'cause that's on this side of the river and I was thinking on that side of the river. But if you wanted to get your car gassed up and didn't want to go get gas yourself, you called up and they came out, two guys came out in a pickup truck. One of them got in your car, they drove back, filled the gas thing up, did what had to be done to the car, always came back spotless, with no extra charge because there were several gas stations and great competition between them. So that gives you some idea of what it was like. Can you imagine? But it was a very poor place. Academic standards were not very high, but in my first class was one of the best students I ever taught, still a friend. And about twenty years ago, I went out to Dartmouth to participate as a visitor in his installation as president of Dartmouth.

BN: It's your first class.

RD: Yeah, he was in my first class. In fact, he was seated in the front row. It was a small classroom, good sized class, but there wasn't a lot of room in that place, if you can imagine. Big fellow, sat with his feet stuck out, and I walk around when I talk. And he seemed never to take a note, and was not sleeping but sort of sitting sleepy-eyed. And I was a culture shock to the people there. Most of the faculty were giving mostly multiple-choice examinations with maybe one essay question. I'd seen some of that at the University of Houston, but there was none of that at UCLA and there had never been any of that in my classes. One class once complained, a small class at UCLA complained that they wanted a multiple choice test. One guy got up and said, "I didn't do very well. I don't know if I'd do this well, but my high school, we had multiple choice tests." And there's a lot of -- you know what would happen, the class said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." They knew they could approach me. I said, "Well, if you want to, I'll give you a multiple choice test. But remember, it's going to be conducted the way a multiple choice test should be. And to each question that you have, there are three possible grades, plus point for a right answer, minus point for a wrong answer, and no points at all for a blank answer." And there was a little nervousness in the class, and some people said, "No, no, no," and they took a vote. And it was like two-thirds said, "Yeah, we'll take a multiple choice," etcetera, and I gave one. And they never wanted to see another one again. I worked very hard in constructing it. For instance, a whole list of historical events, some of them rather obscure, "List them in precise chronological order." And it's hard to make just one mistake. If there were seven on the list, that was a seven percent question, because there were always a hundred questions to make the arithmetic simple. And some students as a result wound up not with zeroes, but with negative grades. And I'd had experience with the other kind of test grading at the University of Houston. And one student at the University of Houston achieved almost the impossible, a three hundred question final exam, all multiple choice, some true and false, some pick the right answer, etcetera. Two hundred and ninety-eight consecutive wrong answers, one right answer, and another wrong answer. Almost, I took it in to the professor and said, "Here's one that's almost perfect." He says, "Oh?" and looks for it, and then saw what kind of perfection it was. [Laughs] And by the way, in that class, eventually, I never counted that exam toward their grades. It was a special exam, but nobody ever asked me for a...

<Begin Segment 12>

TI: And Roger, how did you get to Platteville? I mean, how did you get that job?

RD: It was advertised. It was a Wisconsin job, Theo Saloutos grew up in Milwaukee, had degrees from what was then -- not what it is now, now it's the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, but it was something separate. It was a state school, but it did not have anything like the prestige of the Madison campus. It still doesn't, but it's up higher now. And he had all sorts of connections and it turns out he knew people there. And wrote a letter, made a telephone call. Was I interviewed for that job? That was in the old days where old boys networks placed people, almost always boys, in ways today that would seem unethical, but it was standard procedure then.

TI: And during this time, did you continue with research?

RD: Well, the first task I had there was to deal with the proofs of my first book, and I had a big fight with the University of California Press over several things, but that's another story. Yeah, I continued to do research, there were summers, I was reading, I always went to historical meetings, I used to go to a minimum of two a year every year, except when I was in Europe, and being in Europe was almost like a historical meeting. Yes, I was already, I was working very, very hard at that time on one book, the Concentration Camps book. But when I got to UCLA, Irving Bernstein, in that same conversation where he told me to talk to Harry Kitano, talked to me about the papers of Pelham D. Glassford that UCLA had. Glassford was chief of police, general in the army, had been the youngest general in the AEF, but retired early and became chief of police in Washington. Title wasn't chief of police, but that's what he was, in Washington, D.C., which didn't have a city government then but was run by district commissioners appointed by the President. And he was in charge of the Bonus March. Irving Bernstein had written about the Bonus March, was the first person to use his papers, but thought that there was a fuller story to be told there, and told me about him and said that that was a good idea. And I looked at the papers, and my initial thought was that I would do an article for a historical journal. It was going to be called "A Policeman's Lot: Pelham D. Glassford and the Bonus Army."

<Begin Segment 13>

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.

<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Who came up with the title of the book The Politics of Prejudice?

RD: By the way, it had been used, not as a title of a book, but as a subtitle. I found that out after I used it, but you can't copyright a title. And it's in Barnhart's book as a subtitle. And then the rest of it is a horror, The Politics of Prejudice... how does it go? It goes on forever, the subtitle. But you can do that with an academic book. This originally came out in a university monograph, which was really a gray, dull thing. And by the way, what you got, in those days, there was no signed contract, you got fifty-three copies, that was it. But it was a calling card.

BN: So no royalties at all.

RD: No. And then thanks to some friends of mine who were well-connected, arranged for a paperback version. They had to go to the Press to get permission, and I think the Press took some of it, but I got royalties on that. And then I discovered accidentally that after that and before the paperback was out, that they had allowed a small book publisher, reprint publisher, to publish a hardback version without telling me or giving me any money about it, and they eventually did that after I caught 'em. But it delayed the paperback edition for a while because that had just come out in the paper. My publisher was a very ethnical man, said, "If I bring this out now, that publisher won't sell any books at all, because he's marketing that at a higher price, and I'm marketing this much more attractive thing. And then eventually under different management, University of California Press, after the rights drew out for the other thing, they put out an edition. And then at some anniversary, they put out a -- although there was no difference in the text -- they put out a special commemorative edition which was very nice, and all of which I got royalties on. But I've never submitted another manuscript to the University of California Press.

BN: And that, I guess it had the desired effect of getting you out of...

RD: Oh, yeah. And I was very lucky. It got reviewed in the right place, the American Historical Review, about this much type. In very, very rapid time, it was a small book and it's well-written, easy to read. And the first sentence contains the phrase: "written with clarity, accuracy and grace." An absolute rave review. Some people thought I was far too partial. Couple of the reviews were obviously written by people who still had reservations about citizenship for "those people." But in general, I've been very fortunate in my reviews. They're good books, but good books don't always get good reviews, and I've been -- with a few exceptions, and never by anybody who amounted to anything -- I've had very, very good reviews from some of the top people in the country. And I just got one, not a review, but a blurb, unsolicited by me, from David Kohl, who is the leading legal opponent of Bush and Obama's policies at Guantanamo and elsewhere. And it's just a rave, this is for the new book. Just an absolute rave review that'll do me a lot of good. He's a distinguished professor of law at Georgetown University and one of the most... and most of the blurbs come from your friends or your colleagues and they've got to be taken cum grano salis. Except for his books, I've never seen him or heard of him. I mean, I've seen him, I know who he is, I've read his books, but I've never met him personally or had anything personal to do with or asked him to do it. So that it seems to be that much, the music seems to be that much sweeter.

<Begin Segment 15>

BN: So how did the move back to UCLA come about?

RD: Well, very simply. I didn't apply, I was invited. I was the first person invited, first graduate of UCLA's history department to be invited back. And I discovered when I got there, not everybody was in favor of that.

TI: And why was that? Why weren't certain people in favor?

RD: Well in one particular case, because he had a candidate of his own. And there were a number of divisions in the department. It wasn't as bad as Berkeley.

TI: But to go to the unprecedented step of the first time invitation back, grad student, there must have been a strong sentiment to get you back. I mean, I'm surprised there was still that dissention. If there was enough, that probably would have stopped the invitation.

RD: Well, all this is ex post facto. Nobody ever told me anything. I'm sure that Theodore Saloutos had something to do with it, I'm pretty sure that John Caughey had something to do with it, and these things get voted on. And that department, as I quickly discovered, quite often split on things. But it wasn't like the Senate, you couldn't just delay it. [Laughs] If you had a position to fill, you either filled it or you lost it, and nobody wanted to do that. So that's what happened.

BN: How big a department was it at that time?

RD: It was a good sized department. There were all kinds of special areas. Gustav von Grunebaum in Middle Eastern Studies, you know, didn't have any students, but they had a lot of support. It was a good sized department. For a long time, it had been essentially a farm club for Berkeley, and there were still people holding down jobs there when I came who had been planted there by people from Berkeley who shouldn't have been full professors anywhere. Not very many, but there were some. But it was becoming an important department. Not nearly as important as it is now. It was very much inferior to Berkeley in all things. That's not true anymore. There are some things that had done better there than at Berkeley, and some things that are done better at Berkeley, but it's a big department. Most people today, if they had to choose between going to UCLA or going to Berkeley would probably put more weight on whether they preferred to live in a place like Berkeley or in a place like UCLA than because of differences. Because there are no real differences in the pay, no real difference in the quality of students, but what do you like better? There are people who would prefer to live in Los Angeles, and there are people who prefer to live in Berkeley. And there are people who would prefer to live somewhere else and not in California at all.

<Begin Segment 16>

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.

<Begin Segment 17>

BN: So you're continually doing this work on research, on what would lead to Concentration Camps USA, the twenty-five years comes, what happens at that point, or what opens up?

RD: Well, I go charging into the National Archives, and it turns out that while yes, all this material has been declassified, before you can look at it, somebody has to stamp it. Under today's conditions, I don't know what would have happened. It's a different world now, and they do things very differently. But there were two guys declassifying papers for me when I went there. And I used every minute that the place was open. Sometimes you have to wait for things, and I was never as eager... that's not the right word... adventuresome or insistent as one of the most accomplished American researchers, that's at the University of Michigan, Sidney Fine, who had two projects going, and he'd run from one to the other while they were putting materials up, and he always had stacks of material waiting for him. And they don't like that, but he would do it. They don't like to have too much sitting around and out.

But I got through all kinds of things, and I have to say that the first thing I did was not go to the National Archives. The first thing that I did was go to the office of the Chief of Military History, who at that time was a man named Stetson Conn, C-O-N-N, whose work I discovered when I was doing the earlier search. He had a 1959 article, and I discovered the uses of the official military army histories which too few people who are not military, just military historians, utilized, because they're very, very good stuff. And his essay on the origins of the policy of what he called evacuating Japanese Americans, published in 1959 and 1960 in various versions, and official army documents, very good. So I had an appointment with him by mail, told him what I wanted to do, and we talked, and gave me some advice. And then he said, "Would you like to see my notes?" I said, "Yes, that would be very, very nice." And he was ready for that, and he took me to a room he had all set up, and there were boxes and boxes and boxes; I spent three days. Paid my respects, left, and then he said, "Could I take a look at your notes?" And I thought, "Ugh." I had some dynamite. He goes through them very carefully and a big smile creeps up on his face and he says, "I'm glad you found that." And that was my bomb. I had it on a separate piece of paper. But it raised an interesting question in my mind, and I left, and he'd been very helpful. And every piece of information he had was labeled with where it was, so I knew where to look. I wasn't just going in and saying, "Well, I got to look at all this stuff." I went some other places, but really, that was a road map, an itinerary.

BN: So he had access to some of this material?

RD: Oh, he'd had access to anything he wanted.

BN: Right, but no one else, no one outside the government had access to it.

RD: Yeah, and publish it. And it wasn't in the Archives. But the question is why he hadn't used it. I never asked him that question. I said something, and he muttered something about, "I was lied to about that." I'm not sure that's a direct quote, but something like that. And what that particular set of words was was a document of John J. McCloy's quoting himself in an argument with the attorney general, in which he expressed himself very vigorously in saying, "If you're telling me if it's a question of the security of the United States, the Constitution of the United States is just a scrap of paper to me." And that's dynamite. And years later... not years later. I eventually found that piece there, and when I'm in the Archives, as opposed to being in Stetson Conn's office, I don't have to write it down. They would microfilm it for you. They won't do that now. You have to go do your own Xeroxing, but there was no Xeroxing in those days. There was copying, but not Xeroxing. When that particular document came, it wasn't on a microfilm reel. It came to me in a personal letter addressed. And when I opened it up, there were holes cut out around that particular phrase. Well, I knew what the words were. And in the original preface to the Concentration Camps book, I described this document and its censoring. And my wife said to me -- I don't know if she remembers this or not. She read it; she reads everything I write. She said, "You know, they're not going to like that back at the National Archives." I said, "I know, I know, I know." I thought about it some more, and this is when I was, I finished this book in Laramie, University of Wyoming, and I'd made friends with somebody in the federal records center down in Denver. And I went down and I talked to him about this, and I showed him the preface, and I thought I knew what would happen. And lo and behold I get -- that letter was a form letter from somebody, "This was left out of your other shipment, here it is," and then that thing came up. So maybe ten days later I get a letter from the Archivist of the United States apologizing for this, saying that the person had been disciplined, lieutenant had been disciplined, and that it was improper, etcetera, and here is the full text without the part taken out. So my preface now reads... not in my preface, but in the acknowledgements part, "I thank the Archivist of the United States for restoring to me a document that had been improperly censored by one of his subordinates." I did that because, as my wife had suggested, and I knew I would be back there again. And it might well be that some people wouldn't give me -- nobody's going to stop me, but if they want to screw you up, they can be slow and drag their feet and this sort of thing. So that's it.

And I'd run into that once before from my research on the Bonus March. There was no city government of Washington at the time. This would have been while I was teaching at UCLA. I got hold of an awful lot of stuff, and again, before I went to go to the archives, and a lot of the stuff was not in the archives as the story will later say. I went to see somebody, and in this case I went to see a congressman named Wright Patman who had been -- we're talking about 1962, 1963, 1964, somewhere in there, probably '64 or '65. Back in 1932 he had been the major spokesman for the Bonus and he's still there, he's now a powerful committee chairman. And I introduced myself to him in a letter, and introduced myself in a way that I do not usually do in that I started off by saying though I now teach at the University of California, I was an undergraduate at the University of Houston, and so he thought I'm a Texan. He's from Texas. And he said, "Yes, come see me," etcetera, so I came to see him, talked to him, met him in his office, told him what I wanted to do, and he says, "Well, somebody ought to have done that a long time ago. I've got a lot of material. Not here." He was a committee chairman, so he had two offices. He may have had three offices, but he showed me another one and says, "I got a lot of stuff on the Bonus March in here. This is one of my research offices, and you can come anytime you want to, and here's a key to the room. I'll leave a note downstairs that you're to have complete access." He was in one of the subsidiary buildings. I don't know if any of you have been in Washington in the summertime, but it can be brutal. And I was in a non-air conditioned hotel.

So I got up really early in the morning, and the first morning I was there, I was there about six. About six-fifteen, in comes Patman. He sees me working, and he just straight out, "Son," he said, "you're a person after my own heart. I just remembered I got one thing in this drawer I don't want anybody to see." And he took it out and he said, "Everything else is yours." So that helped. One of the places I had to go was the office of the District Commissioner, and they had a lot of stuff. And they let me write in, let me go through stuff, and I copied all, had all sorts of things copied, doing my own copying, but at their expense. As I'm about to leave, up shows... what was his title? Anyway, the Chief Attorney, and he's not going to let any of that stuff out. I asked, "Can I use a phone call?" "Sure," he said. He was a decent fellow, but he said, "I can't let you do that, the regulations," you know what lawyers are like. So lo and behold, Patman's in his office, and I tell him what's going on, he says, "Will you give that gentleman the phone please?" I said, "Congressman Wright Patman wants to speak to you." He hadn't been listening to what I was saying even though he was right there, he was doing something else. He suddenly turned a little green. And I could hear Patman on his phone because he could raise his voice when he wanted to. He wasn't a Texas politician for nothing. And it went something like this: "What is your name?" and he told him his name, says, "Now why, Mr. So-and-so, an employee of the United States government, why are you interfering with a young Texas scholar who's a personal friend of mine? Do you want me to talk to," and he mentioned the name of the guy who was chair of the district attorney, "my friend So-and-so?" etcetera, etcetera. And this guy's turning greener and greener and greener. Well, you can imagine. I was about ready to go home, I'd done all my archive work. Well, anyway, some of the stuff still had to be copied, and I was supposed to pick it up the next day. And he explained that to Patman, he says, "Well, I don't want there to be any confusion, because my friend will be leaving and he's got a lot to do. I want you to deliver that material to him at his hotel at night, and you do it personally." And I went out to dinner, and I came back, and this guy's sitting in the lobby. He was very glad to see me, gave it to me, and I said, "I will reassure him that you did everything he requested, and I'm sure he'll be very grateful to you. He can be a good friend when you're on the right side of him," etcetera. So I've been very lucky. But some luck comes because you do things the right way, and some luck comes because it's just luck. And I've had a lot of good luck in my life.

<Begin Segment 18>

TI: When you say "do it the right way," what's the right way? How do you get such access, such cooperation from these people in power?

RD: Well, I ask for it in a polite way, I treat 'em with respect. There are people who I have reason to believe -- this goes back to, say, Abiko. I'd read some of his stuff, I knew the sort of thing that he'd say, and I thought that he was the kind of person who would like to have this story out so that he's somebody I could talk to. I wouldn't try this on just anybody. And not everyone that you approach thinking that they will be cooperative, not everybody cooperates. So I remember the happy times. I could dig up some other times where I didn't get access, I was denied, or people told me things that I thought were wonderful, said, "But, you know, you can't possibly print that," etcetera. Those are some of the worst words I've ever heard in my life. You're talking to somebody, they say something particularly good, you've been listening for an hour, and all of a sudden they've given you a gem that you can use. You start to write it down, says, "Oh, you can't write that down, you can't say that. I don't want that to appear in my name." So what are you going to do? You play it the way it looks like, you try to be intelligent and plan it the right way, you try to present yourself in a way that you think would appeal to him without being totally unscrupulous and lying and this sort of thing. And as I say, I've been very fortunate, and there are a lot of people... I've been dealing with issues that a lot of people feel very strongly about, and some of them feel strongly positive about it and will cooperate. They might not have cooperated in the same way on another issue. A lot depends on when you do this. Now it's an easy thing to talk about. I'll never forget how stunned I was in the wake of 9/11 to find that three television networks wanted me to talk to them. And I said yes to the first and no to the other two because it'd be all the same night, this was the night after. Which really meant that to a greater extent than I realized, the basic experience of knowing about the evacuation to become almost a part of the wallpaper of American life for well-informed people, and journalists tend to be well-informed, that was not true when I began. There are questions I got when I'd be interviewed for the Concentration Camp book by newspapermen and journalists and television people were incredulity.

TI: Well, I'm impressed that after 9/11 these journalists found you so rapidly, too. I mean, how did they know you were the one to talk with? I guess I don't hold journalists in as high regard as you do, so that's why I'm asking.

RD: Well, if they looked at one book... what journalists do, they ask people. And the network I talked to told me that Robert Dallek had recommended that they talk to me, 'cause I knew Bob, Bob and I were assistant professors together at UCLA. Hadn't seen each other in years, but he knew what I did, and he reads. So somebody tells him, the television folks in particular have to have people who, all of them have a historian or two on tap, mostly people who were in New York for obvious reasons, and they can call on when they need to know. And when they need to know, they need to know in a hurry. I'm sure they have cell phones and numbers and this sort of thing, so that's what happens. But that also... and when I first read it I thought it was an exaggeration, that's also one of the things that Judge Patel said about how little significance and power the decisions in those cases now had, and that they'd already been widely disregarded. So that was it. And in one way... well, go on.

TI: Going back to meeting Stetson Conn and him allowing you to look at his notes, it seems like that was kind of a real breakthrough moment in terms of kind of laying out where things were. I mean, it really helped you.

RD: Yeah, that's right.

TI: Did he know what he was doing? Did he know what you were writing?

RD: Oh, yes, yes. Of course he knew. And he'd said many of the same things. But the question is, that I've never determined, and I've thought about asking him and I never did, is why he hadn't used it. And as I say, I think he'd been pressured not to say it, and had been almost waiting for somebody to come and ask him. And what he'd have done if nobody had come, I don't know. Somebody would have eventually found that. But I found it, and I found it because I was looking, and nobody was looking. Just wasn't a big thing on anybody's agenda. But there were people in publishing who understood the importance of it by that time. The book I wrote was for Helen Wang... not Helen Wang, that was later. Who published Concentration Camps? Rinehart. Holt Rinehart & Winston. They had a series with a scholarly editor, it didn't go very far, just two books and then they changed policies and didn't want any. Well, the scholarly editor was an immigration historian I knew, he'd been at UCLA for a short time and wound up at San Francisco State, his name was Moses Rischin, and he wanted to know if I would do a book on Japanese immigration. I said, "Well, I'll do a book on Japanese American incarceration," and he says, "Well, that's okay." I probably didn't say "incarceration" at that time. So that book, like almost everything else I've done since The Bonus March, had a contract in advance. So that there were publishers willing to publish. I didn't have to break down doors, and I've never had any trouble in getting things published. As a matter of fact, many times people come to me, this Kansas book, they've got a series on American law cases, a rather extensive one. There's one on Tokyo Rose coming, the trial of Tokyo Rose coming out. And they came to me in 2001 and asked me if I would do this book. The book I'm doing is not the book they thought they'd get, but I showed them what I was doing. They thought it would be a more orthodox thing and what I've given them is a social history of the cases and people. Most of their books focus on lawyers, I focused on plaintiffs, although the lawyers are there.

BN: I was also curious if you knew... you mentioned a little about knowing Barnhart, but I was wondering if you knew Grodzins.

RD: No. I didn't know Barnhart, I never met him. He told me in correspondence he didn't know where they were. No, I never met Grodzins. He's a political scientist; we go to different meetings. [Laughs] I've met most historians of my generation and previous generations, and for a while post generations. Most of the people on history programs today are people I've never known.

BN: At the time you're writing this or doing the research for this...

RD: The research and the writing, you know, I was already... this book was written almost as if I dictated it. It wasn't quite that simple, but it was pretty simple. I knew what I was going to say long before I found all the documents. That was just to fill in the holes and make sure I used the right words.

<Begin Segment 19>

TI: So how about the title for this book? How did that come about?

RD: It's my title. I mean, other people had used "concentration camps" not quite in that style. It was apparent to everybody that these were concentration camps. If you'd been at my talk, you'd have heard this. I opened up with quoting from... I quoted just from four documents and sat down. But the first document was a memorandum from... slipped my mind. From the second director of the War Relocation Authority Dillon Myer to all his chief subordinates for distribution throughout the agency, before he had ever seen a relocation center, and maybe before he'd ever met a Japanese American. "The words 'concentration camp' are not to be used in connection to these processes, even to deny that they were concentration camps." And then I used, I read the transcript of the Roosevelt press conference to point out that it was pretty clear they were press conferences to these folks, and I talked about more contemporary things. No, I'm pretty good at titles. Gary Okihiro, by the way, thinks and has said so, that Asian America is a terrible title. He thinks that's an awful title. Maybe you do, too.

BN: Your 1988 book.

RD: Yeah. He thinks that's a terrible title. You think it's a terrible title?

BN: I didn't care for it either, just because it's not very descriptive of...

RD: To me it is. To me it's essentially descriptive of an era in which Americans born in Asia were the leading figures in the Asian American communities, and that after that, after the Second World War, that ceases to be true. Not the day the war was over, but that really ceases to be true. And this is true in all immigrant generations. Language and orientation, the influence of the home country, is very important to that first generation. It's a tie, it's something that doesn't break, and the kids born here almost rarely can really speak the language, and rarely have any real attachment to a country most of them never saw. Today's Nisei of various ethnicities, even when they're poor, really have more stronger roots. They grow up surrounded by videos from the home country, telephone, electronic communications, and reasonably inexpensive airfare. I mean, the percentage of immigrants and the immigrants' children, very recent immigrants' children who go back to the home country for a visit, is now a very, very high thing. If there were a situation in which somebody was trying to figure out the percentage of what we call Kibei from any of these would find it's a much higher percentage, so that's it. But I think it's important. This is when, this is a time when most of the groups -- I'm talking about Japanese and Chinese only -- most live in segregated environments, most have few contacts with people who are not of their own ethnicity. That's why I use it. But I can understand why the people... and it's not in any way a denial of the American-ness. And then the subtitle is, I think unobjectionable.

<Begin Segment 20>

BN: What I wanted to ask you also about was at the time you were doing the research and writing in the book, that the Japanese American community was largely not talking about this experience. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the 25th anniversary conference that you and Harry Kitano organized.

RD: Yeah. It really ought to be the other way around. Initially there was support for it from the Los Angeles JACL chapter. And the University of California Extension which sponsored it, supported it, and paid... not us, but paid the expenses of people who came from outside. We did as much as possible use on-campus people, for instance. We were able to use Leonard Arrington who was spending time as a visitor at UCLA. But they paid some expenses. Nobody got an honorarium to the best of my knowledge and belief. But the assumption was that we'd publish the proceedings, and that it would be done by the university, but that most or all of the expenses would be covered by JACL or people it raised. Very quickly, as word got out of what was going on, and before it had been held, the climate changed in the community. People... I don't know whom, but I have my suspicions, began to put pressure. I didn't realize some of the pressure. Harry, for instance, got phone calls from senior members of his family. Not the direct members, but the larger group, saying that it would be a disgrace to the family name if he participated in such a thing. And Harry told me about this years later. He didn't want any pressure or some such thing, or maybe it embarrassed him at that time, I don't know. So that it was not universally popular. Nobody, of course, no Issei or Nisei who disapproved came and protested, because that is not the way things are done. But I know that there were people in the audience who sat there with grim faces, but most began to feel that it was something to do. I had one classroom experience. Niseis are not tremendously, were not then much involved in the humanities. They felt much more confident in the sciences. Not social sciences, but in the sciences, where they felt that whatever linguistic difficulties they had, and cultural difficulties they'd had would be minimized.

But I had, in one year, the year in which I taught an immigration history course, two male Nisei students. And one of the things you have to do in my history courses, immigration history courses, is do a paper on your family history with the objective of getting at least one parent, one ancestor on each side to a specific place in a specific foreign country. For African Americans, who are not great fans of immigration history generally, the qualification was from the South. Anyway, each of these guys -- they were both males -- told me that they had been born in Los Angeles. They have a family... everybody has to be, your birth dates and death dates for those who have died. And one in 1943, and one in 1944. No Japanese American babies were born in Los Angeles County in either of those years. My assumption was that they were ashamed; they didn't want to mention it. I had to have interviews, everybody had to come in and talk to me, and these guys came and talked to me. No, that wasn't the case, no, no, no. "I wasn't born in a concentration camp." Because they'd heard about concentration camps, so they knew about the camps from me, if nowhere else. So I said, "Well, you go home and talk to your parents," said to each of them separately. These were separate interviews, nobody else there. One guy came in the next day and says, "Professor Daniels, you were right. I was born in a place called Topaz. I'm kind of in shock." Other kid didn't come in, and didn't come to class. And then his parents came in to see me. He'd left home. And I got in touch with him and he came to see me, he eventually came to class. And he said, "My parents have lied to me all my life. I don't even know who I am anymore. I can't have anything to do with them." You can imagine how I felt. And I don't know if you've ever had to deal with a self-satisfied, arrogant, smug nineteen-year-old who thinks he knows everything about a certain situation, but that's what I had there. And then it dawned on me that a person I knew well from our mutual services on a committee that was concerned with race relations on campus was in the psychology department. I called him up, and I asked, "Do you know," and I told him what it was. I said, "Can you help me with that?" "Roger," he says, "I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. But I have a colleague who for some strange reason specializes in teenagers. I'll have him call you." So he called me. And he got to see the student, and he got to see the parents, and they had a conciliation meeting, this sort of thing. He probably would have gone home anyway, but that was a great relief because you can imagine what the parents were like. They were a well-to-do middle-class couple and they were just distraught, and, "What have we done?" and feeling guilt, which they're very good at. And anybody who has a Jewish background has observed this. But it was also emblematic of the way in which the community had just suppressed this business.

By that time, of course, I was, Japanese American people were asking me to give talks, people wanted to meet me, and no ethnic group can be more grateful than Japanese Americans. Most ethnic groups, my colleagues tell me, are not too happy with historians writing about them. But Japanese Americans are delighted to do so. I've talked to a number of JACL chapters, talked to different groups. The chapter in Cincinnati is a fascinating chapter. When my friends come out, or when people come out from the West Coast who are officials and see these chapters in places like Cincinnati, which are now dominated by mixed couples, and my surveys and discussions with these people lead me to believe that in a majority of cases, the impetus to get involved with the JACL is a result of having hapa offspring. And that at least in the people I talked to, the impetus came more from the non-Nikkei parent than from the Nikkei parent. Whether this is accurate is something else again, but it's not inconceivable to me that this is in fact true. And Brian is nodding as if he thinks this is the case. Anyway, all of these kinds of things continue to enrich what I know.

Apart from working with Harry, no single individual was eventually a greater influence on me, Nikkei individual, had more influence on me. I suddenly realized, Tom, that since I've met you, that has to be in the past tense. And Gordon Hirabayashi, who I spent a quarter of a leave in residence here, working on Japanese American materials, mostly in the UW library. I spent an incredible amount of time there, and the footnotes show it. It's a wonderful collection of very special things. And Gordon was here then and it was just after redress. Of course, I was a celebrity since I had been in Washington and dealt with the committee. So we spent a great deal of time together. We'd known each other before that time, and had corresponded a lot and seen each other occasionally, but that was a very intensive period. And that's the period in which of course I did a long oral history interview with him.

[Interruption]

RD: And last week, in San Francisco at the convention, I was approached to do a small paperback book for classroom adoption about Gordon, which would be full of documents, and there would be attached to it for this series a website in which all kinds of videos could be put. And I've not signed a contract, but I told them it's ninety percent sure, but I've got to get other things out of the way. And as described, it's not a full biography, it's something I can write left-handed. But I'm very happy to be able to do so. I haven't yet read Jim and Lane's book. I want to see that, and I'm sure there'll be stuff in there. Now, go on.

<Begin Segment 21>

TI: Going back, you were talking about after you became better-known in your relationship with the Japanese American community and how -- I'm not sure gratitude is the word you used -- but how grateful the Japanese American community is for your work, maybe more so than maybe other ethnic groups. And I'm wondering, is it because... you were reporting more than just on the Japanese American community. It was about an event that really affected them. So it wasn't like a traditional historian doing something about an ethnic community. I see your work more in terms of uncovering or helping to show an injustice that happened to the community.

RD: Yeah, and that's important. For instance, during my stint at UCLA as a teacher, Sue Embrey came to me and asked me to speak. I had the experience for the first time of speaking in a Buddhist temple surrounded by all these things, it was the one in West L.A. And an anecdote about that: while I'm talking, I knew that there were people in that audience who didn't want to be there or who objected to what I was saying. I wondered what was going to happen when the question period came. And the first question, from one of the guys who'd been most fidgety and obviously just unhappy at where he was, popped up. He said, "Professor, that's all very well and good, and I appreciate what you're saying, but what has that got to do with juvenile delinquency?" And what happened was that there had been a schedule switch that not everybody knew about, and there were two meetings scheduled for there. And their meeting had been there and it was supposed to be somewhere else. Some people had actually gone there, so that was the reason for that. [Laughs] And that was the first experience I had had in speaking to a totally Nikkei audience in a very Nikkei surrounding.

BN: This is when you were at UCLA, so this was in the '60s.

RD: Yeah, that's right. And then in the little book that Sue Embrey put out, there's a piece by me.

TI: Now did you ever push back? Because even when I started Densho in the '90s, I felt a little pushback from the community to not do the project. It's sort of, "Don't stir up the old stories, let it go." Did you ever feel that from community members, like, "Professor, that's enough, don't do this"?

RD: Well, I talked to a lot of people, interviews, and men were more difficult than women. Women talked. They didn't always talk frankly. I'm not sure how originally, how well I originally realized that people weren't being frank. I think I always knew it, but I wasn't sure the extent. What I didn't realize was the degree that was almost a community conspiracy not to talk about certain things. When fate took me surprisingly to the University of Wyoming, which naturally meant that my model camp would be Heart Mountain, and where there were archives with the complete run of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, etcetera, I discovered something. Bill Hosokawa and all those other folks hadn't told me that there was massive draft resistance. I went back before I published and tracked down several people who had talked to me who were from Heart Mountain and really knew about it, and asked them about it. "Oh, Professor, you're interested in that? I'm so sorry, it was so unpleasant, you know. I didn't want to bother you with it." That may not be a quote, but that's really what it was all about. And that happened three times. I had a couple other people to see, and I said to hell with it. They weren't right there, they were in San Francisco, and I didn't know if they were alive still. But altogether in that period I did what no sociologist would continue in interviews -- though I don't call them interviews -- I had talked to more than a thousand Nikkei about their incarceration experiences.

<Begin Segment 22>

BN: Well, maybe one thing that we didn't talk about at UCLA was JARP, and I was wondering if you had any...

RD: Yes, I had an unhappy experience with JARP. I was asked to join --

BN: Japanese American Research Project.

RD: Yes. I was glad to... on the board, and there wasn't a hell of a lot going on, but I was there. And then the second or third meeting, they had to deal with a request from an assistant professor with a Japanese name who I'd never heard of who wanted to see some materials for research. And the decision was, and we were to ratify it, that he not be allowed to do so. And I said, "That's wrong," etcetera, and I was the only one who thought that way. I didn't resign in a huff, but shortly thereafter I said, "I'm kind of busy, I don't have time for this anymore." And they knew what it was. The man's name was Akira Iriye, by the way. But he was an unpublished professor at that particular time, so it wasn't that I was deferring to someone, but it was... I've never thought that history and historical evidence could be private property, at least not as far as a historian is concerned. Your life is your private property, but once those papers are out there, and somebody supposedly devoted to research has them -- and you don't give everything you've got to somebody, but when someone comes, you've got a big collection, someone comes and wants to see it, you can surely set down certain ground rules. But it's not your property. What's important is making such materials generally available. And that's always been a touchstone of my work. I've never denied a legitimate request for assistance and information. I mean, some people want you to write their books for them, and that's something else again. But I don't care if it's a high school student -- and I get high school students, particularly since there have been History Days. And some of them are really very good and very grateful. Some of them are not, but nevertheless, that's not my... not only it's my philosophical thing, it seems to me that my higher education was all done on public money. And I've been supported by public money, and therefore in some ways I'm almost a public utility. So that's important. Oh, yeah, it's clear there are people who wish I'd never written, but that's something else again. I've never run into what hakujins writing African American history have run into. They tell me, they get told that, "This stuff is for white folks and this is not for white folks, so we don't have any of it." If anybody has felt that, I haven't felt it. In fact, in some cases, I felt that many people were more comfortable talking to a hakujin historian than they would to a Nikkei. That may be not true, but...

TI: Do you have any thoughts about that, Brian?

BN: I think that's definitely true. Because any other Japanese American is gonna have some familial ties or connections or... I think it's safer in some ways to talk to someone who doesn't have, who's coming from the outside.

RD: I don't know, but I had that distinct feeling.

TI: Well, good. We went long at this last session, but this was excellent. So, Roger, that concludes our first interview. So I think it sets a good foundation for us going forward. So, thank you.