For all their considerable value, oral history interviews are not an unproblematic source. Although narrators speak for themselves, what they have to say does not. Paradoxically, oral history's very concreteness, its very immediacy, seduces us into taking it literally, an approach historian Michael Frisch has criticized as “Anti-History,” by which he means viewing “oral historical evidence because of its immediacy and emotional resonance, as something almost beyond interpretation or accountability, as a direct window on the feelings and . . . on the meaning of past experience.” [Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 159-160.] As with any source, historians must exercise critical judgment when using interviews—just because someone says something is true, however colorfully or convincingly they say it, doesn't mean it is true. Just because someone “was there” doesn’t mean they fully understand “what happened.”
The first step in assessing an interview, then, is to consider the reliability of the narrator and the verifiability of the account. The narrator’s relationship to the events under discussion, personal stake in presenting a particular version of events, physical and mental state at the time of the events under discussion and at the moment of the interview, as well as the overall attention and care the narrator brings to the interview and the internal consistency of the account all figure into the narrator’s reliability as a source. The veracity of what is said in an interview can be gauged by comparing it both with other interviews on the same subject and with related documentary evidence. If the interview jibes with other evidence, if it builds upon or supplements this evidence in a logical and meaningful way, one can assume a certain level of veracity in the account. If, however, it conflicts with other evidence or is incompatible with it, the historian needs to account for the disparities: Were different interviewees differently situated in relationship to the events under discussion? Might they have different agendas, leading them to tell different versions of the same story? Might the written sources be biased or limited in a particular way? Might intervening events—for example, ideological shifts between the time of the events under discussion and the time of the interview or subsequent popular cultural accounts of these events—have influenced later memories? Writing in 1977 about the confirmation of Griffin Bell for United States attorney general, journalist Calvin Trillin quoted a black attorney who had quipped that if all the white politicians who said they were working behind the scenes for racial justice actually were doing so, “it must be getting pretty crowded back there, behind the scenes.” Similarly, John F. Kennedy’s assassination not only reshaped Americans’ subsequent views of him but even changed how they remembered their earlier perceptions. Although Kennedy was elected with just 49.7% of the vote in the fall of 1960, almost two-thirds of all Americans remembered voting for him when they were asked about it in the aftermath of his assassination. [Calvin Trillin, “Remembrance of Moderates Past,” New Yorker (March 21, 1977): 85; quoted in Cliff Kuhn, “‘There’s a Footnote to History!’ Memory and the History of Martin Luther King’s October 1960 Arrest and Its Aftermath,” Journal of American History 84:2 (September 1997): 594; Godfrey Hodgson, America In Our Time (New York: Random House, 1976): 5.]
In fact, inconsistencies and conflicts among individual interviews and between interviews and other evidence point to the inherently subjective nature of oral history. Oral history is not simply another source, to be evaluated unproblematically like any other historical source. To treat it as such confirms the second fallacy identified by Frisch, the “More History” approach to oral history, which views interviews as “raw data” and “reduce[s them] to simply another kind of evidence to be pushed through the historian’s controlling mill.” [Frisch, 159-160.] An interview is inevitably an act of memory, and while individual memories can be more or less accurate, complete, or truthful, in fact interviews routinely include inaccurate and imprecise information, if not outright falsehoods. Narrators frequently get names and dates wrong, conflate disparate events into a single event, recount stories of questionable truthfulness. Although oral historians do attempt to get the story straight through careful background research and informed questioning, they are ultimately less concerned with the vagaries of individual memories than with the larger context within which individual acts of remembering occur, or with what might be termed social memory. In what is perhaps the most cited article in the oral history literature, Alessandro Portelli brilliantly analyzes why oral accounts of the death of Italian steel worker Luigi Trastulli, who was shot during a workers’ rally protesting NATO in 1949, routinely get the date, place, and reason for his death wrong. Narrators manipulated the facts of Trastulli’s death to render it less senseless and more comprehensible to them; or, as Portelli argues, “errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings.” [Alessandro Portelli, “The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli, pp. 1-26; quoted material is from p. 2.]
What is needed then is an understanding of oral history not so much as an exercise in fact finding but as an interpretive event, as the narrator compresses years of living into a few hours of talk, selecting, consciously and unconsciously, what to say and how to say it. Indeed, there is a growing literature, some of it included in the appended bibliography, on the interpretive complexities of oral history interviews, replete with strategies for mining their meaning. Much of it begins with the premise that an interview is a storied account of the past recounted in the present, an act of memory shaped as much by the moment of telling as by the history being told. Each interview is a response to a particular person and set of questions, as well as to the narrator's inner need to make sense of experience. What is said also draws upon the narrator’s linguistic conventions and cultural assumptions and hence is an expression of identity, consciousness, and culture. Put simply, we need to ask: who is saying what, to whom, for what purpose, and under what circumstances. While these questions cannot really be considered in isolation when applying them to a specific interview—the who is related to the what is related to the why is related to the when and where—here we will consider each in turn to develop an overview of the issues and questions involved.

Who Is Talking?
What a narrator says, as well as the way a narrator says it, is related to that person’s social identity (or identities). Who a narrator is becomes a cognitive filter for their experiences. Recognizing the differing social experiences of women and men, feminist historians have noted that women more so than men articulate their life stories around major events in the family life cycle, dating events in relation to when their children were born, for example. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to connect their personal chronologies to public events like wars, elections, and strikes. Women’s narratives also tend, as Gwen Etter-Lewis has put it, towards “understatement, avoidance of the first person point of view, rare mention of personal accomplishments, and disguised statements of personal power.” [Gwen Etter-Lewis, “Black Women’s Life Stories: Reclaiming Self in Narrative Texts,” in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1991), 48; quoted in Joan Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” in The Oral History Reader, Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds. (London: Routledge, 1998), 89.] Racial identity, too, figures into oral historical accounts. Writing about the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Scott Ellsworth coined the phrase “segregation of memory” to describe the varying ways blacks and whites remembered this gruesome event. [Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).] It is a typical pattern, suggestive of the deep racial divides in the United States. In interview after interview, whites recalled either “very little at all” about members of minority groups or that “we all got along,” while members of minority groups tended toward both a more nuanced and less sanguine view of white people. Interviews with politicians and other notable public figures pose particular problems. While they are perhaps no more egocentric or concerned about their reputations than many others, their practiced delivery and ability to deflect difficult questions often leads to accounts that are especially facile and glib. Indeed, the general rule of thumb is the longer a public official has been out of the public eye, the more honest and insightful the interview will be.
One can catalogue any number of ways different “whos” inflect oral history narratives. Yet identities are neither singular nor fixed. “Who” exactly is speaking is defined by both the speaker’s relationship to the specific events under discussion and temporal distance from them. Hence while we would expect labor and management to record differing accounts of a strike, union members too can differ among themselves, depending upon their relative gains or losses in the strike’s aftermath, their differing political views and regard for authority, or their differing levels of tolerance for the disorder a strike can create. And their views can change over time, as perspectives broaden or narrow, as subsequent experiences force one to reconsider earlier views, as current contexts shape one's understanding of past events. All are part of who is speaking.

Who Is the Interviewer?
There is no doubt that the single most important factor in the constitution of an interview is the questions posed by the interviewer. Inevitably derived from a set of assumptions about what is historically important, the interviewer’s questions provide the intellectual framework for the interview and give it direction and shape. For especially articulate narrators, the questions are a foil against which they define their experience. Good interviewers listen carefully and attempt to more closely align their questions with what the narrator thinks is important. Nonetheless, more than one interviewer has had the experience described by Thomas Dublin as he reflected upon his interviews with coal mining families: “Once, when looking over photographs with Tom and Ella Strohl [whom he had previously interviewed], I expressed surprise at seeing so many pictures taken on hunting trips with his buddies. When I commented that I had not realized how important hunting had been in Tommy’s life, he responded good-naturedly, ‘Well, you never asked.’” [Thomas Dublin, with photographs by George Harvan, When the Mines Closed: Stories of Struggles in Hard Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 21.]
Yet the questions asked are not the only influence an interviewer has upon what is said in an interview. Like narrators, interviewers have social identities that are played out in the dynamic of the interview. Narrators assess interviewers, deciding what they can appropriately say to this person, what they must say, and what they should not say. Thus a grandparent being interviewed by a grandchild for a family history project may well suppress less savory aspects of the past in an effort to shield the child, serve as a responsible role model, and preserve family myths. And I described above how my own social identity as the upwardly mobile granddaughter of Polish immigrants created a particular emotional subtext to interviews with Polish cannery workers.

What Are They Talking About?
The topical range of oral history interviews is enormous, including everything from the most public of historical events to the most intimate details of private life. What is analytically important, however, is the way narrators structure their accounts and the way they select and arrange the elements of what they are saying. Interviews frequently are plotted narratives, in which the narrator/hero overcomes obstacles, resolves difficulties, and achieves either public success or private satisfaction. There are exceptions, of course, but these conventions, typical of much of Western literature, suggest something of the individualizing, goal-oriented, success driven, morally righteous tendencies of the culture and hence the underlying assumptions people use to understand their experiences. They also perhaps reflect the egocentric and valorizing tendencies of an interview, in which one person is asked, generally by a respectful, even admiring interviewer, to talk about his life. Comparison with interviews conducted with narrators outside the mainstream of western culture is instructive here. Interviewing Native American women from Canada’s Yukon Territory, anthropologist Julie Cruikshank found that her questions about conventional historical topics like the impact of the Klondike gold rush or the construction of the Alaska Highway were answered with highly metaphoric, traditional stories that narrators insisted were part of their own life stories. Negotiating cultural differences about what properly constituted a life history thus became Cruikshank’s challenge. [Julie Cruikshank, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).]
Narrators also encapsulate experiences in what I have come to term “iconic stories,” that is concrete, specific accounts that “stand for” or sum up something the narrator reckons of particular importance. Often these are presented as unique or totemic events and are communicated with considerable emotional force. So, for example, one woman recounted the following incident from her childhood, illustrating the value she places on charity and self-denial:
 
One thing I'd like to tell about my grandmother, she was not a very expressive person, but one time she heard of a family with three daughters about the same age as her own three daughters, who were in pretty hard straits. And she had just finished making three elegant new costumes for her daughters in the days when a dress . . . took a great deal of labor. And, instead of giving the three girls the discarded ones of her daughters, she gave them the three brand new ones, which I've always liked to remember. [Louise Rhoades Dewees, interview by Nicolette Murray, March 26, 1979, transcript, pp. 7-8; Oral History among Friends in Chester County, Chester County [Pennsylvania] Library.]

Folklorist Barbara Allen has argued that the storied element of oral history reflects the social nature of an interview, for in communicating something meaningful to others, stories attempt to create a collective consciousness of what is important. Applying this notion to a body of interviews from the intermountain West, Allen identifies certain categories of stories—how people came to the West, their difficulties with the terrain and the weather, the “grit” required to survive—and suggests that these themes speak to a broad regional consciousness. Whether a given story is factually true or not is not the point; rather, its truth is an interpretive truth, what it stands for, or means. [Barbara Allen, “Story in Oral History: Clues to Historical Consciousness,” Journal of American History 79:2 (September 1992): 606-611.]
As important as what is said is what is not said, what a narrator misconstrues, ignores, or avoids. Silences can signify simple misunderstanding; discomfort with a difficult or taboo subject; mistrust of the interviewer; or cognitive disconnect between interviewer and narrator. Interviewing an immigrant daughter about her life in mid-twentieth century Baltimore, I asked if she had worked outside the home after her marriage. She replied that she had not and we went on to a discussion of her married life. Later in the interview, however, she casually mentioned that for several years during her marriage she had waited tables during the dinner hour at a local restaurant. When I asked her about this apparent contradiction in her testimony, she said that she had never really thought of her waitressing as “work”; rather, she was “helping Helen out,” Helen being the restaurant’s owner and a friend and neighbor.
Silences can also have broad cultural meaning. Italian historian Luisa Passerini found that life histories she recorded of members of Turin’s working class frequently made no mention of Fascism, whose repressive regime nonetheless inevitably impacted their lives. Even when questioned directly, narrators tended to jump from Fascism’s rise in the 1920s directly to its demise in World War II, avoiding any discussion of the years of Fascism’s political dominance. Passerini interprets this as evidence on the one hand “of a scar, a violent annihilation of many years in human lives, a profound wound in daily experience” among a broad swath of the population and, on the other, of people’s preoccupation with the events of everyday life—“jobs, marriage, children”—even in deeply disruptive circumstances. [Luisa Passerini, “Work ideology and consensus under Italian fascism,” in The Oral History Reader, 58-60.]

To be continued…

Linda Shopes



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