In Support of History

This article is reprinted by permission from Institute News, newsletter of the Institute of Applied History, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 109 E. Jones St., Raleigh, NC 27611 (Suellen Hoy, editor). The content was the opening address at the South Atlantic Archives and Record Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 25, 1983.

A little over a year ago, the New York Times carried a story headlined, “Sri Lanka Puts Modern Twist in Ancient Epic.” The story began:

A committee of scholars, appointed and paid for by the Government, has recently extended Sri Lanka’s 1,500-year-old epic to cover the period 1936-1957 so that such development as air conditioning and alu­minum cans are now rendered in the same kind of verse used to chronicle the succession of ancient kings and the evolution of Buddhist traditions on the island.

The Sri Lankan epic, the article continued, was the work of a monk who sometime in the fifth century collected the legends of the island and wrote them on pages of palm leaves. Contemporary scholars note that within the web of this legend lies a valuable historical record whose dated events conform to accounts found in Burmese, Indian, and Tibetan archives. “True, there is no lack of fables and marvelous tales,” states the German scholar who has translated the epic, “but they appear the outward decoration which can easily be omitted.”

The original epic, called the Mahavamsa, was updated three times by three monks. It is indicative of the growing problems of con­temporary history that the only controversial update was that of 1935 when, among other topics, the epic described the way in which the island of Ceylon became a British colony. Noted for its metered blank verses and stories of flying magical kings, demons, and changelings, the newest addition to the Mahavamsa was placed in the hands of a com­mittee. Fifteen experts contributed chapters on such topics as government, agriculture, mass communication, and science as well as Buddhist institutions. This epic by com­mittee was then turned over to four monks, the youngest of whom was seventy-eight years old, so that the information might be ren­dered into blank verse in the original language of the fifth-century chronicle. Sri Lan­ka, noted the sccretary of tins com­mittee, is “the only nation in the world with such a continuous chronicle.”

Will our own national epic revert to the modern equivalent of magical flying kings and demons as we lose the factual record of society and government?

This newspaper story about a country so remote and an ancient culture so exotic is instructive. First and foremost, it reminds us of the absolute necessity of history; each and every culture, society, and nation needs some way to formulate and express the past. Sec­ond, this newspaper story should serve to bring us back to basics. We are, as members of the historical community, in support of history. Our purpose is basically to write our national “epic,” seeking within the web of our own myths and legends the valuable historical record. Of course, in our own diverse, multifaceted society, we are continually writing thousands of epics, seeking with no attempt at consensus merely to understand our remarkably young society. Indeed, because the nature of our politics and society makes this effort so confusing, disorganized. and difficult, we often lose sight of our basic purpose.

There arc certainly legitimate reasons for our disarray. As H. G. Jones,. curator of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, reminds us in his study of local government records, there are 81,000 different units of local government in the United States—a sobering indication of the tangled web of governing bodies, their records, and their history. Added to this array are the cultural divisions expressed in regionalism, old immigration patterns, and the newer ethnic groups that fill our country. In addition, about forty years ago, policy decisions made in Washington not only came to govern the people and states within our union but also peoples and na­tions around the world. The sense of the United States as a world power gave another cast to our history, a greater responsibility to those keeping the records and writing history, and a renewed appreciation of our ever present sense of American destiny.

And now, further complicating the situation, we are faced with new technologies. It seems as though we have only recently come to appreciate the impact of the telephone upon the writing of history. A poignant re­minder of that impact came in two separate book reviews in a recent Washington Post. In a review of Herbert S. Parmet’s biography of John F. Kennedy, the author, aware that much documentation of that administration is closed, nevertheless asked: “Did John Kennedy write letters? . . . Earlier presidential biographies have relied heavily on letters.” Did Kennedy only use the telephone? The question was especially apt since the very next page carried the conclusion of a review of the twentieth volume of The Papers of Tomas Jefferson (the last one edited by Julian P. Boyd before his death in 1980), a volume that reflects only five months of Jefferson’s life in 1791.

Well. let’s face it! The impact of the telephone pales in significance before that of the new technologies and the “paperless office.” As easy as it was to erase eighteen minutes on a tape a decade ago, it was even easier to destroy eighty pages of correspondence within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by simply erasing one floppy disc of a Lexitron word processor. And EPA recently purchased about 600 of these machines. In fact, the federal government now owns or leases over 17,000 general purpose computers and employs 200,000 full-time computer science personnel. The recently prepared National Historical Publications and Records Commission state assessment studies indicate that this is a story repeated in every state and institution in the country.

Professional and scholarly meetings have had countless sessions on quantitative history and machine-readable archives, but we still do not have an answer to the most funda­mental question: How will the world of information management and floppy discs affect the writing of history? Will our own national epic revert to the modern equivalent of magi­cal flying kings and demons as we lose the factual record of our society and govern­ment? Therefore, it is helpful to read about the Mahavamsa, to be reminded that beneath the complexity there is simplicity in the basic task and that this task is not so different from that of the monks of Sri Lanka.

The study of history in this country has experienced a kind of renaissance in the past decade. The commemoration of the bicen­tennial era, as well as the search for roots, has inspired it. The obsession with genealogy has encouraged the development of community history, and the new social history has increased interest in the preservation of buildings and historic sites and what we now call material culture. Perhaps the insecurity bred by rapid social change is responsible for this need for a usable past. For whatever reason, this is a remarkable change for a nation that for so many years seemed too engrossed with present to think very much about the past. Many of us who grew up twenty or thirty years ago—far from the original thirteen colonies and on the west side or the Mississippi River—frankly never thought of local events as even being history. We read about the French Revolution and went off to college to study kings and parliaments or puritans and cavaliers unaware of the rich sources for state and local history surround­ing us. Returning to my home town a few years ago, I was astonished to see the metamorphosis of a “changing neighborhood” into a charming “historic district” and an old slum into a National Park Service historic site. (It was even more startling when that historic district and its environs became the setting for the television version of “The Blue and the Grey.”)

The significance of this new historical con­sciousness came home to me again recently in front of my neighborhood supermarket when I cheerfully grasped the clipboard of an intense young man and signed a petition to save historic Rhodes Tavern. As I gath­ered together shopping list and cart and prepared to confront the produce, it sudden­ly occurred to me that no one—absolutely no one—stands on the streets of Washington or any other city gathering petitions for the preservation of records, public or otherwise. Indeed, the major concern over a recent small fire in the National Archives building was that “all those fire engines downtown at 5:00 p.m. just made rush hour traffic even more impossible than usual!”

It is extraordinary that so many of the citizens who arc concerned, even obsessed with reconstructing a small part of the na­tional epic have failed to connect the preservation of records to the presentation of his­tory. Yet, we know too well that each of their concerns—historic sites, the search for roots, appreciation of material culture, even the historic drama that attracts large television audiences—is based upon information that only can be found in archives or manuscript collections. How has it happened that in this age of overwhelming citizen interest in his­tory there is such a failure to appreciate the value of the documentary sources for all of history?

One part of the answer is obvious to any­one who has ever taken a walking tour or strolled into a museum. Houses or old spin­ning wheels lend themselves to more inter­esting displays than often illegible docu­ments. But that answer does not entirely explain the current situation. Just as mem­bers of the historical community  must share the result of this failure to connect documents and history, so must we recognize that, in fact, we are part of the problem.

The historical community has traditionally been deeply divided into several groups. Each has been concerned with original sources, but each has used them differently. Academic historians who wrote detailed monographs were prolific users of manuscripts and records, and they assumed that only graduate training in doctoral programs properly prepared one to use these sources. Thus they largely deprecated the efforts of “amateurs” who used documents in different ways—to rehabilitate a building, to prepare a museum exhibit, to trace a family’s origins, etc. And there were, of course, just enough blue-haired ladies and retired gentlemen writing selective local histories of first fam­ilies (usually their own) to lend credence to the elitism in the universities.

Neither of the groups thought much about the nature of the documentation. It was a gift. Rarely writing about the recent past, academics reconstructed a distant past domi­nated by national issues, world problems, and heroic figures from a finite set of sources in obvious repositories. For their part, the “amateurs,” working in state and local history, rarely thought of documents except as tools for studying houses, furniture, or illus­trious ancestors. Nor were archivists out front drumming up patronage for their col­lections! Old-school historian/archivists felt protective about “their” archives and were reminiscent of that generation of librarians who begrudged checking out books because it messed up the shelves.

. . . the major concern over a recent small fire in the National Archives building was that “all those fire engines downtown at 5:00 p.m. just made rush hour traffic even more impossible.”

Much has changed in the past thirty years. These stereotypes are rarely found in the historical community these days. Academics involved in the new social history, for exam­ple, arc no longer preoccupied with heroic figures or elites. They are in search of “ordi­nary people,” and the search has led them straight to state and local history. It would certainly be difficult to categorize members of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) as amateurs, while archivists pride themselves on their usage statistics.

But, ironically, the old divisions still exist. We remain deeply divided. Members of AASLH frequently resent academic histori­ans who have suddenly discovered the world of state and local history. Although academic historians now fill their texts with photo­graphs of restored houses or communities, many still do not respect as equals those who care about historic “things.” And  archivists, in their growing professionalism, have developed a jargon so that archivists can be under­stood by other archivists. Thus, in spite of the evident changes, each of these three groups with in the historical community has continued to function within its own sphere with separate publications, meetings, and con­cerns. The business or teaching and practic­ing history has experienced some radical changes, but the participants are still barely speaking to each other!

These divisions might not have mattered in another era, country, or society (such as Sri Lanka). But, alas, we do not live in a society where we only need to seek the patronage of the Elector of Hanover. We live in a diverse society of various representative institutions, multitudinous governing divisions, an individualistic private university sys­tem, and an extensive philanthropic commu­nity. Therefore, to preserve the historic doc­umentation, we need the support of each of these groups and we need a national commit­ment to give direction to that support.

Like other institutions, archives, universi­ties, and historical societies benefited from the postwar years of an expanding economy. Individual institutions received their share of government and foundation grants and local support. But the pie is no longer being enlarged; instead, the slices are getting small­er. This simple fact means that the historical profession must come to grips with the seri­ous implications of its traditional divisions. As individual institutions prospered in a modest way and individual historians seemed content with available resources, we consis­tently failed to see ourselves as a community. We failed collectively in what should have been the most fundamental of our tasks: to seek national support from the society and government whose documents we so careful­ly preserve, whose history we record and analyze, whose culture we proudly exhibit.

Whatever our individual successes in this university or that, this state archive or that historical society, we as a group have failed to impress our national leaders or publicly spir­ited citizens that without records there is no history. And no wonder. Because of our divisions, we have failed to establish a nation­al consensus even within the historical community. You may argue that divisions persist because we do not agree on methods or goals. I would argue that disagreement over methods, indeed our obsession with meth­ods, has served to obscure our goal (one so clearly understood in Sri Lanka). A fundamental point of agreement—the goal which should unite us—is the importance of rec­ords, of documentation in support of history.

How to proceed? How do we face reality, mend our fences, and plan for the future? Fortunately, to start the process, we have a few tools at hand.

First of all, there is the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (NCC). Two years ago, the NCC was transformed into an organization to alert the historical community to public policy deci­sions affecting their interests and to educate the decision-makers to those interests. The NCC must continue to receive wholehearted support. With an office no larger than an oversized closet, the occasional assistance of college interns, and the word-processing and copying machines of the American Historical Association, Page Putnam Miller has alerted us to problems at the National Archives, the threat of the erosion of historical influence in the National Park Service, the changing poli­cies in the National Endowment for the Humanities, alterations in federal information policies, and many other issues. Recognizing the effectiveness of NCC, the Society of American Archivists recently joined the his­torical groups in financially supporting it. However, an indication of a continuing divi­sion is the fact that AASLH has failed to renew its contribution.

There is also the public history movement. Although many of you who have completed long careers in archival or historical agencies are cynical of the academic enthusiasm for public history just as tenured teaching jobs disappeared, reconsider your views. Rather than criticize the public history movement because it represents an intrusion into the special world of state and local history, ex­ploit it. The National Council on Public His­tory is probably the only organization in the historical community that brings together under one umbrella (admittedly a broad umbrella covering a pretty disparate crowd) every facet of historical interest.

Furthermore, historians concerned with public works, criminal justice, environmental policy, or social welfare are heavy users of important collections of documents neglected by more traditional historians. Many pub­lic historians, in corporations for example, must organize documents before they can use them and thus become knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters of state, local, and national archives. Consider too that some of these public historians are in positions of far greater influence than an asso­ciate professor at a local university. There is every indication that public historians, those preparing students for nonacademic careers as well as those working in the public or private sectors, could become the most ardent supporters of archival institutions everywhere.

Archivists must recognize that, for better or for worse, support for their institutions comes from the users. Historians, or those doing historical research, can only be rallied to support documentation if they are recognized as having legitimate interests in those documents. It is no longer enough for lead­ers of archival  organizations to note that some of their best friends are historians. Researchers must, of course, be educated to understand archival policy. But exclusion is not conducive to either education or understanding. Forget the old complaint that his­torians cannot be trusted to meddle in archi­val policy because they want to  save everything. Involve them, co-opt them if you will. Meanwhile, these same historians—all of those who use records of any kind for any reason—must understand that archivists alone do not have the resources to fight the perpetual battles with city councils. state legislatures, university budget officers, founda­tion officials, or the United States Congress. If academics want documents, preservationists want photographs, and genealogists want census reels, they will have to leave their library carrels, offices. and microfilm ma­chines to save them.

Is this merely a utopian vision? If so, then we will all be back next year and the year after, wringing our hands over the same issues, grown steadily worse. There will always be suspicion and disagreement between archivists and historians, between those who keep the records and those who use them. It is inherent in the system. There will always be suspicion between an arrogant assistant professor whose youthful objectivity gave him the necessary insight into southern politics and the third-generation president of the local historical society whose knowledge of Reconstruction comes from another age. No, let’s not seek utopia. Instead let us recognize our mutual interests and build a coalition based upon an understanding of our differ­ences. Surely we can agree to disagree.

As I was preparing these remarks, I was also re-reading material assigned to my class in United States diplomatic history. Two quotations, introducing a chapter on the grand alliance of’ World War II, caught my eye. The first was from Napoleon: “Give me allies to fight against!” How Napoleonic we have been in the historical community. The second was from the eminently quotable Winston Churchill: “There is only one thing worse than fighting [a war] with allies and that is fighting without them.” He is right, and it is time that historians of every stripe and archivists of every variety recognize that fact. We need to practice the art of diplomacy with each other; we need to build alliances instead of fighting skirmishes. Throughout history alliances have been built upon mutual self-interest, not absolute agreement. We are allies—allies in our attempt to write the national epic; allies in our understanding of the absolute necessity for the preservation of records; allies in support of history.