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?