April may be the cruelest month to poets, but it is also a grinding one in the Association’s headquarters as we prepare for the spring cycle of meetings of the three divisional committees and the Council. This year the committees meet on March 30 (Research), April 13 (Teaching), and May 4 (Professional) before the meeting of the Association’s Council on May 10-13. The Council will convene not in the usual Washington locale, but rather as the guest of the Skidmore history department in Saratoga Springs, as a special commemoration of our founding there in 1884. Although the pressures of the regular business of the AHA thus keep your headquarters staff jumping during the spring, this column would like to focus on one regularly scheduled meeting and two special causes of deep concern to historians.
The meeting we wish to mention was the semiannual convening in Chicago on February 24-25 of the Joint Committee on Historians and Archivists. The Joint Committee, to use its short title, was created in 1969 as a means of cooperation between the Organization of American Historians and the AHA on matters of common concern relating to the federal government. Its title then was “Joint Committee on the Historian and the Federal Government,” which reflected its charge from the two organizations. Both organizations had long had their own committees (ours was established in 1949 as the “Committee on the Historian and the Federal Government”) but a more structured system of liaison was found to be more effective than the old system of relying on overlapping membership and informal contacts. Then in 1972 three members of the Society of American Archivists were invited to join the spring meeting of that year, and thereafter the SAA was invited to become an equal sponsor of the committee.
The February 1984 meeting, hosted by the SAA, devoted much of its attention to legislative matters concerning both the National Archives and classification policy (of government documents). It made arrangements for all three organizations to testify at the House Government Operations Committee hearing (see below) on the Archives’ need for separate agency status. The committee reviewed the jointly sponsored session held at the AHA annual meeting in San Francisco on the complexity of contemporary source material, and it previewed plans for jointly sponsored program events at the OAH and SAA annual meetings in April and September. The Joint Committee also reviewed the committee’s original charge, its current function, and future role. With the sharp increase in activity of all three organizations on matters of federal government policies and legislation affecting historians, the joint committee’s raison d’etre has become a matter of almost daily concern to the organization rather than a subject on which a committee “gadfly” was needed. The committee agreed to study the question and placed it on the agenda for its fall meeting to be hosted in October by the OAH.
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On March 7 the Subcommittee on Legislation of the House Government Operations Committee devoted an entire day to hearings on H.R. 3987, a parallel bill to S. 905, which, if passed, would restore to the National Archives and Records Service the independent agency status that it enjoyed from its creation in 1934 to 1949. As members know well, the health and success of the Archives is a cause close to the heart of the Association. Its creation in 1934 was largely the result of the tireless lobbying of our longtime leader, J. Franklin Jameson, who worked on members of Congress and Presidents from Theodore to Franklin Roosevelt. The AHA’s Council has repeatedly called for an end to the Archives’ mesalliance with the General Services Agency brokered by the too-hasty efforts of the Hoover Commission on government reorganization in 1949. We and most historians, archivists, and genealogists perceive that subordination to be at the root of the problems which have enfeebled and wasted the Archives over the last two decades.
The hearing, chaired by Congressman Jack Brooks, was very successful from our point of view. Eleven witnesses were heard, ranging from the Acting Administrator of GSA and one of his deputies, to Congressman Glenn English, who chairs the House subcommittee charged with NARS’s oversight. Only the two GSA witnesses foiled to support the bill. Former Archivist of the United States Bert Rhoads and veteran South Carolina State Archivist Charles Lee were particularly eloquent on behalf of the National Archives. The Joint Committee on Historians and Archivists was well represented. Dr. David B. Gray, Director of the Texas State Archives and President of the Society of American Archivists as well as a constituent of Chairman Brooks, made a strong case for independence of the Archives, and AHA’s executive director spoke by prearrangement for both the OAH and the AHA. Our combined membership of 20,000 lends considerable weight to our advocacy on behalf of the profession.
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February and March have been busy months also in the effort to put together the resources and talents necessary for launching a popular magazine of history. The special policy committee named by the Council for this project, with the aid of headquarters staff, has put together a small “nest egg” to cover initial planning costs; together with its editorial consultant, Robert Erwin, it has assembled a striking collection of articles for a first issue and begun work on contents of a second, and it has prepared and sent off an attractive grant proposal to four major foundations. In addition we are in touch with two prominent specialists in the arcane mysteries relating to magazine launchings, test mailings, and market surveys. Although the project is moving more slowly than our first uniformed expectations, it appears to have prospects of moving forward successfully.
