Oral Historians Seek to Preserve Link to Past : Southern California Group Reconvenes Thursday to Celebrate 20th Year

To preserve history’s spoken links, those connecting generations in time and place, oral historians have embarked on a new program this year to record the voices of California’s recent political heritage.

“More is happening now in five years than used to happen in 50 or 100 years,” said historian Enid Douglass, who directs Claremont Graduate School’s Oral History Program, the third oldest in the state.

“The discovery that people weren’t keeping records anymore and that today, we are getting on airplanes or on the phone to conduct business means we have no feeling for what went into decision-making,” she said. “The records just aren’t there unless we do the interviews.”

The California State Archives Government Oral History Program, launched through passage of Assembly Bill 2104, sets aside $170,000 annually for oral history documentation of key players in state government. It is administered through the office of Secretary of State March Fong Eu.

Passage of the legislation parallels heightened oral history activity throughout the state. In Southern California, renewed interest in the narrative tradition takes on a special significance as the birthplace of the national Oral History Assn.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary aboard the historic Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor, the organization of approximately 1,500 historians, librarians, folklorists, anthropologists, political scientists, writers and many others will return Thursday for three days of papers, panels, workshops and sessions at various sites in the Los Angeles area.

Oral History Assn. was inspired by the efforts of about 80 scholars, including many from Southern California, who met two decades ago for the first national oral history conference ever held. Among those at the Lake Arrowhead Colloquium was historian Allan Nevins, who founded Columbia’s program in 1948 after realizing that the country was already into an era of vanishing documentation.

State Archivist John Burns, chief architect of the state documentation program, said implementation puts California in the running with a handful of states--including Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wisconsin and Texas--which have stepped up efforts to supplement state historical records.

“California’s program is the largest in terms of funding of any state government documentation effort, and the most comprehensive in the amount of research that has been established and in the program’s focus,” Burns said in a telephone interview.

“Initially we will select legislative leaders and key people (in state government) who have dealt with fiscal matters and education,” he said. “As the program is developed, we will then branch out to interview people at all levels of the executive and legislative arms of government who played pivotal roles in some aspect of events transcending different administrations.”

At the hub of regional efforts are three university and college-based programs, including Claremont Graduate School, UCLA and California State University, Fullerton. The fourth at UC Berkeley is the patriarch of academically based state programs.

Claremont, Fullerton, UCLA

Existing state government collections include individuals in Claremont’s archives such as former Republican Jerry Voorhis, the man whom Richard Nixon defeated in 1946; former Assemblyman Ernest R. Geddes, who had a keen interest in education and library legislation; and Upton Sinclair, who spearheaded the “End Poverty in California” movement of the ‘30s.

Fullerton’s archives highlight the lives of Democratic Assemblyman Robert Moretti, Republican Sen. Gordon Cologne and Orange County lawyer Gordon Richmond. UCLA’s collections include volumes on such individuals formerly in state government as Atty. Gen. Robert Kenny, Los Angeles County Assemblyman Jack B. Tenney, and former Assemblywoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

With longstanding reputations, the three participating Southern California university programs, along with UC Berkeley, have been earmarked to conduct between three to six oral documentation projects each year. Burns said criteria for assigning oral histories will reflect interviewees’ geographic proximity to programs and staffing capabilities.

Unlike other disciplines, oral histories--sometimes referred to as “envelopes of sound”--can be invaluable devices for historical reconstruction, both as written records perish and the pace of life quickens.

“Probably the most important questions in an oral history are why and how,” said Dale Treleven, director of UCLA’s program. “We generally know what has happened in researching an event, based on primary and secondary sources. But why people got involved in something, whom they were associated with, and in what ways are details that are generally not clear.”

For instance, in his oral history, the late Carey McWilliams, who authored such classics as “Factories in the Field,” “Ill Fares the Land” and “A Mask for Privilege,” describes the impact of his youthful exposure to the agricultural valleys and migrant workers of California during the 1930s, and of his mentor, Louis Adamic, a Yugoslavian writer and radical champion of America’s immigrants.

“ He (Louis Adamic) had some real insights into what he called ‘Shadow America,”’ McWilliams recalled in a UCLA volume titled ‘Honorable in All Things.’ “I did a book about it . . . a very interesting concept about all the thousands and thousands of Americans who have a kind of shadowy sense of their own identity; they’re not quite certain about it, you know. And of course with his background, he reflected this very vividly and intelligently.”

McWilliams’ experiences, writes interviewer Joel Gardner in the introduction, depict the author’s changing world as he witnessed and reported for eastern magazines his encounters with Asian, black and Chicano discrimination.

Among acquaintances such as former California Atty. Gen. Robert W. Kenney, McWilliams was regarded as a generous individual and “unflinching liberal.” He joined the ranks of politics briefly in 1938, becoming commissioner of the state Division of Immigration and Housing. “Brothers Under the Skin,” published in 1943, reflects those years.

“ . . . I recommended creation of what became in effect the Civil Rights Commission, that kind of approach,” McWilliams recalled in his oral history. “I was convinced that you could prevent discrimination by legislation. And one of the reasons I was convinced (was) because California was such a marvelous laboratory for the study of ethnic and race relations.

“It all happened so soon, you could just see it. You could see, for example, that legislation had helped create bias against the Chinese and the Japanese in particular . . . a great deal of legislation was patterned on the anti-Chinese legislation in California.”

Kenny, whose oral history is also on store at UCLA, complements McWilliams’ history as the two recount their mutual efforts to bring such legendary events in state history as the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles.

During Kenny’s representation in the fall of 1947 of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of movie industry people labeled “unfriendly” by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he recalled the reactions of one client, German playwright Bertolt Brecht, to the hearings.

“ Brecht had been driven out of Germany by an un-American Activities Committee,” Kenny recalled in ‘My Forty Years in California.’ “Then he was forced out of Denmark by the approaching Nazis and their Un-Danish Activities Committee. This was reported in Sweden. He then traveled across Russia and Siberia. Just as his ship had cleared Vladivostok for San Pedro, California, the world received news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The ship did not turn back, and Brecht ultimately arrived in Hollywood. His story, ‘Hangmen Also Die,’ was produced on the screen,” Kenny recalled.

“Then the Un-American Activities Committee caught up with him. When he appeared in Washington, Brecht had an airplane ticket in his pocket which would have taken him back to Europe,” Kenny continued in his oral history. The playwright showed up with two cigars, one for himself and one for Kenny. Several days later, Kenny recounted hearing news of Brecht in Paris, who had told a friend that the Un-American Activities Committee had been very kind. “The Nazis wouldn’t have let me smoke.”

One of Claremont’s oral histories retraces the story of Sonia Johnson, self-proclaimed fifth-generation Mormon and fiery ERA supporter who made headlines seven short years ago when she was excommunicated.

On the crest of the women’s movement, Johnson’s words crystalize both the mood and significance of her political activities at the close of the 1970s.

“ . . . when the equal rights amendment came, when the church began to speak against the ERA so vociferously, so vehemently, it reminded me of that place in Shakespeare where one character says to another, ‘Methinks she doth protest too much,” Johnson recalled.

“What was it that was causing them to overreact so much to this, what was this thing? . . . As I listened, I heard the old fear that men will lose dominance, will lose the right to control, will lose the right to keep women in their place.”

She continued: “This story affects women very deeply. They see it as symbolic. It really hasn’t that much to do with me personally as the fact that it is the story of a person, any helpless person, against some enormous power . . . It’s symbolic of the fight against oppression, of the right of one person (to work) against some overwhelming force.”

Still a fairly young field, oral history was first envisioned by historian Allan Nevins, who heralded the coming discipline in his book, “The Gateway to History.” Nevins, after discovering a dearth of information on Grover Cleveland and Henry Ford, established Columbia University’s program in 1948, after tape recorders began to enter the market.

Programs in Southern California cropped up in the mid-1950s. UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library Oral History Program, formally funded and begun in 1954, was fashioned after Columbia’s 1948 funding program. UCLA’s program followed in 1959, Claremont’s in 1962, and Cal State Fullerton’s in the fall of 1967.

With thousands of oral histories on file in oral history archives statewide, researchers are encouraged to peruse the tapes rather than the transcripts. Historians such as Shirley Stephenson, associate director and archivist of Cal State Fullerton’s oral history program, would contend that auditory clues, such as voice inflections, pauses or vocabulary, are key to an interviewee’s personality.

“You’re as close to the event or incident as you can be with a primary source, there’s nothing closer,” Douglass added. A person’s train of thought may also underscore the impact of an event on his or her life.

Thematically, collections focus on people intimately associated with the development of regional interests, such as the citrus industry in Claremont. One of UCLA’s collections emphasizes the arts, which transformed Los Angeles into a multicultural mecca, while one of Fullerton’s, called the Brea project, highlights the oral histories of citizens who saw the young oil town grow and change.

Fullerton’s best known oral history documents Richard Nixon’s boyhood through the words of friends and relatives. Another, entitled the Indian Urbanization Project, looks at the adjustments reservation Indians underwent as they entered the hectic swirl of urban Los Angeles. The Southeastern Utah Oral History Project focuses on the pioneers who settled and mined that region.

Bilingual Transcripts

Within Fullerton’s Japanese American Project, spanning the growth of that community in Orange County from pre-World War II through contemporary time, is one project, the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Project, which includes transcripts in both English and Japanese.

Stephenson said the project currently consists of 151 oral histories of Orange County Issei, first-general Japanese, half of whom do not speak English. Bilingual transcriptions are unique to Fullerton’s program.

“Because some of the interviewees did not speak English, we are conducting the histories in both languages . . . not on opposite pages but following the narrative right along so that you have the English and then Japanese translation,” Stephenson said. “This technique was developed with the Issei community in Seal Beach.”

Among Claremont’s more extensive series is the China Missionaries Project, which documents the lives of former Chinese theologians whose interactions with Western life brought about cultural changes in modern China. The Atlantic Richfield (Arco) Oral History Project will be used eventually in developing a history of that company.

New directions in UCLA’s program have resulted in a series on civil liberties, another on black leadership in Los Angeles, and later on “Entrepreneurs of the West.”