Prologue Magazine - Your Land, Our Land

Your Land, Our Land New Book Samples NARA’s Regional Archives By Monroe Dodd

S

ome of the National Archives’ most interesting treasures don’t reside in its Washington-area facilities. The evidence is in a new book, Your Land, Our Land: Two Centuries of American Words and Images from the Regions of the National Archives. Its 240 pages sample scores of intriguing items from each of the Archives’ 13 regions—from fanciful, full-color posters for early 20thcentury carnival attractions to snapshots of lifeboats filled with Titanic survivors to the document indicting Susan B. Anthony for illegally voting in the 1872 election, a half-century before women won equal suffrage in the 19th amendment. Above: Students from the Seneca Indian School in northeast Oklahoma Territory in 1905. The school was founded by Quakers in the late 1860s and named for the Native American tribe that ceded the land to the government. It closed in 1980.

6 Prologue

Fall 2009

Recruits lined up for their picture as they entered the service at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in 1933 and then posed again shortly thereafter in full uniform.

Chilkats—Alaska Natives whose language was Tlingit—showed off their regalia beneath a Panting Wolf carving at a potlatch, a ceremonial gathering of clans, near Sitka in 1904. The gatherings were outlawed in Canada, but Natives in American territory continued the practice, although often in secret.

The autographs of some of America’s most famous sons and daughters on documents both highfalutin and humdrum appear in its pages. Ordinary Americans are represented, too, some of them because they’re having to make way for big projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and others because they were at the mercy of experiments on the nature of venereal disease. More than a quarter of the Archives’ holdings reside somewhere other than in the columned building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., or the state-of-the-art archival facility in College Park, Maryland. They’re in the regional facilities from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in the East to Chicago, Kansas City, and Fort Worth in the Midwest, to Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Anchorage in the West and in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Your Land, Our Land was a joint project of the National Archives and the book-publishing arm of the Kansas City Star. The idea was born in 2006, when the Archives’

Central Plains Region worked with the Star to produce a full-color volume about the holdings in Kansas City. The success of that project, Great Plains Originals, inspired Reed Whitaker and his staff at the National Archives at Kansas City in the Central Plains Region to propose a book showing off the wares of all the regional archives. Central Plains would be the clearinghouse, asking each region to suggest documents and images. Choosing from among those, Star Books would organize, write, edit, design, and produce the book. The key to the book’s appeal and its success would lie with Archives staffers in each region. Only they had longterm familiarity with the tens of thousands of cubic feet of material stored at their location. No visitor could hope to cover the same ground in a reasonable time; no scholar would be intimately acquainted with oceans of documents outside his or her subject area. In spring 2007, at Whitaker’s request, regional staff gathered a first round of digital versions of their favorite

Your Land, Our Land

Prologue 7

Above: A poster announcing the coming of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to New York City for the 1907 season. Left: Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army on March 24, 1958, to the disappointment of his fans. Below: Imprisoned at the Atlanta Penitentiary for breaking into a post office, Joe Fleming of Clarksdale, Mississippi, wrote to a Memphis resident named Pearl Robinson in 1918. He wrote that he would soon be free, wanted to live in Memphis, and would like “to have a good girl like you to spend my money on and to love.”

8 Prologue

Fall 2009

Left: Arthur Voegtlin, producer of a 1906 film called “The Great Train Robbery,” sued William F. Cody over his train-robbery production in the Wild West Show. Right: A cable dated December 7, 1941, notified U.S. Navy installations of the raid on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. This copy was received by the Squantum Naval Air Station in Quincy, Massachusetts.

items, copied them to compact discs, and delivered them to Kansas City. Working through archivist Tim Rives in Kansas City, editors at Star Books sorted through the discs. They found intriguing items from throughout American history and, of course, from all over the map. From Denver came a surreal black-andwhite photograph of turn-of-the-century hard-rock miners at work on an irrigation project in western Colorado, their smudged faces lit by flash. San Francisco sent an appreciative letter written to John Steinbeck in 1936 by the director of a migratory labor camp, the same man who became the prototype for the camp manager in The Grapes of Wrath. From Chicago came a court paper with the signatures of the Chicago Eight— Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, et al. before the departure of Bobby Seale made them the Chicago Seven. Philadelphia delivered cloth tobacco

Your Land, Our Land

pouches, a manifest from the airship Hindenberg, and a letter from an African American woman named Eleanore Sawyer to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for help in landing a job at the Navy Yard. Sawyer said she had been turned down because she was black. Some of the regional archives gems date from the 1790s. There were slave ship manifests and prosecutions for violating the laws against slave trading, images of sailors and soldiers off to war, and exhibits submitted by scores of companies off to sue other companies for infringing patents or copyrights or trademarks. Indeed, federal courts through the years have produced not only reams of pleadings and boilerplate but also visual treasures introduced as evidence to protect their brands. A “Students’ Magic Slate” boasted: “No pencils to sharpen. No slate to break. No paper to buy.” Planters trotted out its smiling, monocled Mr. Peanut to advise

retailers how best to display its product. Of conflict there was plenty—fliers calling for student protests at Kent State in the fateful year of 1970, calls for a strike by dressmakers in southern California in the 1930s printed in both Spanish and English, a broadside against the despoliation of the Alaskan coast by the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. By 2008, the book’s editors were asking the regions for even more. After Rives left for the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, archivist Lori Cox-Paul took over the clearinghouse chores in Kansas City. In later rounds of offerings, Anchorage sent a 1904 image of a Chilkat potlatch, for which Alaska Natives dressed in ceremonial garb and lined up beneath a massive carved totem of a Panting Wolf. From Chicago came photographs showing agents hired by the Ford Motor Company as they pummeled union organizers during a shift change in 1937 at the Dearborn Plant, an

Prologue 9

This new volume reveals just a sampling of fascinating American stories that are held in the documents and images housed throughout the National Archives system in its regional archives.

incident that gained fame in labor history as the “Battle of the Overpass.” Atlanta offered a full-color photograph of researchers testing men of Macon County, Alabama, in the infamous Tuskegee experiment. Los Angeles delivered hand-tinted views of cliff dwellings in Canyon de Chelly and panoramas of Monument Valley. It also sent a letter from an atomic scientist who rode along as the first bomb was dropped on Japan; the scientist, writing aboard the bomber, described to his son the terrible sight of the blast and his hope that the mere threat of its use could prevent future wars. The introduction of Your Land, Our Land is by historian and screenwriter Geoffrey C. Ward, who collaborated with Ken Burns on his acclaimed television documentaries. Ward compares the thrill of his

10 Prologue

own research in the Archives with the objects in the book: “Nearly every page . . . makes us want to know more.” “That is its fascination,” he says, “for anyone even remotely interested in our past.” For Your Land, Our Land, the Archives’ regions mined a rich lode of America’s wonders, but also some of its warts. That’s in keeping with the Woody Guthrie ballad from which the title is drawn. Although his “This Land Is Your Land” is remembered today mostly for its evocation of America’s natural beauty—its golden valleys, diamond deserts, redwood forests, and gulfstream waters—Guthrie’s lyrics did not ignore the country’s flaws and frailties. He sang of Americans down on their luck and wondering about their share of it all. The country, he said, was ours to accept or change because it belonged to us.

The same goes for America’s heritage, the greatest treasure in the holdings of the National Archives. Your Land, Our Land puts a small part of it on display in hopes that Americans will turn to their regional archives to find out more about their land. P Author Monroe Dodd, editor of Your Land, Our Land, is the editor or author of several books about the history of Kansas City and its region, including Great Plains Originals, based on the collections of the National Archives at Kansas City, and The Ike Files, drawn from the holdings of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas. He holds a bachelor of science in journalism and a master’s degree in history from the University of Kansas. From 1976 to 2008 he was an editor at the Kansas City Star.

Fall 2009

discover

America’s

heritage

s h op on l i n e at estore.archives.gov