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Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern
Society
Edited by Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace. Westport,
Conn.: Quorum Books, 2002. vi, 340 pp. Index. $60.00 (SAA members); $70
(non-members). ISBN: 1567204694.
Review essay published in American Archivist (Vol.
66, No.2, Fall/Winter 2003)
The modern publishing industry fights a constant battle to convince
consumers that the old cliché that “you can’t tell
a book by the cover” is untrue. Design and marketing people look
for pictures and color schemes that will make the book leap off the sales
table at Barnes and Noble. Publicists twist arms to get blurbs from big
names proclaiming, “this book changed my life.” And editors
press authors to accept a properly enticing title, preferably with a
number in it like “Seven Highly Effective Ways to Lose 100 Pounds
in Less than 8 Days.”
What, then, do we make of a book that arrives in the mail with a plain maroon
cover (no pictures, no blurbs, nothing but the title and the author) and an almost
deliberately bland title consisting of nondescript words and phrases like “accountability,” “records,” “public
good” and “modern society?” That the book is about archives
would only seem to reinforce the further cliché that archives are a boring
and bland topic. Yet, in fact, the book disproves at least this cliché since
the nondescript packaging hides a remarkably lively book about a remarkably lively
topic. The medium is definitely not the message here.
What is the message? The title proves only partially helpful. Editors Richard
Cox and David Wallace explain that they sought to assemble case studies “focusing
on the intersection between record keeping and accountability,” which presumably
explains the subtitle (although the title’s reference to the “public
good” is not similarly explicated). “Accountability” offers
an accurate but too capacious framework for the volume. While most of the essays
address the theme of “accountability,” the word doesn’t explain
the selection of articles. Technical studies of how credit card companies or
the Social Security administration maintain backup copies of their records in
safe locations deal with “accountability” but not in ways that would
make them candidates for inclusion here.
A more helpful gloss on the book’s content comes when the editors describe
how their collaboration grew, in part, out of their shared conviction “about
the importance of records in our society and the need to educate professionals
. . . that records are not only artifacts for use by historians and genealogists
but . . . the glue that holds together, and sometimes the agent that unravels,
organizations, governments, communities, and societies” (1). In other words
while the cover and title whisper that archives and records are unimportant,
dead, and safely left to others, the fourteen essays (and eighteen authors) collected
here scream the opposite: records matter deeply, they affect our lives in the
present, and you ignore records at your peril.
They do that through persuasive and readable case studies of the ways that records
do matter and how they can become the sites of active contention in the present.
One way they matter is in determining whether people will go to jail. Co-editor
Wallace—in one of the strongest essays in the book—provides a compelling
overview of the role of records in the Iran-Contra scandal—a subject he
knows well from his dissertation on the White House e-mail “PROFS” case.
Throughout the scandal, key developments centered on efforts to suppress documents
as well as the discovery of documents. Over and over, “elected and appointed
federal officials worked aggressively to hide, destroy, and manipulate the documentary
trail bearing on the scandal.” They shredded, hid, and lied about documents
and tried to keep classified anything that they failed to destroy. Oliver North
and John Poindexter deleted almost 6,000 email messages—a time-consuming
task in the absence of any mass delete option in their primitive email system.
In one afternoon, North, his secretary Fawn Hall and another staffer destroyed
an eighteen-inch stack of documents and North continued his energetic shredding
even while nearby Justice Department officials were looking for documents.
Although it distressing to watch of government officials obliterating the past,
this tale also offers a slightly more encouraging lesson: documentation has become
pervasive in modern society that even dedicated shredders like North and Poindexter
find it hard to sanitize historical record completely. North, for example, forgot
to destroy a key memo that spelled out the diversion of funds that was central
to the scandal. North and Hall doctored documents but Hall—distracted by
the festival of shredding—neglected to destroy her file copies of originals.
And, perhaps most disastrously for them, North and Poindexter’s email deletions
came a cropper because they didn’t realize that the White House Communication
Agency kept backup tapes. Lest we draw too happy a moral from this, keep in mind
that the shredding, classifying, and hiding of documents dragged out Independent
Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation for six years, limited the scope
of the prosecutions, and forced him to drop his key conspiracy charges against
North and Poindexter.
In Canada, in the 1980s as well, the absence of adequate records also hindered
a prosecution—in this case of Nazi War Criminals who had slipped into Canada
after World War II. There, the public “scandal” initially focused
on the archivists, who it was charged—either through a deliberate cover-up
or in a “monumental blunder”—had recently destroyed the immigration
records needed to convict and deport the ex-Nazis. But, in one of the most thoughtful
and complex essays in the book, Terry Cook shows that the destruction of the
records followed normal procedures and, in any case, those records would not
have been of any real assistance to prosecutors. Cook, however, does not stop
at defending himself and his colleagues; he also acknowledges that the harshest
critics of the Archives had a point in arguing that records retentions policies,
as a whole, reflected “the lack of enthusiasm by the government in pursuing
war criminals vigorously” at the end of World War II.
Such—often-belated—efforts to come to terms with crimes of the past
result in previously neglected records mattering a great deal. Greg Bradsheer
provides a detailed chronicle of how the (U.S.) National Archives and Record
Administration (NARA) records relating to “Nazi Gold” suddenly became
extremely popular in the mid –1990s. Individual claimants, their lawyers
and representatives of foreign governments and companies (as well as journalists,
authors, and historians) crowded Archives II trying to determine who was owed
what, who was going to have to pay, and who was to blame. “Not since the ‘Roots’ phenomenon
of the mid-1970s,” he writes, “has NARA experienced such a large
and sustained research activity on a single topic” (177-78). Records were
similarly crucial to compensating the victims of the infamous “Tuskegee
Syphilis Study,” which left African-American men with syphilis untreated.
According to Tywanna Whorley, “the government did not begin to discuss
the possibility of a settlement until after the records concerning the study
were found in the National Archives” (169).
While these cases involved grievous historical injustices, they also reveal how
records come to matter when large sums of money are at stake. David Gracy II
describes some fascinating cases of document forgery where money was often the
motive as when James Addison Reavis concocted an incredibly elaborate set of
document forgeries as the basis of his claim to 11 million acres of land in the
Southwest. Equally large sums of money were at stake for the Brown and Williamson
Tobacco Company, which (unsuccessfully) sued the University of California, San
Francisco, Library to remove a collection of damaging documents from its reading
room and to block it from posting them on the Internet—a story ably told
by Robin L. Chandler and Susan Storch. Records also had enormously financial
consequences in the collapse of Jamaica’s indigenous commercial banks in
the late 1990s, which set off a continuing economic and social crisis for that
island nation. As Victoria L. Lemieux explains, inadequate records creation and
recordkeeping practices were crucial factors in the bank failures. (Think microfilming
technique is unimportant? Well, part of the problem was that poorly trained microfilm
camera operators produced black or blank films that made it impossible to track
suspected fraud.)
Records also matter when they emerge at the center of historical, rather than
just financial, accounting. Nowhere has this been more true in recent times than
in South Africa, which initiated an extraordinary public process of historical
reckoning know as the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” But,
as Verne Harris shows in his rich study, that search for “truth” was
hampered by the systematic destruction of records relating to the state security
apparatus that took place in the final, dying years of the apartheid regime—a
record of record destruction that surely left Oliver North and Fawn Hall green
with envy. When the new democratically elected government took power in May 1994,
it found that “a massive deletion of state documentary memory had taken
place.” The protracted demise of the regime meant, “unlike counterparts
in the former East Germany, Kampuchea and other countries, South Africa’s
apartheid leaders had had plenty of time to do the job thoroughly.” Still,
as with Iran-Contra, “surprising pockets of public records survived the
process, even within the security establishment” (p. 218).
And, finally, sometimes records turn out to matter so much that they lead to
bitter disputes over ownership or control. James O’Toole engagingly recounts “the
strange case of the Martin Luther King, Jr., papers,” in which Coretta
Scott King and her allies at the Center for the Study of Non-Violent Social Change
sued Boston University (BU) to get back the papers her husband had given to the
university before his death. Shelley Davis offers a lively, but depressing, tale
of her crusade—largely unsuccessful, alas—to get the Internal Revenue
Service to retain and make available its historical records.
One of the reasons that most of these case studies are so detailed and compelling
is that more than half of them come from insiders. Given the IRS’s mania
for secrecy, only someone like Davis, who spent eight years as its official historian,
could take us “inside the secret culture of the IRS” (to quote the
subtitle of the book she wrote about her experiences). Similarly, the extraordinary
detail in Verne Harris account reflects not only his work as member of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission’s investigative team with responsibility
for investigating the destruction of records but also his earlier role as the
person who leaked the word of the record destruction to the African National
Congress.
Yet inside accounts do not always provide a fully rounded story. O’Toole
amusingly informs us that BU had much more carefully catalogued the papers of
Roddy McDowell than Martin Luther King even though the former were restricted
until the year 2100. (Is there a scandal about the making of The Planet of
the
Apes that we don’t know about yet?) But we never learn why BU was so careless
with such an important collection—information not available to O’Toole
as the expert witness for the King family. Davis scathingly indicts historians
and archivists for failing to back her up, but we want to hear the explanation
of the professional societies for this lapse. At times, the first-hand accounts
appear self congratulatory as when Greg Bradsheer quotes Stuart E. Eizenstat
saying “Mr. Bradsheer of the National Archives has really done truly heroic
work in opening and indexing and cataloging . . . all of this information.” But,
at their best, insiders like Terry Cook offer thoughtful self-reflections on
their own roles in the events being described.
If the book has a larger theme than “records matter,” it is that
openness and access are good things. “[A]ggressive oversight and power
to seize the documentary records provides one of the few means by which democratic
accountability can be secured,” writes Wallace. “Let the people know
the facts and the country will be saved,” concludes Anne Van Camp by way
of quoting Abraham Lincoln in her review of the State Department’s move
toward greater openness. Such sentiments are surely shared by most readers of
this journal. But as most readers also know, other factors often come into tension
with the commitment to preserve records and make them available. But studies
of egregious cases of the destruction or suppression records—as in Iran-Contra,
South Africa, or the IRS—are not necessarily the best forum for engaging
these dilemmas. Still, they do emerge periodically in this volume. For example,
Terry Cook notes how space pressures undercut the desire for a complete historical
record. And Whorley’s study of Tuskegee raises the difficult problem of
privacy. She argues that African Americans will continue to distrust government
accounts “until the government grants access to all the information it
has on the study” (170). Yet fully opening the record would expose the
patient records of still living men with syphilis and their families.
But the volume is not really intended to provide fully rounded histories of these
archival episodes or to engage philosophical or technical issues in archival
practice. Rather the editors sought to “provide powerful narratives for
the classroom” that would communicate “the significance of the roles
records play in constituting society” (2, 1). In this, they have succeeded
wonderfully. This would be perfect volume to assign to beginning students in
archive or public history courses—except for the small matter of the $68
price tag. A paperback version is badly needed and while they are at it, they
might try a new title. How about “Fourteen Ways Records Matter: Tales from
Eighteen Archivists Who Are Saving the Past for the Future?”
ROY ROSENZWEIG
Department of History, George Mason University
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