Washington Notes, March 1986

President Kennedy once described our nation’s capital as “a city of Northern charm and Southern efficien­cy,” and this is never more true than in the winter months. One-half inch of snow causes blind, unreasoning panic among the local drivers—who, of course, outnumber public transport us­ers vastly—to  the scornful amusement of visitors from the snow belt. Amid these alarums and excursions during the months of January and February, the business of the Association goes on at a less frenzied tempo than during the spring and fall.

While we do not go into hibernation, we do have time to focus on the routine activities of headquarters. This column will describe the activities of a “normal” month; activities that would get squeezed out of the column during our busy seasons. We hope that members will get a feel for these bread and butter items in the AHA’s daily diet.

Any month brings a steady flow of visitors. Some are members who are in town to use the Library of Congress or the Archives and drop by to see the AHA. Others are foreign historians, whose itineraries, arranged perhaps by USIA or the Fulbright program, in­clude a stop at the historical organization in the US. Still others are local col­leagues with a problem to discuss. There are often convention center and hotel salespeople from cities all over the country seeking our interest in siting an AHA annual meeting amid the incom­parable beauties of Wheresoeverville.

January and early February 1986 pro­duced a delegation of Romanian histori­ans, a New Zealand government educa­tor (interested in our joint program with OAH and NCSS to develop collabora­tives of secondary and post-secondary teachers), the AHA’s insurance suppli­er, and the head of one of the major military historical programs (to consult on the threat to government historical offices posed by looming Gramm-Rud­man-Hollings mandatory budget cuts).

An average monthly workload in winter will also produce a number of headquarters staff activities. For example, we offered advice and assistance to a pro­ject to establish a foundation to assist the State Department’s Foreign Service In­stitute in its educational activities; to represent the historical profession, we attended the deeply moving national ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol to dedicate a bust of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. We consulted repeat­edly with a number of our members to help mobilize a rescue effort for the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History and its Car­ter G. Woodson Center. Thanks to their efforts the back-taxes wolf has been driven back a little distance from the door of the Center; although that asso­ciation is not one of our affiliated sister organizations, we feel strongly that a major effort should be mounted on its behalf.

The Executive Director made a one­-day visit to Kansas City to participate in a meeting of the special committee of the Truman Library and  Institute, which is planning a broader program of educational activities. Headquarters staff met with the leadership of the Education Division of the National En­dowment for the Humanities to discuss plans for a possible conference on grad­uate education in history. We also at­tended executive committee meetings of two of the three lobbying organizations in which we participate—the National Humanities Alliance and the Consortium of Social Science Associations. (Our primary advocacy arm is histori­ans’ own National Coordinating Com­mittee, with which we are in daily and even hourly contact.)

A number of individual and confer­ence phone calls  were made in connec­tion with planning for the VIth Collo­quium of Soviet and American Histori­ans, which is slated to take place late this winter or in the spring in Washington under the auspices of the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. At this writing we have still not been able to pin down a mutually convenient date.

AHA staff also participated in a num­ber of other meetings in the Washing­ton area. “Free Trade in Ideas,” a coali­tion of organizations under the umbrel­la of ACLU sponsorship, held a meeting in mid-January at which it announced the proposal of legislation to amend sections of the McCarran-Walter Act, specifically those placing certain ideo­logical restrictions on visits to the Unit­ ed States by  noncitizens.  Elsewhere in this newsletter we discuss a major con­ference convened by the Visions Foun­dation of the Museum of American His­tory of the Smithsonian Institution, planned to coincide with the birthday celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. The conference was also the occasion for the release of Visions, a bimonthly popular magazine of Black history.

Lastly, we had the pleasure of partici­pating in a meeting with representatives of seven social science learned societies to discuss the NCSS planned commission on the future of history and the social sci­ences in the schools. Members will recall that the AHA Council, in its December meeting, endorsed the plans for the commission and will be represented in the planning phase by former AHA presi­dent Arthur Link (Feb. 1986, p. 1).