As these notes are being written, your headquarters staff is slowly returning to normal after the climax of its year’s activities in Chicago between Christmas and New Year’s. An out-of-town annual meeting site—the majority of them, that is—involves most of the staff traveling to the meeting. Two or three hardy souls stay in Washington to keep the doors open and take in mail and telephone messages. All the rest went to Chicago, where they cheerfully and effectively worked fourteen- to sixteen-hour days handling all the myriad details of registration, exhibits, job register, membership desk, relations with affiliates, meeting schedules, publications sales and liaison with the superb local arrangements committee and the hotel.
In the three weeks before the Christmas holiday and the annual meeting, however, other activities continued to be fitted into the bits of time left over from the crescendo of preparations. Some of these may be of interest.
Early in December AHA staff spent a fascinating day participating in a panel arranged by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Government aficionados will recognize that this in scrutable name and acronym is the lawful label of a small but important government office charged with general supervision and federal policy formulation on classification—and declassification—of official documents. ISOO is directed by the White House National Security Advisor, housed in the General Services Administration, and until now, on the rolls of the National Archives and Records Service. This latter connection, largely a paper one in any case, will cease with the independence of the National Archives and Records Administration this spring.
The director of ISOO organized an all-day meeting December 5, for between 700 and 800 government officials, at the policy level, in agencies dealing with classified documents. The panel of six articulate speakers was made up of three “openers” and three “closers.” Those advocating greater openness and access to documents included the distinguished Washington Post reporter and author, Scott Armstrong; Mark Lynch, one of the American Civil Liberties Union’s leading litigators (who is “our” lawyer in the suit against the National Security Agency in which we are participating) and the AHA’s own executive director. The three advocates of greater security restrictions were the former curator of CIA’s historical intelligence collection; Guenter Lewy of the University of Massachusetts, and Richard K. Willard, Acting Assistant Attorney General, who among many other responsibilities oversees prosecution of spies, leakers and other unauthorized practitioners of openness.
Under the overall rubric—National Security Information: Different Perspectives—a most informative debate took place and was followed by a couple of hours of Q’s and A’s. Although the final score would have to be recorded as visitors 3, home team 3, there was no doubt where the sympathies of most of the spectators lay. As harassed government servants, they find the Freedom of Information Act burdensome and the workload of declassification reviews and actions on top of their ongoing principal responsibilities an unwelcome one. The questions from the audience members made it clear, however, that they and their staffs will do their best to carry out the law carefully—they just wish it was not so heavy a load!
Another December event of interest to members was the meeting of the joint committee of the AHA and the American Political Science Association, which directs our collaborative Project ’87. It is clear that the year of preparation and effort are paying off. As the calendar marches remorselessly toward 1987 and the constitutional convention’s bicentenary, many meaningful activities are coming up on the commemorative schedule. Plans are being finalized for a Mount Vernon conference in early April, 200 years after Washington mobilized Virginians and Marylanders to consider improving commercial conditions and thereby setting off the march toward Philadelphia’s convention. An other occasion in 1986—200 years after the Annapolis conference—is being planned with the Maryland Bicentennial authorities. Those members subscribing to Project ’87’s splendid quarterly this Constitution can keep up with the full plans and schedule.
Two other December meetings were valuable AHA occasions. We met in New York City with our five trustees, who together with our New York banker, Fiduciary Trust, keep watch over our modest endowment funds and ensure their wise and fruitful investment. The care these major Wall Street authorities give to what can only be by their measurements a small account is an earnest of their continuing and public-spirited interest in history.
We also participated in a meeting at Princeton at which former AHA President Lewis Hanke turned over to President Arthur S. Link the first half of his mighty work, Guide to the Study of US History Outside the United States 1945–80. This heroic undertaking assembles publication and archival data regarding material relating to US studies in over forty countries. This project, under the aegis of the AHA and the University of Massachusetts, has been carried forward by Professor Hanke with awesome dynamism, with only modest help from us but with steady assistance from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It will be published by Kraus Thomson International, who also publish the series W1itings in American Hist01y for us and should be a bibliographic landmark for years to come.
As a relief from this list of meetings piled on meetings, important as they were, let us turn toward a different but also important role played in December by the Association as the watchdog for the profession. One of our colleagues alerted us to a report that the City of New York might be in the process of destroying the city’s old voting registers from 1873 onwards. We, of course, directed an urgent enquiry to the NYC Department of Records and Information Services and have been assured that the records are not scheduled for disposal but for “alternative adequate and safe (storage) space . . . ” until such time as they can be microfilmed and organized for researchers’ access.
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The Chicago annual meeting was a resounding success. Total registration was nearly 2,700, the largest in over five years. Comments heard in the corridors were very favorable to the Hyatt Regency hotel staff—and even more favorable about the rates. As always the annual meeting saw the participation of many of our affiliated societies. Nineteen eighty-four, in addition to being our centennial, was the sixtieth anniversary of the History of Science Society, one of the most active and dynamic of our many affiliates. The experiment of holding a conjoint meeting with HSS, with equal billing in the joint program book, seemed to please both organizations’ members equally. We look forward to other such dual occasions with affiliates.
Following up on our new and closer relations with our affiliates, the incoming president, William H. McNeill, held a breakfast meeting with representatives of many of these organizations present in Chicago. The meeting discussed ways in which the AHA might be more helpful to affiliates and ways in which they might assist the umbrella organization. Apart from the always difficult problem of right of participation in the AHA’s annual meeting program, many areas of agreement were found. All agreed that this publication, Perspectives, might be further developed into even more of an organ for the profession by publicizing affiliates meetings, prizes, and important developments in their fields. We also agreed to exchange mailing list data periodically to encourage plural memberships.
The second annual meeting with Department of History chairs attending the annual meeting, was also of use to participants and to headquarters staff. Chairs attending reported that course enrollments are generally steady to upward in numbers, that graduate enrollments are adequate to forseeable replacement needs for history faculty vacancies, given the backlog of under- or unemployed historians, and that the AHA might well address the problem of closing the gap between corporate leaders and their own firms’ personnel offices. Many chairs reported that while captains of industry are always vocal in their praise for the humanities as a foundation for corporate leadership, on campus recruiters from their own firms are interested far more in acquired skills, whether computer or engineering, than in educated minds.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge a “goof” made in the AHR survey form which appeared in the September issue of Perspectives. One of the survey questions gave the unfortunate impression that the AHR draws its book reviewers exclusively from historians in academia. That is, of course, not true. The Review makes its selection of reviewers solely from persons who have published in their fields of expertise, a criterion which embraces many, many historians outside the academy.
