Oral History and the Construction of Multiple and Conflicting Histories

The transformation of oral history that I want to talk about today was, of course, part of a broader, more general transformation of historical studies:  what has come to be called the “linguistic turn” or the “historical turn” or the “cultural turn”. This change is widely known and has been quite copiously documented and to go into it in any detail here would be time consuming and probably unnecessary. Essentially what was involved was the acceptance of a set of assumptions about the study of history, many of which had a long period of gestation. Grounding all else was the concept that history (knowledge about the past) was not something to be discovered in the facts or events of the past that one examined, but was, rather, a historically and culturally specific construction, and the ways in which history was constructed had to be comprehended in order to understand and analyze the processes of change over time. History itself was an object of historical investigation. Foremost, history, like all knowledge was constructed through the agency of language and discourse. Historical narratives were not the result of the ways in which events related to other events in a system of causality, but in the ways in which the imagination of the historian used words to create a symbolic world and textual representation. It was through language that one discerned what Clifford Geertz called “the ensemble of texts” that composed a culture. Language was structured and structuring. Thus, history in its traditional guise which was now seen as a narrow, class based sociology was to be invigorated by a new cultural vision.

In this view it was not the facts of experience but the experience of experience that was of interest. There was no master narrative but only stories and ambiguities. In the world where the personal was the political one was concerned with the interrogation of such categories as nation, race and gender to capture how understanding was revealed in practice. Data was interpretation and interpretation was data. Gone was the objective observer, and politics was to be understood as the process by which plays of power and knowledge constitute identity and experience. This is simply one way to describe what has been described at greater length and depth elsewhere, and I hope it will not take too much of our time to go over a well plowed field, although later I will come back to these issues in a slightly different context.

In the world of oral history there were two themes to this changing perspective; (1. the transformation of oral history from a source of information (data) to a source for the production of and interpretation of texts, and (2. the alteration of the view of the historian/interviewer from objective and contemplative observer to active participant in the process of the creation of the interview. These two changes define much of our project.

Oral history had its origins in two different practices, in many ways geographically defined. In the United States and many areas influenced by American trends, or American institutions, those who sought to define oral history linked it to archival practice. Concerned that in the age of the telephone and in an era when men of affairs no longer kept diaries or wrote memoirs, historians of the future would no longer have the kind of base for their research that they had traditionally enjoyed oral history, made possible by the invention of recording devices, was seen as a way of filling in the record. Interviews, properly researched and processed, on file in an archive or manuscript collection would complement the existing written record in the same manner that letters or memoirs had done since the dawn of literacy. Located in libraries or archives rather than departments of history the practice was seen as passive. Just as an archivist or director of collections played no role in the creation of the materials he or she administered, so too the oral historian was to play no role in the creation of the interviewer, or as little and unobtrusive a role as possible. The model was, in many respects, survey research. Questioning was to be as neutral as possible and directed as much as possible to descriptions of what was believed to have actually occurred. The focus was recollected experience.

To a large extent the object of investigation was the exercise of power, and therefore interviews were conducted with those who had held power—usually in the American context, white men.  One interviewed movers and shakers, those who had left a written record that would be the base of research for the interview, the record wherein the gaps were to be filled. Even projects in labor history or women’s history were with leaders or outstanding figures. Thus in this view oral history was elitist to the core. The positive side of this practice, however, was that the document was to be made public and available for alternative readings, thus countering any tendency toward source monopoly.

An alternative to this archival orientation was the growth of oral history and the “new social history”. Influenced by the movements of the 1960s in the European world many historians began to call for a new view of the past, one that included the study of and the recognition of the importance of those who had traditionally been left out of the master narrative – members of the working class, blacks and other minority populations, women, sexual minorities, and dissenters. The goal was to document the lives of the inarticulate who turned out not to be so inarticulate once one began to talk with them. The mission of oral history, which was formulated for the most part by new left historians was double edged: (1. the creation of the history of the everyday lives of those who had heretofore been ignored by historians in order to create a “better’ and more honest history, and (2. to radicalize the practice of history by contesting a hegemonic view of agency and power.

The most thoroughly articulated description of this conjoined evolution was The Voice of The Past by Paul Thompson, which after its initial publication in 1975 became a virtual text for the practice of oral history. In Thompson’s view oral history was the latest stage of a long tradition of using ‘oral evidence’ to uncover the history of everyday life. Starting with Herodotus, through Michelet and folklore studies, the tradition of social reportage of the 19th century, the Chicago school of sociology and the American slave narratives he traced along lineage for oral history. If archival oral history came into its own with the invention of the tape recorder, oral history for the purposes of social history had always been part of historical studies and now it was to play an important role in recreating the history of ordinary and everyday life. Based upon the culturalist formations of social history being articulated by E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese, in this view oral history was to be part of the struggle to produce a history from below. At its most ambitious the claim was that oral history would be a moment in the drive for consciousness raising. Those studied would become radicalized by the process of recalling their past oppression and would become part of the on-going struggle against that oppression.

The differences between the two approaches to the collection of oral histories were clear.
There seemed to be little consensus as to who was to be interviewed, who was to do the interviewing, and what should be done with the interview. Archivists, who saw themselves as removed observers separated the creation of the interview from its final use, while social historians who saw themselves united with their interviewees in creating a new history argued that those who did the interviewing should be responsible for their use and interpretation. Social historians seemed to be little concerned with issues of organization of collections and source monopoly, while archivists resented and resisted calls to interpret the interviews they were creating.
 
Looking back now, it seems clear that whatever the forms and differing perspectives, in the actual thinking about and practice of oral history, archivists and social historians shared a set of common interests and visions: a concern with local history, a view of the relationship between oral history work and the established historical profession and a common set of epistemological assumptions. Archivists encouraged local libraries and historical societies to collect the oral history reminiscences of local leaders while social historians mounted any number of community projects where citizens were encouraged to do their own history. Archival projects were seen by the profession at large as ancillary to the main task of the academic historian, while, in many cases, social historians with their political agendas were scorned as out of the mainstream. Both spoke to the marginalization of the practice. In addition, both shared the view that the end result of oral history activity, even among community historians, was the published monograph, in one case to be composed by some future user, in the other by the interviewer/historian.

Most significantly, for this discussion, both archivists and social historians shared a very traditional view of what an interview was, how it was created and how it was to be read. Oral histories were seen as documents similar to other documents, repositories of facts and thus were to be treated by the historian as he or she would treat any other source. There was an understandable and observable gap between the historian and the source (the person interviewed). The historian was distanced and contemplative observer in the same manner as someone examining a manuscript source. The knowledgeable and ‘objective’ historian was to use the tools of a traditional historiography to discover the truth which resided in the source in the guise of facts whose relationship to one another were to be extricated from the testimony. Because the interviewer/historian knew more about the “real” history of what had happened in the past he or she was able to sit in judgment upon the testimony of the interviewee whose view was always partial at best. The facts of the case were transparent in their meaning and could be tested for accuracy, verifiability and representativeness by the historian whose role was unquestioned, and whose cultural position in a world of production was invisible. Knowledge lay in the accumulation of facts. The goal was the production of information.

The transformation in the practice of history noted at the opening of this talk, the shift from social to cultural history can be described in many ways, Daniel Wickberg has recently argued, it was a shift “from immediate experience to mediated forms of representation; from agency to discourse; from recuperation to critique, from modernism to postmodernism, or, more broadly from freedom to necessity.” Where the traditional historiography sought to recuperate the social experience of people in the past, cultural historians sought to unmask the constructed categories and representations found in language and discourse in and of the past. The social historians of the 70s in particular sought to find evidence in the past of a history of groups that had not been included in the dominant narrative of American history.  In doing so they identified closely with the people they studied and saw in the struggles of the past similarities with their own struggles and visions and values. There was, a later generation was to argue, an essentialism to the experiences of those studying and those studied. In oral history there was a common intersubjectivity.

All of this is to frame our discussion of oral history. I have no intention of delving into any of these convoluted theoretical issues. That is for some other study. In oral history these changes had two dimensions: a concern with the interview as cultural artifact and the relationship of the interviewer and interviewee.

The peculiar attributes of an oral history interview make it particularly apt for cultural studies. It is first and foremost a linguistic construction, a conversation. It is a document of the here and now about the then and there. It is obviously a narrative fraught with possible meanings. Embedded in the testimony is a story of identity and it is thus a repository of identity categories and representations. It is inherently subjective in its dependence upon memory. The changing debate about memory in oral history is an index of the shift I am talking about. In a positivist, empiricist and behavioral world memory is a problem. The question framed in terms of accuracy. Can memory be trusted, how can memories be verified, memories are fragile, people forget over time. Now, however, in our work, memory is seen as the gateway to narrative construction. It too is an object of investigation. We are now concerned with how remembering is structured and how it reveals historical consciousness.

In all of this the interviewer is deeply involved. The interview is now seen as the meeting ground of two differing horizons and subjectivities. Elsewhere I have described the interview as a conversational narrative. There is no need to go into a detailed analysis of that idea but I do want to point out that such a conception allows to view the interview as more than just a repository of fact and to begin to examine its dialectical structure, and as a to gain an understanding of the role of subjectivity in historical construction. If properly understood we can see people, and many times relatively modest people, emplot their histories and thus reveal the hidden discourse of the interweaving of ideology, myth, consciousness and memory. The differences I am describing can be easily seen in the comparison between the first edition of the Voice of the Past, published in 1975, and the volume of essays collected in The Myths We Live By, a compilation of papers given at an international oral history conference in 1984.

I would now like to shift gears somewhat and move from these questions of theory to an examination of differing ways in which oral history work has responded to these changes, and then speculate on some possibilities for future work.  While I do think that some of what I want to note can be seen as a form of progression, I would not want to overstate the case since, as will be clear, the styles of doing oral history, although seemingly leading one to the other with a certain inevitability, continue to mark our work throughout the period about which we are talking. In general I want to point to three ways in which oral history has been used, and rather than loading this discussion with reams of unfamiliar bibliography, concentrate upon some general themes by focusing on four works in particular, which embody these themes.

It is not at all surprising that oral history, especially in its early uses, should have been biographical. It was a quite natural extension of the interviewing format.  From the late 1940s on a raft of biographies of famous Americans (mostly powerful white men), or monographs accenting the personal agency of powerful men, were published based upon oral histories. Even a brief glance at the annual reports published by the Columbia University Oral History Research Office and other oral history centers shows the listing of biographies of lawyers, publishers, doctors, ambassadors and others of note, as well as histories of decision-making in political and diplomatic life which were produced by historians using oral histories. In an age when the influence of the social sciences was supposedly conquering all, biography, both individual and collective more than held its own. Even when, under the impact of the movements of the 1960s historians heeded the call to broaden the scope of history by including the histories of those heretofore ignored, the initial impulse was biographical. Thus we had a veritable stream of biographies of ignored but famous black Americans, women and other minority representatives. Projects such as notable American Women or Notable Black Women were mounted by centers. Biographies of African American civil rights leaders, labor movement activists, notable gay or lesbian Americans and prominent Italians, Jews and Asian Americans became a hallmark of oral history publication. This was part and parcel of the recuperative movement in American history mentioned earlier.

A very popular and important example of this tendency was the publication in 1975 of All God’s Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten. One long and extended oral history of a black southern sharecropper, with no intervention by the historian/interviewer, All God’s Dangers is in many ways a loving and inspiring biography (verging on autobiography – showing the tendency of oral history to blur genres) revealing in a time when some were arguing that the problem in the African American community was the absence of strong male role models, a monumental patriarch who, despite a set of debilitating racist experiences maintained his family, his dignity, his sense of self and worth and left a heritage of struggle and  inspiration for his family. On close examination the volume exhibits all of the attributes we have ascribed to oral histories of that moment. Concentrating upon experiences rather than representations, it is a rich repository of facts about African American life in the American south from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, an extended treatise on agricultural life, and populist politics. But the uses of oral history are unproblematic. The interviewer is totally abstracted from the process. Although obviously sympathetic to Nate Shaw, our hero, Rosengarten includes none of his questions or interventions. He is the quintessential disappearing presence. The lesson of the tome is clear. Not only were African Americans present in the American past but they were unsung heroes. Their past is simply waiting to be discovered.

The social history thrust of oral history was a logical consequence of the biographical thrust except that in these works the focus was upon community studies, broadly defined. Thus we had studies of the African American community of Greensboro North Carolina, the Italian American cannery worker community of Buffalo New York, the Polish American community of auto workers in the 1930s and other ethnic communities and neighborhoods, the gay community of San Francisco, nursing students, women’s groups, singing societies etc. Many of these studies sought to integrate ethnicity, race, class and gender as they played out in the experiences of workers in specific locales, from cities to shop floors. A favorite genre was political or union struggles against a rapacious capitalism wherein people recalled a past of radical responses to economic exploitation. In making their argument they sought to document the independent agency of these communities in formulating a tradition of resistance and identity through the construction of their own structures churches, social clubs, marching societies, secret societies etc. They were studies of resilience and resistance and of people who in their own voice revealed a fundamental sense of themselves as workers, women, Blacks, Chicanos, Jews etc., people who were bearers of an essential identity, culture and language.

Like A Family: The Making of A Southern Cotton Mill World is a fine example. An extended report of the fieldwork experiences of a North Carolina collective, it is the history of the industrialization of the piedmont South, an area, for the most part populated by white people, which was the scene of intense textile mill construction and cloth production in the post World War I era. Deeply researched and finely textured in its writing the essential argument is that “family” both real and imagined was the essential heart of the culture and society of those who worked in the mills and inhabited the mill towns that sprang up around them and who were interviewed for the project. It was family relations that were the basis of their ability to resist the paternal claims of the mill owners, who also controlled every public and private institution in these towns. It was family that was the basis for various unionization efforts and struggles against the hegemony of the owners. Family was the metaphor used in these drives and in the religious ethos that sustained them. It is a wonderful study and a fine example of the limits of the genre and the limits of thinking about oral history.

Like the biographies based upon interviews, social history works, such as Like A Family takes a very unproblematic view of oral history. There is little reflection of how present meets past and how the intersubjectivity of the partners to the interview collectively shape the vision of the past. While there is an extended discussion of the metaphor of family there is little or no discussion of how that metaphor operates to integrate the narratives of the interviewees, or even how that narrative is constructed; the combination of paradigmatic and syntagmatic elements that weave past and present into a story. There is a single-minded devotion to what is told in the story and an ignoring of the ways in which the story is structured. There is simply no conception of what we would now call emplotment. Most importantly the category of family is unquestioned even when it is noted that the metaphor is used with often conflicting and contradictory meanings –in the epilogue reduced to a description of the ways in which an elderly worker remembers the relations between the mill hands on the line; So too with other categories. The work ethic noted often is never questioned as a category, while mention in made about the particular violence of masculine culture, drinking, fighting, sometimes violent shootings, the category of masculine is never questioned, even when it bears so directly on the major metaphor. The family here is, of course, the patriarchal family. The greatest absence is, however, race. We are told again and again that these workers and their community are white but we are not told what that means. Of course it has no meaning without understanding the meaning of its other – black. How did these white workers think of themselves as white?

Lastly, like many of the works in social history we are discussing the story ends at the Second World War. There was an in built nostalgia among liberal to radical historians of the 1907s in the United States for the labor militancy of the 1930s and a silence about a later time.

One questions such categories by historicizing them; pushing historiography away from a commitment to reconstructing the lived experiences of people toward an analysis of the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality and their cultural meanings thereby unmasking the ideological contingency of any claim to universal identity. The uses of oral history in this process are most clearly seen newer studies of whiteness, masculinity and especially in the history of sexuality.

What was once called gay and lesbian history and is now called queer studies went through the phases we described earlier, first a concentration upon biography and the recuperation of heroes of the past, and then the uncovering the history of various communities, particularly in the era before gay liberation. Because so much of this literature was based upon the politics of liberation the notion of historical identity as contingent was inherently evident in it, especially community studies. The object was, as in the other historical genres we have discussed, the recuperation of a gay past as a method to liberate gays from the restrictions of heterosexist ideology. One way this would be done is through the discovery of the ways in which the community itself identified itself in opposition to that ideology. It was a search to find ‘gayness’, similar to the search for blackness, Italianness, Jewishness, or womaness, to find the essential identity that had been obscured by a hegemonic historiography. The process involved, of course, the questioning of the dominant ideology of identity. Oral history fieldwork, however, led many of these scholars to begin to question their own categories. Lesbians in Buffalo did not describe themselves as lesbian but as fem and butch, and many constructed other identities in other situations, both public and private On the summer resort of Cherry Grove they were also landlords and renters, longtime or yearly etc. It turned out that there were many overlapping, contradictory and conflicted understandings of what it meant to be gay in a gay community.

This raised fundamental questions. In an evolving genre of historical narrative based upon oral sources and seeking to investigate the history of communities built on sexual self-identification, how does desire structure lives. How do some people build physical and geographically specific communities around same sex attraction. What does community mean? How are they organized over time?

Following Micheal Foucault and Judith Butler by the mid1990s workers in the field had moved toward historicizing homosexuality as a category. Homosexuality, it was argued, was something made, not found. Perhaps, the most obvious work exhibiting this shift was Gay New York by George Chauncey. Using manuscript sources as well as oral histories the book, it is clear, began as an exercise in recuperative history. But somewhere in the process Chauncey turned away from a notion that gay identity was fixed and stable; that pre-World War Two New York contained a world of gay men who simply faced different constraints and contexts than those of today. Instead he found a world where different roles in sexual acts were not conceived of as homosexual and that these roles were defined not by sex roles but by gender roles. Sexual identities were much more variable than contemporary notions of sexual orientation allowed and heterosexuality as well as homosexuality was a historically variable identity category. It was a world where men were sometimes active, sometimes passive, some men who seemed to have gay lives were indeed married and heterosexual, some were simply cross dressers and others were sex workers. Identity was conflicted and contradictory. The study became an examination of the contingency of the ideology of heterosexuality that had invented homosexuality as a category.

More to the point of the use of oral history is the work of John Howard in Men Like That. Howard uses 50 sets of interviews to construct a history of men who have sex with men in mostly rural Mississippi. Less concerned than Chauncey with identity construction his aim is to recover the history of desire. By posing the simple charge “tell me your life story” to narrators, Howard captures the voice of ‘men like that’ and asks them to tell him stories of the more elusive “men who liked that’. This not the history of identity it is a search for the history of desire. It directly addresses what is termed “the ephemeral sex’ factor – sometimes you do one thing, sometimes you do another. How is that desire structured? How does it change over time? What are its cultural and social meanings?
 The fieldwork problem was to find men of a certain generation who had sex with men but who did not identify as homosexual or gay, especially in the overlapping and maybe not so overlapping communities of white and black who trafficked in same sex desire that would be difficult to track through any traditional historical methods. Oral history was the only way to go. But it was important that he not load the issue by directly asking questions that would be framed within the very categories he wished to escape. The method was to begin by asking people to tell stories and to adhere to the vernacular language within which those stories were told, eventually coming to ask stories about ‘men like that’—men who engaged in same-sex desire but didn’t talk about it and certainly didn’t write about it. Essentially he used oral history to document the unsaid, the silences that ideology must impose if it is to remain hegemonic. Much more can be said about Howard’s work, which has been held up as a clear example of queer history rather than gay history but what I find compelling is the ways in which the work resonates with work now being done in ethnic history, women’s history and other sub genres, say disability studies, to seek a new historical vision.
Race, class, gender, sexuality should always be understood as contingent terms. Definitions and meanings attached to these terms are always historically and culturally specific and never ideologically neutral. This does not mean that they are merely artifacts of poststructuralist dematerializations of the individual or subjective experience. Differences do exist across a wide spectrum of human experience, and as Butler notes in reference to gender roles, they find their meaning in performance. But identities such as gay or black or woman are socially constructed categories with complicated implications for the writing of and rewriting of history. That, I think, is the future of oral history. Our interviewing will explore in detail and with texture the space opened by the tension between the myth of race and the ideology of racism, the myth of sexual identity and the ideology of sexual repression and the myths of masculinity and femininity and the ideology of sexism in order to formulate more multiple and conflicting histories.  It is still an exercise in liberation. 

Ronald J. Grele (PhD)
rjg5@columbia.edu