From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Listen and Learn
A brief history of oral history.
You've never heard of him, but Robert Rush may be a modern-day Herodotus. Mr. Rush, who jokes that "he got his B.A. from the back of a Humvee," is an oral historian with the U.S. Army. A retired command sergeant major who spent 30 years on active duty before getting his doctorate in history, Mr. Rush believes that recorded testimonies "can flesh out details that aren't present in the paper histories." In 2006, he was stationed in Iraq, where he spent seven months interviewing everyone from "engineers to bricklayers to military officers," all with his handheld Olympus.
A century ago, historians might have laughed at Mr. Rush's desire to spend time talking to construction workers. Today, the populist impulse is everywhere in the study of history. For that, some credit is due to Joe Gould. A West Village bum with a Harvard degree, Mr. Gould told The New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell in 1942 that he would "put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude--what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes and sorrows--or . . . perish in the attempt." He announced that he would do so in a work he humbly called "Oral History of Our Time." He claimed that the tome, covering the first half of the 20th century, included nine million words of everyday New Yorkers. It was revealed upon Mr. Gould's death that he had made the whole thing up.
Besides remaining a part of New York City lore--a portrait of the small, bearded man still hangs in Minetta Tavern on MacDougal Street--Mr. Gould left another legacy: The term "oral history" was thrust into the public lexicon.
The roots of oral history, of course, are much older than Mr. Gould. They "go back to the beginning of human beings," Alphine Jefferson, the president of the Oral History Association, tells me. But Ronald J. Grele, the author of "Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History," says it all started a little more recently--the fifth century B.C., perhaps, with Greek storytellers. "People have told their history since time immemorial. . . . But Herodotus left a written record, so we know that he was going out and doing this."
Still, there is a distinction between Thucydides recounting oral testimony culled from interviews with Athenians and what we now consider oral history. What distinguishes modern oral history is the recording of the voices of its witnesses. "Up until the 19th century or so, sound disappeared," says Mr. Grele. It wasn't until Thomas Edison developed the cylinder and the phonograph in the late 1870s that it was possible to capture sound and replay it.
Some of the earliest recordings--on wax cylinders that could hold only a couple of minutes of sound--were those of American Indians taken by ethnographers. Funded by the federal government, these early oral historians "felt compelled to try to record native traditions of what they thought was a dying culture," says the Senate's Associate Historian Donald Ritchie. In the 1930s, as cylinders gave way to lacquer discs, the government expanded its oral-history horizons. Such writers as Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston were hired by the Works Progress Administration to interview immigrants, the Appalachian poor and ex-slaves. The stories of such groups were largely excluded from formal histories of the time. But modern scholars have made great use of their testimonies, now preserved in the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.
As the government funded interviews of those on the fringes of American society, it also sought to record the most dramatic events as they unfolded. Mr. Rush traces the Army's current initiative in Iraq back to 1943, when George Marshall suggested recording the institution's history. And so, according to Mr. Rush, military detachments were sent into the war, most of the time, with nothing but a "stubby pencil." It was only when they arrived in Germany that they realized how rudimentary their recording methods were: The Germans had, by then, developed the magnetic tape, which allowed for longer recordings and splicing. Three years after the war ended, the first scholarly oral-history program was established at Columbia University.
Initially such programs--like all formal historical study at the time--focused on the elites. But in the 1960s, a new movement of social historians began to challenge this way of understanding the past, arguing that history be told from the bottom up. For a while, the populist streak was so dominant that, Mr. Ritchie jokes, "you were much more likely to be interviewed if you were a fisherman than a member of Parliament."
Today, digital technology has allowed for every fisherman and every member of Parliament to immortalize their stories. With folks from all walks of life now making autobiographical podcasts, historians in the future will be presented with the issue of how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Storycorps, an ambitious national oral-history project whose results can occasionally be heard on NPR, does some of this sorting, providing a more structured opportunity for such recordings than YouTube. In soundbooths across the country, Americans can come in and record their stories for 40 minutes, which then get archived in the Library of Congress. David Isay, the founder of Storycorps, describes the act of listening to the voice as "an adrenaline shot to the heart." The physical experience of hearing another's words can bring an understanding that reading those words on a page simply cannot.
If you go to the Library of Congress Web site you can listen to Lloyd Brown, the last U.S. Navy veteran of World War I, who died earlier this year. On the 71-minute recording, which he made at age 103, Mr. Brown offers a confession for posterity. "I lied about my age; I told them I was 18," he recalls in a Southern drawl. At 16, he couldn't wait two years to join the Navy. "It was a matter of patriotism." So says the voice from history.
Ms. Weiss is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal this summer.
