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TI: I was going to ask later in the interview about this, but since we're here, so tell me a little bit more about how that relationship with University of Illinois Press started. It became such a huge series, well-known series, and I'm curious, we're now talking about the beginnings of that. Why University of Illinois Press and how did that happen?

RD: Well, I'd known Dick Wentworth at meetings for a long time. I'd read a couple of manuscripts for him, never published for them. But one of the things I was going to talk about, shortly after I came to Cincinnati, the Immigration History Society, of which I was one of the founding members, a very junior member, and my mentor, Theodore Saloutos was the first president, was approached by the National Park Service to help them with the planning of the immigration museum on Ellis Island. And I was one of the historians who went on what became the History Committee, which was an advisory group that met for years. It's still going on, I resigned shortly after we came to Bellevue. But this was, I think, one of the really important things that I've done in my life. And one of the things that really surprised me was the degree to which Asian Americans, who I met and talked to and speaking and this sort of thing, were so interested in Ellis Island even though very few immigrants ever came there.

TI: So I'm surprised, too. Why would Asian Americans or Asians be interested?

RD: Because they thought it was very important, and they were delighted to hear that Asian Americans would be in the historical part. Several of those things I was on there to make sure of, although it's not a big part of it, obviously, because very few went in, but it does tell the whole, the story of American immigration, including a great deal about the period before Ellis Island existed. So that it's really a museum about American immigration, about immigration to the United States, and it concentrates clearly on the Ellis Island years, which really only run from 1982 into the, barely into the 1930s.

TI: Okay, so I understand. So the museum -- and I'm not sure how much you had to do with it -- was more about the full immigration experience. I guess initially I thought that the Ellis Island museum would have been about the Ellis Island, which would have been more European.

RD: Well, it certainly... we reoriented the Park Service's views of what should be done, and there were Park Service historians who agreed with us, but there were, not combat, but there were... the original view was more parochial than the final view. And the historians certainly had something to do with that, but Park Service historians were very important in doing that as well. But the work on that and the work I did in leading up to research, leading up to the establishment of the Presidential Commission, and then my work with the Commission, are two aspects of my life as a public historian. When I was in graduate school, nobody knew, the term didn't even exist. Although there had been public historians before, many historians, for instance, had written books about the federal government in the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt insisted on that. They wrote about everything but the White House; he was going to do that himself.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.