In Praise of Oral History: A Dispatch from Fulton, Missouri

Philip White

In a 1940s-style coffee stand in the middle of a drug store, six grey-haired gentlemen sit around a long, light-wood table sipping coffee and swapping stories. They’re here at 10am six days a week (Sunday is a church day, and the drug store, as with many businesses in the town, is closed then), and the proprietor holds the same table for his most consistent patrons, who have gathered in this manner for over 25 years.

Today’s topic of conversation is the day Winston Churchill came to tiny Fulton, MO, 65 years ago to the day. Fulton mayoral candidate Bob Craghead recalls his father charging out-of-towners a whopping 25 cents a pop to park at his farm just outside the city limits. O.T. Harris, whose family is a part owner of the Callaway County Bank across Court Street, is laughing as he recollects the bank’s CFO Tom Van Sant (a frequent visitor at Truman’s White House, and the man who encouraged Westminster College president Franc McCluer in his unlikely bid to bring Churchill to town) reputation as what Jerry Seinfeld called a “close talker.”

My pen is working overtime to scribble down these priceless recollections, in case the batteries in the voice recorder on the table betray me. In the weeks before my Fulton visit, I’ve had similar conversations, albeit by phone, with half a dozen Fultonians. One gentleman was so eager to share his memories that the aforementioned recorder ran to more than 90 minutes. Then he called back the next day with another half hour’s worth of vivid descriptions of the Missouri town as it was in the mid-1940s. I relished each word.

Certainly, oral histories can be distorted by forgetfulness, romanticism and exaggeration, but they remain an indispensable way for a historian (or any writer, for that matter) to add color and personality to his or her work. It is simple (and, sadly, the modus operandi for writers of history that’s as dry as a pile of October leaves) to read a couple of written sources and apply their second-hand generalizations to a time and place. But to talk to people who were in the moment is to see what they saw, hear what they heard, touch what they touched. Such accounts also serve the purpose of putting events that fall into so-called “Great Man” history (in this case, Truman and Churchill parading through town and the latter then delivering his “Iron Curtain” speech) in the context of “regular” folks’ lives. It’s also all too easy to reflect on the impact of such an occurrence through other world leaders’ perspectives or with the benefit of hindsight, but to obtain the real reactions of people who were there adds a new dimension.

Perhaps one reason certain writers avoid oral history is because it requires a different sort of effort. It can take weeks to track down people who were present at a particular event. Some writers surely think “who can effectively describe a bygone era.” You can have 10 conversations before you get one piece of usable information. In addition to prepping for the interview, jotting notes and/or recording, and transcribing, you need to cross-reference certain facts to verify authenticity, and to compare testimonies to establish sources.

And yet, even if it takes 10 hours of panning for every gold nugget minute, such treasures are hidden in the memories of people everywhere. Beyond the benefits of oral history for your project, there is the immeasurable value of creating connections and, if you’re fortunate, new friendships with your interviewees.

Then there is the time capsule bonus of recording first-person impressions for posterity. Recently, Frank W. Buckles, the last surviving American World War I veteran, passed away, marking the end for new oral histories of the Great War. The same will be true in just a few years for World War II, the Great Depression, and all sorts of other 20th-century subjects.

I feel fortunate to be speaking with these fine, 80-something individuals from Fulton while time remains.

Oral History and Iconic Red Desk Objects

Heather Cox Richardson

Morgan’s post on oral history struck a chord. (Among other things, he observes how valuable information is lost from one generation to the next.) I was shocked, recently, when talking to a high school student about her National History Day project, to learn that she had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the US and the USSR.

Indeed, why should she have? She was born after the end of the Cold War, and knows the USSR only from history books, most of which are too general to mention the hotline.

But in the 1960 and 1970s, everyone knew the story of the Red Telephone. It was such common knowledge that no one, apparently, has bothered to make a point of passing it down.

The significance of that loss goes far beyond understanding the mechanics of the connection. Indeed, the actual hotline was not a red telephone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype machine at the Pentagon. (The history of the hotline is told wonderfully here, by Webster Stone, now producer and executive of the American Film Company.)

The mechanics of the line are far less important than the cultural context it evoked. Imagine watching TV or films from the era of the Cold War without the knowledge of what a red telephone meant. Everyone who lived during that time understood that when a red phone sat on a desk, it was not a fashion accessory. It was a symbol of an enormously important link on which hung the fate of the world. (See this clip of a 1967 episode of Batman, for instance.)

But to a more recent generation, it’s just a red telephone.

For younger readers who don’t see why this matters, think of a red Swingline stapler. It’s a key prop from the black comedy Office Space. It represents the stifling bureaucracy of the modern office, cut into cubicles staffed with faceless paper pushers. (This is also the film that gave us “Didn’t you get the memo?”) To a certain generation, a red stapler carries an indictment of the soul-crushing big business of the early twenty-first century. Ignorance of that meaning tears a critical understanding away from modern popular TV and film.

But will anyone bother to tell their children what a red stapler signifies?

It seems to me that such cultural context is one key aspect of history that is lost without oral history. People simply don’t write down what is common knowledge. It is more likely to get recorded in a passing comment made to an oral historian.

Death, Memory, and Oral History

Morgan Hubbard

A recent piece in The Root on World War II-generation African Americans got me thinking about memory.

When people die they take their memories with them. Their memories become inaccessible forever. Our understanding of events that shaped our world can be lost with the death of one woman, man, or child.

When memories have contemporary political valence, this can be dangerous. Allesandro Portelli’s The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and the Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) illustrates this point well. Portelli shows how nationalist Italians have purposefully misremembered the circumstances of a Nazi massacre sixty-five years ago for present political purposes. In 1945, anti-fascist Italian partisans attacked a column of German soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome. The Nazis retaliated less than 24 hours later by massacring more than 300 Italians. Pro-fascist Italians at the time concocted a counter-narrative that blamed the partisans, not the Nazis, for the massacre, alleging that the partisans ought to have turned themselves in to forestall the murders. The documentary record demonstrates that this was never possible, but the counter-narrative is persistent, even among young right-leaning Italians today. Portelli's work rescues the truth, but only in the nick of time—the citizens of Rome who remember what really happened are now elderly. Many have already passed away.

Granted, most cases of memory are not so politically and morally fraught. But the fact remains that the loss of memory accompanying a person's death is also tragic for the historical record. Since the inception of large-scale oral history projects in the 1940s like the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project—and the cultural turn in the humanities since the 1960s—academic historians in America have increasingly considered this. This is a good thing; memory enriches the documentary record.

The next step is to understand that generational memory loss is no longer as inevitable as it once was, thanks to technology, which has made democratized/amateur oral history a reality. If you have a laptop, or even a smart phone, you can conduct an oral history. StoryCorps has an excellent Do-It-Yourself guide to oral histories; the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is another good place to start.