Roger Daniels

Roger Daniels was born on December 1, 1927, in New York City. George Roger Daniels, his World War I veteran father, a freelance writer, died when Roger was six, likely as a result of having been gassed in the war. Roger was thus mostly raised by his mother, Eleanor Lustig Daniels, a German Jew who had immigrated from Hungary as a baby, and his Jewish grandmother. After his father's death, the family moved to Miami, Florida. Sent to a military prep school in Virginia in 1941, he dropped out two years later and, wanting to serve in World War II, joined the Merchant Marines using "phony papers" to conceal his age. ^[1] He was wounded by shrapnel that left a scar on his forehead. He also worked as a newspaper reporter for the New York Journal-American before he turned eighteen, claiming a college degree.

After a series of jobs and adventures in his early twenties—while also sustaining a serious back injury from doing dock work—he decided to resume his education at the University of Houston, having moved there because of a surplus of jobs in the area. While in college, he was drafted, entering the army in late 1952, serving in Korea where he managed construction projects and was decorated for "administrative excellence." ^[2] Upon his discharge, he finished up at the University of Houston, graduating in 1957.

Having long been an avid reader with an interest in history, he was determined to pursue a career as an academic historian. A chance meeting with a Nisei lawyer in New York in 1944 had introduced him to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, something he initially disbelieved. Upon entering a Ph.D. program at UCLA in the fall of 1957, he was determined to do a dissertation on that topic. However, his advisor, Theodore Saloutos, cited his age and the need to finish quickly—he was by then nearly thirty—and the fact that key government records he would need for his research would be embargoed for another decade, subject to a twenty-five years rule—suggested that he do his dissertation on Chinese or Japanese immigration instead. By the end of the year, he had begun research on Japanese immigration for his dissertation and what would be his first book, intending to follow that up with a second book sometime after 1970 when the necessary records would be available. Due his lack of Asian language ability, he would focus more on what was done to Japanese Americans on these projects.

He worked quickly. "When you approach thirty and you haven't really gotten anywhere," he said in a 2013 interview, "you concentrate your mind wonderfully if you have any serious ambitions, and I'm a reasonably ambitious person." ^[3] Finishing his M.A. and passing his qualifying exams by the end of his second year, he spent the summer of 1959 doing dissertation research on a fellowship at UC Berkeley—he cited the collections of Hiram Johnson and Chester Rowell as being most useful—and had a draft of his dissertation by the summer of 1960. It turned out to be an eventful summer in other ways as well, as a date with a fellow grad student named Judith Mandel quickly led to an engagement and a small wedding that October. She would go on to play a key role in his career as a sounding board, advisor, and editor. Finishing his Ph.D. in 1961, Saloutos helped him line up part-time teaching and research jobs in Los Angeles until Daniels landed his first full-time job at Wisconsin State University (now the University of Wisconsin-Platteville) in 1961.

While in Platteville, his dissertation was published by the University of California Press in 1962 as The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion to positive reviews. On the strength of that book, he was invited back to UCLA as an assistant professor in 1963. There, he did research using the papers of Pelham D. Glassford, which led to his second book The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression in 1971. Part of a faculty committee on racism on campus, he helped organize a group of historians to go to Atlanta to take part in a civil rights march and rally, as part of a larger effort led by University of Chicago Professor Walter Johnson. He made a second trip to Atlanta with a group of students, where he met Martin Luther King, Jr.

He also met Nisei sociologist Harry Kitano at UCLA, who would become a close friend and collaborator with whom he would co-author four books, beginning with American Racism: Exploration of the Nature of Prejudice in 1970. With Kitano, he organized a 1967 conference at UCLA titled " It Did Happen Here: The Japanese Evacuation of 1942 " to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 , perhaps the first public event to acknowledge the wartime incarceration. He also embarked on the research that would lead to Concentration Camps, USA: Japanese Americans and World War II , also published in 1971.

Despite his publication and teaching record, he was denied tenure at UCLA in 1968 and subsequently took a position at the University of Wyoming as an associate professor. The relative proximity to the Heart Mountain camp aided his research on the concentration camps, and with his graduate student, Douglas Nelson, he discovered the story of Nisei draft resistance there. Though satisfied with his position at the university, the quality of the public schools—by now, he and Judith had a son and a daughter—and the racism of the local community led him to take a position at SUNY Fredonia in 1971. Finally, he moved to the University of Cincinnati in 1976, where he spent the rest of his academic career, becoming the Charles Phelps Taft Professor in 1994 and attaining emeritus status in 2002.

Among Daniels's other major books are Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (1988), Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (1990), Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (1993), Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (2004), Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882–1939 (2015), and Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939–1945 (2016). His oeuvre also includes numerous articles, essays, and edited volumes. He also served as the general editor of the "Asian American Experience Series" of the University of Illinois Press starting in 1993 overseeing the publication of thirty-four books.

He remained engaged with Japanese American incarceration related topics throughout his career. In 1983, he, Kitano, and Sandra Taylor organized a conference in Salt Lake City centered on the incarceration and Redress Movement that took place just after the release of Personal Justice Denied , the report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). The conference proceedings, published in 1986 as Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress was perhaps the first anthology that considered the wide range of Japanese American experiences during World War II from enemy alien internment to " voluntary evacuation " to the Hawai`i experience. In 1989, Daniels edited a nine-volume compilation of primary documents titled American Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1945 . He also published two additional monographs on the topic, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (1993), a broad overview of the topic meant to be used as a textbook and The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War (2015), on the wartime legal challenges of the exclusion and incarceration.

Regarded as an expert on the topic after the publication of Concentration Camps, USA , Daniels was called on frequently to give public talks and to advise on various public history projects and appears in many documentaries on the incarceration. He was an advisor on the National Museum of American History's landmark 1987 exhibition, A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution , correcting many errors in the script. He also served as an important behind-the-scenes advisor to the CWRIC, providing an introduction to the topic to the commissioners and advising them on the amount of reparations they should recommend. He also reviewed the draft manuscript of Personal Justice Denied . Later, during the legislative process, he cited the failure of the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act in strongly advocating that there not be a claims process in the redress legislation, that it should be up to the government to find those eligible, laying the groundwork for what became the Office of Redress Administration . More recently, he wrote widely a cited essay on the terminology used to describe the incarceration titled " Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans ."

Along with Judith, Daniels spent his last years in Seattle, having moved there to be close to his daughter and grandchildren. Failing eyesight curtailed his writing, but he continued to advise scholars, students, and friends in person or by phone until his passing on December 5, 2022.

Roger Daniels oral histories, 1983–2013 . Densho Digital Repository.

Friedman, Max Paul, and Alan M. Kraut. "Roger Daniels, 1927–2022." The American Historian , Fall 2022, 36–37.

van Harmelen, Jonathan. " In Memorium: Historian Roger Daniels, 95; Scholar JA Incarceration. " Rafu Shimpo , Dec. 17, 2022.

———. " Remembering Roger Daniels—A Reflection. " Discover Nikkei, Dec. 16, 2022.

The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962; 2nd ed., 1978.

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

Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.

Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II . New York: Hill and Wang, 1993; 2nd ed, 2004.

The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War . Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013.

ed., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (with Sandra C. Taylor and Harry H.L. Kitano). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. Revised ed., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.