Power and Memory in Oral History: Workers and Managers at Studebaker

Abstract

No one who has conducted oral history interviews has escaped the question, But how do you know it is true? The issue of veracity remains important for anyone interested in analyzing oral expressions of memory in historical research. Obviously, memories are limited, and a complete reconstruction of the past through memory (or any other means) is not possible. Oral historians have generally combined the memories they recorded with other kinds of records or cross-checked their interview material with data gathered from other interviews. Their work has yielded extremely valuable insights into particular historical questions, but it has not eliminated the need to think carefully about what people actually remember about their past. An analysis of the memories revealed in oral interviews with men and women who formerly worked at the Studebaker Corporation automobile plant in South Bend, Indiana, offers suggestions about the nature or truth of the memories captured in oral interviews. This material, recorded mostly between 1984 and 1985, allows not only a partial reconstruction of the traditional history of labor and management at the plant, but, more importantly for our purposes, a partial reconsideration of the social construction of memory: the interviews can be read not only to discover what people remembered but also to discover how they went about the process of organizing and creating their memories in the first place. David Lowenthal has written that the contingent and discontinuous facts of the past become intelligible only when woven together as stories. Indeed, what appears most compelling about the Studebaker memories is not the details of life in the plant, which was much like life in other auto plants, but the narrative structures or central plots in which individual memories and discrete bits of evidence were placed. Those plots actually reveal the way in which workers and managers at Studebaker gave meaning to their experiences; they organized the past for both the historical actor and the interviewer who attempted to understand it.,