Ohio History Journal

ESSAY AND COMMENT                                                  49

 

The True Profile of the Harding administration will emerge only as the

new historiography is joined with a modification of the old.

DAVID H. JENNINGS,

Professor of History,

Ohio Wesleyan University

 

ESSAY AND COMMENT

Oral History in Ohio

 

 

During the past half century as the telephone and computer are replacing

the personal letter and the telegraph, a new era in historical research is

emerging. No longer does the detailed letter serve as the major source of

expression, for the dominant mode of communication in the atomic-space

age is personal conversation. Leaders in many stations of American life can

manage their roles quite adequately without committing much of their ac-

tion or thinking to the cold permanency of ink and paper. Usually only

their conclusions settle into the printed pages of newspapers, magazines, re-

ports, and form letters.

How does the American historian of the recent period seek to penetrate

behind the often superficial written records to probe the cycle of background

events and the obscured motivations of the participants? One technique now

widely used by historians is called oral history. Defined simply, oral history

consists of tape recorded interviews with persons (respondents) by a trained

historical researcher (interviewer) for the purpose of documenting opinions

and events not readily available in written records. The tapes are then

transcribed into typed memoirs that may be used immediately or in the fu-

ture by qualified researchers.

The first oral history program in the United States was begun at Colum-

bia University by professor Allan Nevins in 1948. In the two decades since

that date, about thirty professionally staffed programs have been established.

The majority of the larger programs are at major graduate universities on

the east and west coasts and at the six presidential libraries, while there are

smaller programs at historical societies, company archives, and special li-

braries. Usually these have focused on subjects that relate directly to the in-

terests of the sponsoring institution. Examples of some of the well estab-

lished oral history programs plus a sample of a few of their many completed

interview projects are as follows: University of California, Los Angeles (his-

tory of motion pictures and California water problems); Kennedy Presiden-

tial Library (life of John F. Kennedy); National Library of Medicine

(American medicine) ; Princeton University (career of John Foster Dulles);

50                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

University of California, Berkeley (forest history of the West); University

of Texas (oil industry and the political career of Lyndon Johnson); Ar-

chives of American Art (American painting); Cornell University (agricul-

ture in New York); and Columbia University (history of aviation and radio,

administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and the

lives of Adlai E. Stevenson and Robert A. Taft). The number of oral his-

tory programs across the nation became large enough in 1966 that a national

organization was formed, the Oral History Association, which sponsors an

annual three day meeting, a newsletter, and special publications.

Until very recently, however, the oral history movement had not entered

the state of Ohio. The exceptions were a few interviews that had been con-

ducted by the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati on Jewish history and

some interviews sponsored by the Archives of the History of American Psy-

chology at the University of Akron. Also, two Ohio-based scholars have done

broadly scaled series as part of their personal research projects: Dr. James

Wilkie while at Ohio State University on the Mexican Revolution from

1910 to the present, and Dr. Maurice Klain of Case Western Reserve Uni-

versity on the political power structure of Cleveland.

A permanently functioning statewide oral history program in Ohio was

inaugurated in September 1968 when the Ohio Historical Society officially

established an Oral History Department within the Society's Archives and

Manuscripts Division. The Society's oral history holdings will be considered

another type of material for use by researchers and will take their place

along with the existing collections of books, periodicals, newspapers, audio-

visuals, iconography, manuscripts, and archives.

The Ohio Historical Society will follow the oral history procedures gen-

erally standardized at other repositories. The curator of oral history will

write to a selected respondent asking for an interview appointment. The

interviewer will then bring a tape recorder to the office or home of the per-

son to be interviewed. Ideally, the interviewer and respondent will have

met beforehand and have discussed the procedures and nature of their par-

ticular interview and the scope of the whole series. An interview session

will last from one to two hours and most respondents will be called on

for one to five sessions, scheduled a day to a month apart.

After each interview, a transcript is typed verbatim in triplicate of the

entire recording. One transcript will be given to the respondent and two

copies will be kept by the Ohio Historical Society, one for use by researchers

and the other for a security copy. The recording tapes will also be preserved

in their complete form, although scholars seldom refer to the tapes, except

on rare occasions to gain an impression of voice quality, because it is so

much faster to assimilate the written transcript than the oral tape. All re-

spondents will sign a legal form assigning the property and literary rights

of the tape and transcript to the Ohio Historical Society. The respondent

may make stipulations deemed necessary in the legal form concerning use of

the tape. The three alternatives for use of the tape are: open--read and

quote without restriction; permission--written approval from respondent re-

quired; or closed--sealed for a period of time specified by the respondent.

52                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

Oral history is an expensive method of developing a new reservoir of

historical data, but it is expected that the Society will be able to finance a

substantial portion of the program through private grants from interested

individuals and organizations. The present program is being handled by

the existing archives and manuscripts division staff. After the program is

firmly established over the next two years, a full-time curator of oral his-

tory will probably be employed to direct the program. The rest of the oral

history staff will consist of transcribers and interviewers who will be hired

on a part-time basis for the duration of a special interview series, with the

number of transcribers and interviewers totalling from four to eight people

at any one time during the next five years. The Society plans to make its

oral history holdings known by publishing a guide in a few years, with

periodic revisions after that, and by reporting descriptions of interview

series to the Library of Congress' National Union Catalog of Manuscript

Collections.

The ultimate value of the oral history material is the aid it will give

scholars of the future in their research on twentieth century American and

Ohio history. At this initial stage in the development of a viable program

in Ohio, it appears that oral history will prove to be the best method of

supplementing the contemporary written records presently being collected

by the Ohio Historical Society and by the other historical repositories in

the state.

DAVID R. LARSON, Chief

Archives and Manuscripts Division

The Ohio Historical Society