From reference request to preservation project

Previous blog posts have covered our preservation queue for sound recordings: the delicate balance between the physical stability of the medium and importance of the content that dictates our usual operations. Meanwhile, patron requests, which always receive prompt attention, often interrupt this, sometimes happily. Let me explain.

A visual appraisal usually tells us what we need to know about a sound recording’s physical stability. However, one hidden benefit of patron requests is those cases where this usually doesn’t apply. In those cases, we monitor the tape during digitization and thus spot things originally not apparent that affect the sound quality: bad splices, slitting issues, odd track configurations, and so on. Because some collections were created at the same time with the same tape stocks, the issues on one or two tapes can tell us a lot about the rest of the collection.

What this means is that what we thought was a stable collection isn’t. We then reassess the collection and modify its place in the queue, with it possibly becoming a preservation project. Of course, I’m writing this inspired by recent examples. One is the sound recordings in the Mont Pelerin Society records, which had bad splices of acetate tape. A second was an inquiry from my alma matter leading me to poorly wound acetate tape recordings of Gamal Abdel Nasser. As you may recall, acetate tape is one of the more unstable formats, and acetate tapes with abnormal problems are worse. Thus the Mont Pelerin tapes became a project; the Nasser tapes, though moved forward in our queue, are still awaiting preservation.

On the lighter side, there’s another benefit: the content is sometimes humorous and timely. Within a week of the opening of the movie Atlas Shrugged, Part One, I hear Lawrence Fertig describe Ayn Rand’s book (Atlas Shrugged) as “one of the recent books that has caused a sensation.” He was extolling the virtues of the novel at the Mont Pelerin Society’s 1960 meeting, joking that Ayn Rand had called Ludwig von Mises “a left-wing deviationist.”

An offending splice point, Box 61, Mont Pelerin Society records, Hoover Institution Archives

Herbert Hoover and the Great Mississippi Flood

The Mississippi River is expected to crest at 57.5 feet at Vicksburg today, a foot above the record 1927 “Great Mississippi Flood.” In April that year the river broke through the levees, submerging vast expanses of farmland and destroying the homes of more than one million people.

Known for his monumental humanitarian relief work in Europe during and after World War I, then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover (who's commerce department records are in the Hoover Archives) was called on to organize relief for the victims of the epic disaster. Hoover swung into action, assembling hundreds of ships to carry supplies, overseeing the creation of tent cities for refugees, and making radio and press appeals that helped raise millions of dollars for the Red Cross. “I suppose I could have called in the whole of the army, but what was the use? All I had to do was to call in Main Street itself,” Hoover said later. “No other Main Street in the world could have done what the American Main Street did in the Mississippi flood, and Europe may jeer as it likes at our mass production and our mass organization and our mass education. The safety of the United States is its multitudinous mass leadership.” Hoover did everything he could to provide the means for relief, but he knew then, as we know now, America’s greatest resource is its citizens and their boundless generosity, resilience, and hope.

Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover broadcasts a plea to the nation to donate funds for disaster relief for the victims of the Mississippi flood, April, 1927. Herbert Hoover Subject Collection, Photo File, Envelope V.

Resolved: That Firing Line Fans Want to Know Why All Episodes Aren't Available

Without a doubt one of our most popular collections at the Hoover Institution Archives is the Firing Line Broadcast Collection; as a result we get a lot of comments about it through the website. Going through these comments has made the assistant archivist for visual collections and I (the administrative associate for AV services) realize that, aside from the collection having a vocal and enthusiastic fan base, most users have the same questions. We at Hoover have therefore resolved to explain the logic and methodology behind our seemingly cryptic treatment of Firing Line programs.

Let us begin with the core question that most fans ask in some way, shape, or form:

Why aren’t all the episodes available?

There’s a long answer and a short answer to this question. Because the short answer—“because not all of them have been preserved yet”—only leads to more questions, here’s the long answer:

As we explain on the Firing Line website, there are 1,505 episodes in the series. The general policy of the Hoover Institution Archives is to allow researchers only to access copies of audiovisual material so as to limit excessive handling of the originals. This policy especially applies to Firing Line where the archival master videotapes are in obsolete broadcast quality formats. Those tapes must be shipped to a laboratory specializing in archival media that reformats them to access and preservation copies on modern videotape stocks so that not just the general public but we archivists can actually view them.

The preservation treatment and reformatting costs are not inconsequential. Depending on the videotape format, its condition, and the duration of the program, creating the necessary preservation and access copies currently costs between $325 and $800 per episode. To do all 1,505 programs at once would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars!

Since funding is limited and we have numerous collections requiring preservation and digitization, we send the programs to the laboratory in batches of twenty to thirty at a time. Due to the physical toll shipping and lab work inflicts on videotapes, we only send unpreserved archival master videotapes to the laboratory if preservation work will be done on that trip. To date, approximately a third of the programs have been preserved.

The pace of preservation may not wholly satisfy every one; keep in mind, however, that “slow and steady wins the race” and the race to preserve all Firing Line programs in our collection is one we intend to finish.

William F. Buckley, Jr. meeting audience members Mrs. Fred Harris and her mother at the WETA studio, Washington, D.C., Sept. 14, 1971. Box 8, Firing Line Broadcast Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

Film or Video?

Motion picture film enthusiasts can revel in more than a century of people and places, the artistry of Bergman or Hitchcock, the shimmering beauty of nitrate prints, all preserved on film, which boasted a golden age before videotape was born. Hollywood's film industry was an actor's dream and a tourist's destination before tape existed. Early TV shows were preserved not on tape but on film taken by pointing a motion picture camera at a television screen. Movies offered a brief escape from the Great Depression; television is now derided as the opiate of the masses. But if you associate video with television, videotape may win the numbers game with film because American homes hold so many TV sets. Yet it seems that film has the edge.

But I'm thinking labels (again). The archives relies on labels to identify the content of audiovisual materials. A vague or incorrect label--or even worse, no label at all--lowers the preservation priority of the item to which it is affixed. When we've got thousands of sound and moving-image materials identified with good labels, the poorly identified ones inevitably fall to the bottom of the work plan--unless we can play them back.

Playback can be problematic. We can only play an item if we've got the right equipment, which is often lacking. In addition, in our efforts to preserve the material, we play archival sound recordings and moving images only once, during the reformatting process.

That leaves the simplest operation: carefully unwinding the reel and eyeballing the content. Videotape is magnetic, existing as particles on a tape base. It looks black, undeveloped, opaque. You can't discern anything when it has been unwound. Film is optical, a sequence of photographs. Look at it with a light box, and you can see the images, overcoming the obstacle of a missing or damaged label. Score one for film!

Frames from film of German Day ceremonies held in Hindenburg Park, Los Angeles, 1936, Warren Olney motion picture film, Hoover Institution Archives

The King’s Speech Found in an Attic

By now many will have seen The King’s Speech, the excellent movie about the relationship between Britain’s King George VI and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. And many will have watched the Academy Awards in February, when the movie won four Oscars, including for best picture. (By the way, weren’t the dresses fabulous? Except maybe…but I digress.)

For an archivist, however, most interesting of all was the February 20 episode of 60 Minutes, which had a segment on the movie’s production. CBS’s Scott Pelley interviewed David Seidler, the scriptwriter, who had received permission from the Queen Mother as early as 1977 to publicize the story. But he could only do so after her death, which came in 2002; Seidler proceeded with the project in earnest as soon as he heard the news.

To flesh out Logue’s character, researchers for the film needed photos. Fortunately, they were able to locate his grandson Mark, who not only had photos of his grandfather but also his diaries, and not just diaries! When rummaging through the family’s archive in the proverbial attic, Mark Logue and the movie team discovered documents that not even the family knew it had: more than hundred letters between Logue and the king, revealing how much their professional relationship had evolved into friendship; appointment cards showing hour-long sessions daily, including weekends; and…THE speech! Yes, the original version drafted by the king’s entourage and typed on Buckingham Palace stationery but annotated by Logue, with some words crossed out and replaced with ones easier for the king to pronounce and with vertical marks indicating the optimal moments for him to take a breath.

Of course, the movie producers did have at their disposal—and did use—the official audio recording of the king’s famous speech of September 3, 1939, in which he announces that Britain has declared war on Germany following Germany’s invasion of Poland, but it’s hard to imagine this crucial scene in the movie without this annotated version of the speech, with Logue guiding the king through it word by word, as the camera zooms in on those vertical lines.

Moral of the story: when doing research in our library and archives, don’t look for just one thing and don’t stop looking even if you find that one thing.

Postcard depicting the royal family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace on Coronation Day, May 12, 1937, including Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth (sorry, Queen Elizabeth and King George VI). Mrs. Leland E. Cofer papers, envelope D, Hoover Institution Archives

Money Ball

Over the years, the Commonwealth Club of California has featured such noted speakers as Milton Friedman, Cesar Chavez, William Shockley, Tony La Russa, Dusty Baker, and Billy Beane. Because the club is interested in all aspects of life, its collection here at Hoover includes materials related to some things one might not expect, such as professional sports in the Bay Area, especially baseball. With the new baseball season just underway, I thought it might be interesting to highlight this.

Going back to at least 1954, the club’s sports events have not been superfluous entertainment but generally concern things of economic (and social) importance. For example, Mayor Frank Jordan dedicated half of his talk to what his administration was doing to keep the Giants in San Francisco. Other events of the era concerned the same topic. Revenues and salaries come up as well, as does drug use by athletes. Baseball’s movers and shakers have visited the club pretty regularly and they’re still at it.

The Commission for Relief in Belgium (C.R.B.) Delegates baseball team, playing its only game on Independence Day, 1916 in Brussels, Belgium. Philip S. Platt is at bat. Philip S. Platt collection, photo file, Hoover Institution Archives

Hoover Archives Fond 89: Witness to a Lost Great Opportunity of the Twentieth Century

As unrest threatens to fell dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, it is appropriate to consider history’s lessons. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire offers a look at how some thirty countries, many newly created, have made the transition from dictatorship to democracy. A close look reveals that viable democracies are more likely to emerge when the old guard is blocked from emerging in the guise of a new “democratic” elite. Nations that have nostrified (a Latin word originally meaning “religious purification”) government, party, and secret police officials have become democracies, including the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and, to a lesser extent, Poland. Former communist countries that have not confronted their past–the Russian Republic, Central Asian countries, Belarus, and the Caucasus (an exception being Georgia)–continue under authoritarian rule. Studies show a remarkable rate of “elite survival” in these countries, with the new elite being the old Soviet nomenklatura. Russia is ruled by former KGB agents; former republic party bosses reign in Central Asia and in Belarus.

History teaches that nations adapt better to democracy if they come to grips with their brutal past via a Nuremberg trial, a South African Truth Commission, or a public trial of aging Khmer Rouge leaders.

The Hoover Archives Fond 89: Communist Party on Trial is a stark witness to Russia’s missed opportunity to confront its Stalinist and post-Stalinist legacy. Hoover’s Fond 89 microfilms contain documents submitted to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation for the intended trial of the Soviet Communist Party. The documents were gathered by archivists from the formerly secret archives following President Yeltsin’s decision in November 1992 to outlaw the party. Government prosecutors received more the than ten thousand pages of documents covering Stalin’s purges, the Gulag, the financing of communist parties abroad, and the repression of dissidents by interior security forces, all of which are in Fond 89.

On July 8, 1992, the Russian Constitutional Court began its hearing on the Communist Party’s challenge to Yeltsin’s ban and his charge that the party was a criminal organization. The court ruled that a reformed Communist Party could compete on an equal basis with other parties and declined to examine the massive evidence in Fond 89. With this disappointing and perfunctory ruling, the opportunity for a “Russian Nuremberg” was lost forever, leaving the issue for historians to sort out.

Although we do not know what the outcome of a full-fledged trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have been, the public airing of the party’s criminal activity surely would have weakened nostalgia for the old Soviet Union as Russian economic performance deteriorated. Public revelations on Stalin’s murder and imprisonment of more than a million ordinary citizens should have quashed subsequent revivals of the Stalin cult. Such a trial, most likely, would have made Vladimir Putin’s rise, with his open admiration for the Soviet empire and the KGB, unlikely if not impossible. If so, the failure to use Fond 89 changed world history.

Triumphant Romanians celebrate atop a tank in Bucharest after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, December 23, 1989, Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives