Oral History: Playing by the Rules

Abstract

Last year the American Historical Association (AHA) issued seven guidelines on the use of interviews in scholarly research. They were long overdue. Oral history is booming, yet there seem to be no common rules. Most historians are without the slightest training and still conduct their interviews by instinct. Some tape their subjects; others do not. Some donate these tapes to a public archive; others keep them in a file drawer at home. The AHA and the Oral History Association have good reason to be concerned. The present methods for collecting, sharing, and verifying oral documents are inadequate, to say the least. Historians do not treat these materials in the same way or with the same care as they treat other kinds of evidence. I am referring here not to historians associated with oral history programs or projects, but rather to individuals like myself. I suspect that my experiences in this field are not unique. I began doing interviews in the 1970s because I had no choice. While researching a biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, I could find little information about his early life. Most books about him and there were dozens described his childhood in very bleak terms. The accounts were brief, covering two or three pages; they used the same examples and anecdotes, often word for word. Almost all of them assumed that a thug like McCarthy could not have been a normal child.' In 1977 I traveled to Wisconsin to interview the people who had known him best -his neighbors, classmates, and friends. My stated goal was to find the real McCarthy, but I surely hoped to humanize him as well. I followed the path of his early life -his birthplace on a farm outside Appleton, the small towns where he went to school and worked, the county seats where he practiced law and presided as circuit judge. In all of these places, I found people who claimed to remember him well. I had no training in oral history, no guidelines to follow. I simply interviewed the senator's contemporaries wherever I could find them in their houses, in coffee