ARCHIVISTS AND HISTORIANS:

The Times They Are A-Changin'*

PATRICK M. QUINN

To paraphrase John Donne: No archivist is an island; we are all

influenced by the swirl of social forces all around us. Our job is to

interpret, understand and anticipate those forces so that we might

have some control over them, both as human beings and as archi-.

vists. Archivists, like auto workers or carpenters, or for that matter,

most workers, have a tendency to internalize their work experiences.

Work by its very nature engenders and fosters parochial and provincial

attitudes and outlooks. Not looking beyond the confines of his

or her archives, the archivist is concerned primarily with the day

to day requirements of the job. Just as it is difficult for the auto

worker to transcend the confines of tightening the same nut with

monotonous regularity and visualize his or her role in the entire

production process, or a carpenter to place the house she or he is

building in the context of providing decent housing for the people

of a nation, archivists, too, have necessarily found it difficult to

conceptualize the historical and societal framework of their role.

The nation has recently emerged from a particularly turbulent period

in American history. The 1960s witnessed a massive unleashing of

social forces concerned with the issues of minority oppression, the

war in Southeast Asia, and the struggle of women to achieve full

equality in modem society. We all shared the experience of the

sixties and are familiar with the decade's impact both on our own

personal lives and our profession. In this context, it is important to

keep in mind that the modem American archival profession also had

its birth in a decade of turbulent social change-the 1930s. While

the archival profession was indeed well established in Europe and

embodied literally centuries of tradition, experience and theory, the

American continent was a relative archival desert until the thirties.

To be sure, exemplary research repositories did exist, such as the

State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and the Library of Congress,

but the archival profession itself was fragmented and dispersed. The

national government had no systematic archives, most universities

had none; what collections that did exist were administered by librarians,

historians and well-intentioned amateurs.

The crash of 1929 and the social crisis that ensued engendered

massive unemployment among most strata of society. The turbulent

times created a situation which coalesced the embryonic archival

profession into a distinct entity in its own right, forged a cadre of

archivists who would lead our profession for the next 30 years,

stimulated a project which provided archival jobs for thousands of

unemployed academics and students, and established a national

archives to house the records of a nation.

The social crisis of the 1930s posed as its solution the alternatives

of reform or revolution. Through the implementation of the New Deal,

the former alternative prevailed. The Roosevelt administration was

faced with the harsh reality of millions of unemployed workers understandably

quite discontent with their condition. Attempting to stave

off this discontent, the administration initiated a large scale program

of public works. Most of the jobs created were manual and consisted

chiefly of civic and community improvement projects. Special consideration,

however, was given to students and unemployed members

of the academic community who constituted a potentially explosive

social layer. Federal art, writing and theatre projects were established

both to absorb the creative energies of their participants and provide

them with subsistence wages. For members of the historical profession,

the Historical Records Survey of the Works Progress Administration

was established. Young historians and history students were dispatched

to conduct a monumental survey of the extent, condition, and

location of the records of the country.

From the Historical Records Survey project emerged a generation

of historians-turned-archivists who had learned their. trade in the field.

Similarly, with the establishment of the National Archives in Washington

in the mid 1930s, a corps of young unemployed historians

and graduate students were transformed through experiment and

experience into a cadre of archivists who would found the Society

of American Archivists. Many of these pioneering archivists eventually

became almost legendary giants in our profession.

The social turmoil in Europe led to the arrival of Dr. Ernst

Posner on the American archival scene. Dr. Posner personally embodied

the traditions, experience and theory of the European archival past

and, as such, would come to serve as both the bridge to long

established European archival practices and as the major theoretician

of the American archival craft.

The advent of World War II pulled the country out of the

depression and created the need for new archivists to cope with the

rapidly accumulating records of the Army, Navy, and War Departments,

the Office of Strategic Services, and other war-related agencies.

Many' young archivists who completed their apprenticeships during

the New Deal period, moved into these new positions, gaining further

experience in the process.

With the war's end in 1945, a quarter century of unparalleled

prosperity unfolded. A rapidly expanding American economy created

the need for literally millions of college-educated personnel. As a

consequence, we witnessed a veritable explosion in higher education,

visibly manifested by the development of the mass public universities

and university systems.

This educational explosion had a greater impact on our profession

than any previous phenomenon. With the educational expansion came

thousands of new jobs in the history profession, a geometric increase

in historical research, and a commensurate need for facilities for the

care of the raw materials of historical research. As the universities

themselves expanded, a need was created for the systematic preservation,

organization and servicing of their own official records. Some

corporations, flush with new wealth generated during the post-war

prosperity, began to give serious attention to their records, providing

ample financing and staffing for newly established corporate

archives.

During the late 1960s, as the economy began slowing do~-federal

funds became more difficult to obtain. The Society of American

Archivists had begun to stagnate, with neither its numerical membership

nor its overall outlook reflecting the changes that had occurred

within the profession and in society as a whole. Both the Society

of American Archivists and the archival profession entered a transitional

period-a period spanning adolescence and maturity that

was marked by a generational turnover within the Society itself. A

new generation assumed leadership roles. The founding members of

the profession and the Society, the same generation forged by the

conditions of the thirties, gave way to a new generation shaped by

a different set of social conditions.

This new generation, represented by such individuals as Robert

Warner, Herbert Finch, Mary Lynn McCree, Philip Mason, and F.

Gerald Ham, began questioning some of the values and assumptions

of the founding generation of our profession. Many of these values

and assumptions while novel and innovative in their time, had become

encrusted, ossified, and impervious to changing reality during the

quarter century following World War II. Behind the McCrees,

Masons, and Hams loomed still a younger and even more strident

generation of archivists who had come to the profession during the

social upheaval of the 1960s. Together these two younger generations

began pushing the Society and the profession, not without resistance,

in the direction that it is moving today.

Many members of both new generations began drawing a number

of conclusions about the profession and the Society of American

Archivists:

(1) The SAA itself was stagnating in terms of its activities,

outlook and membership. It neither reflected the reality of the changing

profession nor adequately met the needs of its members.

(2) The SAA, led in part by a rather staid and closed group comprised

in the main of top-level administrators, National Archives

administrative personnel and an unusually large number of archivists

from Southern states who held rather traditional values, was seen by

many newer members as an elitist and undemocratic organization.

(3) The SAA was virtually lily-white in its composition and, with

but a few notable exceptions, women in the profession were not treated

as equals.

(4) Many traditional notions of what types of primary source

materials should be collected and from what sectors of the population

source materials should be solicited encouraged an elitist approach to

writing history, an approach that in effect ignored the history of

blacks and other minorities, women, working people and the poor.

(5) The national priority of spending public monies on foreign wars,

especially in Southeast Asia, instead of meeting the needs of Americans

for improved health care, housing, and educational and cultural

opportunities (including archives) was seen as a fundamentally wrong

priority, one that must be altered.

As these issues began to penetrate the hitherto impregnable walls

of the SAA, they were reflected in a number of ways, including:

(1) The Report of the SAA Committee on the Seventies which

initiated the process of democratizing the Society,

(2) The creation of the ad hoc SAA Committee on the Status of

Women in the Archival Profession which was charged with inquiring

into that question and, eventually, offering remedies for abuses extant

in the profession.

(3) Pressure placed upon the SAA to adopt a policy opposing discrimination

within the Society and the profession.

(4) The development of action groups within the SAA such as ACT

(Archivists For Action) and the emergence of newsletters such as the

New Archivist.

(5) The initiation of a campaign to recruit new members and secure

funds to support a full-time executive secretary for the SAA.

(6) The development of the regional archival organizations to meet

needs the SAA could not fill.

Many of these new ideas were by no means held by a majority of

either the SAA membership or practitioners of the profession. This

fact was perhaps best exemplified by the remarks of a respected

senior member of the profession at the 1974 SAA Annual Meeting

in Columbus, who objected to the fact that the SAA was getting too

large and wondered aloud about the credentials of the new members

who had recently joined.

Many of the problems and issues currently facing the profession

should be examined in the context of a generalized downturn in the

American economy., In short, the post-Vietnam War period of economic

expansion has run its course. This is said not as a prophecy of doom

but as a realistic observation of the fact that the American economy

no longer reigns unchallenged on the world market-Japanese and

German capital have become competitive and the American economy

is no longer artificially stimulated by the massive military expenditures

of the Vietnam War.

What implications will this new economic situation likely have for

archivists?

(1) An already tight job market will become tighter.

(2) Large-scale cutbacks in public expenditures for archival operations

can be expected. Archives, after all, in a non-expanding economy,

are a luxury. With the cutbacks will come layoffs and threats to job

security.

(3) For the next few years, at any rate, unemployed history Pills

will continue to compete with apprentice, on-the-job trained, archivists,

for the few jobs and promotions that become available.

(4) With the tight job market, no substantive change in the almost

exclusively white complexion of the profession will occur.

(5) The use of part-time students and other para-professionals in

order to cut costs will escalate. Such use of student help will

inescapably undercut jobs for full-time archivists.

(6) Salaries will barely keep pace with the rate of inflation; the

days of generous salary increases are over.

(7) Controversy over the right of privacy vs. the right of access to

our holdings will increase. Watergate is merely a foreshadowing of

things to come.

(8) Many archivists will militantly defend the gains they have

already made and actively seek further gains. Archivists, especially in

non-administrative, lower-paying positions, will begin to join trade

unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal

Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, and the

American Federation of Government Employees in order to protect

themselves, simply because the profession, small as it is, packs no

real economic or political clout.

(9) The SAA, compelled by the new turn in events, by its increasingly

younger composition, and by pressure of regional groups such as MAC,

will seriously try to come to grips with some of the problems facing

the profession.

(10) The related phenomena of individuals becoming archivists by

default, and the archival profession comprised in the main of history

prelim flunkouts and librarians assigned to archival work against

their wishes, are over. The new archivist will be a person who consciously

and deliberately chooses to enter the profession. Criteria for

prospective archivists will be determined more and more by exigencies

of the economy combined with apprenticeship performance rather than

being based upon artificially imposed educational standards.

If in the past the historian has been the bricklayer and the archivist

the hod-carrier, the future will witness at least an equalization of

these roles. If the archival profession can manage to organize itself,

it will become a meaningful pursuit in its own right and not simply an

appendage of either librarianship or the pursuit of history. To achieve

this maturity it will be necessary for archivists to commence a dialogue

with colleagues in other fields-especially historians.

Prior to 1970 most archivists came to their chosen trade after

brief stopovers in the temple of Clio, but the relationship between

archivists and historians in the period following World War II has not

been particularly cordial. Most historians tended to view archivists

in the same manner as they did filling station attendants, while

archivists, especially those with history backgrounds who entered

the archival craft by circumstance or default, looked upon most "real"

historians with resentment and jealousy.

This situation was perhaps best articulated by W. Kaye Lamb, then

Dominion Archivist of Canada, in a paper presented at a joint

luncheon of the Society of American Archivists and the American

Historical Association in Washington, D.C., in 1961. Noting that to

historians "the archivist is essentially a hack, a hewer of wood and a

drawer of water," Mr. Lamb devoted the balance of his presentation

to an impassioned defense of archivists, calling upon them to shed

their collective archival inferiority complex.

The infamous "Lowenheim affair", involving scholarly access to

records at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, exacerbated

the uncongenial relationship between archivists and historians.

Separated by a wall of mutual suspicion and narrow specialization,

archivists and historians, in many respects, became adversaries. The

longstanding European tradition of the archivist as historian-scholar,

as exemplified by Dr. Ernst Posner, virtually disappeared in the

United States by the 1970s.

Yet, ironically, two of the most important critiques of contemporary

archival practices in recent years have come from historians. In both

instances an historian came before the Society of American Archivists

with a trenchant criticism of commonly accepted archival theory and

practice and challenged the Society and its membership to transcend

narrow and parochial traditions and concerns and begin to implement

a wholly different approach to acquiring and making available the

records of our time.

Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University shocked and offended

many in his audience with a paper entitled "The American Archivist

and Radical Reform" presented at the 1970 Annual Meeting of the

Society of American Archivists in Washington, D.C. Zinn delivered

his paper at a session on "The Archivist and the New Left," chaired

by Frank Evans. The other panelists were Philip Mason of Wayne

State University and myself.

While Zinn' s paper most certainly was received with disdain by

many of those present, it was welcomed most enthusiastically by a

relatively small group of mainly younger archivists who thereafter

committed themselves to publicizing Zinn's views and persuading

their colleagues of the validity of his criticisms of the archival profession.

Largely as a consequence of Zinn's challenge, a small number of

archivists in San Francisco the following year for the 35th SAA Annual

Meeting founded ACT, an informal caucus dedicated to reform within

both the SAA and the archival profession. During the six years

since ACT was founded in 1971, many of its ideas and recommendations

have been adopted by the SAA.

At that same meeting in San Francisco, another historian ventured

into the archival den, offering a critique and challenge similar to

Zinn's. Professor Sam Bass Warner, Jr., then of the University of

Michigan, presented at the session on urban archives a paper entitled

"The Shame of the Cities: Public Records of the Metropolis" in which

he scored the deplorable state of urban archives in the United States

and called for a fundamental reassessment of all of the traditional

assumptions, notions, and practices connected with the acquisition,

preservation and research use of municipal archives. His views, in

large part, were echoed and reinforced by the other members of the

panel, including Dennis East, then of Wayne State University, and

Allen Weinberg of the City and County Archives of Philadelphia. The

session was chaired by Edward Johnson of the Florida Bureau of

Archives and Records Management.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Warner's paper did not have the

same impact as Zinn's, in part because of the relatively small attendance

at the San Francisco meeting. Warner's plea, however, did not

go entirely unnoticed. F. Gerald Ham, in his SAA presidential

address given in Toronto in 1974 entitled "The Archival Edge,"

called attention to Warner's suggestions and urged that they be given

careful consideration.

Most archivists, however, have only heard about Zinn's and

Warner's papers. Few have had an opportunity to read either of them.

Warner's paper was never published and Zinn's appeared in a small

circulation journal not easily accessible to archivists. It is thus as a

service to the archival profession that the Midwestern Archivist is

including both Zinn' s and Warner's papers in this issue. I hope that

readers will consider these articles not merely as historical documents

but as contemporary guides for action, offered in good faith and with

good will. These colleagues from an allied profession had the courage

to disregard the arbitrary constraints that confine and circumscribe

academic disciplines. Their stimulating critiques and recommendations

present archivists with a challenge that warrants serious attention.

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fall 1973

meeting of the Midwest Archives Conference in Madison, Wisconsin

From Midwestern Archivist Volume II, Number 2 1977 pp. 5-13.