Concentration Camps USA (book)

In the fall of 1957, Daniels began graduate studies at UCLA. Having been introduced to the story of Japanese American incarceration through a chance encounter with a Nisei over a decade earlier, Daniels had by then decided he wanted to do his Ph.D. dissertation on that topic. However, his UCLA advisor, Theodore Saloutos, pointed out that key documents necessary for his research might be unavailable to him due to the federal government's policy of not declassifying such documents for twenty-five years after their creation. Saloutos suggested that Daniels do his dissertation on Chinese and/or Japanese immigration instead. Taking this advice to heart, Daniels decided on a plan by that December to do his dissertation and first book on Japanese immigration, followed by a second book on the incarceration (written around 1970), after which he would focus his research on the New Deal. Due to his lack of Japanese language ability, his focus on the two Japanese American projects would be on what had been done to Japanese Americans, rather than on what Japanese Americans themselves did. ^[1]

Daniels completed his dissertation in the summer of 1960, and it was eventually published as The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion in 1962 by the University of California Press. As Daniels's academic career took him to Wisconsin State University, back to UCLA, then to the University of Wyoming, he pursued research on the incarceration. At UCLA, he became close friends with sociologist and former incarceree Harry H. L. Kitano , and the two collaborated on several projects, including a 1967 conference marking the 25th anniversary of the incarceration. At Wyoming, Daniels took advantage of his relative proximity to the Heart Mountain site to study that camp, in collaboration with his graduate student Douglas Nelson, who later published an influential study on it. As documents began to become available in the late 60s, he did research at the National Archives. He also visited Stetson Conn, the former chief historian of the army, who had written about the causes of the incarceration and who shared key documents with him. ^[2]

Concentration Camps USA was first published in 1971 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and, along with Allan R. Bosworth's America's Concentration Camps , was among the first to use the term "concentration camps" to refer to the Japanese American incarceration. The slim 188 page volume provides a broad overview of the forced removal and incarceration, drawing on Daniels's prior research on the anti-Japanese movement to set the context for the incarceration; building on the prior work of Morton Grodzins , Jacobus tenBroek, et al., and Conn to expand our understanding of the run up to Executive Order 9066 ; and exploring what he dubs the "left opposition," in particular the draft resistance movement at Heart Mountain. Daniels also looks at the evolution of the forced removal policy, Milton Eisenhower 's stint as the director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), and the test cases, concluding with a chapter on the end of exclusion and the return of Japanese Americans to the West Coast .

Academic reviews were uniformly positive, including from three reviewers who were themselves chroniclers of incarceration, Conn, Asael T. Hansen , and Forrest LaViolette . Reviewers praised Daniels's research, the writing, and his highlighting of inmate resistance. A couple of the reviewers—Conn included—were critical of the work's title and its implicit comparison with the Nazi death camps, something Daniels disputed in a reply to Conn's review. Curiously, Hansen, who like LaViolette worked as a WRA community analyst, disputed Daniels's characterization of the agency, seemingly arguing that it was given too much attention, calling is "a minor agency."

Despite the book's significance, commentary in the Japanese American press was minimal. Bill Hosokawa calls the writing "lucid and readable" and writes that Daniels "treats in some detail Nisei resistance to the military draft, a facet of history ignored or treated only lightly by most writers," despite the fact that Daniels implicitly criticizes Hosokawa himself for doing just that. In a review of another book by Daniels, Edison Uno calls Concentration Camps USA "a comprehensive overview of that historic event." ^[3]

A decade later, Daniels published a second edition of the book, under the title Concentration Camps, North America (Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1981), which added a new chapter on Canada, a revised epilogue, and some other minor additions.

In her 2008 study of the historiography of the incarceration, Alice Yang praises Daniels's tone that "clearly conveyed his outrage at the injustice of internment." She goes on to write that Concentration Camps USA "encouraged some Japanese Americans to confront their memories of the war. Instead of blaming themselves for the incarceration, former internees could now cite a wealth of evidence indicting the racism of the architects of internment." ^[4]

Despite its age, Concentration Camps USA remains an often cited work, particularly its account of how the decision to exclude and incarcerate West Coast Japanese Americans came to be.

Daniels, Roger. Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

———. Concentration Camps, North America: Japanese in the United States and Canada during World War II . Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1981.

Murray, Alice Yang. Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008.

D. K. Adams, The English Historical Review 89.353 (Oct. 1974): 937–38. ["Many of Daniels's judgments reflect the skills of the publicist rather than the considered conclusions of the historian, and are too frequently expressed in intemperate language that seems to be deliberately invoking echoes of Nazi racism and propaganda techniques."]

Stetson Conn, Pacific Historical Review 41.4 (Nov. 1972): 548. ["… the most comprehensive and useful synthesis to date on an episode of great injustice that all Americans would do well to remember.]

Asael T. Hansen, The International Migration Review 6.4 (Winter 1972): 465–67. ["… a well-researched and well written book."]

Forrest E. LaViolette, Pacific Affairs 45.3 (Autumn 1972): 475–76. ["From the unpublished and published materials he has improved our documentation on the major issues of the episode and refined some of the interpretations."]

Allan R. Millett, Military Affairs 37.1 (Feb. 1973): 35. ["… despite its polemical title… an able account of one of the mobilization's unhappier episodes…. Even for those familiar with earlier studies, it is sobering reading."]

William Preston, Jr., The Journal of American History 59.2 (Sept. 1972): 476–77. ["Roger Daniels has written a brilliant, short, yet definitive account of the Japanese-American evacuation and imprisonment during World War II."]