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SECRECY, ARCHIVES,

AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST*

HOWARD ZINN

Let me work my way in from the great circle of the world to us at the

center by discussing, in turn, three things: the social role of the

professional in modern times; the scholar in the United States today;

and the archivist here and now.

I will start by quoting from a document-an insidious move to

gain rapport with archivists, some might say, except that the document

is a bit off the beaten track in archival work (a fact we might

ponder later). It is the transcript of a trial that took place in Chicago

in the fall of 1969, called affectionately "the Conspiracy Trial." I

refer to it because the transcript occasionally touches on the problem

of the professional person-whether a lawyer, historian, or archivist-and

the relation between professing one's craft and professing one's

humanity. On October 15, 1969, the day of the national Moratorium

to protest the war in Vietnam, defense attorney William Kunstler

wore a black armband in court to signify his support of the Moratorium

and his protest against the war. The government's lawyer, Thomas

Foran, called this to the attention of the judge, saying: "Your

Honor, that's outrageous. This man is a mouthpiece. Look at him,

wearing a band like his clients, your Honor."

The day before the Moratorium, Attorney Kunstler had asked the

court to recess October 15 to observe the Moratorium. This dialogue

between Kunstler and Judge Hoffman then followed:

Mr. Kunstler:...And I think it is as important, your Honor, to protest

more than some thirty thousand American deaths and Lord knows

how many Vietnamese deaths that have occurred in that country

as it is to mourn one man {Eisenhower} in the United States, and

if courts can close for the death of one man who lived a full life,

they ought to close for the deaths of thousands and millions of

innocent people whose lives have been corrupted and rotted and

perverted by this utter horror that goes on in your name and my

name-

The Court: Not in my name.

Mr. Kunstler: It is in your name, too, in the name of the people

of the United States.

The Court: You just include yourself. Don't join me with you.

Goodness. Don't you and I-

Mr. Kunstler: You are me, your Honor, because every citizen-you

are a citizen and I am a citizen.

The Court: Only because you are a member of the bar of this

court and I am obliged to hear you respectfully, as I have done.

Mr. Kunstler: No, your Honor, you are more than that. You are a

citizen of the United States.

The Court: Yes, I am.

Mr. Kunstler: And I am a citizen of the United States, and it is

done in our name, in Judge Hoffman's name and William Kunstler's

name.

The Court: That will be al~ sir. I shall hear you no further. ¹

Kunstler was trying to accomplish something very difficult, to get a

judge to emerge from that comfortable comer which society had

declared as his natural habitat, and to declare himself a citizen, even

while on the bench, in his robes, plying his profession. Kunstler said

a slaughter was taking place in Vietnam, and it was going on in the

name of all citizens, and he wanted the Judge to recognize that fact

not only in the evening at home after his robes were off, or at the

country club on the weekend, but there, in his daily work, in his most

vital hours, in the midst of his job of judging. Kunstler failed, but

his attempt illustrates the tension all of us feel, if we have not

been totally mesmerized by the grandeur of our position, the tension

between our culture-decreed role as professionals and our existential

needs as human beings.

Professionalism is a powerful form of social control. By professionalism

I mean the almost total immersion in one's craft, being so

absorbed in the day-to-day exercise of those skills, as to have little

time, energy, or will to consider what part those skills play in the

total social scheme. I say almost-total immersion, because if it were

total, we would be suspicious of it. Being not quite total, we are

tolerant of it, or at least sufficiently confused by the mixture to do

nothing. It is come thing like Yossarian's jaundice, in Catch 22, where

Joseph Heller writes:

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just

short of being jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it.

If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge

him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused

them. ²

By social control I mean maintaining things as they are, preserving

traditional arrangements, preventing any sharp change in how the

society distributes wealth and power. Both in pre-modern and modern

times, the basic combination for social control has remained the same:

force and deception. Machiavelli, writing on the threshold of the

modern era, drew upon the past to prescribe for the future that same

combination: the power of the lion, the shrewdness of the fox. The

modern era has magnified enormously both elements: it has concentrated

force more efficiently than ever before and it has used

more sophisticated techniques for deception. The printing press,

heralding the spread of knowledge to large sections of the population,

made large-scale deception both necessary and possible, and in the

last four centuries we have progressed from the printing press to color

television, from Machiavelli to Herman Kahn.

There were few professionals in the old days. Now they are everywhere,

and their skills, their knowledge, could be a threat to the

status quo. But their will to challenge the going order is constantly

weakened by rewards of money and position. And they are so divided,

so preoccupied with their particular specialities, as to spend most of

their time smoothing, tightening their tiny piece of linkage in the

social machine. This leaves very little time or energy to worry about

whether the machine is designed for war or peace, for social need or

individual profits, to help us or to poison us.

This specialization of modern times is pernicious enough for waiters,

auto mechanics, and doctors, and the bulk of the workers in society,

who contribute to the status quo without even knowing it, simply by

keeping the vast machinery going without a hitch. But certain

professionals serve the status quo in special ways. Weapons experts,

or scientists in military research, may be enormously gifted in their

own fields, yet so constricted in their role as citizens, as to turn

over their frighteningly potent products without question or with very

feeble questioning, to whatever uses the leaders of society decide.

Remember the role of the humane genius, Robert Oppenheimer, in the

decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Oppenheimer was a

member of the Scientific Advisory Panel which recommended the

dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, thinking it was necessary to

save lives. But Oppenheimer later commented (his testimony is in the

files of the AEC):

We didn't know beans about the military situation in Japan. We

didn't know whether they could be caused to surrender by other

means or whether the invasion was really inevitable.

Equally important for social control as the military scientists are

those professionals who are connected with the dissemination of

knowledge in society: the teachers, the historians, the political

scientists, the. journalists, and yes, the archivists. Here too,

professionalization leads to impotence, as everyone is given a little

corner of the playground. And it is considered unprofessional to

organize everyone in the yard to see if the playground director is

violating various of the Ten Commandments as we play. We have all

heard the cries of "don't politicize our profession" when someone asks

joint action on the war in Vietnam. This has the effect of leaving

only our spare time for political checking-up while those who make

the political decisions in society-this being their profession-work

at it full time.

This neat separation, keeping your nose to the professional grindstone,

and leaving politics to your left-over moments, assumes that

your profession is not inherently political. It is neutral. Teachers are

objective and unbiased. Textbooks are eclectic and fair. The historian

is even-handed and factual. The archivist keeps records, a scrupulously

neutral job. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut says.

However, if any of these specialists in the accumulation and dissemination

of knowledge were to walk over to another part of the playpen,

the one marked political sociology, and read Karl Mannheim, who in

Ideology and Utopia, points out (following Marx, of course, but it is

more prudent to cite Mannheim) that knowledge has a social origin

and a social use. It comes out of a divided, embattled world, and is

poured into such a world. It is not neutral either in origin or effect. It

reflects the bias of a particular social order; more accurately, it

reflects the diverse biases of a diverse social order, but with one

important qualification: that those with the most power and wealth in

society will dominate the field of knowledge, so that it serves their

interests. The scholar may swear to his neutrality on the job, but

whether he be physicist, historian, or archivist, his work will tend, in

this theory, to maintain the existing social order by perpetuating its

values, by legitimizing its priorities, by justifying its wars, perpetuat-

ing its prejudices, contributing to its xenophobia, and apologizing for

its class order. Thus Aristotle, behind that enormous body of philosophical

wisdom, justifies slavery, and Plato, underneath that dazzling

set of dialogues, justifies obedience to the state, and Machiavelli,

respected as one of the great intellectual figures of history, urges our

concentration on means rather than ends.

Now maybe we have not been oblivious to this idea that the

professional scholars in any society tend to buttress the existing

social order and values of that society. But we have tended to attribute

this to other societies, or other times or other professions. Not the

United States. Not now. Not here. Not us. It was easy to detect the

control of the German scholars or the Russian scholars-but much

harder to recognize that the high school texts of our own country

have fostered jingoism, war heroes, the Sambo approach to the black

man, the vision of the Indian as savage, and the notion that white

Western Civilization is the cultural, humanistic summit of man's time

on earth.

We could see where scholars in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, by

quietly doing their job, would be perpetuating an awful set of conditions;

to keep that kind of social order intact was wrong and we

hoped intellectuals would rebel. The U.S. however, was a different

matter; what was wrong here was not the social order itself, but

problems at the margins of it. It was all right for intellectuals to keep

this basically decent order intact by doing our jobs; and we could

attack the problems at the margins by signing petitions and joining

political campaigns after hours.

Events of the past decade, I would now argue, have begun to

challenge that complacency, that part-time commitment to political

involvement which assumes a basically just society, needing only

marginal reforms. We have won those reforms. The U.S. is the great

model in history of the reformist nation, and the past half-century

has been labeled by one of our important historians as "The Age of

Reform." We have had New Deal legislation to take care of our

economic flaws, Civil Rights laws to take care of our racial problems,

Supreme Court decisions to expand our rights in court, the Good

Neighbor Policy, Marshall Plan, and Alliance for Progress to repair

our relations with other countries.

Yet, it is exactly at the crest of these reforms that the United

States has found itself in a turbulent internal crisis in which a significant

part of the younger generation has begun to question the

legitimacy of the government, the values of the culture. How is it

that after a barrage of Supreme Court decisions, Civil Rights laws,

the confrontation between black and white in this country is at its

most intense? How is it that after the New Freedom, the New Deal,

the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, the distribution

of the immense resources of this society is at its most irrational,

its most wasteful?

The problems of the United States are not peripheral and have not

been met by our genius at reform. They are not the problems of excess,

but of normalcy. Our racial problem is not the Ku Klux Klan or

the South, but our fundamental liberal assumption that paternalism

solves all. Our economic problem is not a depression but the normal

functioning of the economy, dominated by corporate power and profit.

Our problem with justice is not a corrupt judge or bribed jury but

the ordinary day-to-day functioning of the police, the law, the courts,

where property rights come before human rights. Our problem in

foreign policy is not a particular mad adventure: the Spanish American

War or the Vietnam War, but a continuous set of suppositions about

our role in the world, involving missionary imperialism, and a belief in

America's ability to solve complex social problems.

If all this is so, then the normal functioning of the scholar, the

intellectual, the researcher, helps maintain those corrupt norms in the

United States, just as the intellectual in Germany, Soviet Russia, or

South Africa, by simply doing his small job, maintains what is normal

in those societies. And if so, then what we always asked of scholars

in those terrible places is required of us in the United States today:

rebellion against the norm.

In the United States, however, the contribution of scholars to the

status quo is more subtle and more complex than in more blatantly

oppressive societies. Only a small number of scholars give direct

service to the war. Most simply go about their scholarly business,

their acts of commission subtle, their acts of omission gross. For

instance, the historians' emphasis on presidents and laws only subtly

perpetuates an elitist approach to politics; missing completely in

Morison's Oxford History of the American People is the Ludlow

Massacre of 1914. The political scientists' emphasis on electoral

politics only subtly suggests that voting is the central problem in

democratic control: you look in vain for extensive work on the politics

of protest. The scholar's emphasis on Supreme Court decisions only

subtly distorts the fact of constitutional rights; constitutional

histories omit the reality of police power in determining how much free

expression there really is on the streets.

The archivist, even more than the historian and the political

scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his

job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest:

a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records

of the society. But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars,

and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate

the political and economic status quo simply by going about his

ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake.

If so, the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not,

as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the

humanizing of an inevitably political craft. Scholarship in society is

inescapably political. Our choice is not between being political or not.

Our choice is to follow the politics of the going order, that is, to do

our job within the priorities and directions set by the dominant forces

of society, or else to promote those human values of peace, equality,

and justice, which our present society denies.

I would guess from my small experience-and I leave it up to you

to carry on the discussion from there-that the following points are

true:

(1) That the existence, preservation, and availability of archives,

documents, records in our society are very much determined by the

distribution of wealth and power. That is, the most powerful, the

richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find documents,

preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the

public. This means government, business, and the military are

dominant.

(2) That one of the ways in which information is controlled and

democracy denied, is by the government withholding important documents

from the public, or keeping secret their existence altogether, or

censoring them (how we must struggle to get data about the Gulf of

Tonkin, the Bay of Pigs, the bombing of Laos, CIA operations in

Guatemala). And that while the ostensible purpose of such secrecy is

the physical security of the nation, the actual purpose is almost

always the political security of those who run the nation. Ernest

May writes in ,. “A Case for Court Historians:"

The materials needed by historians would also contain much

information which, on other than security grounds, government

officials would prefer not to see released. . . Sec’y of State Rusk

could conceivably have been embarrassed by revelations about advice

he gave when Asst. Sec’y of State in the Truman Administration. . . . .³

(3) That the collection of records, papers, and memoirs, as well as

oral history, is biased towards the important and powerful people of

the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure: we learn most

about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures; the old,

not the young; the politically active, not the politically alienated; men,

not women; white, not black; free people rather than prisoners;

civilians rather than soldiers; officers rather than enlisted men. Someone

writing about Strom Thurmond will have no problem with

material. But what if someone wants to write about the blind black

jazz pianist, Art Tatum?

(4) That, despite the recent development of oral history, the written

word still dominates, and this tends to emphasize the top layers,

the most literate elements in the population.

(5) That the emphasis in the collection of records is towards

individuals rather than movements, towards static interviews, rather

than the dynamics of social interaction in demonstrations. For

instance, where is the raw material-that very raw material lon

the experience of demonstrators in Chicago at .the hands of the

police at the 1968 convention, which was used by the Walker Commission?

I wonder, for instance, if Boston University, proud that it

holds the papers of Martin Luther King, has recorded the experience

of students who were clubbed by police at the Student Union last year?

(6) That the emphasis is on the past over the present, on the

antiquarian over the contemporary; on the non-controversial over the

controversial; the cold over the hot. What about the transcripts of

trials? Shouldn't these be made easily available to the public? Not

just important trials like the Chicago Conspiracy Trial I referred to,

but the ordinary trials of ordinary persons, an important part of the

record of our society. Even the extraordinary trials of extraordinary

persons are not available, but perhaps they do not show our society at

its best. The trial of the Catonsville 9 would be lost to us if Father

Daniel Berrigan had not gone through the transcript and written a

play based on it.

(7) That far more resources are devoted to the collection and preservation

of what already exists as records, than to recording fresh

data: I would guess that more energy and money is going for the

collection and publication of the Papers of John Adams than for

recording the experiences of soldiers on the battlefront in Vietnam.

Where are the interviews of Seymour Hersh with those involved in the

My Lai Massacre, or Fred Gardner's interviews with those involved in

the Presidio Mutiny Trial in California, or Wallace Terry's interviews

with black GI's in Vietnam? Where are the recorded experiences of

the young Americans in Southeast Asia who quit the International

Volunteer Service in protest against American policy there, or of the

Foreign Service officers who have quietly left?

Let me point to some random pieces of evidence to illustrate these

points I have made about the going bias in archival work. Recently,

I came across a list of letterpress publications sponsored, assisted,

or endorsed by the National Historical Publications Commission of the

General Services Administration. The papers of thirty-three Americans

are being published. There is one black person on the list, and that

is Booker T. Washington. What about Mother Jones, the labor

organizer, or Bob Moses, the SNCC leader, or the papers of the man

who lives down the street? I know that the very stress on collected

papers is severely limiting, but there are papers of the leaders of

protest movements. Of course there are problems: the papers of Big

Bill Haywood were destroyed by the United States Government. But

what of Eugene Debs or Clarence Darrow? I suppose it could be

claimed that there is one important leader of a protest movement on

the list: that is Jefferson Davis.

Another item of evidence: In an article by Amelia Fry and Willa

Baum, oral-historians at the-University of California at Berkeley, the

authors cite the lack of money as causing some oral history projects

to erase important tapes. They note the feeling among some persons

involved in oral history that "since preserving tapes is expensive and

required special conditions, the decision should hinge on the affluence

of the project and the relative importance of the person interviewed."⁴

The Oral History Collection at Columbia University seems almost a

caricature of the biases I have noted. It has long ignored the poor,

the obscure, the radicals, the outcasts-it has ignored movements

and living events. When I wrote from the South, in the midst of the

civil rights movement, to the Columbia Oral History Collection to try

to get them to tape what was happening at the time in Georgia,

Alabama, Mississippi, I got a bureaucratic response which muttered

about money and priorities and allocations, the upshot of which was:

no. But the latest report of the Oral History Project gives doting

attention to its Air Force Project, Navy Project, Marine Project. It is

happy to have the reminiscences of General O'Donnell: how about the

reminiscences of the various Yossarians in the Air Force? It has the

Allan Nevins project which consists of interviewing the friends of

Allan Nevins (wouldn't it be more interesting to interview the enemies

of Allan Nevins?) It will spend much time interviewing members of the

Eisenhower Administration, based on a $120,000 grant from' the

National Archives. Has the Project interviewed Mrs. Fannie Lou

Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, or Eldridge Cleaver or Dave

Dellinger? Did it go to the Poor Peoples' March and interview the

people camped out there in the mud? Has it interviewed Vietnam

veterans in the rehabilitation hospitals? Does it go into the ghetto

around Columbia University? Or is that job only for Kenneth Clark?

For important contemporary interviews, one might do better to consult Playboy

Magazine than the Columbia Oral History Project.

Another item of evidence: In the American Historical Association

newsletter of April 1970, there is a report of the "Thirteenth Meeting

of the Advisory Committee on "Foreign Relations of the United States, "⁵

a series of State Department documents issued by the year. The Advisory

Committee has representatives of the American Historical Association

the American Political Science Association, and the Society of International

Law. One clause in the report reads: "in 1962 the Secretary

of State officially set the time lapse at 20 years-the committee

cannot have access to these Foreign Relations documents until twenty

years have elapsed. By what right, in a democracy requiring the

enlightenment of the public, does any bureaucrat make such decisions

for us all? Yet this advisory committee of scholars is painfully obsequious

before the might of government: they complain that it takes as much

as two years for the volumes of Foreign Relations to get clearance

from Department of State, but instead of challenging the whole concept

of clearance, the committee only asks humbly for the clearance procedure

to move faster.⁶

Note -also that while the Foreign Relations staff must wait 20 years,

the public at large must wait 30 years, and indeed the committee of

scholars say they are "highly disturbed by the narrowing gap" between

the scholars' wait and the public's wait, and by the possibility of "outside,

ad hoc publication"-that is publication outside the official aegis

of the State Department and the committee of scholars. Such publication,

they warn, may beat the Foreign Relations series to the punch,

and "provide inaccurate or partial accounts" which "may achieve a

popular impact." This could be offset, however, by quicker publication

of the Foreign Relations series, with the cooperation of the State

Department.7 We find in it another paragraph of outstanding timidity,

in which the committee expresses its concern that the open period

may move back beyond 30 years. Such a move, the committee says

with measured sycophancy, would be "violative of the commendable

record the Department of State has maintained over the decades in

making the foreign relations documentation of the United States

publicly and systematically available." In that paragraph the committee

notes that other countries such as England are moving in the

opposite direction, decreasing the years of closed records, and then it

concludes: "The committee is not herewith advocating advancing the

open period for full public access to diplomatic documentation, but

it believes that everything should be done to prevent it from being set

back in excess of 30 years."

Thus. the committee falls allover itself in gratitude that the public

only has to wait 30 years. It doesn't want to rock the boat (which all

hands aboard know is sinking) by asking for a shorter wait. Where is

the bold, inquiring spirit of the scholar in a democratic state. demanding

to see government documents as a right. not a privilege? No

wonder, with such a government, and with such scholars, we do desperately

need I. F. Stone.

What is the net effect of the kind of archival biases I have just

described? To protect governmental authorities from close scrutiny,

and therefore from the indignation, the anger that might result from a

closer look at government policies. To glorify important people, powerful

people, military, political, and business leaders, to keep obscure the

lives of ordinary people in the society. To maintain such archival biases

requires no malfeasance on the part of archivists, only passivity, only

falling into the lines already set by the dominant trends of the

profession.

I say dominant trends, because I know there are some good things

being done in archival work, some pioneering efforts in recording

events, in oral history with ordinary people, in black history, in labor

history. But let's resist the characteristically American trick of

passing off fundamental criticism by pointing to a few reforms. The

Saigon regime reformed itself for twenty years before it finally fell.

We are still passing civil rights laws, and poverty bills. Let us not once

again be happy because like Yossairian, we don't quite have jaundice.

We also are not quite cured. Like Yossairian, we are still in the hospital.

Like him, we are in danger. And we will remain in danger until, like

him, we rebel.

I have argued that the crisis of present-day America is not one

of aberration, but of normalcy, that at issue are not marginal

characteristics, but our central operating values: the profit system,

racial paternalism, violence towards those outside our narrow pale.

If this is so, then scholarly passivity, far from being neutral and disinterested,

serves those operating values. What is required then is to

wrench ourselves out of our passivity, to try to integrate our pro-

fessional lives with our humanity.

I have only two proposals for archivists: One, that they engage in

a campaign to open all government documents to the public. If there

are rare exceptions, let the burden of proof be on those who claim them,

. not as now on the citizen who wants information. And two, that they

take the trouble to compile a whole new world of documentary material,

~bout the lives, desires, needs, of ordinary people. Both of these proposals

are in keeping with the spirit of democracy, which demands that

the population know what the government is doing, and that the condition,

the grievances. the will of the underclasses become a force in

the nation.

To refuse to be instruments of social control in an essentially undemocratic

society, to begin to play some small part in the creation of

a real democracy: these are worthy jobs for historians, for archivists,

for us all.

FOOTNOTES

1. U.S. v Dellinger, et al. 69 CR 180; Judy Clavin and John Spitzer,

The Conspiracy Trial (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970),

pp. 88-9.

2. Robert M. Scotto (ed.), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (New York: Dell

Publishing Co., 1973), p. 7 .

3. Charles Warren Cambridge (ed.), Perspectives in American History,

1969, Vol. III (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.) pp. 421.2.

4. Amelia Fry and Willa Baum, "A Janus Look at Oral History,"

The American Archivist 32 (October, 1969) 325.

5. American Historical Association, Newsletter, 8 (April, 1970) 2-10.

6. Ibid. p.4.

7. Ibid. p. 6.

* An abridged version of this paper originally appeared in the Fall,

1971 issue of The Boston University Journal.

From Midwestern Archivist Volume II, Number 2 1977 pp. 14-27.