You Are What Your Archive Says You Are – The American Spectator

OXFORD, England — David Garrow, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and praise for his work on the Eyes on the Prize PBS documentary, receives a shunning for undercovering truths about the man underneath the Barack Obama myth.

In a recent interview with Tablet magazine, Garrow explained, “Barack writes to [his Occidental College girlfriend] Alex [McNear] about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.”

The letter, which Emory University historian Harvey Klehr viewed at Garrow’s direction in an archive associated with that school, demonstrates the too-common reality that while one finds spin and faded memories in interviews, one discovers truth in archives.

The Garrow interview ironically came to my attention in the midst of visiting several archives in the United Kingdom. The repositories of old papers do not generally reward those looking for short-term rewards. One looks for needles in haystacks. This vocation calls to the patient.

Still, at the London School of Economics a few hours after I stepped off a plane at Heathrow, I found what I looked for, and what I did not know I looked for found me. The next day in Cambridge at Trinity College’s Wren Library, surely one of the most beautiful rooms on this planet, the material I had requested underwhelmed.

Material from archives mostly acts as puzzle pieces do. Alone, the pieces mean nothing. But as they accumulate, one begins to match piece with piece and see the bigger picture.

In rare instances, an item discovered in an archive possesses meaning powerful enough to tell a story on its own.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, I stumbled across something called “A Plan for World Peace” in Margaret Sanger’s papers at the Library of Congress. The early 1930s document detailed a scheme for a vast system of concentration camps in the United States to protect the gene pool against various groups — amounting to tens of millions of people — Sanger regarded as undesirable. Why did I not first learn about this in the half-dozen or so books on the Planned Parenthood founder that I had read?

At Harvard University around 2007 or so, the papers of John Reed, of Ten Days That Shook the World fame, revealed trouble in the free-love relationship that he so famously pursued with Louise Bryant: She reported contracting a venereal disease and worried about losing her ovaries. At the time I thought Reed a certain cad. In the years since, I read more about Bryant’s pursuit of Eugene O’Neill and others, which indicated that probably Reed did not transmit the disease, after all. Such complications to their love story as social disease never made it into the Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton–starring film Reds.

Yale’s stunning Sterling Memorial Library contained a letter more shocking than the Reed–Bryant correspondence, if less consequential. Here I read a letter 12 decades or so old from the coach of the University of Alabama seeking football advice from the coach of Yale.

At the University of Chicago a few years later, the unprocessed Mortimer Adler collection contained letters clearly showing Adler attempting to manipulate his first wife into divorcing him. Great books, alas, do not always imbue greatness in their readers.

A few years ago at Wesleyan, I found clear, and repeated, evidence of forged military citations in the papers of William Manchester, a historian who went native in wanting to become history and, in doing so, tarnished his credibility as a historian.

In the age of online searches, archives seem more relevant than ever. One can Google one’s way to a book, a very bad book. Archives provide a way for writers to provide readers what they cannot readily obtain themselves. Googling strikes as a lower form of research than reading a book, which seems lower than going through old publications on microfilm, which seems lower than interviewing participants and witnesses to history. Archival material, collecting dust somewhere, beats all that because it inevitably digs up unknown, accurate material that provides a greater understanding of history.

As some institutions, particularly wealthy ones, digitize archives — Yale scans the entire folder for wider digital access whenever a researcher requests a document within one — a danger arises from democratizing, and necessarily decontextualizing, information the way search engines do. But that danger always existed, and the tiny dots gleaned from an old letter or tax return or report card will add up to a big picture only when one does comprehensive work. One must do an awful lot of reading prior to entering an archive, even a virtual one online, or risk stumbling around blind.

My trip concludes Friday with crammed visits to the London School of Economics Library and the British Library to inspect 90-year-old letters and records. The chances of landing a find on the order of what Garrow and Klehr discovered — or what Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and other collaborators discovered in the former Soviet Union decades ago — appear less than nonexistent.

But the possibility of learning something interesting, something that nobody else alive knows, exists every time one enters an archive. Curious people keep returning, it seems, for this knowledge-for-knowledge’s sake reward.