Hayes Presidential Center
Dear Editor:
This is not a significant issue, although distinguishing between the significant and the trivial is, except at the extremes, a relative matter.
In the March 1987 issue of Perspectives, that which you considered “Noteworthy” included a column on presidential libraries. It is true that the federally supported presidential libraries constitute a major resource for re search in contemporary history; they are well-managed and cooperative.
It is not true that they are the only presidential libraries in the country, as the boldfaced heading intimates [“Status of Presidential Libraries”]. There is at least one other of some magnitude—the library of the Hayes Presidential Center.
The last paragraph of that otherwise useful news note suggested that prior to the establishment of the Roosevelt Library, “the Library of Congress received papers of the presidents.” Unhappily, that statement is wrong, at least in one instance. The Hayes Presidential Center library—established in 1916 as the first presidential library in the country—holds the major corpus of the Hayes papers, along with many other collec tions that reflect the dynamism of the Gilded Age, the years between the Civil War and the first World War.
The Hayes Papers have been published in a microfilm edition of 304 reels. For information write The Hayes Presidential Center, Spiegel Grove, Fremont, OH 43420-2796.
Sincerely,
Leslie H. Fishel, Jr.
Director
One Sound Reason
Dear Editor:
The “Noteworthy” item in your March issue (p. 9) concerning proper English usage of a/an historian argues that a historian is correct grammar and that an historian arises only because “lazy American tongues” elide the h in ‘istory.
The editorial advisor, however, does not mention one sound reason for an usage, which is the vocal effect of a. Simply say aloud, “I am a historian” or “that is a historical novel” or “I have written a history,” Unless one makes a long pause between the a and the h we end up saying something that no historian would confess to: “my work is ahistorical analysis of …”
I say this at the risk of being classified as a “very bookish American … addicted to an before historical” (Follett, Modern American Usage re. aspirates) but take that risk in the face of a society already too ahistorical.
Sincerely yours,
Robert H. Keller
Fairhaven College
Popular History Magazine
Dear Editor:
From time to time in your newsletter I have seen references to proposals for a popular history magazine to be published one day by the AHA. Until that day comes, may I remind your members that a popular magazine devoted to American history already exists and welcomes queries and contributions from professional historians. In the past year we have published articles by John A. Garraty, William Leuchtenburg, Bernard Bailyn, Robert V. Remini, James H. Hutson, David McCullough, Elting E. Morison, John Lukacs, John Demos, Ronald H. Spector, and William Manchester, among others.
Our rate of payment is better than that of most commercial magazines in our circulation category—a circulation that has risen to 240,000 and is growing rapidly for the first time in many years. Something good for history is happening at American Heritage and we would like your members to benefit from it.
Sincerely,
Byron Dobell
Editor
American Heritage
Self-Righteous Agenda
Dear Editor:
I would like to comment on the Annual Report, Committee on Women Historians, which appeared in the February 1987 issue of Perspectives.
We are informed that the CWH has proposed AHA guidelines for “gender neutral language to be used in all its publications.” I think this country has already suffered enough pollution of the English language in the form of genderspeak: he or she, his or her, he/she, his/her, chairpersons, spokespersons, and worse. The AHA has a greater responsibility to the welfare of our language than to the promoters of a neuterized, wooden expression. I cannot improve upon John Simon: “Chairperson is certainly disgusting; but chair sounds, at best, like a fossilized metaphor or metonymy not worth serving; at worst, like a stick of furniture.”
Equally offensive is the advocacy of “gender integrated” program sessions (in the poetic language of genderspeak, by committee no less: “our concern is that such a policy be institutionalized rather than left to the good will of individual chairs”). The opportunity to participate should be available to all. But a proposition that participation be guaranteed on the basis of gender or any such criterion is contemptible. The AHA should resist such ideological pressure groups.
It would take a combination of Orwell and H.L. Mencken to do full justice to the view of the CWH at present. I can only say that if the AHA succumbs to the self-serving and self righteous agenda of the CWH, then they would deserve each other.
Sincerely yours,
Roy Lubove
University of Pittsburgh
AHA Memoirs Remembered
Dear Editor:
Lewis Hanke in his laudable plea for a history of the Association (Perspectives, vol. 25, Feb. ’87, pp. 14-16) writes that no administrative officer of the Association or editor of the AHR has written a memoir on the Association and the Review since 1920 (Jameson and Leland). Apparently he overlooked not only the many annual reports but “Ten Years, 1953–63, of the Association and Review” (Annual Report, AHA, vol. I, 1963, Proceedings, pp. 68–84) and also published separately. The last was the Report, as Executive Secretary and as Managing Editor, that I prepared before going back to teaching in 1963.
Those years saw (I must summarize) the Review become larger as it reviewed more books and published more articles and the Association membership grow from ca. 5,000 to ca. 13,000. Attendance at annual meetings of the Association doubled as did the number of papers delivered. The Association became nation-wide instead of chiefly East Coast. The capital funds of the Association doubled and for the first time the Association obtained substantial foundation grants for re search and publication. We started the Newsletter, now Perspectives, acquired for the first time a national headquarters (400 A St. SE), and began the Job Register. We prepared, among other aids for historical study a second Guide to Historical Literature (1961), guides to the captured German World War II Documents, a report on graduate education in history, another on prejudice in textbooks, and established the Service Center for Teachers (seventy-four pamphlets and many meetings of college and high school teachers). During those years, too, we vigorously pursued our international historical responsibilities, which saw one culmination in the international meeting in San Francisco in 1975 (the first in the US). We did much more.
This, obviously, is becoming too much of a listing. Still one further note. During these years we never bent in our defense of freedom for research, writing, and teaching, successfully blunting, for example, the attack of the “McCarthyite” Carroll Reece Committee on the Association.
We need continued study of the history of historians making history.
Sincerely yours,
Boyd C. Shafer
Executive Secretary and Managing Editor 1953-63
Not a License to Classify
Dear Editor:
I would like to offer the following comments on the excerpts from Professor Weinberg’s Ranke Conference speech entitled “The End of History,” which were carried in the February issue of Perspectives.
First let me compliment Dr. Weinberg for sounding a fire bell in the night regarding the very real difficulties that future researchers may confront when trying to retrieve present day documents which are being generated and preserved electronically. The frenetic pace of technological development in the field of data processing is such that it is not inconceivable that today’s hardware and software may be no longer available twenty or thirty years from now to permit the retrieval of documents from the tapes, floppy and hard disks, on which they are being stored. There is also the risk that because the shelf life of such recordings is comparatively limited, the information so stored will disappear over time unless it is re-recorded in some more permanent medium. These are concerns worthy of the attention of the profession. I know that the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Office of Technology Assessment (among others} are already aware of the problem, but the more attention focussed on it the better.
Having said all that I must now part company with Dr. Weinberg in his discussion of classification and declassification within the United States government. Admittedly, I can speak authoritatively only on behalf of one agency, the Department of State, but from that coign of vantage, I can assure Professor Weinberg that the current executive order on the protection of national security information (E.O. 12356) was not seized upon by the department as a license to classify or withhold. In fact, since its issuance, the number of classified documents generated within this department has declined as has the number of officers with authority to create classified documents under the criteria specified in the executive order.
Furthermore, contrary to what Professor Weinberg asserts, no declassification positions were abolished at the Department of State as a result of the executive order’s issuance. The number of people employed in both our mandatory and our systematic review offices has remained essentially the same over the last seven years. (In fact there has been a slight increase in the number of professionals engaged in systematic review.)
I am particularly puzzled by Professor Weinberg’s statement that “what this means in practice [i.e., E.O. 12356] is that serious research in American history will be halted chronologically at some point from the early 1950s to the indefinite future.” That is hardly the case. The department continues to transfer its thirty-year old files to the National Archives. (Accessioning and opening of the 1950–54 bloc of diplomatic records was completed last year, and we and NARA are now reviewing and opening the 1955–59 bloc.) In fact, when in 1981 NARA informed the department that due to budget cuts it would be unable to continue the traditional accessioning of the department’s records, the Department agreed to subsidize the process to insure that the thirty-year line of acces sioning could be maintained. In each subsequent year, the department has furnished one-half to two-thirds of the costs associated with this program.
The department’s historian and his staff continue to produce the volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series that began in 1861. Eight of these compilations of previously classified documents were published last year. And as an indication of support for this program, President Reagan issued a memorandum in the fall of 1985 to the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as to the Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the National Archives, and the Government Printing Office, pointing out the historical importance of this series and directing that all efforts be made to bring it to thirty-year currency.
And, of course, the Department of State continues to process approximately four-thousand requests annually under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), under the Privacy Act, and under referral procedures from the presidential libraries. Literally hundreds of thousands of documents have been released under these programs, many of them only weeks or months after origination, and a large percentage bearing classifications up to and including top secret. (Our experience with FOIA convinces me that Professor Weinberg’s proposal for automatic declassification is impractical, not only because certain documents retain their sensitivity even after ten or twenty years, but also because certain highly classified documents lose their sensitivity in a very brief time and oftentimes can be released after the passage of a very few months or years.) My one regret as a former historian—does one ever cease to be a historian?—is that the documents being released by the department under the FOIA or mandatory review cannot be made generally available to scholars everywhere. As of now, only the individual requester enjoys the benefit of these documents.
Sincerely,
John R. Burke
Deputy Assistant Secretary
Classification/Declassification Center
Bureau of Administration
US Department of State
