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MIXED COMPANY: Speakers include
Baez (above), Dole (right), Goodall (below left)
and Cousteau (below right).
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images |
On my way to meet Elena Danielson,
director of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives,
I play the word association game. Archivist: musty,
fusty, bespectacled; silent, plodding; introverted,
obsolete. I know the time to retire the stereotypes
is overdue, even before I meet the articulate, animated
and, well, fast-talking Danielson. But a few minutes
into the interview, I’m the one feeling obsolete
as she explains how the recent donation of audiotaped
speeches from the Commonwealth Club of California will
be made accessible to students and researchers. Terms
like metadata, open source and migrating digital masters
pepper her conversation.
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Michael Smith/Newsmakers
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Welcome to the brave new world of the archivist. Yes,
there are still more than a million books in the closed
stacks of Hoover Tower, and more than 50 million documents
stored in the institution’s humidity-controlled
archival facilities on and off campus. But some of Hoover’s
most significant recent acquisitions of rare and one-of-a-kind
materials include media that we might not think of as
scholarly. There are the television broadcasts of William
F. Buckley’s current affairs program Firing
Line; the entire archive of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty broadcasts; and the extraordinary cache of 2,700
recorded speeches, 400 acetate discs and 1,570 boxes
of transcripts of speeches given at the Commonwealth
Club between 1903 and 1999. These record some of the
20th century’s most influential politicians, social
architects, scholars and foreign dignitaries.
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Stephen Boitano/Getty Images
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Don Perdue/ Liaison
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The roster speaks for itself. Every U.S. president
since Hoover—and a string of hopefuls including
Ross Perot, Malcolm Forbes, Bob Dole and Al Gore. Foreign
leaders from Charles de Gaulle to Corazon Aquino, Yitzhak
Rabin to Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Scientists like Jacques
Cousteau and Carl Djerassi, Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall.
From the entertainment world, Joan Baez and Cecil B.
DeMille. Activists like Erin Brockovich and Ralph Nader.
“The Commonwealth Club donation intersects in
interesting ways with most of our other collections;
it weaves together the strands of 100 years of American
politics and history,” says Danielson, MA ’70,
PhD ’75, who calls the trove a “crown jewel.”
Hoover usually acquires papers and eyewitness accounts
by direct request, but it was more of a blind date that
brought the Archives and the Commonwealth Club together.
“We’d been looking for a way to preserve
our archives for several years,” says Gloria Duffy,
the club’s CEO. “We had reel-to-reel tapes
stuffed into a closet in our office and boxes of recordings
and manuscripts elsewhere in storage. I was feeling
guilty: part of our mission is to educate the public
and promote issues. I wanted to find a way to preserve
this tremendous resource and get it out there.”
Enter matchmaker Tad Taube, ’53, MS ’57,
a Woodside investor who sits on the Hoover board of
overseers and is an active member of the club. He realized
the two organizations were a good fit. The century-old
Commonwealth Club defines itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan
group that fosters public discussion on topics ranging
from politics and culture to social issues and the economy.
It hosts some 400 events a year, mostly talks followed
by Q and A sessions, broadcast on radio, TV and the
Internet.
Who better to preserve and disseminate those recordings
than the 85-year-old Hoover Institution, whose mission
is “to collect knowledge, generate ideas, and
make both accessible to the public to safeguard and
secure peace, improve the human condition, and limit
government intrusion into the lives of individuals.”
Hoover acquires 80 to 100 collections each year and
makes them available free of charge.
The two organizations complement each other in several
ways. Both promote discourse and analysis of political,
social and economic issues. Both have followed major
political currents and historical events in the 20th
century, including the Cold War, the fall of Soviet
communism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And
both document viewpoints from across the political spectrum.
The Commonwealth Club has hosted speakers as diametrically
opposed as left-wing politician Henry Wallace (a Communist
who ran for president in 1948) and the right-wing segregationist
George Wallace. Similarly, says Danielson, Hoover “makes
a point of covering as many points of view as possible.”
One example is the documentation they’ve assembled
on czarist Russia alongside that of the Soviet Union
and post-Communist Russia.
The congruence and overlap extend further. Herbert
Hoover was a member of the Commonwealth Club and spoke
there seven times between 1922 and 1947. And many club
speakers, including Hoover fellow George Shultz, William
Casey and George Deukmejian, have donated their personal
papers to the Hoover Archives, Danielson says.
Duffy was relieved to hand over the recordings. “We
settled on the Hoover Institution because of their technical
expertise. Some of the archives aren’t even playable
now. They’re on old, fragile reel-to-reel tapes
and acetate discs.”
Since the arrival of the archives last April—in
2,100 boxes stacked on 24 pallets—Danielson and
her staff have begun to orchestrate technical feats
typical of the electronic era. Danielson invited bids
from vendors who specialize in digital reformatting
of acetate discs, open reel tapes and digital audiotapes.
The recordings must be transferred to high-resolution
digital masters so that the data can be migrated every
few years as new storage media are developed. The successful
bidder will also make lower-resolution, web-based copies
available for distribution and use.
One of the most important and time-consuming aspects
of the project is cataloguing. Descriptions of the speeches
will be available on Stanford’s public access
catalog, Socrates, and on the Online Archive of California
(OAC). The entire project—cataloguing the collection
and digitally reformatting 600 of the most significant
speeches—will take two years beginning this March
and cost in the high six figures. Both the Commonwealth
Club and Hoover are raising funds. Danielson has applied
for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
and Duffy reports that the Koret Foundation, of which
Taube is the president, has made a grant.
What importance can one place on recorded speeches,
apart from their curiosity value? Danielson maintains
that understanding the political process in modern society
is difficult without considering the influence of electronic
media. Sometimes, she says, we can only understand a
person’s influence, charisma or commanding presence
by seeing her gesture or hearing him speak.
“The Reagan revolution took American political
scientists by surprise. What they didn’t take
into account were several Commonwealth Club speeches
he made that were broadcast all over the country. When
you hear his voice and the very clear and deliberate
way he spoke, you can understand why people in Iowa
and Vermont picked up on his ideas.”
Stanford history professor David Kennedy, ’63,
an adviser to the project, adds that the collection
contains “probably the most important speech by
Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign,” known
as the Commonwealth Speech. “Making these taped
originals available to researchers and students is an
invaluable service,” the Pulitzer Prize winner
says.
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