The Ubiquitous Mr. Hoover

There it was, nested in a notebook between Miss Anna R. Elderkin in Coeur d'Alene and Miss Frances Hoyt of Los Angeles: "Herbert Hoover, 623 Mirada, Stanford University." And I wasn't even looking for it.

Working at the Hoover Institution, I'm often amazed at the number of stories I hear from visitors about their connection to the Institution's namesake. Although the story might be as simple as a dedication written by Herbert Hoover in a book found in their grandparent's library, they all resonate to make this historical figure human. Looking at pages of this little notebook that listed not only names and addresses but ranch expenditures and the number of lemons picked in 1935, I realized I had stumbled across another such story.

Few people understand that archivists don't do research as part of their daily work; sometimes I do it at home after hours. Lately I've been studying a largely overlooked federal Indian agent named Kelsey who worked out of San Jose in the early 1900s. Although Kelsey and Hoover were contemporaries, Republicans, and lived just 15 miles apart, there was no reason that they would know one another.

In pursuit of Kelsey's seemingly lost papers, I tracked down his descendants, who shared with me scanned copies of his few surviving materials. The notebook was among them. When I found Hoover's name, I went back to them for an explanation, and they told me their Hoover story: Hoover's sister and Kelsey were neighbors, and when Hoover visited his sister, Kelsey's young daughter liked to call to him, "Mistah Hoovah! See me t'un ovah!" while playing on her swing.

Although the story is too inconsequential for a published biography, it's the kind of anecdote that makes Hoover human, a brother, a neighbor. And I'm not sure whether it's a Kelsey family story or now my own Hoover story.

Excerpt from notebook in private collection

Archival History and Family Roots

I grew up on my father’s stories of his youth in Chita, Siberia: walking from one village to the next trailed by a pack of hungry wolves, forgetting to wear his cap (on purpose) and getting frostbit, the flight on foot from Chita to Manchuria during the chaos of the Russian civil war, life as a telegraph operator in Kharbin, Manchuria. Other than the stories, we knew little of my father’s life as a White Russian emigrant traveling from Kharbin to Tokyo and then on to San Francisco, Berkeley, and then the oil fields of West Texas, where I was born.

I am now conducting research for my new book on six families, caught up in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, showing how the decisions made by Stalin and his henchmen played out in the lives of ordinary families. I am using the Hoover Archives Fond 17 (Central Committee of the Communist Party) and Fond 89 (Communist Party on Trial) to follow the high-level decisions that set off the Great Terror and then largely unpublished family memoirs to tell the stories of the victims. One such family is that of Alexander Ignatkin, an engineer in charge of the Chita operations of the Transsiberian railroad, with a wife and three children. The youngest, a boy, Yury, wrote an account of the family’s tragic story in 2003. He went on to become a respected mining engineer in Siberia’s goldfields, living in Chita until his death in 2008.

In researching the Ignatkins’ story, I had a number of encounters with my father’s past. Alexander Ignatkin surely would have known my grandfather, who was also an engineer on the Transsiberian. Unlike Alexander, however, he fled Russia in the early 1920s, just as Alexander was getting his first assignment to head a small station outside Chita; his story of itinerant life at various stations in the vicinity of Chita, the headquarters of the Transbaikal line, surely resembled my father’s first years. From my passport, I learned that my father had been born in a place called Khilok, but no one in the family knew where it was. Now I know that Khilok was a small station along the Transsiberian, some two hundred miles west of Chita. Alexander Ignatkin, before his appointment to Chita, served in a number of small stations along the Transsiberian; his three children were born in such villages, which consisted of wooden cottages and a rail station. My father would have been born under similar circumstances in Khilok.

Khilok enters the Ignatkin family story in yet another way: Alexander’s wife, Maria, was arrested on October 7, 1937, not knowing that her husband had been executed on September 29. Shortly after the arrests of their wives, the local newspaper published the list of the 117 executed railway workers (Alexander was 101). The wife of Dianov, the Khilok station head, was arrested in the Chita railway station just after she saw her husband’s name on the execution list (she had traveled to Chita from Khilok hoping to find her husband). Having hidden the list in her shoe she showed it to the other wives, all of whom were confined in one large cell. It was thus that Maria Ignatkina learned of her husband’s execution.

The Chita NKVD headquarters was located in the most imposing building in Chita, Shumovsky Palace, which I learned had served as a prison and hospital during World War I. One of my father’s most vivid memories was having volunteered to transport wounded soldiers on a sled from the train station to Shumovsky Palace); one of them, he said, died before reaching the hospital.

Perhaps the most telling moment of my research was the story of the return of the Kharbintsy, those Russians who, like my father, had fled to Kharbin (now part of China) in the aftermath of the revolution and civil war. There they, like my father, worked for the Chinese Eastern Railroad, which connected the Transsiberian to points east. My father chose to continue east to Tokyo, but many Kharbintsy, promised a warm welcome by Stalin, chose to return. Virtually all were executed or sent into the Gulag under special decrees aimed specifically at them. In Ignatkin’s sector were large numbers of prisoners doing track repairs and coal mining; during his first imprisonment, he was sent to one of those mines. As the Kharbintsy returned to Russia on the Transsiberian, the prisoners called up to them: “Soon you will be joining us down here.” At that very time, my father, one of the “people’s enemies” a Kharbintsy, was working as a petroleum engineer in the West Texas oil fields.

Railroad tunnel in Siberia, Harry L. Hoskin papers, photo file B, Hoover Institution Archives

Kozelsk–a Glimpse into a Soviet Death Camp

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Forest Massacre, the murder of thousands of Polish prisoners ordered by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party Politburo in March 1940. A Polish exhibition commemorating this event, which has been touring Europe and the United States for the past few months, is now in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Pavilion through January 2011. The exhibition consists of forty-three panels of images and text, augmented by selected documentation from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, home to the largest and most comprehensive holdings on modern Poland outside Poland.

Among the Hoover contributions to the exhibition is the only known photograph of the Kozelsk prison camp, in which more than forty-five hundred Polish prisoners were kept between October 1939 and April 1940, before they were executed and buried in the mass graves at Katyn. The camp occupied the buildings of one of the most important centers of Orthodox Christianity in prerevolutionary Russia, the Optina Monastery, which had been visited by tens of thousands of the faithful, including some of Russia’s leading writers and intellectuals, most especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for whom the monastery provided much of the inspiration for his best work, The Brothers Karamazov. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks killed or exiled the monks and turned the monastery into a prison camp. During the time that it housed Polish prisoners, it was identified to the outside world as the “Maxim Gorky Rest Home.” The photograph of the monastery-turned-prison was brought out, folded and concealed in his clothing, by Ludwik Jaksztas a Polish air force lieutenant, who was one of the several dozen prisoners selected by the NKVD, probably for operational reasons, for transfer to another camp and thus spared execution. Who the photographer was is not clear; it may have been made by a member of the camp underground who did not survive or somehow obtained from a Soviet source. It was likely one of several photographs given to individuals as they were being taken out of the camp, virtually all to be executed. The copy given to Jaksztas was the only one that reached the outside world and is now in the Wiktor Sukiennicki papers in the Hoover Archives. Sukiennicki, a Polish legal scholar and later a research fellow at Hoover, was the principal investigator of the Katyn murders on behalf of the Polish government in exile.

Lieutenant Jaksztas escaped the killing fields of Katyn but never made it back to Poland. Released from captivity after the Nazis attacked their Soviet ally in the summer of 1941, he joined the Polish forces loyal to the London-based Polish government in exile. A navigator with the RAF Polish 305 Squadron, his Mosquito bomber was shot down on the third day of the Normandy invasion. He is buried in the Langannerie cemetery in northern France, along with some seven hundred other Free Poles. The Kozelsk Optina Monastery has been returned to its original purpose and, after major restoration, has again become a vibrant center of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Box 2, Wiktor Sukiennicki papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Diplomatic Horseplay

After a hard day of high-level talks and shuttle diplomacy, how do diplomats unwind? More than fifty years ago, one did so by spoofing his colleagues on all sides of the table. His account of the 445th meeting of the European Advisory Council, on April 1, 1945, is written in the dry, reportorial style typical of meeting minutes, and is in the John Marshall Raymond papers at the Hoover Archives.

The minutes begin with a review of the minutes of the previous meeting. After a series of amendments to change "will" to "shall" and "labour" to "labor" (with the British representative dissenting), the group moved on the future organization of the Tripartite Council in Berlin. As the chair, the USSR representative opened by announcing that his government had decided to be represented on the council by one member from each state in the Soviet Republic. Because there were sixteen states, he proposed that the council be called in future the Unumdevigintipartite Council.

The meeting quickly recessed so that the U.S. representative could get a Latin dictionary. On reassembling, a counterproposal, that "Novededemipartite" be substituted for "Unumdevigintipartite," generated "a lively but indeterminate discussion" that lasted until noon, when they adjourned for lunch.

At 2:30 "the U.S. representative, being the first back from lunch, took the chair." During the recess, he had consulted both his government and the adviser to the U.S. embassy on ancient languages. The United States was prepared to accept the USSR proposal, he announced, "on condition that his country be represented by one member from each of the United States. There were forty-eight of these (at this point the Br. Representative expressed his surprise and stated that according to his records held in the Foreign Office there were only thirteen). Continuing, after some reference to a schoolroom atlas, the U.S. representative proposed that the Tripartite Council should be called in future the Septemet Sexagintapartite Council. He was also understood to say 'Check,' but since none of the Central European countries was represented at the meeting this remark was considered irrelevant."

At this point the British representative left to make an urgent call, so the meeting adjourned for tea, coffee, and vodka. When the U.S. and USSR representatives returned at 4:30, they found the British representative in the chair making calculations. Resuming the meeting, he announced that his government would accept both proposals on condition that each of the dominions, colonies, crown colonies, and dependencies in the British Commonwealth also be represented, which he figured totaled forty-nine. He therefore proposed that the council be called the Centumestsedecempartite Council. "He expressed his warm feelings of friendship for the other members of the Council and their Governments by saying to the USSR representative 'Mate,' and the U.S. representatives 'Mate to you, too."

Before discussion could continue, a "considerable commotion outside… made further work impossible. On inquiry it was discovered that a foreigner calling himself 'de Gaulle' had attempted to get in but had been overpowered and removed to safe custody." Because it was 5:00, the meeting was adjourned.

Icing the cake, the author classified these meeting minutes Top Secret.

Is Firing Line the New Sex? (with apologies to Mary Eberstadt)

Since its publication in Policy Review last year, Mary Eberstadt's exploration of the effects of unlimited sex and food on advanced nations, "Is Food the New Sex?" has been a perennial favorite on the web. In a shameless effort to transmit that success to our blog, I posit here that Eberstadt's observations about food also apply to William F. Buckley's Firing Line television series. After all, with more than one hundred Firing Line programs available on Amazon.com, additional titles available directly from the Hoover Archives, and just about any transcript available through the Hoover website, Firing Line fans now enjoy a previously unimagined level of abundance. As Eberstadt observes with food and sex, the dramatic expansion in access to Firing Line is due to technology, in this case the Internet, digital copying, and DVD on demand.

Where Eberstadt takes us to the kitchens of Betty and Jennifer, I suggest visiting their living rooms. Thirty years ago, Betty's living room was equipped with only a television to enjoy live broadcasts of Firing Line. No matter how much Betty loved the show, she was limited by the television schedule but was accustomed its enforced scarcity.

Betty's thirty-year-old granddaughter Jennifer pays far more attention to Firing Line and feels far more strongly about it than Betty ever did. Even though Firing Line ended in 1999, Jennifer can watch any title from her library of Firing Line DVDs at any time, and she even proselytizes; on occasion she'll rack up her current favorite episode when friends visit, and when gifts are exchanged a DVD featuring Malcolm Muggeridge is sure to be inside Jennifer's colorful wrapping. She argues the merits of the Allen Ginsberg show with her liberal coworkers and consistently asserts the moral authority epitomized in "Is It Possible to Be a Good Governor?" Jennifer's annual holiday tradition includes viewing "How Does One Find Faith?" Clearly, where Betty felt opinions about Firing Line were a matter of individual taste, Jennifer is certain that her opinions about Firing Line are not only politically correct but also morally correct: she feels that others ought to be as devoted to Firing Line as she is.

Deep down, there has been a revolution in how we now think about Firing Line--changes that allow Firing Line to become a way of life. Over breakfast you can watch program clips on You Tube; sneak a peek at the studio shots on Hoover's Firing Line slideshow when you're at work; during lunch, screen a show on DVD for your coworkers. When you ask someone a tough question, deliver it with your best impression of Buckley's winning smile. En route home on the train, read a PDF transcript and memorize Buckley's best lines to share at your next party. After dinner watch another DVD and then write a review of it on Amazon.com--be sure to match Buckley's elevated discourse and set a higher standard for the social Internet! Before you go to bed, peruse the list of Firing Line's 1,504 programs, send us a request for the next title you'd like to watch, and fall asleep dreaming of it.

The Fragility of Youth

Today is UNESCO World Day for Audio Visual Heritage 2010 and its theme is: "Save and Savour your Audiovisual Heritage - Now!" Though Hoover's audio collections pose unique problems, our specialists are rising to that challenge.

For some, audio preservation is a black art, and I am not going to help that. From a certain point of view, I’m more concerned with preserving a tape from 2003 of Kid606 than I am a recording from 1971 of Milton Friedman calling the Mont Pelerin Society. Am I being facetious? No. Am I being provocative? Absolutely. Another blog entry has already acknowledged the shock of the familiar in photographs, and in audio recordings there is the fragility of youth.

We’ve got more than 100,000 unique sound recordings in our stacks. How do we decide which recordings to migrate and preserve? As was mentioned in an earlier blog, there are two dominant factors: the stability of the medium and the importance of the recording. With stability, it’s not always intuitive.

The list from relatively stable (there are no stable audio recordings) to at-risk (yesterday): vinyl discs, cassettes, mini- and microcassettes, polyester open-reel tapes, acetate open-reel tapes, MiniDiscs (MDs), digital audio tapes (DATs), and lacquer discs.

I’m willing to bet a lot of readers may be scratching their heads right now. Many would consider vinyl discs more obsolete than microcassettes, and the word digital in DAT most likely set off a few flags as well. Because audiophiles and hip-hop DJs are keeping alive an interest in the turntable, great turntables are still in production and vinyl discs are remarkably stable. (What’s old is new again, right?) Meanwhile, digital audio tape is incredibly unstable. No company is making new DAT machines, and once those 1’s and 0’s rust particles have fallen off that thin strip of plastic, the recording is caput. MDs are also digital/magnetic devices and are similarly at risk.

Thus on any given day, one might find me digitizing Crusade for Freedom lacquer discs from 1950 and migrating DAT tapes and MDs from this century. Yes, it’s odd.

P.S. For the record, the content of a recording absolutely influences our priorities. That Friedman phone call was digitized years ago. We also make special efforts to digitize things such as Radio Free Europe’s coverage of the Romanian revolution and, on the advice of our curators, a lot of audio on cassettes in collections.

Commonwealth Club of California Records, Hoover Institution Archives

What's in a Label?

The label said "General Stilwell's talk to Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Feb. 13 1946," but could it be trusted? I've written about the problems with labels before. This one was attached to a compact sound cassette, which is at least one generation removed from the laquer disc on which a speech given in 1946 would have been recorded. So the person who originally recorded the speech--the most reliable source of information--probably did not write this label.

Any speech given at the Commonwealth Club would be documented in the club's records, which are at the Hoover Archives. (Even Herbert Hoover's nine off-the-record talks at the club show up in various ways in the club's publications and internal files, though the cursory information available lives up to their billing.) Searching this collection for a Stilwell speech yielded only one, by Joe Stilwell Jr. in 1966.

Thinking the speech itself might have clues, I cued a digital copy of the recording on my computer. It begins with applause, and then a man addresses the mayor and friends of San Francisco. He mentions that the war with Japan ended seven months ago, and in closing he refers to the Sixth Army at the Presidio, all of which places the talk in San Francisco in March 1946. This meshes with Stilwell's assignment as commander of the Sixth Army, which was reactivated effective March 1, 1946, at the Presidio of San Francisco (he died there that October). But we still didn’t have a venue.

A speech by a big war hero like Stilwell was sure to get press attention, especially given Stilwell's frank and colorful style. A search for Stilwell in newspaper indexes for 1946 yielded a likely hit, on March 29, 1946. The San Francisco Chronicle's front page barked, "Gen. Stilwell Talks Back: 'Army Caste System Sounds Nasty, but Discipline Is Vital.'" The article reports that Stilwell "covered the caste system, Army brass hats, the atomic bomb, and charges of undemocratic procedures in the Army," which closely parallels the arc of the recorded speech. Stilwell's quotes in the newspaper synched with the phrases I heard, which is about as definitive an identification as we're ever likely to have for this sound recording. And the venue? San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce luncheon on March 28, 1946. So much for labels.

Joseph Stilwell in Burma. Oversize folder m*SSSS,
Joseph Warren Stilwell papers,
Hoover Institution Archives