Transcript

Jim Albins: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to The Mary Baker Eddy Library. Our program this evening is titled, “An Archive of One’s Own—Women’s Archives, Past and Present.” And it’s the third in our season’s series on the importance of being archival, discovering who we are. My name is Jim Albins, and I’m manager of the program development department at the Library.

The season’s series is underwritten by a generous gift from H.L. Peterson, and it celebrates the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Collection here at the Library—one of the largest collections by and about an American woman. We’re also pleased this evening that the Women’s Network of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce has joined the Library in presenting this evening’s event. So, a special welcome to you all. For those of you who may not be familiar with Mary Baker Eddy, or the archival holdings of the Library, I encourage you to come back, have a look around, visit our Research and Reference Rooms, enjoy our exhibits, and of course, come to our future exhibits.

Mary Baker Eddy was a daughter of New England, whose life spanned much of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. And even though for much of the first half of her life, there was very little to indicate that she would become a figure of historical significance or importance, she, nonetheless, like many women of her day, collected in copybooks and scrapbooks some of the early writings that she penned, articles that interested her, and other documents from her life story. These remained dear to her, throughout her life. And of course, they now occupy a core place within the collection, which consists of tens of thousands of documents. In fact, in her later years when she had achieved a considerable record of accomplishment and public recognition for her writings, she commented to a friend about some of these first scrapbooks that she had compiled, that, “If the house were on fire and I had time to save but one of my treasures, I think I should save the dear old book.”

Now, I’d like to introduce the moderator for this evening’s panel. Kristi Andersen is a professor and former chair of the department of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, at Syracuse University, where her work focuses on women and politics, political parties, and American political history. Dr. Andersen’s books include: After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics Before the New Deal and The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936, both of which were published by the University of Chicago Press. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1976. And of course, we’re absolutely delighted that she’s accepted our invitation to moderate this evening’s panel. So, with that, Kristi, it’s yours.

Kristi Andersen: Thank you, Jim. Tonight we have with us three writers whose work has ranged over a broad array of topics, but who have in common that they have studied and written about women and women’s activities. And to do so, they have depended, as have many others including myself, on collections of letters, documents, papers, photographs, and other artifacts of women’s lives. And our conversation tonight will focus on how such collections help us to understand the lives lived by both notable women and more ordinary women of the past, and help us to reflect on our contemporary situation as well.

Barbara Haber to my left, is the former curator of books at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. She was instrumental in building this wonderful library, one of the country’s preeminent resources, for the study of the lives and contributions of American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She wrote Women in America, A Guide to Books. And served as general editor for the ten-volume series American Women in the Twentieth Century. The Schlesinger Library is particularly well known for its extensive collection of more than 12,000 works in the fields of cookery, gastronomy, and domestic management. And, Ms. Haber has helped make this collection visible, with her work. In particular, her recent book, which is titled From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks & Meals, published last year. She also co-authored a chapter on culinary history in the Cambridge World History of Food, and has written widely on food-related subjects for popular and professional publications.

Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University, and previously directed Princeton’s Program in African-American studies. She has a doctorate in history from Harvard University, and has published numerous books, articles, reviews, and essays. Her most recent book is Southern History Across the Color Line. She is also the author of a widely acclaimed biography of Sojourner Truth, titled Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol.

Professor Painter is also widely known as a mentor of younger scholars. She has advised more than 20 dissertations at four major universities. Her current work looks at the social construction of gender, race, and personal beauty. And she plans to complete—I can hardly believe this, but I will read it—three books in the next few years. Oxford University Press will publish Creating Black Americans, which shows how African Americans have drawn on art and history to develop their identity in the United States. And Norton will publish two books, The History of White People and Personal Beauty: Biology or Culture? Good luck.

And finally, Sylvia Jukes Morris, who was born and educated in England, where she taught English literature, before emigrating to America, has written two widely acclaimed biographies, one of which is Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Booth Luce. Mrs. Morris is working on a second volume about Clare Booth Luce now, which we hope we’ll hear about tonight. And she also wrote Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady, which a reviewer for The Washington Post called “endlessly engrossing.” For her biography of Roosevelt she had access to Mrs. Roosevelt’s previously unpublished diaries and other papers. And for the Luce book, she also had access to previously restricted papers. And was able to spend several years meeting and talking with Mrs. Luce.

So, we’re looking forward to hearing from all three of these writers. We will go in the order in which I introduced them, and ask each of them to speak a little bit about their work and about their use of archives. And then we hope to have a more general conversation and eventually to open it up to the audience for any questions you may have.

Barbara Haber: Thank you, very much. It’s such a great pleasure to be here, at a very highly regarded collection and library facility. I’ve been in the library business for a very long time. I was just thinking back, when we were talking about archives and building collections. I came to the Schlesinger Library right straight out of graduate school, when I was barely walking—1968. And, it was a job that, frankly, my mentor in library school didn’t think was the right job for me. But it was not the linear career path that he would have chosen for me. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found a place like that. It was very small in those days. The Schlesinger had about 6,000 or 8,000 books altogether. And now the collection is closer to 100,000, which is still a small library. But now one that’s on a single subject. And the irony is that it existed before the field of women’s history ever existed. That was the kicker. And, very few people used the library. When I would show up at dinner parties, for instance, and you know how people have to talk to the person on one side, and then the person on the other. And one person said to me, a hostile male, as I recall, “And what is it that you do?” And I said, “Well, I work at this women’s history library.” And I heard him visibly sigh and turn his back, and I never heard more from him again. He was experiencing a nasty divorce, I later heard. But the whole idea of women’s history, not such a long time ago, seemed funny to people; seemed strange and absurd to people. And that is because women had historically been subsumed under the rubric of men. I remember men in society being always unquestioned. When you were talking about a, let’s say a high school history course, would be called “Men in Society,” and nobody would question it.

So there I was in 1968 entering this place. I had the great luck of being hired by a woman named Janet James. Some of you may know of her. She was a fabulous historian—one of the few women of her generation who had actually gotten a Ph.D., and then studied women’s history. Very few people had, at that time. And I was lured into the field by her. I loved the interview. It happened that I was sitting in a room and was surrounded by cookbooks, and even though the whole interview was about women’s history, there was my hobby. I mean, I was always an admitted reader of cookbooks and at the end of the whole interview, I said, “Why are these books here?” And she said, “Well, they’re sort of our hobby.” The library was designated, within the Harvard system, which has 100 libraries, as the library that collected cookbooks, because it was the women’s library, I suppose. And so, they just came in. They found their way there. And there was plenty of room on the shelves, and so they were stored there. But, they weren’t dealt with, and maybe at Thanksgiving someone would come and look at a pumpkin pie recipe, but that was the extent of it.

All right, that’s the background. I don’t have to tell you that at the end of the ’60s when I started, at the beginning of the 1970s, the world cracked open. For very complicated reasons, women’s studies became a discipline; women’s history was a very core part of it. This came right on the heels of the women’s liberation movement. And there I was, in this library, responsible for building a printed collection on the subject. Now, history books about women were not recent; there had been a lot written before 1920, at the last wave of feminism, when there was a lot of discussion about what women really wanted, and what the women’s issues were. There was that literature, and then, from about 1920 until the end of the ’60s, there wasn’t very much written about women. And so, when I first got there, I had a lot of time on my hands. It was a half-time job; I was responsible for selecting books; for cataloging the books; for doing any reference that had to do with the books; and for doing a little dusting on the side, presumably. And very few people used that collection in those days. Or, if they were there, they were there because they were looking at the archives, the manuscript part the library, and they might have even been writing about a male member of the family we had the papers on.

Now, a little bit about collecting women’s history. The historian Mary Beard was saying, very early on, “No documents, no history.” She was inspirational in starting not only the library at Radcliffe, but a similar collection at Smith College, known as the Sophia Smith Archives. She had opened the eyes of people to the need to collect papers, because otherwise you won’t have any history. In the early days, not many other libraries competed for papers. I make that point because it is so different now. It used to be that only literary collections would be pricey. Historic records were not usually sold; people were very happy that somebody wanted mother’s records and would take care of them. And they would often turn to the Schlesinger Library. So one collection after another was offered to the library. And it was often accepted; and there was no competition and not a dime would change hands. At the same time, it is also true that the library still gets, as donations, lots and lots of papers. I make the point about the money, because it’s a different world now. Lots of other libraries are collecting women’s papers, and so you have much more competition. There aren’t a lot of archives, and there’s good reason for that. It’s very expensive to run an archive. It always was a lot of fun to bring people into the vaults of the library—what you would see in the vaults of the Schlesinger would be in an air-conditioned, temperature-controlled, dust-free atmosphere.

Sometimes a collection comes in and it’s raw—I personally worked on Betty Friedan’s papers when they came to the library. And I remember sorting out various drafts of The Feminine Mystique. And it was very hard to do. I had to judge it by the quality of the paper and the color of the paper and all the rest of it. Miserable handwriting. Her collection came in, a hodgepodge of papers. People are very different in their habits—some very organized people’s files would still have to be redone, according to archival principles. With Betty, we got her chest X-rays, tea bags ... a lot of stuff. You just never know what a collection is going to look like. And therefore, processing a manuscript collection is expensive and time-consuming work. It’s very different from putting a label onto a book. When a book comes into the library, you give it a kind of pejorative meaning: feminism, anti-feminism, whatever. You don’t do that with raw material. You organize it according to types: if they’re diaries, letters, and so on. You organize the letters according to the correspondent; you set them up in terms of the chronology of when they came in, and then the archivists write a description. We call them inventories of what’s in a collection. So it’s extremely time-consuming. Our inventories are wonderful. People really like using the Schlesinger Library—which, by the way, is open to the public. And that’s a very important thing to say. Everyone is welcome to use that collection.

The library also collects photographs, and ephemera—that’s the grey area, you know—broad sheets, or advertisements, and so on ... which give you an insight into history as well. My responsibility was to publish and collect the books that came into the collection. And when I arrived there, there were about, I don’t know, 6,000 or 8,000 books. I remember looking around, after I accepted this job, and thinking, “I can read them all ... this is a manageable job.” Which is not a professional librarian way of looking at that kind of work. But I was struck by the narrow definition of women’s history. The library had been, by and large, collecting history books about American women. And those were books written by historians, or, even if they weren’t official historians, they were people who were interested in, at least, biography. But there weren’t any books that were on any of the controversial subjects. Nobody was talking about violence against women in those days; abortion was a criminal thing. In some states, birth control was a criminal thing, and that kind of stuff was considered psychology or criminal behavior, and was not collected in a library like that. Certainly, the library had no fiction, a decision that was made when it was founded in 1943. And very often, when something starts, it just continues, in the same old vein.

I mention these particular things because I felt all of them had to be changed. Because my definition of women’s history is: “What happened yesterday?” And the issues that were coming along throughout the ’70s were so rapid. We had to move and we had to expand, and luckily so many of the things we needed to buy were cheap. It was a time of pamphleteering, when 35-cent articles would be available and distributed. Those were the days when everybody was reading the same article; everybody was reading the same book. Nobody would have predicted how solid the field had become. I remember attending outrageous lectures, when people talked about women’s history as being just a fad ... a flash in the pan. I would get indignant and say, “Well, how come every publisher now has a women’s history list, or a women’s studies list if it’s a fad?” At that time in the Harvard history department, it was tough going to get women’s history understood. We were on a missionary path. And it was such fun. To live your work, and for your work to be part of how you feel about the world. Those were heady times. And we all belong to it now; and we all did other kinds of things as well as this kind of professional work.

One of the big problems in doing research about women is that when women married in those days, they changed their names. So, you would lose track of somebody that you were trying to discover. If she married and moved away, how would you know that was the same person? Or, if there were collections that described the woman you were looking for, they wouldn’t be in the inventories of most other libraries. Well, an extraordinary project got under way, which is called Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States, edited by Andrea Hinding and others. This was an extraordinary project that was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which meant that people went out to all the major repositories, or even the smaller ones, however long the money lasted. They did a real inventory of what was in those collections, and uncovered a lot of information about women. Remember: “No documents, no history”? What I have always understood and felt very strongly about is that if it’s not there, nobody can write about it. The huge responsibility of building a library collection, whether it’s books, whether it’s unpublished sources, is unless the collection is there, there won’t be anything for anyone to write about. That’s heady stuff, that’s saying we are shaping history in this particular way. And it’s very, very important to collect on all sides of issues; to be very open minded about what you are collecting and to not have a particular attitude about how you process those materials. The Hinding collection was eye-opening, and it was, as you can imagine, a wonderful entrée into more women’s history.

I remember one time involving the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company. The archivist had gone out to get the papers from the company, which was going out of business. The hope was that these letters would talk about female complaints and what ailed women, and that there would be a lot of descriptions of what nineteenth-century women were going through. Alas, the company destroyed the letters. However, the collection is hugely interesting for other reasons. The point I want to make is that this collection was strewn all over the reading room, because it had just come in from the field. Every once in a while, someone calls the library and says, “I have a friend who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and I think that library work would be just right for her.” It’s heavy going at times. You’re dealing with the mice or the rats, and you’re hauling big boxes around. And you’re dealing with internal and external political situations. But anyway, a graduate student, I think from Yale, came along and saw the Lydia Pinkham collection and decided that it would be her dissertation topic. And she wrote it, and it resulted in a nice book. Which is what I mean: if it is there, it will be written about.

I mentioned politics in passing, and I’ll close just with this point. Who gets to see a collection as a political issue? Not that long ago, a well-known woman, whose papers we have, called me and said, “So-and-so is going to be doing a biography of me, and she suggests that we close the collection to everybody else. What do you think?” And I said, “No. Don’t do it. She will have full access to the papers, but don’t stop other people from using them.” There is a lot of competition, like in anything, among scholars. And my particular philosophy is, let them all in and don’t play favorites.

The other issue, of course, is privacy versus the public record. Very often, we’ll get a collection only after promising that it will be closed until the last child of the person dies. And we’d just as soon get the papers and open them right away, but sometimes you can’t do that. Privacy is something that we take very much into consideration. And the last point, there are ethical considerations. Do you want to take a collection if another library, not that far away, also has the major collection in that field? Isn’t it unfair to the scholar if you make him or her run around to a lot of different libraries, when it would be a lot better if the collection was all in one place? And archivists of good repute really think about that. Previously, I talked about the vault, but I didn’t talk about the whole process of removing clips and staples and all the rest of it. That’s the last point, but it fascinates me. Similarly, we put things into acid-free containers, and acid-free Hollinger boxes. So, it’s a lot of systematic thinking that goes into keeping these records. But the most exciting part, of course, is after all that work is done, meeting the historians, the biographers, the literary people, the undergraduates, and anybody else, like you Nell, who comes and uses our collections.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Nell Irvin Painter: Thank you, Barbara. I’m delighted to be here. This is my first time here, and I’m actually swept off my feet by the library, and by the people here, and by the beauty of the building. It’s a place where you could really rest. I think I’ll stay.

I’d like to talk to you about archives, photography, value, and individual subjectivity. I’m going to talk about archives first—a little less than I would have, because Barbara has done such a good job of telling you about the business of archives and where the money goes, and what’s needed. But I do want to stress some of that.

I think we’ll be OK if I assume that you know who Sojourner Truth is, and that you’ve read my book. Sojourner Truth was born in about 1797, in Ulster County, New York. When she was born, slavery existed in New York. She emancipated herself in 1826; the state emancipated her legally in 1827. She moved to New York City in about 1828 and made her way as an itinerant preacher. This was the Second Awakening, so God was talking to a lot of people, telling them to preach their truth. Gerda Lerner, who pioneered women’s history, once said, “When God speaks to women, he tells them first to do two things: stop sleeping with your husband, and then leave your husband and your children.” So, God spoke to Sojourner, who was then Isabella, and she did leave her husband and her children, to speak her truth. She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, at the height of the Millerite enthusiasm, when followers thought the world was coming to an end. The world did not come to an end; she kept talking. I’m going to skip over a lot here, tell you that she made her name as a feminist abolitionist, with the emphasis on both parts. She visited President Abraham Lincoln; she lived and ended her life in Battle Creek, Michigan, which was the Rochester of the west, or Berkeley of the east—a reforming community. And she died in 1883.

This biography of Sojourner Truth is one of three scholarly biographies that came out in the mid ’90s. I think Sojourner Truth in the late ’80s was kind of knocking on historians’ doors, saying, “Do me!” And three of us said, “OK.” So, we have three books that came out in close succession. I’m going to talk a bit more about Sojourner Truth, but in a special way, related to archives.

Michel de Certeau, who wrote L’Ecriture de l’Histoire, or The Writing of History, talks about how it is that the raw material of history, archival collections, gets into archives. And, building on what Certeau had to say, I want to stress the concept of value, that is to say, how much money it takes, how much in the way of resources—material resources. But also, value in the sense of the individual in question and other people, including survivors and archivists and historians—thinking that that person is of value. So, regarding the archive, one of the first things we need, in terms of value, is the space for an archive. Here you have a lovely, gigantic block in the middle of the most thoughtful and read city in the United States, but also in the midst of an enormous and probably very wealthy institution. So, the space is here. And I mean the literal space, in addition to the psychological space and the emotional space. Also, the Schlesinger is at Radcliffe, and Radcliffe is a part of Harvard, also a wealthy institution, with space. Though, as I remember the Schlesinger, it was kind of cramped.

BH: Yes, it’s in an historic building, which you can’t add on to.

NIP: But you do have the space. And the space is important, because Mary Beard said, as Barbara Haber said, “No documents, no history.” But archivists also say, “Three moves is the equivalent of a fire.” So, if you move documents three times, they’re lost. You need space—be it in 1934 or in 1850—it needs to be the same space, for several generations. Also, in terms of value, you need the money to attend to the chores and the simple maintenance of a collection, year after year, in the same place. You need someone to receive documents, whether they’re in boxes in folders or in cardboard boxes with mouse droppings. There is simply a labor cost involved. There is skilled labor; people like Barbara Haber. And then there are the people who clean up, and keep the air conditioning going, and who go and buy those acid-free folders, all that sort of thing. So, that work also is valuable. And then there is the value that goes into letting other people know that the collection is there, even after you’ve processed it; even after you’ve created inventories and the catalogs. It’s an ongoing work of value. But even before we get to the space, and the work, and the continuing of letting people know what’s there, and the bringing them to collections, there’s the question of value. The value of saving the triteness of one’s life. How many of you save your letters? I bet you all do. I’m surprised that you all don’t. How many of you print your e-mails? Oh, c’mon, print your e-mails, print your e-mails! We need that, don’t we?

BH: That’s right.

NIP: We do.

BH: It’s a crisis, I think.

NIP: Yes, definitely print your e-mails. You know, one of the reasons there are so many books on the Civil War, is that then they had the equivalent of e-mails, in telegrams. People would send telegrams back and forth saying, “Move the troops here, or send the hot dogs over there,” or whatever. There is this incredible pile of document resources, on the minutiae of the Civil War, which Civil War buffs burrow into and produce ... so, print out your e-mails and save them. But, the fact that all of you don’t do that says that you may not consider those communications valuable. The first step in archives is considering them valuable and considering yourself, or whoever, as a person creating meaning that is larger than yourself, larger than your life, and meaning for the future. The leavings of life must be seen as imparting meaning, and imparting value, beyond the person, beyond that life. In addition to you, yourself, or the individual subject, other people have to share your conviction. Here’s where it gets hard, because those other people have to be your children. So, your children, or your executor, or whoever is responsible for your leavings, must also see you as a person of value, and save those letters, those journals, all of that material ... your tea bags, your mice. And have them ready to go to an archive. And usually that means the space: the attic, the basement, whatever. And usually that means space over a lifetime, or at least some passage of several years. Now, home ownership is related to class standing; it’s related to wealth. And people who are stable and who have attics and dry basements are more likely to be better off than people who have to move from one rental place to another, year after year. Which is what most poor people have to do. This is one of the reasons why archival holdings tend to be skewed toward the wealthy. They have the space to keep the stuff.

BH: And the time to write it.

NIP: Well, so many more people have the time to write it. I think most people have a sense of their inherent importance. But they think they’re the only person who thinks that. And then, even if they keep and write journals, their 15-year-old daughter or son comes along and says, “Oh, that’s just mom’s.” So, this sense of the importance of the person, somebody having that click that says, “This is valuable; this is important ... let me capture this.” That is related to the moment of photography. Susan Sontag, and many other scholars of photography, point out that what makes a photo is some person saying, “I want to capture this; I want to say that ... this image is worthwhile; this image is important.” So, even before we get to the archive, that moment of creation, the intentionality, between the archive and the photograph, overlaps.

Sojourner Truth lacked the first value in creating an archive. She didn’t read and write. There are no Sojourner Truth papers; there is no Sojourner Truth collection; and of course there is no Sojourner Truth archive. There are no Sojourner Truth papers anywhere. However, Sojourner Truth did have her photograph taken. As I was writing about Sojourner Truth, I was trying to figure out a way to get around the lack of archives. There is no getting around the lack of archives. Archives are indispensable. But what I wanted to do with Sojourner Truth was somehow get to her in a way that she, herself, had produced. She didn’t take the pictures, but she decided how she wanted to be captured in the pictures. Now, these are cartes de visite—they’re little pictures; they’re 3 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches. The technology came from Paris in the mid-1850s; came to the United States in the 1860s and set off “carte-omania.”

People used cartes de visite for all sorts of purposes. People like Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous authors and actresses and so forth, used them as publicity. Matthew Brady Lincoln had a carte de visite for campaigning purposes. Veterans of the Civil War, who had been wounded or maimed, used to have a carte de visite made of their maimed part. There is also a famous one of a man who had been a slave—actually a series of three. His name was Gordon, and the first one was as he came behind Union lines; he’s all in rags and tatters ... a mess. The second one is Gordon under inspection with the doctors, and you can see all the scars on his back. And then the third one is Gordon in his Union uniform, in which he’s become a man. This is just to say that you could use a carte de visite to show whatever you wanted to; there was no given formula. Abolitionists made some cartes de visite of white-skinned slaves to show that anybody could be enslaved. So Sojourner Truth, whose right hand was permanently injured—maimed—during the work that she had done in slavery, could have shown herself as a pathetic, former slave by showing her hand. Or, she could show her scars from being beaten. Or, if she wanted to be the Libyan Sibyl, as Harriet Beecher Stowe described her, she could show herself as kind of exotic and naove, with palm trees waving. She could do anything she wanted. She decided to do this [showed slide]. So, this tells us, this is not an archive; it doesn’t take the place of verbal sources. But this series of photographs does tell us something about what Sojourner Truth wanted us to know about her. And what she wanted us to know was this woman—not a fiery exotic. She was a creature and that shows through here. She is a person of God. She is a composed person. So, what this lack of archives does, in terms of Sojourner Truth, in terms of other black women, or poor working-class figures, people who don’t read and write, people who don’t have attics and dry basements, is to shrink them, in the historian’s eye, into types—into emblematic figures. If we have archives, we can find people writing to each other, for instance. We can see how people blossom, or keep their silence. But, more than anything, express themselves as individuals. With Sojourner Truth, the closest I could come was with photographs. If only I could have an archive.

APPLAUSE

Sylvia Jukes Morris: Well, I hope we’ll get a chance later to ask Ms. Painter how she came to write such a wonderful book without an archive. And I hope there will be time for that, because it’s a very valid point. I’m going to play a bit of an iconoclast here, because I’m going to say, right at the outset, that not all of the best material is already in the archive. It’s somewhere outside the archive. And you have to go in search of it, if you’re ever going to plum the depths of the character that you’re writing about. And this is certainly true in the case of both of my two subjects.

Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, who was married to one of the most brilliant and energetic of our presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, was quite the opposite from him in character. She was an extremely private person. So her idea was always not to have a photograph taken; not to have her letters published; not to have a biography written of her, or anything else. My husband was writing a screenplay once about Theodore Roosevelt, and I helped him type it. It was in the old days when we had the old typewriters. I said, “Who’s this mysterious woman that Theodore Roosevelt passed over, and instead married the girl from Brookline, Massachusetts, when he could have married his childhood sweetheart Edith Kermit Carow?” [Roosevelt later married Edith Kermit Carow as his second wife] And he said, “Oh, nothing is known about her, because she was such a private person.” So I thought, “Well, she intrigues me; I’m going to find out what I can.” So I went to the library, and read all the articles and the things from the period that were written about her. And I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll give it a shot.” So, I spoke to my agent and she said, “Oh, yes, I think I can get you a contract,” and she did. Once I got the contract, I thought, “Well, now what do I do with this private person, who really didn’t keep any papers?” So I put a little ad in The New York Times, as many authors do, asking if anybody knew of any papers or letters to do with Edith Kermit Roosevelt. And I heard, first of all, from her son, who was then alive, believe it or not—Theodore Roosevelt’s son. This was in the 1970s. And he wrote me a letter and he said, “My mother certainly deserves a biography.” And that was it.

So I had to grit my teeth and try and get an appointment with Mr. Roosevelt, who was living in Hope Sound at the time. And I went down there, and he came to the door on crutches, a very crotchety old curmudgeon. And he had been wounded, actually, in the same arm, and the same leg, in both World Wars. So, he had a right to be a little bit curmudgeonly. But anyway, I really didn’t start off too well, because I had seen in the letters of Theodore Roosevelt that the family always called this son “Little Archie, the Georgia Cracker.” And I, being an Englishman, didn’t know what a Georgia cracker was. So, I say, “Why did your parents, Mr. Roosevelt, refer to you as the Georgia Cracker? What is a Georgia Cracker?” And he said, “Well, it’s some kind of backward person who lives in the hills of Georgia.” So I thought, “This has not started off too well.”

But, anyway I finally did get the interview with him, and one of the things I found out was that none of the children—there were three living at that time: Ethel, Edith, and Mr. Roosevelt, all of whom I interviewed—not one of them could tell me the color of their mother’s eyes. And I found after a while that they hadn’t known her or her character all that well. She was probably the archetypal Victorian mother; a little bit aloof, a little bit austere. They started to tell me things that I knew that they had read, because I had read the same books. So, I thought, “Well we’re not getting too far in this project.”

But, I was about two years into it, after plodding on, and suddenly got a phone call from Ethel’s daughter. Ethel had suddenly died. When I had interviewed Ethel, she said, “Oh, my ... there aren’t many letters from my mother, between my mother and my father, because my mother destroyed them all ... I came upon her one day, in the attic, burning all of Theodore Roosevelt’s letters.” Now, Theodore Roosevelt, as you know, went to war; he went on big-game hunting, several times every year; he traveled a great deal on campaigns. And he always wrote his wife, every night. So, there were thousands of letters. And she [Edith Kermit Roosevelt] was in the attic burning them. And, Ethel said, “Oh, Mother, please don’t burn them all. At least save a few. Why are you doing this anyway?” And she said, “Well, I’ve just finished reading the biography, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, and I do not want my love letters known to the world. So I’m getting rid of them.” She managed to save four. Well, Ethel said, “I’ve got a lot of my mother’s stuff in the attic, and I’ll get it down for you one of these days.” But I, looking at her—she was in her 80s—knew she was too decrepit to climb the regular stairs, yet alone get to the attic. And I gave up hope of those.

But after her death, I got this call and it was in this great storm that you’re now celebrating, 25 years ago, in Boston, the great blizzard. And the daughters called and said, “You’d better come out here; we’re dismantling Mother’s house, and we’ve been in the attic, and we found all these trunks.” And the trunks were labeled with the name of Edith’s grandfather, who had been a merchant seaman, so there were these great steamer trunks in her attic. So I rented a car and went out there, and literally the snow was up to my thighs. And I go up to this old Queen Anne-style house, next to Sagamore Hill, where Theodore himself lived. And there were these two women, dismantling their mother’s house, and they had these trunks in the hall. So I took one look, and I said, “Well what am I going to do? Are you going to close the house down?” They said, “Take them.” So, I literally put all of this stuff in the back of the car and drove away. And when I got home, for about six weeks I was in paradise. There were 40 years’ worth of diaries Edith Roosevelt had kept, right from the time Theodore became vice president in 1901, to her death in 1948. And she had lived through 27 presidents and 17 administrations, was born in Lincoln’s first, and died when Harry Truman was campaigning for his second. So, this woman spanned almost a century of American history, and there were these daily diaries.

There were letters to and from Henry Adams; letters to President Taft, who asked her if she’d like to have her favorite sofa that she left behind in the White House, things like this. It was a really rich collection. Much better than anything I’d seen at Harvard at that time, which were mainly her letters to her sister, whom she wasn’t fond of—they were sort of slim pickings. There were also letters to her two sons, which were in the Library of Congress. But this was outside of the archives. After this, a lot of other family members came forward.

I remember going up to Avon, Connecticut, to the family of Theodore Roosevelt’s sister. And one of the brothers in the family mentioned that there was a lot of stuff in the barn—he had a cattle farm. So I went up here one weekend, and he gave me a lamp in the barn, and I thought, these lamps could set fire to the whole archive ... but anyway, I spent the whole weekend going through the barn and I found a picture—a daguerreotype actually, tinted and colored—of Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife. Finally all of this stuff has ended up at Harvard, but it was there languishing in attics and barns until somebody went in search of it.

I’m very much of the laundry-list school of archivists—I love the laundry lists; I love the receipts; I love everything. I think if you read these things properly, they tell you a story. One day at Sagamore Hill, when I was doing picture research, there was a pesky box under the table. It kept getting in the way of my feet. So I finally snatched it open to see what was in it, and there I found Edith’s correspondence with her son Quentin, who was killed in World War I, in a dogfight over France. All her passports were there, along with this little receipt. This receipt, I discovered, was from Theodore and Edith’s hotel on the Italian Riviera, where I knew that they had spent their honeymoon. I read this little receipt and it read: two omelets, one bottle of Chablis wine, and a cord of firewood. As I looked at the date of this receipt and counted the days until the birth of Theodore Junior, I realized that it was exactly nine months to the day from the date of this receipt. So, she had kept this because she knew the night she conceived her first child. Everything has a face.

In the case of Clare Booth Luce, she kept all the receipts in her archive. She was very mercenary, and was always keeping an account of her expenditures. Extravagant, but thrifty at the same time. I found a mass of receipts for a very famous French lingerie maker, and realized that she was collecting all of this stuff in the hope that Henry Luce was going to propose. She was actually collecting her trousseau ahead of the proposal—she was anticipating it. I talked once to Pamela Harriman about this little trove of receipts, and she said, “When I was married to Randolph Churchill, I was down at Winston Churchill’s country house one day, when I knew that Clare had visited there. One of the maids told me that when Clare arrived from Paris, they unpacked her suitcase, and found that she had a lot of very fancy silk underwear, all still packed in cellophane. And they laughed about this, because the English are notorious for having tatty underwear.” So ... they were still laughing about this 30 or 40 years later.

Additionally, Clare Booth Luce knew that she had a rage for fame, which is what I call my book, from the moment she was born. She kept every scrap of paper. Her archive in the Library of Congress, at the time when I began researching, was over 1,000 boxes. It was bigger than most presidential collections. But as I soon found out, much of it was rather sterile stuff, such as letters from her Connecticut constituents, because she had been a two-term congresswoman. And a lot of her diplomatic papers were over at the State Department. But the archive was quite sterile, and I knew that the real Clare was somewhere else.

Since she was still alive, I was able to go and ask her where the real stuff was, and she said, “Well, you know, I always intended to write my own memoirs.” And I said, “Well, why didn’t you? It was one of the great stories in American female history.” And she said, “Well, autobiography is nothing but a lay biography.” And then she asked how she could tell the truth about Harry—a marriage that had gone on the rocks pretty early in its life. So, I said to her, “Then where is all the private stuff that you had put aside to write this sort of biography?” And she said, “It’s all in my house in Hawaii, and you must come out there to see it.”

So, I went out there for three weeks and there again, of course, was trunk upon trunk upon trunk of stuff. Every scrap from childhood; all the schoolbooks and the papers; everything that you can imagine—diaries and letters. She knew everybody—Nehru, Mrs. Gandhi, Churchill, Beaverbrook—everybody in twentieth-century history she knew and corresponded with. So I thought, “What am I going to do?” There was not even a Xerox or a photocopier in that house. And she said, “Well, I will ship them to the Library of Congress for you. I intended to leave them after my death anyway, but I will ship them as soon as I’ve sold this house.” Which she was about to do. So, guess what? Those papers never came.

The relationship got a little rancorous for a while there, because I thought she was holding out on me. Then she died, and the last thing the executors were going to deal with were papers, even if they found them—and they couldn’t find them. Well, some months went by after her death, and I got a call from a friend of hers, who said, “I’m over at the warehouse in Washington D.C., and I’m looking for furniture to send to Sotheby’s ... they’re having a big sale of Clare’s old furniture, and I have come across these boxes, clearly labeled, Library of Congress.” They were incorrectly shipped to the furniture warehouse.

All of this meant that the book was delayed. People ask, “Where is the book? Why haven’t you finished?” And the reason why is that we can’t always get our hands on the vital material that gives life to all biographies, because in the end, it’s really the personal stuff. And as Ms. Haber will tell you, not all the best personal stuff ever ends up in an archive. Because people get cold feet at the last minute; they destroy it, or they give it to their children, where it ends up in their attic. That, actually, is another issue I hope to address now, with the question of Ms. Truth.

APPLAUSE

KA: I want to thank all three of you for these fascinating stories. I feel like I could sit here all night and listen to more of them. Before we close, I’m wondering if any of you have additional thoughts or responses to what each other said, or things you’d like to say about archives.

BH: I have a question. It’s hard asking scholars this, but do you think sometimes it’s OK for people to destroy papers? Do they have a right to their private lives?

SJM: Absolutely. They are their papers. The most famous case of this is that of J.D. Salinger. Salinger’s biographer was not appointed or authorized, but he found letters from Salinger, not in Salinger’s papers, but in the person’s files to whom they were addressed. That person owns the letters. But Salinger owns the copyright. So, when this biographer wanted to quote from those letters, Salinger took him to court and refused permission.

So, biography is going to be, I think, impoverished in coming years, because more and more people are beginning to say they own the copyright and won’t give permission. The only person I didn’t get permission from was Winston Churchill, Jr. And I had found a really juicy love letter that Randolph Churchill had written to Clare after an assignation at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. And he wrote, “Oh darling, you are so wonderful at night; but in the morning, disillusion seems to set in.” And I wanted so much to quote this letter, but he refused me permission. So then I had to just exercise my prerogative, which was to use eleven words, or one-tenth, whichever is greater. So, of course, I chose the juiciest. In a way, it’s sort of self-defeating to withhold permission; biographers will paraphrase, which never sounds as good.

KA: I guess I had a question about the advent of e-mail too. You mentioned that everybody should print out their e-mails, but I wonder how the decline of letter writing and the rise of e-mail communication, or other sorts of instant messaging, is going to affect what archives collect and can do, and what biographers can do.

NIP: I think we are in better shape now than we were before e-mail, because before e-mail it was all telephone. And it’s very difficult to capture your telephone conversation. So, at least now we’re back to writing, even if it’s not penned writing—we’re on our way back.

KA: And it’s automatically dated, and more readable than handwriting.

SJM: Good points. We were just saying earlier that Gore Vidal never, ever dates a letter.