Oral History and the Story of America and World War II

Abstract

Although oral history has struggled for legitimacy in the historical profession, it has always been central to telling the story of World War II. During the years, historians and journalists began using oral history to celebrate the role of the United States in the conflict and to unravel the complex military and political events of the period. Three decades later, a new generation of social historians started employing oral history to question the heroic picture of the years and to document the experiences of minorities, women, and working people in wartime. Throughout this half century of scholarship, there are many cases in which oral history has been used brilliantly to illuminate dimensions of the experience inaccessible through printed sources. However, only occasionally has the full potential of oral history to enrich understanding of the war's effect on America been reached. Surprisingly undeveloped in the literature on World War II is the use of oral narrative as a source to uncover the process of constructing a past, where the selection and distortions of memory serve as evidence of how particular- but not necessarily accurate - versions of what has happened inform the present. Rarely have interviews been examined as texts in which the language of an interviewee, along with his or her silences and omissions, can provide unique insights as well. In particular, it is striking how infrequently oral history has been used to reflect on patriotism and the imprint of the on American culture. Political and military historians, who generally assumed the patriotism of their interviewees, rarely saw a need to interrogate what it meant to their subjects. Most social historians of World War II, whose interview methodology was driven by concerns about class, gender, and race, largely eschewed investigation of how participation in the effort stimulated patriotic attitudes. Ironically, debate among these scholars over whether World War II really was a good war has focused on facts and experiences and only incidentally on meaning and memory. In this short essay I will examine selectively how oral history has been used to tell the story of America and World War II. I will highlight some of the many contributions historians have made through use of this technique and identify the Roger Horowitz is associate director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the