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TI: Earlier, in an earlier interview, you talked about when you were a graduate student, you had a plan to first do the immigration of Japanese up to 1924, and then when documents became available, cover through the incarceration period. And with the completion of both the Politics of Prejudice and then Concentration Camps USA, you essentially completed your initial plan when you were a younger man. And so at this point, what were you thinking? What was your career path now that you had accomplished those early plans?

RD: Well, I thought I was done with that. I had a number of other things I wanted to do. I'd published my first book with Harry Kitano, I assumed it was my last. I was interested in immigration, I was interested in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, I was interested in a lot of things. But with two books out, I was suddenly the most visible active scholar writing, and suddenly publishers and institutions were asking me to do this, do that, and the other thing. And within five or six years I was pretty well established as a specialist in not just Japanese Americans, but in Asian Americans. And I began to think about the whole question of the field and what the field needed. And it needed more exposure and more information. So one of the things that I did was arrange with a subsidiary of the New York Times, the Arno Press, to put out a series of some forty-odd books, reprint editions. And it was very simple. I just identified the book, and they got a good copy and printed from it. And they came out in a uniform red binding, you've seen a number of those because they're in Densho's library. But what these did was put all kinds of source material, either early work, unpublished dissertations, or government documents which were almost impossible to get. For example, I was given, back in 1960, by a man named Guy Caulden, who was a Berkeley attorney who had a retainer. It was really from the Japanese consulate, but it was arranged through the association, as per advice on the alien land laws, he published a little book on the alien land laws. I have it, you have it now, and he also arranged for the Japanese consulate to publish two volumes of documents, legal documents, about Japanese Americans, and that was one of the things, he gave me a set of that stuff. And it's very rare and very few libraries have it, so here they were reprinted, and all these things would be in libraries all over. I included General DeWitt's report, the Final Report that was so crucial for redress, so there'd be copies of it all over. I had them reprint the Tolan Committee's reports, and this meant that students doing research papers in university libraries could have all these materials handy which were not generally available. I don't know how many people over the years have come up and told me, scholars have told me how useful it was to have this kind of material.

And eventually, the other thing that kept happening was that people started coming to me for advice, younger scholars, the most important of whom was Sucheng Chan, who I met at about that time. And this was another thing that kept propelling me into it. People would put together a panel on some aspect of Asian American history, and in many cases either they or the arrangers would want me to comment on them, so I did. So I met a lot of younger scholars and commented on their work. I remember when I met Sucheng, and there were three or four papers, and I'm reading them in order, in a certain order, and it happened hers was the last. And the first three, each one was more mediocre than its predecessor. And then I came to this thing, which was just incredible. She's a person without formal historical training. She had a lot of work in social science, she knew all kinds of things, and it was a brilliant piece of work. It needed some structuring and this sort of thing, but it was clear that this was a major talent, and she was already seriously disabled from post-polio syndrome. So that I was able to help a number of younger people, and eventually decided that Sucheng didn't need that much help. And her book This Bittersweet Soil about the Chinese contribution to California's agriculture, is really a landmark, a major work in the revision of the so-called history of Chinese Americans, which largely didn't exist as professional history. So there was that. And by the time I spent five years at Fredonia, and expected to spend the rest of my life there, it was very congenial, and did a stint as chair and got out of that, so now I was a full professor. It was not a heavy teaching load. And quite happy, kids happy, a good public school system. And then the gas crisis came in the Nixon administration. And Fredonia had really benefited from the fact that a lot of well-to-do kids from Long Island whose parents didn't have enough money to send them to Ivy League schools and wanted to get them out of the city, they could go up there, and they could get back weekends if they had to. Fredonia is a very small town, and close to a slightly bigger small industrial city and port named Dunkirk. But not exactly the place that young people like to be. [Laughs] And the gas crisis made it impossible to do that, and it changed the whole structure of the school and the kind of students we were getting, and caused them to crunch back on the history department. And they were going to get rid of several young scholars who did not yet have tenure, including one who had just won the annual prize for the best first book by an American historian. And I had a big blowup and attacked the dean who had organized all this in the student newspaper, and told the administration that if they wanted a line, they could have mine. They'd save one of these jobs, I wanted to save two and couldn't.

And I put the word out that I wanted a job, and I immediately got some nibbles, the nicest of which came from... well, actually, to be frank, Cincinnati had asked me to apply for its chair, they were looking for a head of the department. And I'd said, "No, I'm not interested, I'm quite happy here." And when this happened I called up the person who had asked me and said, "Is that headship still open?" He said, "Yes, we're still searching." I said, "Well, if you're interested, I'm interested." And there were two offers I looked at. One down at TCU, which did not seem to be a place I wanted particularly to be, and the other was Cincinnati, which looked very good. So I went out there, and then they paid for Judith and I to go out there so she could see the place, and we agreed to go. And that's a long, complicated story.

But by this time, I was already very well-established in the profession, beginning to be able to pretty well call my own shots. And one of the things I did, although it took a little while to get started, was to arrange with University of Illinois Press to create a series of monographs in Asian American history of which I would be the general editor. We would recruit manuscripts and we'd accept manuscripts that came to us. And my hope was -- and I wanted very high standards -- at the same time Sucheng was starting a series at Temple University Press, and she was really interested in getting a lot of books out fast. And I was a little more conservative, and I hoped to get twelve, maybe eventually get a dozen first class monographs done. And I'd do this for a few years. They didn't start coming out until the '80s. But when I stepped down two years ago, thirty-three books had been published, and one will be published later this year. The last one will be published later this year, which is a biography of Joe Kurihara.

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