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NLA News - home June 2006 Volume XVI Number 9

‘From the lips of humanity’: Allan Nevins and the Oral History program

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Unknown photographer
Mel Pratt, Douglas Wilkie and unidentified chauffeur  1930s
negative; 8.3 x 10.9 cm
Pictures Collection,
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Barry York describes how an American’s inspiration helped to shape a key component of the National Library’s Collection

The National Library is a creature of Australian conditions and circumstance but it has also been influenced by overseas experience. One of the Library’s most fascinating and successful special collections—the Oral History program—is a case in point. Along with other institutional oral history collections around the world, it owes an intellectual debt to an outstanding American historian named Allan Nevins (1890–1971).

Nevins was probably the first significant historian to appreciate the challenges posed to his profession by new technologies. Born in Illinois in 1890, he grew up with three fantastic inventions of the late nineteenth century: the phonograph, the kinetoscope and the telephone. For the first time in human history, sound could be recorded and played back, movement filmed and viewed and, at the same time, the telephone was lessening peoples’ dependence on letter writing as a means of distant communication.

These three inventions carried profound implications for historians. Technological innovation gave rise to new sources of historical evidence and to new, exciting, ways of learning about the past.

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For President, Grover Cleveland of New York  c.1884
b&w film copy negative
Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

Nevins was the first academic historian to theorise the significance of the new sources. In 1938, in his book The Gateway to History, he speculated about the new ‘non-literary data’, such as sound recordings and actuality films. He described non-literary data as essential parts of the mass of evidence upon which historians must rely, and ‘not to be ignored because they flow apart from what is today the great central stream of historical evidence, the written or printed word’.

Nevins had to be taken seriously. He was a brilliant scholar, with a passionate commitment to the discipline of history and to its value as literature. By 1938, he had already been on the faculty at Columbia University for a decade and had been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, for books on former US President Grover Cleveland, and Hamilton Fish, a former Secretary of State. A prolific writer who began his career as a journalist, Nevins wrote more than 50 books, most of which are in the National Library’s collection. In addition to those on Cleveland and Fish, he produced biographies of Henry White, Abram Hewitt, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Herbert Lehman. His multi-volume history of the American Civil War, Ordeal of the Union, took more than 20 years to complete.

To Nevins, a critical spirit lay at the heart of the genuine historian. He believed in factual accuracy and strong narrative, and history as a means of teaching ‘lessons of value for the future’. He believed that history served a ‘democratic function’.

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Hamilton Fish  (undated)
b&w film copy negative
Library of Congress

His early thinking about oral history was influenced by a desire to compensate for what he believed to be a decline in letter writing. Public officials and businesspeople were, he believed, increasingly using the telephone to discuss important matters and therefore leaving less written evidence about decisions taken. Letters were important to him because they could provide evidence of motivation in human behaviour. He edited for publication the letters of Grover Cleveland as well as the diaries of historic American figures Philip Hone, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk and George Templeton Strong.

It wasn’t until 2004, more than 30 years after his death, that a biography of Nevins himself was published. Written by Gerald L. Fetner, Immersed in Great Affairs provides new information about the development of Nevins’ interest in oral history. Two publishing projects shortly after World War Two were particularly important to the process. One concerned the memoirs of Cordell Hull, who had served as Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944; the other was about Henry Morgenthau Jr, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Treasury between 1934 and 1945.

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Henry Morgenthau  (undated)
Digital file from original negative
Library of Congress

Nevins had been asked by the Macmillan publishing company to review a draft of Hull’s memoirs. He was dismayed by the way in which Hull merely restated the official State Department line on the vital issues of the 1930s and early 1940s. Nevins had a strong interest in all this, as an opponent of American isolationism and supporter of collective security. Nevins suggested that Hull should work more of the human element into the book, especially the conflicts within the Roosevelt administration and his disagreements with Morgenthau. Hull agreed, and a better, deeper memoir was achieved. It was an example of how an oral history interview would ideally have proceeded: an informed interviewer, using the existing record, seeking information from someone’s recollection of personal experience that might provide an understanding beyond that record. Essentially, Nevins wanted public officials to reveal how policy was made and conducted, and to reveal the motivations behind their actions.

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Unknown photographer
H.L. White, C.B.E., the National Librarian  1960s
b&w photograph; 21.4 x 15.8 cm
Pictures Collection,
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Nevins’ interest in Henry Morgenthau led him to propose an edited collection of his papers and diary. Nevins wrote to Morgenthau and explained the proposal in terms of ‘a record of serious conversations and conferences’. A publisher had shown interest in a book that would be ‘more of a conversation’ about Morgenthau’s experiences. Nevins set out the principle of the relationship between the print-based record and oral history when he told Morgenthau that ‘you naturally cannot recall the greater part of the events—much less the intricacies of very complex transactions—without written material from the Diary to stimulate your memory’. In February 1946, Nevins sat down with Morgenthau in the former treasurer’s New York office and conducted an interview with him about Roosevelt’s international economic policies. Fetner says this interview was a precursor to the oral history program established by Nevins at Columbia three years later.

Nevins once remarked that the deeds and experiences of men are the content of history, while the thinking which led to their actions is its passion. ‘The WHY of history’, he said, ‘remains shrouded in for-the-record-only sentimentality’. In The Gateway to History, he proposed a way of tackling the ‘WHY’ factor:

We have agencies aplenty to seek out the papers of men long dead. But we have only the most scattered and haphazard agencies for obtaining a little of the immense mass of information about the more recent American past-—the past of the last half century—which might come fresh and direct from men once prominent in politics, in business, in the professions, and in other fields; information that every obituary column shows to be perishing.

The solution, he argued, was the creation of ‘some organisation which made a systematic attempt to obtain, from the lips and papers of living Americans who have led significant lives, a fuller record of their participation in the political, economic, and cultural life of the last sixty years’.

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Australian Information Service
The Prime Minister, Mr Edward Gough Whitlam (centre), the Premier of New South Wales, Sir Robert Askin (left) and the Premier of Victoria, Mr R.J. Hamer (right)  1973
b&w photograph; 15.5 x 21.6 cm
Pictures Collection,
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Unknown photographer
Hazel de Berg with tape recorder, early 1960s
gelatin silver photograph;
23.1 x 17.5 cm
Pictures Collection,
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Nevins was able to establish such an organisation, in 1948, at Columbia. The Oral History Research Office was the first of its kind in the world. It adopted Nevins’ approach of focusing on eminent individuals. Interviews were based on thorough research of the existing record relating to the interviewee, and the basic purpose of the interview was to allow the interviewee to fill any gaps in the public record of their life and work and to reveal their thinking and motivations. The Office is still going strong today and has among its early interviews a recording with Charles C. Burlingham (1858–1959), who recalled New York’s 1863 draft riots.

In 1950, Harold White, then Australian Commonwealth Parliamentary Librarian, visited the Columbia Oral History Research Office while in the United States. White, who in 1960 became the first Australian National Librarian, spent many hours with Nevins. Little detail is known about their time together. Perhaps it is buried away in Harold White’s papers, which are contained in more than 93 boxes in the Library’s Manuscript Collection, or perhaps in Nevins’ papers (including 12 000 letters), which are archived in 207 boxes at Columbia’s Manuscript Library.

However, we do know that White returned with enthusiasm for the Columbia project. In 1994, Alec Bolton wrote in Interviewing for Oral History at the National Library, that:

[Harold White] was alert to new ideas and interested in new forms of collection-building, and he returned enthusiastic about the possibilities for Australia of oral history on the Columbia model. He recalled many years later that he envisaged a program in which not only eminent persons but also ‘a broad cross-section’ of the population would record their memories.

Harold White’s Columbia experience undoubtedly influenced his later support for the work of Hazel de Berg, who started recording eminent Australians involved in the arts in the late 1950s, and for the National Library’s early interest in the folkloric recordings of John Meredith. The work of these two individuals formed the basis of the collections that eventually became the Library’s Oral History program.

The program was officially implemented as the Oral History Project in 1970. A retired journalist, Mel Pratt, was given a contract to record interviews and, by 1978, had recorded 97 eminent Australians in politics, the public service and journalism. The approach was based on the Columbia model, even to the point of draft transcriptions of interviews being sent to interviewees for correction. Staff in the Library’s Manuscript section would undertake detailed research through print sources to help Pratt prepare for an interview. A successful oral history interview was regarded as one that supplemented the existing manuscript material and that uncovered insights into important processes and events. The Columbia model meant that interviews were structured; there was no interest in random reminiscence.

Over time, a social history component was formally added, thus achieving White’s vision of a ‘broad cross-sectional’ collection and, in 1985, the Oral History Collection was separated from the Manuscript Collection. The latter was a very important development, as it recognised the interviews as primary source material in their own right—which was also the case at the Columbia Oral History Office. The Columbia model was never abandoned, however, and the Library continues to record eminent Australians who wish to answer any outstanding ‘whys’ in the existing record of their lives and careers.

BARRY YORK is a historian, researcher and writer with the Biographical Dictionary Unit of the Senate, in Canberra. His email address is: garocon@pcug.org.au

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