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.
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.
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.
LINDA WEBER is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
