Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

     I must protest Ron Robin's brazen fictions and glaring omissions in his review of my book, America's Invisible Gulag (Sept. 2001 JAH?). First, he accuses me of using "the analogy of the Gulag and the archipelago" (NO supporting evidence). I will have to assume he means that I align the Soviet Union's treatment of its political prisoners with the wartime practices of the U.S. Justice Department. But I explicitly reject such an analogy in a footnote following the first mention of the "gulag": "Of course, the invisible American Gulag was not intended for slave labor and extermination. I use the term 'Gulag' in this work only to urge recognition of the broad geographic extent of the American system, its elaborate and multilayered machinery . . . and its capacity to bring out the baseness and cowardice of some, the nobility of others" (p. 305).

     Robin remarks sarcastically that, "not being satisfied with the argument that the eleven thousand German detainees suffered more than their Japanese peers," Fox makes an "astounding comparison" between the victims of Nazi persecution and the German internees. Nowhere do I write that the German internees suffered more than any Japanese. Since the two groups of internees?including those deported from Latin America—had the same status and shared the same camps, they ought to be given equal recognition (pp. xvi–xviii). These internees, however, should not be confused with the Japanese Americans relocated to the infamous War Relocation Authority camps; they were an entirely different category.


     Robin's "astounding comparison" assertion derives from my use of a quote—which he omits—from Milan Kundera that acknowledges the survival of Jews at Theresienstadt: "The whole array of their life was incomparably more important than the macabre theatre of their jailers" (p. xxiii). But surely, to suggest that a single observation about Jewish inmates was also true of the Germans does not mean that German internment, as a whole, was comparable. The triumph of Nelson Mandela over his jailers comes to mind in this context, and I hope that Robin would not think his quarter century in the South African "gulag" comparable to the "victims of Nazi persecution" either.

     Robin says that the book is based on a "dozen or so" interviews. Nonsense. In detailing my methodology (pp. xx–xxiii), I write: "From forty-four original interviews and letter collections, I chose portions of thirty." This leads to his next complaint, that the book "demonstrates a flawed strategy of historical writing" (NO supporting evidence). I do not pretend the book is scientific or unbiased. Indeed, quite the opposite. The foreword notes several methodological caveats, including: "Unavoidably, the book is weighted toward—but is not limited to—aliens who fought to stay in the United States instead of returning to Germany" (p. xx). "Be wary of drawing generalizations from individual accounts" (p. xxi). "A few dozen case histories among thousands [is] a small sample; it is always problematic to generalize about 11,000 people" (p. xxi). "The patterns evident [in the book] offer a basis for tentative inferences about a whole that can never be known. Maybe one day other researchers will sample additional internee files to test the conclusions offered here" (p. xxii). "The evidence offered here—based on the case files of German Americans of marked regional and socioeconomic diversity, whose identification with German interests and periods of incarceration varied widely—suggests. . . . With diligence and time, historians may discover that the patterns uncovered here apply elsewhere" (p. 293).

     I am content that others may find and conclude differently than I. But there will never be a scientific examination (the nature of which Robin does not specify) of the 11,000 German American internees, because the internees and their records cannot be sampled. Only someone unfamiliar with the difficulty of locating former internees and then squeezing their files out of government hands would assume otherwise. Constructively, Robin might have mentioned that to date no other internment study has used so many case histories or has so exhaustively mined the files of the Justice Department, FBI, and Army. . . .