Antiques Roadshow at the Hoover Archives

What's it like hosting a camera crew from a major television show? At Hoover we've dealt with them before, including a team from Phoenix TV in China who taped the Stilwell diaries at Hoover for a documentary about Joseph Stilwell. Even so, we were excited when a crew from PBS's Antiques Roadshow was scheduled to tape a segment at Hoover. The show highlighted a few political posters chosen from the more than one hundred thousand in Hoover's poster collection. The segment is scheduled to air on Monday, May 24th 2010 as part of three hours of programming from San Jose; nearly ten million people watch each episode.

As you might expect, many hours of staff time were invested in what will be a clip lasting just a few minutes. That process began months in advance, when we were initially contacted by Roadshow staff, who already knew they wanted to focus on our posters. After the go-ahead was given, our reference staff assisted the Roadshow people. A production scout team visited during the week of the shoot. They looked at possible taping locations in the archives and provided the final list of three posters for the shoot. Their focus was the "pointing finger" motif in World War I recruitment posters.

The day of the shoot was a long one, with the production team at Hoover from 8:30 to 4:30. Much of the morning was spent setting up; the final footage was taped just before lunch. After lunch a smaller Roadshow crew remained to shoot B-roll footage in the stacks and other locations. Two of our staff members signed waivers before being taped in action shots such as typing at a keyboard and opening a poster drawer. We had to deal with some last-minute changes, such as moving the shoot location to a different room. (If Roadshow ever visits your facility, you'll need a room where the air conditioning can be turned off so that its noise does not affect the sound quality.)

Of course, what you're really interested in is the appraisal. The appraiser, Nicholas Lowry, specializes in posters. He said that our poster of Lord Kitchener pointing his finger is the earliest instance of this motif in a recruiting poster. In all Lowry's years of work, he had only seen reproductions of this poster; ours was his first original. Its appraised value? Watch on May 24th.

Political Poster Collection, Italy 17,
Hoover Institution Archives

How to Turn Eight Hours into Three Minutes over Nine Months

Last August, as part of their field trip segment, the crew from PBS’s Antiques Roadshow descended on the Hoover Archives to look at a few of the 120,000 posters we have in our Political Poster Collection. We’d spent time prepping the Roadshow’s advance team with descriptions of some of the most vivid and famous posters, their dimensions, and their histories. They narrowed their search to three.

A film crew of a dozen or so, including series host Mark L. Walberg and appraiser Nicholas Lowry, showed up at 8:30 on a Friday morning. The sound techs and camera operators checked out locations throughout the archives, looking for the right combination of lighting, acoustics, and authentic archival aura.

Then the fun began: as Mark and Nico discussed and appraised the three posters, the director repositioned the stars, the posters, and the cameras to achieve just the right camera angle. Simple, right? They shot film until 4:00 in the afternoon! Then we were cautioned not to get our hopes up—that the Hoover portion of the program would be edited down to about three minutes.

Nine months later, on Monday, May 24, 2010, the Antiques Roadshow episode containing the Hoover segment will air on most PBS stations at 8:00 P.M.

Be sure to watch and see this World War I poster (featuring British Lord Kitchener) and more next week on your local PBS station.

Political Poster Collection, UK 473,
Hoover Institution Archives

Working at Hoover: An Intern's View

Our student interns, often from San Jose State's library program, bring fresh perspectives and energy to the Hoover Archives. Some interns process archival collections, and others catalog audio recordings. This year Oanh Tran, a capable
and enthusiastic cataloger, has been working with us. She wrote this guest entry:

"If I ever conduct a survey asking my friends and relatives what they know about archival institutions, I am sure their answers would be very simple and short. How do I know that? I know that because I was one of them. I also had an extremely limited knowledge of what an archive really was. I knew the definition of the term ‘archive’ and that archives were where historical materials were stored. I did not know how the work was done on those materials in order for them to be usable. I did not know how archival materials were stored, and neither did I know there were archival collections in different languages. There were so many things I did not know about archives.

"Luckily for me, I was accepted to do my internship at the Hoover Institution Archives. It has been an eye-opening experience for me to be able to learn so many things I did not know about. On the first day of my internship, I was taken on a tour to be introduced to the staff. As I listened to the title of each person, I realized the survival of this archive not only depended on the administration but also on many people with different skill sets and specialties. I realized that everyone at the archives worked well together to create its current success. Then I was even more amazed to have a tour in the basement, where I could see how the archival collections were stored. It was a pleasure for me to look at the types of collections available, the types of materials and how they were carefully taken care of by the staff at the archives. I felt very happy after that tour because it helped broaden my knowledge.

"My main task as an intern at the archives is to catalog the audio recordings in the Commonwealth Club of California records, something I have enjoyed doing very much. By reading the summaries of the recordings, I am actually learning about the issues that were important to our country back in the 1980s. In addition, I have become more experienced with cataloging. Sometimes I would encounter certain small problems such as choosing the appropriate Library of Congress subject headings. That is when I turn to my supervisor and the archives’ cataloger for guidance. They have been a great resource in helping me do my job more successfully.

"I am still doing my internship at the Hoover Institution Archives. Each day of my internship is still as exciting and another great learning experience for me. I am proud of having finished cataloging the last half of the Commonwealth Club's audio recordings for 1980. I am currently working on the recordings for 1981, and I have set as my goal cataloging all of them before my internship ends. I am looking forward to achieving that goal and making my experience at the archives a great asset for my future career.”

Accessing the Catalog of the Commonwealth Club of California Records, Hoover Institution Archives

The Good Librarian

Because of the collecting scope of the library and archives, the original impetus for which came from Herbert Hoover's determination to document World War I in hopes that future conflicts could be prevented, many of its materials relate to
episodes of collective violence: the mass deportations and executions under Stalin; the Holocaust; and various wars, large and small. One can't help being struck by the extent of the inhumanity that is recorded in such documents, bringing to mind a line spoken by one of the characters in James Joyce's Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Fortunately, one also encounters examples of individuals and groups who worked to alleviate suffering or help the victims of catastrophes. In preparing materials to show the ambassador of Lithuania on his visit to the archives, I had a chance to look again at a small collection pertaining to a woman who, at great risk to herself, rescued Jews in German-occupied Vilnius during World War II. That the woman, Ona Šimaitė, was also a university librarian made her story even more compelling; she was concerned with preserving not only the printed word but human life.

Using the cover of her profession to visit Jews in the Vilnius ghetto, Šimaitė brought them books and also food, medicine, and clothes. She was able to rescue a number of Jewish children, bringing them out of the ghetto hidden in potato sacks. She also acted as a courier for the underground resistance to the Nazis. Šimaitė paid a high price for her actions: arrested by the Gestapo, she was tortured and eventually sent to the Dachau concentration camp but somehow survived.

After the war, Šimaitė settled in France, where she continued to work as a librarian. Having adopted one of the Jewish children she had saved in Vilnius, she and her daughter eventually moved to Israel. Šimaitė was presented with a medal by the State of Israel in recognition of her rescue efforts. She died in France in 1970.

The Ona Šimaitė papers in the archives contain a small album of photos and clippings, as well as notes she made during the German occupation of Lithuania. It also contains correspondence, including letters written to her by Vytautas Landsbergis in 1968. A musicology student at the time, Landsbergis would later become famous as the leader of the independence movement in Lithuania, serving as the country's first president in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Although Šimaitė’s story was little known outside of Lithuania, a recently scholarly article on her, written by Julija Sukys, can be found in the summer 2008 ( 54, no. 2) issue of the journal, Lituanus.

Ona Šimaitė with Antanas Liutkus, 1969, Ona Šimaitė papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

Six Degrees of Separation

Unless one is an expert on the politics and economics of East Africa, one’s not likely to recognize the name William X. Scheinman.

Unless one followed developments in postcolonial Africa, one’s not likely to recognize the name Tom Mboya.

Every American and most people throughout the world, however, recognize the name Barack Obama.

What’s the connection?

In the late 1950s, Scheinman, an American businessman, and Mboya, a politician, an advocate for democratic development, and a leader of labor and independence movements in Africa, became fast friends. Mboya, knowing education was the key to independence and a vibrant democracy, was looking for a way to get young Africans (mainly Kenyans) a university education in the United States and Canada. With Scheinman’s help, connections, and financial support, Mboya created the African American Students Foundation: the vehicle that helped thousands of Africans to come to America.

One of those young students who came to the United States under the umbrella of the African American Students Foundation was none other than Barack Obama Senior.

Both Scheinman’s and Mboya’s papers are housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. In processing those papers, we ran across thank-you letters from the senior Obama to Mboya. Here are several excerpts from one of those letters:


Barack Obama Sr. to Tom Mboya, May 29, 1962,
Tom Mboya Papers, Box 41, Hoover Institution Archives.

Mboya went on to become a minister in the cabinet of Kenya’s first independent government in 1963, and many believe the history of Kenya would have been very different had Mboya not been assassinated in 1969.

Despite the important role Mboya played in the African independence and labor movements, it is sometimes the other things in collections that catch one’s eye, the Obama letters being a case in point.

Speaking of Labels…

Lisa brings up a good point in her post, labeling materials is quite often a major challenge. Not only are we at the mercy of whatever labeling systems creators use to describe their items, but we sometimes don’t get much in the way of labels. These recordings, for example, which are part of our largest collections, came to us lacking both individual “clamshell” boxes and any sense of order whatsoever. (And yes, that’s a Christmas tape in there.)


Our first move was to untangle the tapes and put each reel in its own clamshell box. Because there are 260 reels in this collection, we separated them and organized them by date range (1997, 1998, 1999, etc.).


From there, making do with what little descriptive information we had (at least they all had dates), we created labels with the date of each recording. (Hint: Don’t buy cheap labels. Get foil-backed labels from an archival supplier. They employ a much stronger adhesive than your standard Avery/office labels, meaning that they’re less likely to end up on the floor of your stacks in a few years.)

Here’s a shot of the tapes as they appear now:


Want to hear them? Give me a holler!

Present at the Creation

In a long and distinguished career as a French diplomat, Jacques Leprette occupied a number of important posts, most notably as his country's ambassador to the United Nations (1976–82) and to the European Community (1982–85). His papers in the archives document important aspects of French foreign policy in this period; they also record Leprette's intimate knowledge of American society, a product of his lengthy stay in the United States as a junior official with the French embassy in Washington.

Among the materials in the collection, however, it was a document from the earliest part of his career that seemed to have been singled out by Leprette as an item of special significance: an original draft of the treaty establishing the Council of Europe, signed in London in May 1949. Leprette was part of the French delegation at the London conference that negotiated the treaty and subsequently served as a counselor at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

The draft in the Leprette papers has handwritten corrections to the French version of the treaty, as well the signatures of the various heads of delegations present at the council’s creation, including Ernest Bevin from the United Kingdom and Robert Schuman, from France. Given the document’s intrinsic value as an artifact and the subsequent importance of the Council of Europe in the story of European integration, it was decided to give it special treatment so that it could be both preserved and shown to visitors to the archives. Among the staff of the archives, such presentation items are known informally as “treasures”; it was nice to be able to add something to this select category.

The archives’ Preservation Department designed and made a portfolio to house the treaty draft. The portfolio encapsulated the draft and a photo depicting the treaty’s signing. The resulting whole allows the items to be easily presented and also protects them from any possible harm.

The Leprette papers contain other documents relating to the Council of Europe, including transcripts of proceedings held during the first years of the council’s existence. The Council of Europe went on to establish the European Court
of Human Rights and continues to play an important role in promoting cooperation among its member states in the areas of common legal standards and democratic governance.


Photograph depicting the signing ceremony for the founding treaty of the Council of Europe, London, May 5, 1949, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives


Last page of draft of Council of Europe treaty, with the signature of Ernest Bevin, the British representative, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives


Cover of special presentation folder for Council of Europe treaty, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives


Expanded view of presentation folder, showing encapsulated photograph and treaty, Jacques Leprette Papers, Hoover Institution Archives