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TI: So let's move on. In 1986, you became involved with Ellis Island in New York, I think it was the Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Centennial Series.

RD: No, well, that comes afterwards. Let me describe my relationship to immigration history. Working with a distinguished immigration historian, it was natural -- and I taught the immigration history course that he had instituted at UCLA, I taught that. And always taught immigration history as a subcourse, and always spent more time in the general survey course, which I always taught, on immigration than most other people did, for that reason. And the Politics of Prejudice, my first book, is in part a history of Japanese immigrants and what was done against them in California and elsewhere, but mostly in California. So that this was a topic I'd dealt with. Sometime in the 1970s -- I can't date it at this sitting -- the National Park Service came to the Immigration History Society, which is now the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, IEHS, of which I was a member, asking for help in the planning of the museum on Ellis Island. And it was a meeting in Cincinnati, the largest organization of American historians, the Organization of American Historians, OAH, was meeting there, and he came to a meeting at which members of the Immigration History Society, he, a representative of the Park Service who had previously contacted some of the leadership, came, and he spoke to a group of immigration historians, everybody who was at the convention which included, of course, me. And a committee was formed to work with them, and it was chosen from people who did various kinds of immigration history, and it included me. And the immigration history that I did was, of course, Asian American history. And it was my notion that I was interested in the museum, I thought it was a wonderful opportunity. We became an official adjunct of the Park Service and of the government, and participated in the planning of that, in regular meetings that went on for years and years. The committee still exists; I finally resigned from it two or three years ago. I can date that, not right now, but it was since I came here, so it's after 2005. So I was on it for about thirty years, maybe a little more than thirty years. And we had a lot to do. And one of the things I found out, interestingly, was that when Asian American individuals and audiences found out that I was on this Ellis Island thing, even though practically no Asian immigrants came through Ellis Island, they were generally enthusiastic that I was doing so, and seemed very, very interested in it. And that surprised me. I didn't think they'd be interested. It was difficult to get them interested in Angel Island, which most of them had never heard of. But Ellis Island they'd heard of and were interested.

And working on that was a fascinating experience. It involved me in all kinds of things, including one Japanese American experience, which had to do with the exhibition of JANM, Japanese American National Museum, on Ellis Island, which resulted in a splinter group of Jewish Americans in New York going to the newly appointed superintendent, not a Park Service official -- the museum is part of the Park Service -- but the Park Service unit includes Ellis Island and Liberty Island. In other words, it includes the two iconic places in New York Harbor. And they told her that this exhibit, which had the word "concentration camps" in it, was an affront to American Jews and to Holocaust victims, and it had to be changed. And she said, "Okay, I'll do that. I'd better do that." If you know anything about ethnic politics, you'll understand that this would be real pressure on the superintendent. And she was very new and very inexperienced and very unwise, but she passed this on to the Japanese American Museum, which wouldn't do it. They came to me, and I was horrified, and I got on the telephone right away. I'm not sure if Karen Ishizuka sent me an email or a telephone call or wrote me a letter, but I found out about it and got on the phone to my friends in the Park Service, and they were horrified. They didn't know anything about it. This had been done and they didn't know about it. Nobody in the headquarters in Washington knew about it, and their protocol is that superintendents really have charge of their own units and do all sorts of things. And they can get into trouble, but you don't just reverse them right away. There was a movement going on to reverse it. However, other people had complained to other persons, some of whom had a great deal of influence, one of whom happened to be Senator Daniel K. Inouye. The National Park Service is part of the Department of the Interior. The Secretary of the Interior, a man named Bruce Babbitt, was at that time in great political difficulties. There was a scandal about him that turned out to be a phony scandal raised by his Republican opponents, but he was in the fight of his life for his political life and political career and his political office. Washington gossip was at the time that he's going to have to go. At this instance, he gets a hand-delivered letter from Senator Inouye that began, "Dear Bruce," this is from memory, but I have a copy. "I hate to bother you at a time of your personal distress, but," and he described this. And our negotiations, the Park Service's negotiations with the superintendent were immediately superseded because Babbitt just said... because Inouye then brought up the thing, he says, "Stop that nonsense," and it was done. And it's too bad it went that way, but that's the way American politics is. It did get changed, and some positive results came about.

There was a very interesting and fruitful meeting between Japanese Americans and representatives of Jewish American organizations in New York who praised the exhibit, went to it, etcetera. And, of course, later, many, many years later, during The Power of Words, a somewhat more prestigious group of Jewish Americans had protested, tried to put pressure on the JACL not to use the word "concentration camps," because some of these people felt that "concentration camps" belonged to the Jews, which is, of course, not true. The first use of the term as we now understand it today had to do with South Africa and the Boer War and the camps that the British set up for the women and children of the Boers who were fighting, the men were off fighting, and they left the women and children on their farms, and the British grabbed them. If the man was absent, the assumption was he was fighting in the Boer army, which was a guerrilla army, so they put them in camps where there were terrible rates of death and disease. So it was a very awful experience.

TI: And at that point was that when the term was coined, "concentration camp"?

RD: In this usage. I have found a contemporary usage in the United States by searching The New York Times to describe a place where army supplies for the war in Cuba were assembled, lowercase "concentration camp." It was not a title of anything. But so there was at least that usage, and there may have been other usages, but this is the first usage that historians recognize as having to do with incarceration of people who were not criminals or indicted for crimes, but who were there for political reasons. And it was then used in all sorts of places, including Germany long before the Holocaust. The first inhabitants of concentration camps in Germany were primarily political opponents from the left, many of whom were Jewish, but they weren't in there because they were Jewish, they were in there because they were members of the Socialist or the Communist Party.

TI: Going back to the incident on Ellis Island with the exhibit America's Concentration Camps, so after Interior Secretary Babbitt said, "You know what, we're not going to change it, we're going to use the same term," did the Jewish organizations know that that decision had been made? Because my understanding was that there was good faith negotiations between JANM and the Jewish organizations to come up with a solution, a compromise, which included a description of the term "concentration camps."

RD: That all happened after the deed was done. And I think if you read Karen's book, I don't remember that she refers to the letter. She knew about it, because I told her, but her book was Lost and Found, if you look at that with some care -- I'm sure you will -- you'll see her description. No, that happened after the fact. That happened after this thing was reinstated, and after there was, in fact, an exhibit, and these people went to the exhibit together or as a group, they were there at the opening, so they saw the exhibit, and then had this agreement which some of their successors had forgotten about.

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