Eddie Glass – Oral History 8800

What does a scientist do when an experiment returns unexpected results? They can edit their conclusion as need be – something that historians both oral and conventional can and must do when a thesis is not supported by evidence. But what if the process of getting there – the method – proves more complicated than expected? That is one of the more interesting questions one might ask while reading Sherrie Tucker’s book Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. How does one extrapolate conclusions from what isn’t said, written, or printed? What steps can an oral historian take to both maximize usable data taken in interviews, and also respect the privacy, agency, and comfort of their oral authors? In this book about the all-woman bands of the Swing Era, Tucker faces these questions of silence when examining a topic whose historical record is practically defined by these silences.

Tucker’s book is about the experiences of women musical artists during and after World War II, specifically among all-woman or all-girl – the distinction here plays a notable role – and their struggles for recognition both past and present. As with many traditionally male-dominated fields, swing music saw a large number of women picking up the slack during World War II. Hundreds of all-woman bands played throughout and after the war, and yet when she attempted to begin her research on that topic, Tucker found silence at best and derision at worst. Traditional histories lauded folks like Louis Armstrong or Count Basie, while ignoring leading lights like the International Sweethearts or Ada Leonard’s USO shows. And yet those histories remained available. When beginning her project to unearth these histories, Tucker was inundated with enthusiastic offers from dozens of women from the era – some of whom were still playing – to record their memories.

It is silence that Tucker primarily attempts to combat in Swing Shift, and she does so through a number of examples that she personally interviewed. For example, women musicians were derided as sex objects and (to quote journalist Robert Toney) “fanatical housewives.” Even when they were allowed to play, all-girl bands often found their talent subordinated to their looks and demeanor. In an interview, band leader Peggy Gilbert noted women being removed from the stage because she “doesn’t smile enough, or is too fat, or her hair doesn’t look just so” (Gilbert in Tucker, 12), and that such practices were in no way conducive to a good sound. Though many opportunities were opened, and many women did forge notable careers, the patriarchal hierarchy began to reassert itself once the war ended – in large part burying the womens’ bands under the veneer of postwar conformity.

Tucker’s interviews were, thus, about breaking through this interference. As discussed in theories of oral history before (Ritchie comes to mind), the importance of documenting and maintaining these waning voices becomes all the more important; this is especially true given that this book is now a quarter-century old, and so many of these voices are now irrevocably lost to us but for Tucker’s work. Furthermore, the silences of historical records despite the availability of sources allows her to draw a logical conclusion: “The flaw of the swing narratives is more likely the uncritical reproduction of dominant gender ideology than a case of careless omission“ (Tucker, 6). When conducting background research for an oral history, it would be interesting to see how the “conventional” history of any topic 

However, as Tucker demonstrates throughout, even this sharper picture cannot be considered complete until one also considers the intersection between race, sexuality, and gender among the all-girl bands. A white woman and a black woman would have faced many of the same stigmas and yet still have very different experiences. Furthermore, women in the all-girl bands faced a great deal of heteronormative suspicion. Both race and gender proved to be complicating factors in her research, and she has tackled both. For the former, she talks about the difference in opportunities between black and white performers, as well as noting the discrepancy in memory between black and white performers on the same tour. 

In a later article, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” she discusses the silence of so many of the interviewed women on the topic of sexuality. As mentioned, and as demonstrated in awkward pauses and evasion, the heavy-handed attitude (especially in the military) towards any who resisted enforced heterosexuality silenced a lot of these stories. A major part of her 2002 article is having to come to terms with the fact that, for some, their sexuality was a private thing, not least because of the prior risk of exposure and ostracism. Having to read these silences is another important part of oral history, especially with narrators who may not be fully forthcoming. It also demonstrates the need for empathy when interacting with oral authors, especially when it comes to guaranteeing their privacy and respect for their boundaries.

It is clear that for all they are ignored, all-women bands did play a significant role in the homefront struggle during World War II, and that they did “It did not matter which way the applause meter swung,” Tucker notes. “Women’s bands were constructed as inauthentic for a variety of ideological, social, and political reasons.” (Tucker, 4). Swing Shift is, for this reason, as much a history of silence as it is a history of music.

For most of my life, I lived on Forsyth Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By the time I was born, the LES was on the march to gentrification, and many of the immigrant families who once called its tenements home have long since left for greener (and less pricey) pastures. But institutions like Orchard Street, the Bowery Mission, and the Tenement Museum still cling on, and so the legacy of immigration persists. Therefore, I was especially interested to hear the stories from the New York City Immigrant Labor History Project – and I was not disappointed.

The Immigrant Labor History Project, undertaken between 1972 and 1976, sought to record and save the voices of hundreds of NYC immigrants from the early 20th century, with the stated goal of “challenging the prevailing theories in social history at the time.” The early 1900s were a period of radical change for people who had until recently been agrarian laborers and subsistence farmers, and CCNY history professor Herbert Gutman set out to document those experiences. 

The aim of the interviewers was to get a sense of people’s daily lives as strangers in a strange land, with topics of conversation varying widely from union politics to (among many other things) culture clashes and personal relationships. They generally kept to Quinlan’s benchmarks, with every participant announced clearly and with questions that were topical to the general narrative of the time – if not always to labor history itself. 

I will note that having listened to this project, the transcripts were helpful, but I find myself agreeing with Portelli’s sentiments to some degree. While my learning style makes it preferable to have a written transcript alongside to ensure I didn’t mishear, as I listened along I felt that there were a few mistakes made (eg. writing “gingiva factory” – nonsensical in this context- while the oral author rather clearly said “ginger ale factory”). The argument in favor of a transcript is, according to Starr, that it is more accurate and allows for after-the-fact corrections, but the example of the Labor History project does show that they are hardly infallible. Additionally, as the authors came from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the authenticity of their accents and voices is an experience that can’t be matched by the blandly functional presentation of the transcripts. It is likely that whoever organized the archive agreed to some degree, as the transcripts aren’t really advertised. They are only available through a link in the audio file embed itself, and so it’s made clear that the audio itself is the main product.

One thing I also found interesting was the way the interview often rambled and meandered; while it did not happen with every interview, the older oral authors like Victor Christianson had a tendency to either forget the line of questioning or trundle off on a tangent. Still, the interviewers did a good job of humoring these distractions, and then refocusing their attention to the question at hand. They also refrained from “leading” questions, ie. seeking out specific answers; as this project is meant to be a picture of how immigrants see their early experiences, this is important, and from the recordings I listened to they did very well.

One question I do have is regarding additional speakers – a caretaker/helper, in the case of the Abraham Belson recording. In that recording, the caretaker does take pains to keep quiet unless needed, but she does occasionally interject to help jog Mr. Belson’s memory; are there protocols and best practices for such a situation? How should an interviewer involve a caretaker? Should they be involved?

This week’s readings are primarily concerned with the history and development of oral history as a practice. First, two chapters of oral History: an Interdisciplinary Anthology provide insight from and about the originators of modern oral history oin the US, Allen Nevins and Louis Starr. Their perspective is on the early evolution of oral history as a methodology and as a medium, recounting the early days of the practice since the 1930s and 40s and up into the oral history renaissance in the 1970s. The other readings represent more specific case studies. Most prominent is the extensive and fascinating Slave Narratives recorded by the Works Progress Administration, described by Nevins as an early antecedent to modern oral history and containing a wealth of over 2,000 interviews of those who still remembered what it was like to be trapped in bondage. There is also the wealth of labor histories that used oral history as their methodology, as described in Halpern’s article – though Halpern does describe a fundamental disagreement over the role of the oral historian in two labor case studies. Finally there is Portelli’s paper, which focuses less on individual case studies and more on the theory and methodology of oral history.

A common theme is what Starr, Portelli, and the Library of Congress have called “history from the bottom up,” the idea that history is incomplete without the perspectives of those usually forgotten in the history books. From former enslaved African Americans to the radical laborers of America’s mid-twentieth century factories, proponents of oral history advocate for this sort of people’s history as a way to give agency and depth to traditionally marginalized groups. Halpern notes that oral history gave scholars the opportunity to push back against “an earlier historiography that regarded mill workers as passive victims of a suffocating corporate paternalism” (Halpern, 609). For the Slave Narrative project, in addition to saving many priceless voices from what Nevins might call “death’s dateless (and undatable) night” (Nevins & Starr, 30), this bottom-up approach did provide invaluable information and context on the historical understanding of slavery. But it should be remembered that the Slave Narrative project was conducted by the largely-white WPA for a largely-white audience, and thus raises a number of questions about the role of an interviewer in the interpretation of oral sources.

In that vein, Halpern in particular focuses on this, relating the disagreements between authors Peter Friedlander and David Brody over the appropriate level of interviewer involvement. Brody, for example, was critical of Friedlander’s practices, such as the use of pseudonyms and what Halpern calls “explicit theorizing” – in Brody’s eyes, the interviewer as active participant would lead to bias and inaccuracy. On the other hand, Friedlander considered his oral histories to be “collaborative projects:” in his interviews with CIO president Edmund Kord, Friedlander noted that he did not simply ask questions and let Kord lead the debate; instead he served as both guide and active participant at the same time.There is also the debate over the ideal final form of the oral history project: Tape or transcript? Some projects, especially those operating outside the US, do not add a transcript to their database or archive. Instead, they argue, an oral history should remain oral – without the emotional nuances and cultural markers present in the actual voice of an oral author, historians like Potelli claim that much value in oral histories will be lost. By contrast, Starr notes (without taking a side) that those in favor of transcription laud its relative accuracy and staying power; after all, a transcript allows for project iteration. 

These were fascinating reads, and the chaotic, very ad-hoc birth of modern oral history is well outlined and described by the authors. I am curious how modern technology – the fall of the tape recorder and the rise of the laptop and phone – has altered oral history best practices, if it has at all.

Upon my first reading of both introductory chapters in Sommer & Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual and Donald Ritchie’s Doing Oral History, it’s clear that my preconceived notion of what oral history entails is both broader than reality and yet simultaneously insufficient to describe it. Prior to this class, I thought that “oral history” was the general term for spoken/recorded stories and histories – interviews, stories, oral traditions, and the like. It was especially interesting to read the definition that both readings supported: “Oral history is primary source material created in an interview setting with a witness to or a participant in an event or a way of life for the purpose of preserving the information and making it available to others. The term refers both to the process and the product.” 

One particular thing to note is Sommer and Quinlan’s distinction between oral history and the interview-based research done by scholars for specific historical projects. The key difference comes in the accessibility of the interviews: they say that oral history must be available to the public and those who gave them needed to have given consent to donate their words and stories. But Ritchie’s definition seems to be broader – he casts a relatively wide net in terms of what is and isn’t oral history, even if he does specify and rule out a number of methodologies and techniques such as journalistic interviews done for a specific purpose and publication.

In a lot of ways, Ritchie defines oral history as a counter to “great man” history and other, more traditional methodologies. He quotes Joseph Gould, a lost pioneer of the discipline: “What people say is history… What we used to think was history… is only formal history and largely false. I’ll 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 I’ll perish in the attempt.” Though Gould did not see success, his definition – a people’s history – comes up often and prominently in Ritchie’s work. Where Sommer and Quinlan focus on the technical aspects of conducting oral histories, Ritchie in this first chapter appears more concerned with the purpose, results, and implications of oral history.

One question I do have, however, is about presentation, something that the two articles appear to disagree on. For example – Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus is a harrowing tale of a Holocaust survivor based on audio interviews taken from Spiegelman’s own father Vladek. If presented simply as the audio recordings of a survivor, it would be a perfect example of a life interview – a historical tale told through the perspective and the real words of a single person. Of the five steps in the oral History life cycle, Spiegelman’s book – and others like it – display four of the five basic “benchmarks” as described by Comner and Quinlan. Though the idea is plain, the plan (if often improvised) followed, the interviews conducted, and his work preserved in graphic novel form, it does fall short in terms of Access/Use; as far as I know, the full interviews conducted by Spiegelman are not available to the public, instead being presented in comic form.

But Ritchie seems to use a slightly different and more broad definition, what Sommer and Quinlan might call “vernacular” – he includes things like Zhou dynasty court records, Herodotus’s often inaccurate writings, and the Spanish records of their conquered peoples as types of early oral history. The big difference between the two perspectives appears to be in the Access/Use section – where Sommer and Quinlan would likely say that the interviews themselves need to be available in full as an archive to be considered a proper oral history, Ritchie’s definition appears to be more flexible in how these interviews are presented. To that end – would books or other media like Maus be considered an oral history based in Ritchie’s definition? I would call it likely.

Hello!

My name is Eddie Glass, a second-year Masters student in History here at Temple University. My undergraduate degree, earned in 2018 from Allegheny College, was political science, although my career path since has diverged from that original idea. I have always had an intense interest in history, having started as a kid with one of my dad’s old Civil War books and moving on to more complex topics as I grew older. While I spent much of my early post-BA years working for nonprofit organizations in my home of NYC, in 2023 I made the choice to swap vocations and pursue a career in a field I was most interested in: History. Since then, I have worked as a Visitor Engagement Associate (or tour guide) at the Museum of the American Revolution in Old City. I hope to continue this career direction, and I’m confident that a full understanding of the theory and practice of oral history

My particular historical interest at the moment is in naval history, particularly regarding developments in doctrine, technology, and the treatment of naval personnel over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries. That said, my experience with professional history-making has been limited to my time at Temple – while important for my political science degree, I had few chances to really dig into history while working at a volunteer clearinghouse for half a decade. With my shift in career, I’m hoping to turn my passion into not just a job, but an investment in my own future.

My career goals are somewhat up in the air at this point, but my current trajectory seems to lead me towards public history and museum administration. As mentioned, I currently work at the Museum of the American Revolution in Old City, and I hope to further pursue a job either there or at another historical institution upon my graduation. MOAR is of particular interest to me, not just as it is my job, but also because my project for Dr. Bruggeman’s Managing History class last semester was a history of MOAR’s predecessor – the Valley Forge Historical Society and its accompanying museum.  While my experience with recording oral history is limited to practically nonexistent, I look forward to learning about its methods, theories, and best practices in this class while completing the project I started with Dr. Bruggeman.

I look forward to getting started!

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