Densho Digital Repository - Roger Daniels Interview III (Densho ID: ddr-densho-416-4)

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TI: So I want to take you back to the early '70s again. And when you were at SUNY Fredonia, it was about the time there was a campaign to repeal Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950. And it was commonly called, or nicknamed, the "concentration camp law." Can you talk about that, and were you involved with that in terms of the repeal of that law?

RD: I think that I was the person who was one of the first to call attention to it. I remember a historical meeting at Palo Alto. I'd have to date it... meeting of the Pacific Coast branch of the American Historical Association. I mentioned it in something I said, and several Japanese Americans came to talk to me about it and ask questions. And that's, of course, an important step to retracing the evolution of what became redress, or for a better term, the public rehabilitation of Japanese Americans. The first truly tangible step, apart from closing the camps, was the inadequate Japanese American... the act in 1948 which paid minor amounts of money to Japanese Americans, and didn't attempt to make any judgments about the rights or wrongs of incarceration, but at least admitted that there were some damages that ought be repaid. It was terribly inadequate; there were all sorts of problems, but nevertheless, there it was. And this, a couple of decades later, is an important step. And at this time, just as I was in the process of leaving Fredonia, the redress movement began to take shape.

TI: But going back to the repeal of Title II, were you surprised that Japanese Americans approached you? It was a different -- it wasn't Executive Order 9066 -- it was different. Did you make that connection for them, or did these Japanese Americans make this connection, that essentially it was very similar to what happened to them?

RD: Oh, no. I made it and I published something on it, the explicit parallels. And that act was put through by liberal Democrats initially who were proving... it passed, I think, in '49, just after the pass of the so-called "Reparations Act." But this was to show that the Democrats could be just as tough, and this went into the Internal Security Act of 1950 as a separate entity, with its separate law, so it was easy to pluck it out and repeal it. And that was another important step; it was the first step back. And Richard Nixon signed it, indicating that the climate had very definitely changed. It was the '60s, and this came at the end of the '60s, early in the Nixon administration. I should be able to date it right now, but this is not a good morning for dates.

TI: That's okay, we can always get those later. But in terms of the Japanese Americans that were interested, did you ever work with Edison Uno on this?

RD: Yes, not on that. I met Edison in the year of his death.

TI: Which was 1976.

RD: That's right. We met, of all places, in Lethbridge, Alberta. Do you know anything about Lethbridge?

TI: No, I don't.

RD: Had a large Japanese Canadian community, they're ranchers, large numbers of them are Okinawans, and there was a meeting down there. I'd taught in Calgary, in fact, I almost died in Calgary in 1976. But I went back there -- not to Calgary, but to Lethbridge -- for a meeting that I'd agreed to go to, and I read a paper there and met Edison, and he and I had just agreed on almost everything. And we were going to get together and do something, and...

TI: Then he died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve.

RD: Yes. But he was the first of the Japanese American activists who I met who had a clear vision of what Harry Kitano later called an impossible dream. It was really something that could be done. I think that large numbers of the people, I'm convinced that large numbers of the people who supported redress never really expected it to happen. And the amount of skepticism, even after the commission report was out, was really very extreme. I happened to be doing research in Seattle about that time, I had a semester off. And the kids were in a certain place in their school, we couldn't move them, so Judith stayed in Cincinnati and I was out here. And I'd met Gordon earlier.