What does an x-ray of Hitler's skull have in common with a jar of Ronald Reagan's jelly beans? They are both part of the Hoover Institution archives. Eric Wakin, Director of the Library and Archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about what it's like to be an archivist and the importance of archival materials for research, culture, and memory.
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Readings and Links related to this podcast episode
Related Readings
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This week's guest:
Eric Wakin's Home page
Eric Wakin on Twitter.
This week's focus:
Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
Hoover Archives on Twitter.
Additional ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:
"The Lusitania: The Epic Battle over Its Biggest Mystery", by Richard B. Stolley. Fortune Magazine, May 5, 2015.
Example: Keynes/Hayek postcard
Abby Smith Rumsey on Remembering, Forgetting, and When We Are No More. EconTalk. June 2016. Keynes's postcard to Hayek at the Hoover Institution.
John Maynard Keynes. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Friedrich Hayek. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Inventory of the Chiang Kai-shek Diaries. Online Archive of California, Hoover Institution, inventory search results.
"Double Exposure: Russia's Secret Police under the Last Tsars." Hoover Institution.
A few more readings and background resources:
The Parthenon Sculptures. British Museum. The Elgin Marbles.
Royal Society of Arts anecdote
Royal Society of Arts. Wikipedia.
Adam Smith. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
"What Happened, Miss Simone?" Netflix trailer.
"What Happened, Miss Simone?" IMDB.
Milton Friedman. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
A few more EconTalk podcast episodes:Kevin Kelly on the Inevitable. EconTalk. June 2016.
Kelly Technology and What Technology Wants. EconTalk. November 2010. Some discussion of survival of human knowledge.
Boudreaux on Reading Hayek. EconTalk. December 2012. Mention of Hoover Institution's materials on Hayek.
Michael O'Hare on Art Museums. EconTalk. May 2015.
Highlights
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0:33
Intro. [Recording date: August 5, 2016.]
Russ Roberts: Now there's a temptation--archivists really don't have that exciting a reputation. It's nothing personal: Eric is a fine person. But I think, when we think of archives, we think of a lot of papers and folders, dusty, dry stuff. But it turns out here at the Hoover Institution we have some pretty incredible stuff. So I wanted to start with 3 of the more interesting things that we have here at Hoover, three things that aren't boring about the Hoover Archive. So, what have you got that isn't boring for me?
Eric Wakin: I'd be happy to answer that question. I want to say, being an archivist is one of the most exciting jobs in the world, believe it or not.
Russ Roberts: You may not be typical, Eric. I think we can say that with certainty. Go ahead.
Eric Wakin: So, I'd say, 3 of the most interesting things we have in our collections are the following--ones that I've come across. One is the operations order for the atomic bomb strike on Hiroshima, which was taken from Tinian Island. One is an x-ray of Adolph Hitler's skull taken after the attempted assassination on him in 1944. And then one is something I came across but we weren't able to acquire, that is the wreck of the Lusitania.
Russ Roberts: So, let's talk about each of those. You've got a copy here--unfortunately I'm a little disappointed: you didn't bring me the real thing--but you've got a copy of that order of the Enola Gay and I know a little bit about that. I've read, I guess, a book about it. I know that Paul Tibbets was the pilot. The Enola Gay was the plane that dropped the bomb. I recognize his name on the order. So, what else is interesting about that piece of paper?
Eric Wakin: I think for me the actual piece of paper represents the power of an actual physical object to take you to a place: the knowledge that this piece of paper was put up on a bulletin board or a sign on Tinian Island and lists the names of the people in the weather plane and the combat strike plane; and for me it's powerful seeing the object, but also if you look at the piece of paper itself, the most important thing for me is where it says 'Bombs' and the only word after that is the word 'Special.'
Russ Roberts: Yeah. That gives me goose bumps. It's very, very powerful. And this is the piece of paper that on most days said, 'Here's your bombing mission'--none of the bombing missions ever are routine. I guess in war at some point it becomes something of a routine, but it can't ever really be much of a routine. But here, this was very out of the ordinary.
Eric Wakin: Yeah. It's an ordinary object, an ordinary concept of a mission description that was out of the ordinary because of the particular mission.
Russ Roberts: And how did we come to have this piece of paper?
Eric Wakin: There was a fellow attached to the bomb group named Harold Agnew [?sp.] who was on the island and believed that this piece of paper should be saved for posterity. Not only did he do that, though, but he was the person who convinced the plane following the Enola Gay to put a camera on it and to film the actual explosion. We have that film, and that is one of our most request items to be duplicated--the actual film from the following plane of the bomb going off.
Russ Roberts: So, we are going to talk about preservation. But that film is fragile, right? You don't make copies of that every day or bring it out every day. Right?
Eric Wakin: Absolutely.
Russ Roberts: So, how do you protect that?
Eric Wakin: No, we don't show people the original film any more. What we've done is made a digital copy of it and preserved the original under conditions where it will deteriorate very little. And what we do is we show people the digital copy. And it's been used in documentaries and so on.
Russ Roberts: Is it--it's fascinating, right? There seems to be something important about preserving the original. But let's pretend that we never take it out again. Right? I guess in theory something could happen to the digital copies; but they are now spread around the world in all kind of formats. We can pull that out of documentaries. It's in the world's archives, right? And we're going to continue to preserve that actual piece of celluloid--I assume it's film.
Eric Wakin: Yeah.
Russ Roberts: Why?
Eric Wakin: That's a great question that--
Russ Roberts: I understand the impulse, but in a way it's a strange--
Eric Wakin: It raises existential issues about what is meaning and how do we establish meaningful objects. If there are simulacrums of that object around the world, what's the value of the original? I still think human nature has a powerful association with original, one-of-a-kind objects. But you are right: it is preserved; no one will see the original again until we need to do another round of preservation--when there's some new technology 50 years hence then we'll say we've got to get that out and copy it again.
5:16
Russ Roberts: It's really amazing. Let's talk about the x-ray of Hitler's brain. So, how did we come to find that? How did it come to the Hoover Institution archives?
Eric Wakin: So, because of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives' reputation--we've been around almost a hundred years and we collect on war, revolution, and peace: that's actually our name, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace--people often come to us with historical material. They want us to preserve it for posterity. And in this case, Colonel William Russell Philip [?sp.] was a military officer who had collected material from Germany during and after the war. And this was in his collection.
Russ Roberts: As an army officer, not as collector.
Eric Wakin: As an army officer, not as a collector, yeah. That was part of his duties. And that stuff came back with him and he wanted to put it somewhere that people could see it; and he called Hoover, literally, and said, 'Would you like this material?'
Russ Roberts: And is there any value to that piece of--whatever it is? X-rays kept on plastic--it's not plastic; I don't know what it is.
Eric Wakin: X-ray film. So there is value, sort of market value to it. We would never sell it but I assume there would be market value. But there's value in people looking at Hitler's dental work.
Russ Roberts: I guess, yeah. Now, I did a little research before this conversation because I knew we were going to talk about this x-ray. There are 5 copies of it, supposedly, maybe; there are probably more; there might be a 6th or 7th or 8th sitting in someone's basement or attic somewhere in Germany. But there are 5 that we know of. How do we know this is one of the 5? How do we know it's real? In general, when people come to us with stuff, how do you verify that it's real? I mean, art museums have this all the time, particularly when stuff is being sold. When somebody gives you something, it's less likely to be fraudulent. But how do you verify the reality?
Eric Wakin: Yeah, that's one filter. One filter is, since they are giving it to us, we are not paying them for it, there's a lower threshold for it being fraud. We generally look at the association of the provenance of the material: Is the person giving it to us, did he or she have a relationship to the material in some way? In this case, this person did. Was it likely acquired legally, and so on, and the person signs a document saying that's true? And then we make somewhat of a leap of faith and we say, 'Yeah, we believe this is true and actual.' We do get calls periodically asking us to authenticate certain things. Every few weeks someone will call up and say, 'I have a letter by General William Stillwell. Will you authenticate its signature?' And we never do that. We say, 'You are welcome to come in and look at the materials and do it yourself; but we don't provide that service.'
Russ Roberts: Now, we were just talking about the two cases, gifts and sales. I know this is not a meaningful number, but I wanted to ask you what proportion of stuff is given to us? It's hard to know how to measure that. But is most of the stuff we get a gift, or is most of it a sale?
Eric Wakin: The vast majority of material we get are gifts.
Russ Roberts: And while we're on the subject--we've got one more thing I want to talk about but I don't want to forget this--how much stuff is in the Hoover Archives?
Eric Wakin: So archives measure their collections by linear feet.
Russ Roberts: For sure. Of course. I mean, I would have done it by items. Not items? Why not items? How many things do we have?
Eric Wakin: We don't know exactly in each box how many individual items there are. So we have, depending on your count, well over 100,000 linear feet of materials, making us one of the top 5, if not the top 2 archives in America by linear feet.
Russ Roberts: So, we have 6000 collections. How do you define a collection?
Eric Wakin: A collection is a body of material from one particular source. It might be, if it's an individual, a group of her letters, photographs, films, diaries, and so on. From an institution it might be reports, objects, and things like that.
Russ Roberts: So we have Milton Friedman's collected papers. That includes drafts of papers he wrote, final versions of papers he wrote, family--
Eric Wakin: Incoming correspondence from other people. Other great economist collections--we also have a collection of Friedrich Hayek.
Russ Roberts: Of course. And as listeners know, I've held in my hands--but in a plastic sleeve, I just want to mention there: don't worry; I'm pretty sure it was in a plastic sleeve--postcards from Hayek and Keynes over an article that he had submitted to a journal. I think Keynes was the editor. But those are protected in various forms and ways from handling, right? All the things are in that--
Eric Wakin: Absolutely. They are stored in acid-free boxes under temperature and humidity controls with fire protection around them, and they are stored in various extra sleeves that protect them from people touching them.
Russ Roberts: So that 100,000 linear feet--are we running out of space? What if we got a lot of stuff that was lengthy?
Eric Wakin: We are almost out of space now. We are doing a process of consolidating, seeing what we have in duplicate--if it's a publication--and looking for new space. That's one of my less interesting but most important things: Where do I find the space for our materials?
Russ Roberts: Do you ever throw anything out? 'Let's get rid of this, clean out this section?'
Eric Wakin: We try not to, but we find some collections, we open them up and the person has saved paper copies of a newspaper for many years, like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. We don't think we need those, we might get rid of those.
Russ Roberts: But how often do you cull through collections to find those things?
Eric Wakin: Rarely, but when a collection comes in, we have processing, we look through.
Russ Roberts: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Eric Wakin: We do what's called 'weeding,' actually.
10:32
Russ Roberts: Let's talk about that third--you were going to mention 3 things. What was the third item?
Eric Wakin: It was the wreck of the ship Lusitania.
Russ Roberts: So the Lusitania was a British cruise liner--I looked this up beforehand-Listeners, I'm cheating--but it was a cruise liner that was sunk off the coast of--
Eric Wakin: Ireland--
Russ Roberts: in 1915, I think, in the middle of WWI by a German submarine.
Eric Wakin: Correct.
Russ Roberts: I'm surprised there were submarines in 1915. I was a little bit embarrassed that I was surprised by that. But it was sunk; and I was depressed to read that it went down in 18 minutes. There was an explosion after the submarine struck--unexplained, there was an explosion; maybe we'll talk about that in a minute. But it went down in 18 minutes. And 1198 crew and passengers dies. I assume there were some survivors? I don't know.
Eric Wakin: There were some survivors.
Russ Roberts: Okay. That's a lot of death, obviously. How do you put that in the Archives? Where is it?
Eric Wakin: So, funny, you just asked about storage. This is the perfect acquisition because there's no storage cost. It's 300 feet under water off the coast of Ireland. The interesting story is that a fellow named Gregg Bemis, who was a Stanford graduate, bought the wreck, or bought into the wreck, which was sold at auction by the insurers, about 50 years ago. And he ended up owning the whole thing over time. And it's his personal property. It's off the coast of Ireland, so it was in international waters, until international waters were extended from--was it 3 miles?--to 12.
Russ Roberts: In which, all of a sudden it now belonged, at least was claimed to belong to--
Eric Wakin: The government of Ireland claims it as an archeological wrecking. And Mr. Bemis needs permission to dive and see his own property. So, he would like to give it to Hoover and Stanford so that we can facilitate research on the ship.
Russ Roberts: And besides the historical interest of a 1915 cruise ship, there was a historical issue which was the possibility it was carrying ammunition.
Eric Wakin: Absolutely. And it certainly was carrying 3 million rounds of rifle ammunition, so, which, depending on your perspective might have made it a legitimate target. The bigger question was: Was it carrying explosives? Which after the torpedo hit caused the ship to explode faster than it would have. And the historical debate is: What caused the so-called second explosion? So, one thing Mr. Bemis would like to do is to have an expedition go down and look for evidence of that.
Russ Roberts: And, because a lot of 1198 people died, it was a huge propaganda vehicle that some say helped the United States get into WWI. Right? So that's another reason of historical interest. So, why don't we have it? I mean, I'd love to be able, when I'm in Ireland, go diving--you show your Stanford ID (identification) and they'd let you go swimming.
Eric Wakin: This is where vision meets the reality of lawyers and risk. The vision is that we would have this ship underwater; students would be able to explore it; and the future value is incalculable. We don't know what would happen if you want to just keep it now for Stanford. On the perspective of the University and the Institution, there are risks of people diving down there and getting hurt; and then someone suing us. And so the risks perhaps outweigh the future value.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. So we don't have it. Does Mr. Bemis still have it?
Eric Wakin: Mr. Bemis still has it, and he's looking for a suitable home. I was hoping it would be here but it's not clear it will be.
Russ Roberts: Okay. Amazing. You mentioned value a couple of times. One of the stranger parts of your job is that most of the stuff doesn't have a traditional market value, but you've got to put, often, a number on it. When does valuation come into play in your business? And how does that work out?
Eric Wakin: A couple of ways. One is where a donation is made and someone wants the tax benefit of the donation. In that case, that person gets an independent appraiser and does the work--we don't have a part of that--gives the material to Hoover and takes the appraised value. But in other ways, suppose someone doesn't want to give material to us but wants to sell it to us, we have to establish what is a fair market value for this one-of-a-kind object.
Russ Roberts: Good luck.
Eric Wakin: So, often there's no market comparables. Most people believe that their item is worth lots of money. And as an institution our job is to collect for history, not for financial reasons. To give you an example, someone recently came to me with a wonderful example of signed photographs and letters from many, many famous people and politicians to someone. And that has a big market value for sale, but for research, not so high. So there's a gap there.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. So we did not buy it.
Eric Wakin: We did not buy that.
Russ Roberts: And if we'd been asked--if they'd have offered it as a donation, would we have taken it?
Eric Wakin: Probably taken it--if it's historical figures in the 20th century and they have occasional nice things to say in the letters that is interesting, or the photographs.
15:14
Russ Roberts: How many people come here to use the archive?
Eric Wakin: We've got about 3000 people a year actually come to the reading rooms, actually physically look at materials; and that's not counting the tens of thousands who look at the material we have on line.
Russ Roberts: Right. For sure. And who can use it?
Eric Wakin: The Hoover Library and Archives are open to everyone, completely without any permissions.
Russ Roberts: So when this airs, get ready for a big spike. Because a lot of our listeners I'm sure will be interested in this.
Eric Wakin: Yeah, line up the reading room.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, for sure. So, how does that work? Suppose hypothetically I'm an anti-Keynesian--just hypothetically--and I get into the reading room and I ask for the--and just mechanically how it works is I put a request in. You can't browse. There's no browsing.
Eric Wakin: No browsing. Closed stacks.
Russ Roberts: So, I put in a request for Hayek Box Number 7, and it comes out on a little cart; it's very old-fashioned, and I feel like I'm in the 1950s when I do this. 'When I do this'--I made it sound like I'm doing Hayek research all the time. I've done it a couple of times. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, the box comes out, and I start looking through it. And it's exciting because I don't know what's in the box. It's sort of a fun part to that. And all of a sudden I come across a postcard from John Maynard Keynes. And I think, 'Oh!' And I have a temptation, let's say, hypothetically to either slip it into my pocket, or in an act of vigilante justice, tear it up, or whatever. What prevents me from doing that?
Eric Wakin: Human nature is always problematic. I always say that. On the way in, we take your name and information. We know who is here and why they are here, for future reference and to make sure, if anything is stolen. You sit at a table under surveillance of cameras and of staff. And we do let you look at some materials. The most valuable materials we will ensure you look at only in copy of, because you are there just to look at the information in it. But if there's a need to see a really piece you can be looking at it in the original in the archives, and I guess in theory there would be nothing to stop you from tearing up a postcard from Keynes. Luckily, we haven't had that problem yet.
Russ Roberts: Okay. I was just asking. You never had any vigilante--?
Eric Wakin: We've never had any vigilante activity here, but other collections have been pilfered at other places which have been associated. One challenge is you don't know every individual piece of paper you have.
Russ Roberts: Correct.
Eric Wakin: So you do your best job to keep a close eye on what people are doing.
Russ Roberts: One of my favorite things is, it does say, on the web page, that you cannot wear a jacket with pockets. Is that correct?
Eric Wakin: That is correct.
Russ Roberts: And your advice to wear a sweater because it might be chilly--I just love that. I assume that's a quality control issue? Or is it just a thermostat issue here at Stanford, which many people often complain about anyway?
Eric Wakin: So, one of the theft techniques has been jackets with fake pockets in it, so we keep that out. And it does get a little cold in the air conditioning.
Russ Roberts: Well, some people cram documents in their socks. But you are allowed to socks.
Eric Wakin: Russ, this is like the real world: the more surveillance you have, the more you can control.
Russ Roberts: But it is under cameras?
Eric Wakin: Cameras and human staff.
Russ Roberts: Now, I know you are a big believer in access. We are talking about the openness of the archive, which is a very cool thing. Why is that important?
Eric Wakin: I like to say that you can have the most important, the most interesting, the most fascinating material in the world, and if no one sees it then it doesn't matter. So, our job as archivists is certainly to protect material, describe it; to collect it. But ultimately the job is to connect our material to the users. People need to find our material. In the archives, in the exhibits, online. And that's our goal, so people can tell the stories from the material.
Russ Roberts: I remember the first time I saw you speak about some of these issues, and I remember just thinking, 'Why don't we just digitize everything?' I mean, it's nice. We've talked a little bit about the specialness of physical objects. But let's put it all online and then people can do all the research they are used to doing now: [?] as I said, it's very old-fashioned to handle the material. Wouldn't it be easier just to put it all online?
Eric Wakin: Sure. There's two things going on there. One is access to resources. Hoover is privately funded, and many of our donors have said that to me, 'Why can't we just be like Google?'
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Eric Wakin: And I say, 'You give me $5 billion, I'll be--'
Russ Roberts: So, why is it so expensive?
Eric Wakin: It's very expensive because you need to--an archive is full of materials like books which go in a book cradle. There are all sorts of different sizes, number one.
Russ Roberts: A book cradle is something that you use to copy a book.
Eric Wakin: You sit a book on it, you scan, and the machine will turn the pages, and it scans. But in this case, you've got individual items. Take the strike order we mentioned. Not only do you have to scan it and store it, which are two costs, but you have to describe it. Someone has to type in what that means.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I've read about that.
Eric Wakin: And the other thing it runs up against when I say there are three things--we want to digitize the material that's in need of preservation, that is outside of copyright--that is we can put online for lots of people to see and there's research interest for.
Russ Roberts: So what proportion of our stuff is accessible online? Again, square footage or linear feet might not be the best--it's hard to measure but do you have some idea? Is it 5%?
Eric Wakin: We're less than 5%.
Russ Roberts: Can we talk about a book cradle for a minute?
Eric Wakin: Sure.
Russ Roberts: Who makes those? Why would anybody make--who could manufacture that? How many could they sell?
Eric Wakin: I don't know. Probably not very many. It's like buggy whips.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Eric Wakin: [?] these days.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's a strange thing.
Eric Wakin: I will say, if I could throw out some numbers--
Russ Roberts: Sure.
Eric Wakin: I'd say we have over 80 terabytes of digital data.
Russ Roberts: Already.
Eric Wakin: Already. Some of which we can only show in our reading room because of copyright or other sorts of restrictions. One of our biggest collections is a collection from the Bath Party in Iraq after the government of Saddam Hussein fell, and we have almost 50 terabytes of that data: secret police archives; 11 million pages, digitized.
Russ Roberts: How did we get that? I'm afraid to ask.
Eric Wakin: After the invasion, various parties came in and collected and took pieces of the state police records, and in one case an anti-Saddam Hussein group took it and got it to Hoover.
Russ Roberts: So those were just private individuals, there?
Eric Wakin: Yeah, and there was intervention by the U.S. government to copy pieces of it: that's how we have our copy. They copied it first and then we got it via that method.
Russ Roberts: We have a copy or the original?
Eric Wakin: We have both the originals and a copy, digitized.
Russ Roberts: Interesting.
21:32
Russ Roberts: Now I know we have a big poster collection. And these are not movie posters. They are typically war-related propaganda, army recruitment. How many posters do we have?
Eric Wakin: We have over 130,000 posters from countries all around the world.
Russ Roberts: That's a lot of linear feet.
Eric Wakin: Yes.
Russ Roberts: How did we come to get--do we have the best poster collection in the world?
Eric Wakin: I would say we have one of the best poster collections in the world.
Russ Roberts: Who else is in the running?
Eric Wakin: Library of Congress, British Library, British Museum. Big institutions have collections and there's a couple of private dealers with nice collections.
Russ Roberts: They don't have 100,000. They might.
Eric Wakin: Probably not. We're talking to one now. The challenge about posters is they're beautiful single-piece lovely colors and they tell a story about some moment in time--some revolutionary movement, political movement, or otherwise. Cataloguing them is a big challenge. We have 130,000; about 25% are catalogued and digitized so you can see them. So that means 75% are in drawers, not described.
Russ Roberts: And how did we come to have so many? Garage sales?
Eric Wakin: July garage sales?
Russ Roberts: Somebody was getting rid of their collection?
Eric Wakin: So, over time people have given them to us; we've bought them. In those two ways. In fact, I'll tell you a story about valuation. A dealer called me the other day and said do I want 10,000 Greek posters?
Russ Roberts: From what time period? If they were from 2000 or 3000 years ago--
Eric Wakin: I'd say yes. 1960s through today. And I said, 'Well, I really haven't been able to catalog the other ones.' And he said, very cleverly, 'Well, you have 70,000, 80,000 uncatalogued; why not have 90,000 uncatalogued?'
Russ Roberts: That would depend on the price, I'm sure would be the answer to that.
Eric Wakin: Exactly.
Russ Roberts: I'm sure that's what you said. But we are, to some extent--I would say we have lots of stuff. But when I think of Hoover, one of the things I think of is those collections. Now, the reason I think about it, part of it, is that many of those posters--I assume they are copies; maybe they are not--are hanging around the building where our offices are, so that they are artwork that are adorning the halls. So I know we have a lot of them. But how did it get started? Did somebody donate 2000 to start with and we suddenly became known as a place?
Eric Wakin: That's a great question. First of all, they are copies hanging in our offices, none of the originals.
Russ Roberts: I'm relieved. So relieved.
Eric Wakin: I don't know how it got started but I've got to tell you, as soon as people started collecting ephemera--one of a kind objects--posters would have been on the menu.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, for sure.
Eric Wakin: So I bet they started early.
23:58
Russ Roberts: Now, we have some traditional archived things--I would just call these pieces of paper. Like the strike order; like letters Milton Friedman wrote to colleagues. General Stillwell--"Vinegar" Joe Stillwell's diaries.
Russ Roberts: Right. We've got those. By the way, I noticed that those were available digitized online; you can read--I picked a day in 1941; it wasn't that interesting, I have to confess, but I'm sure there are more interesting days. But historians are very interested in that, obviously. We also have Chiang Kai-shek's diaries--temporarily. Correct?
Eric Wakin: Yeah. An interesting story. The grand-daughter-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek said, 'Would you hold these materials for me?' In other words, she deposited them with us for 50 years; said we should make them available--with some redactions she wanted--
Russ Roberts: They have--those redactions are personal, family insults or moments of emotion--
Eric Wakin: Yes. Tiny amount. And we've made them available. They are our number one item of interest to researchers because no one knew he kept a diary for so long and no one had ever seen it till 2007, 2008 here. Unfortunately there are other descendants of Chiang Kai-shek who say those diaries belong to them. And we said, 'That's fine; we'd like to give them back to the proper person.' But you can imagine a family trying to decide, together there are 14, who is the proper owner.
Russ Roberts: But when it was donated to us for a 50-year period, there was the understanding that after 50 years they would go where?
Eric Wakin: It wasn't stipulated in [?].
Russ Roberts: Okay. But they gave them with the understanding that they would be returned.
Eric Wakin: Absolutely. And we have no interest in holding onto them.
Russ Roberts: Well, we wouldn't mind holding onto them.
Eric Wakin: I think--I guess it's a great question. The research interest is in the copies, which, we only show the copies. But again, the power of the object is very powerful. When we give visitors here from the mainland, where Chiang Kai-shek was vilified for decades, they want to see the real object, sometimes and we take it out for them. That visceral connection to the object.
Russ Roberts: Do you have a measure--sometimes you go to a library, you'd take out a book, in the old days you would, anyway--and you could see that somebody had stamped, in the old days, when it was last taken out. And you'd realize, 'Oh my gosh, this book is not that popular.' Sometimes it could be a book you wrote--which would be really depressing. But, putting that to the side, there are things in the archives, thousands of things, that have never been examined.
Eric Wakin: I'd say that's probably true.
Russ Roberts: Right--the modal piece is unexamined; that's the most common category. There's some pieces that have been looked at once; there are some collections that are opened often. Besides the Chiang Kai-shek Diaries, what else is popular research-wise? Is it--it must go in waves.
Eric Wakin: Yeah. So, two things. One is, as an archive the amount of times something is used is less important to us than we feel we are preserving the most important material for the few users who want to see it.
Russ Roberts: That's for sure.
Eric Wakin: Because--it's a challenge, because in libraries it's important that if books aren't circulated all the time, they can check; and they can say, 'Let's move these offsite.' That's okay, in my opinion. But in archives, the amount of use is a little bit less often.
Russ Roberts: I mean, something could be unused and then 50 years from now be transformed in how we think about something.
Eric Wakin: Right. That would be wonderful. A good example is Fred Golder[?sp.], one of our earliest collectors, went to the Soviet Union in 1922, just after the Bolshevik Revolution, as they were selling off their treasures to build tractors and bought some books from Russia. They had repossessed them from nobles and churches and so on. And we put them in our archives; and we are just cataloguing some of them now.
Russ Roberts: Wow. [?]
Eric Wakin: So, you asked what collections get a lot of use: you are right; it does go through phases. The Bath Party archives, a lot of books have come out--meaning 5 books have come out in the last few years--
Russ Roberts: That's a lot.
Eric Wakin: That's quite popular.
Russ Roberts: Does anybody ever want something back? We just talked about a case where someone gave us a gift--it's a loan, with the expectation it will be returned. It could be an interesting question if you don't know who to return it to. That will be an interesting legal question, I guess. It's hard to--I can't imagine leaving it on a street corner and hoping someone picks it up.
Eric Wakin: We did recently get a letter from the governor of a province in Russia asking for the return of patrimony of someone who is from their province, and said, 'I understand this material is at the Hoover'--
Russ Roberts: Return of what?
Eric Wakin: A collection of materials by someone who was from the province--saying, 'This material is from a son of our province and this material belongs here. He was an important figure to us.' And Robert Conquest, curator for Russia, came to me and showed me the letter. And he also did some research. He [?] give it back; but anyway, he went to the files and there was actually a letter attached to the deed of gift from the fellow saying 'I never want this material to go back to Russia.' So we sent that instead of the material.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, I guess that's pretty [?]. Although, this is a common problem: Greece wants the Elgin Marbles back--at the British Museum--for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, some probably not so legitimate. Some Bootlegger and Baptist issues, some higher-minded arguments for it; some not so high-minded arguments. But it's hard to give stuff back.
Eric Wakin: There's always an answer for this--for cultural property, and institutions like ours that preserve things that might have been destroyed in other environments, like in revolutions, do a service to history by doing that. So there's always an answer for it.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
29:29
Russ Roberts: So, I think I went off track, but I started asking you about pieces of paper. So we have a lot of pieces of paper. We have a lot of non-pieces of paper, too, which surprised me--I recently discovered. What are some of the things we have--we don't have the Lusitania, but that would be a non-piece of paper, obviously. What are some of the things that are "in the archive" that are not traditionally associated with what people would think of?
Eric Wakin: Sure. A couple of things I would mention. We have most of the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty--the radio stations that were broadcast into Communist countries--in multiple languages, multiple different kinds of tape formats. And so, those are stored in boxes, and we are selectively digitizing them to make them available online. So it's a gigantic collection. We don't have enough people speaking the language to even describe them. We are working with partners around the world to help us. That's really unusual, and a lot of work; and deteriorating fast. So those have become challenges. And you asked about storage: in offsite storage, they limit the amount of non-paper materials due to fire codes. So you've got these tapes which we don't want to use again once they are digitized, but we can't move them out of our storage here. We have some interesting art collections--3-dimensional objects. Swords.
Russ Roberts: How many swords do we have?
Eric Wakin: I haven't counted them all.
Russ Roberts: Do we have 10, or is it 1000?
Eric Wakin: It's between 20 and 50 swords. A lot of projects[?] there. There are swords, paintings.
Russ Roberts: Now the paintings presumably have market value, unlike correspondence. Correspondence can, I guess, too. But a lot of things we are talking about are essentially--they are not going to ever be sold on the open market.
Eric Wakin: No.
Russ Roberts: And there's nothing "like it" on the open market. But artwork is very much that way. But we just keep it.
Eric Wakin: Yeah. Let me tell you: I attempt not to collect non-paper materials. Because we are not a museum, right? And we are not here to store fine oil paintings [?]--
Russ Roberts: Because they don't have research and historical value, presumably.
Eric Wakin: Well, no, they have research and historical value--
Russ Roberts: Of a different nature--
Eric Wakin: but they are a little bit far from our mission, a little askance from our mission. And they should be stored under real, superb museum conditions.
Russ Roberts: So, we do have an exhibit space here. Do those paintings ever get shown? They're just sitting here. It's kind of sad.
Eric Wakin: We do show the paintings sometimes. Our exhibit space does a rotating exhibit, twice a year, on topics like William F. Buckley's 'Firing Line,' we own the recordings and the copyright to that show. The Okhrana[?], the Russian Police Files from the Tsar's era in Paris in 1905.
Russ Roberts: Why 1905? Why Paris?
Eric Wakin: It's an interesting collection, actually. So the Tsar had his secret police surveilling revolutionaries. And a lot of the revolutionaries were based in Paris--Trotsky and so on. So they have mug shots of revolutionaries, surveillance documents on them. This is an interesting collection because it came to Hoover and it was closed till 1956; and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) used that collection to see how early, how the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) might have operated--in other words, what did the KGB learn from its predecessors?
Russ Roberts: Yeah; I wonder how many of those people are the same people? They just switch their badge. So, what's the 1905 part of that? That's when we got it? Or when the surveillance was mainly--
Eric Wakin: No, that's when--before the Revolution, which was 1905-1919.
Russ Roberts: 1917, actually, I think.
Eric Wakin: 1917.
Russ Roberts: 1919 was Versailles, so it's confusing.
Eric Wakin: I think 1919 was when Hoover was founded, too.
Russ Roberts: So, do you know how that came to us?
Eric Wakin: A member of the Russian embassy after the Revolution and eventually got it to Hoover.
Russ Roberts: Are you saying it was a gift? Or a sale? Do you know?
Eric Wakin: I'm sure it was a gift.
Russ Roberts: So interesting.
33:12
Russ Roberts: What are some of the preservation challenges? You talked a little bit about--I mean, there's some trivial, obvious things like pieces of paper tend to be put in slip covers and other things like that. What if--some of the film deteriorates over time. So you want to digitize that sooner rather than later. But what are some of the other issues that--well, I keep my sword oiled. But other than those, where there are some other special things? And how do you keep up to date? One of the things that's interesting about this conversation to me--I see Eric in the hall every once in a while when I'm out here in the summer and we chitchat. And he's a buddy; and I like him. But I really appreciate the scope of what your job must be like day to day. So we've got building acquisition. We've got negotiation, we've got historical mission; we've got a lot of public face of the Institution, the Archives. And now here's this other one--it's like a handyman. So, what are you doing there?
Eric Wakin: So, our mission has got to be to preserve things for the next hundred years. Right? Whatever that means. It means putting them in boxes; it means digitizing them. It means figuring out how to allocate resources to the collections most endangered: we can't also spend a lot of money on all of the collections. So we have this mission to preserve, and we have a duty to conserve the materials: it means we have a laboratory here--
Russ Roberts: We have a laboratory? What does that mean?
Eric Wakin: I call it a lab. It's got book and paper conservation techniques: we rebind books, we preserve 3-dimensional objects; we clean icons. And there are specialists and they are trained in preservation methods.
Russ Roberts: How many people do we have in that, if I may ask, in the lab?
Eric Wakin: Four in that lab; we have 3 in a video and photography preservation lab; we have 2 in an audio lab. We still have some people doing microfilming and we also have a staff doing digitization. So a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff is about making this accessible to future researchers.
Russ Roberts: I just want to say for the record that I took two folks up to the Hoover Tower yesterday to go to the observation deck, and when I came down I tried to take a photograph, and they said I couldn't. And I said, 'Why not?' And they said, 'We just don't allow it.' Do you know anything about that? Eric, I hate to put you on the spot here.
Eric Wakin: No. I've seen that sign there. I can't quite figure it out, either. There's nothing in there that you should not take a picture of. There's only: 'We've always had that law, so we'll keep that law.'
Russ Roberts: No, and the person who stopped me was very pleased about that, stopping me. I think that's an additional pleasure. I'm sorry to report. I will not identify that person. She was just doing her job. That's okay. Anything else about preservation you want to say? Obviously like you say you [?] on cutting edge. Do you lose sleep at night that there's stuff wasting away somewhere that you don't know about that's maybe important?
Eric Wakin: Yes. Especially nitrate film, which both deteriorates and can explode. We keep it in freezers.
Russ Roberts: You keep it in freezers?
Eric Wakin: Special freezers to keep the nitrate, whatever the chemical term is, so it doesn't deteriorate and turn into an explosive substance. All of our recordings that are on old tapes that break. Paper can last for a while. One of the shocking things that I've learned is that microfilm's outdated technology--
Russ Roberts: Primitive.
Eric Wakin: lasts a long time. A good microfilm can last 50, 100 years. Which, digitization, we don't know about the problems with that over 50, 100 years.
Russ Roberts: Do we have a lot of microfilm?
Eric Wakin: We have an enormous microfilm collection.
Russ Roberts: Of what? What are the kind of things that are on it?
Eric Wakin: It used to be the practice, for many collections in the early days, we would just microfilm the entire collection and put it on reels; and then people could look at those instead of the actual papers.
Russ Roberts: Right. So, do people still use those? Because I remember, in my youth--I've done microfilm research. It's not pleasant. It's hard on the eyes, the readers are awkward, you are scanning through--you are rolling the pages of the newspaper. You might as well just look at the newspaper--
Eric Wakin: [?] My dissertation, I've got a lot of old dissertations on microfilm to help me out. To be honest, we do get a lot of useful microfilm. Newer microfilm readers are quite good and allow you to make copies from material. And you can scan through stuff. But, you know what's the best part of microfilm, I've found? Digitizing from microfilm is faster and easier, and much cheaper than digitizing from paper. So if the microfilm was done right, that's a great process. Can I talk about one thing we're doing which I think is really interesting?
Russ Roberts: Sure.
Eric Wakin: We have a project to digitize millions of pages of Japanese newspapers published in America in different communities--in Hawaii and the West Coast and so on--from 1900 to WWII. And what we are doing as part of our access project is to digitize all this with a grant from a donor and make it available for free online. Those kind of projects I find are really satisfying.
Russ Roberts: Cool.
37:46
Russ Roberts: Who is Joan Quigley, and why is she relevant for the Hoover Institution Archives?
Eric Wakin: In the 1980s, Mrs. Nancy Reagan had a private astrologer named Joan Quigley, and she called Joan her private astrologer.
Russ Roberts: What does the word 'private' mean in that sense?
Eric Wakin: A personal astrologer.
Russ Roberts: Okay. Not a government astrologer.
Eric Wakin: Not a government astrologer.
Russ Roberts: Okay, good point. That's what you meant. No, that's good.
Eric Wakin: And she asked Joan to do charts for her and for Mr. Reagan. And Joan did the charts for Mr. Reagan, and one of the rumors has been that President Reagan arranged his schedule based on Joan Quigley's charts--what were the auspicious days for doing things.
Russ Roberts: Nancy Reagan was known for, or at least suspected of being an important figure in the Reagan White House in the day-to-day workings of it.
Eric Wakin: Yes.
Russ Roberts: So, this would be the claim here--that she, through her astrologer, was working on his schedule.
Eric Wakin: Right. So, we thought our mission is to study war, revolution, peace, and American political movements. And Joan Quigley's sister Ruth called us and asked: would we like to have the charts done on President Reagan? And I said, 'Sure.' And it turns out that Joan Quigley was doing charts on many people at the time, one of whom was Reagan. Now, Mrs. Reagan asked for those charts; in some cases Joan Quigley was just doing charts on important historical events to see what happened--how the stars aligned for them. So we've just gotten them in; we haven't had a chance to look at them yet. They've just arrived.
Russ Roberts: It's hard for me to respond to that. I'm just going to leave that alone? Is that the quirkiest thing? I'll just call it that--quirky. Is that the quirkiest thing we have in the archive?
Eric Wakin:
That's pretty quirky, I think. Yeah. We also have a jar of Mr. Reagan's, President Reagan's jelly beans.
Russ Roberts: You scared me there. You really scared me there. When you said 'jar,' I'm thinking 'Abby Normal and Igor in Young Frankenstein.' I don't know why. Maybe it's the Hitler discussion earlier, and the brain. Sorry about that.
Eric Wakin: Mel Brooks is just a [?].
Russ Roberts: We have a jar of his jellybeans. What does that mean?
Eric Wakin: Somehow in one collection of a group of people associated with Mr. Reagan, or Mrs. Reagan [Mrs.?] we acquired that at some point. I don't actually know the provenance of the jellybeans.
Russ Roberts: Could you find them if I asked you?
Eric Wakin: I can find them. They have been seen.
Russ Roberts: By the way, that's got to be an interesting challenge, right? How do you--when you have 100,000 linear feet?
Eric Wakin: Every collection is catalogued and we know where it is on the shelves. And generally the contents of the boxes are described.
Russ Roberts: I assume there are conferences where archivists get together and talk about these kind of things. Is that correct?
Eric Wakin: And there's one going on right now--the Society of American Archivists meets every year and talks about these issues. It's a great conference.
Russ Roberts: Why aren't you there?
Eric Wakin: Unfortunately, I have some important things to do here.
Russ Roberts: It could be this EconTalk interview; I'm sure you wouldn't dream of postponing or canceling it.
Eric Wakin: You haven't asked me--besides jellybeans--the thing that archivists like to share thoughts on is strange things they found in boxes that they didn't expect at the time.
Russ Roberts: Oh, yeah. I bet that's true.
Eric Wakin: So, among the ones we've heard of that were found here have been old cheese--dried cheese, a big hunk of cheese. Gun powder in a little satchel. And in a recent collection we got a brown recluse spider nest.
Russ Roberts: Wow. That's pretty [?]. Now, I'm going to just say this--I think it's a little embarrassing. I'm not sure I've told this story on EconTalk before, and I apologize if I have. But when I spoke in England about my Adam Smith book before my talk at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts), I was put in the Green Room--the room that you hang out in before your talk. And there was a chair there that it turned out had existed when Adam Smith was alive. Adam Smith was a member of the RSA. And the Royal Society of Arts. It's full title is the Royal Society for the Engagement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. And when I went there--and the person guiding me around, meeting me, was new--I was talking about Adam Smith; she was all excited. She said Adam Smith had been a member. So I get to this room. There's a chair in the corner. And the chair was as old as Adam Smith. It had existed when he was a member of the society. And it dawned on me that he may have sat in the chair.
Eric Wakin: Did you get to sit in it?
Russ Roberts: Well, I wanted to sit in it. And I--if you've read my book on Adam Smith--listeners will remember there that there's an interesting thing about celebrity and our desire to be with celebrities. So I wanted to sit in the chair. But there was a sign that said: Do Not Sit in the Chair. But there was no one in the room. So I often ask people, 'Do you think I sat in the chair or not?' And the answer is I didn't. Because even though there was no one in the room, I was in the room and I would feel bad sitting in the chair and degrading it. It's of some historical interest because of the person who designed it. But of course I would say that anyway, because Adam Smith fans know that I have a desire to be lovely, thought to be lovely--but I actually have a desire to be lovely, as Smith would have said. So I did not sit in the chair. Although there's no proof of that. Unless there was video surveillance. But I have to say when you mention the Ronald Reagan jelly beans that there's got to be a temptation to take just one. Let's say there's a hundred beans in the jar--and what would really be the harm? We'd still have a jar of Ronald Reagan jelly beans. No one's going to know. You could do that any time. Could be a scandal of immense proportions. Well, let me ask you this: Is the shelf under surveillance?
Eric Wakin: I'm going to go back into the stacks after our interview and go eat some jelly beans.
Russ Roberts: And you could--in the movie you would turn off the surveillance video cameras.
Eric Wakin: I'd turn the alarms off.
Russ Roberts: There'd be a little flickering and there would be a shadowy figure there that couldn't be identified of you having a jelly bean.
Eric Wakin: As I recall, the jar is tied shut with a ribbon. But I could be wrong.
Russ Roberts: You'll re-tie it. That's no problem.
43:49
Russ Roberts: What do you like most about your job?
Eric Wakin: I love the fact that new things happen every day, and the variety of experiences I get to have and my colleagues get to have. So, in one day, you might be talking to a donor about an interesting collection, working with a vendor on a preservation or digitization project, talking to colleagues about how to collaborate on something, connecting the materials we have to historian's work, speaking at a conference where researchers are coming in to use the archives. So it's a whole host of different activities that will lead to this idea that information is important and material goods are important to society and the world.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I don't know how many listeners have a dream of being an archivist. Probably not that many. But--
Eric Wakin: It's good, because there probably aren't that many jobs.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's a good point. I think what's best for me in our conversation--two things, among others; there are a lot of things I've enjoyed. But one of them is, I think one's perception of an archive is very dull. It's not a dull job. But the second part is, you kind of think--I mean, I would have thought--incorrectly, obviously--that the Hoover Archive has an immense amount of stuff, a lot of it related to Communism; a lot of it related to wars; a lot of it related to the Cold War, political movements, of revolutions, etc. And they all happened already. So, your main job is just to keep the place from burning down. 'I mean, really, what's new? This is history.' Right? So the idea that there's new stuff coming along every day--and not just stuff like Firing Line or, you know, recent, Radio Free Europe stuff--the fact that there's new historical stuff that surfaces must be exhilarating.
Eric Wakin: Yeah. It's fascinating that new historical stuff from the past surfaces and we can collect it. But also thinking about: What will people be interested in 50 years from now? So, we've collected a whole group of publications by jihadi sources in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, going up to the 2000s. Those will be interesting. But really--
Russ Roberts: How did you get those? What are they?
Eric Wakin: So, it's very much a print-culture society; and so the various political parties and groups in Afghanistan publish their own newspapers--magazines and newspapers--frankly. From early days; we've collected since the 1960s. And they published a monthly or a weekly newspaper on their political party: Taliban [?], the shah, the King had them--and so a man collected them from the markets for many, many years and had a private library in Kabul, and asked us if we could help him get them out. And pay him for them. And we're digitizing them and putting them online.
Russ Roberts: How did we--can you talk about how we got them out?
Eric Wakin: Sure. Sure. So the first--
Russ Roberts: Because he didn't bring them to us. And how much--was it a truckload?
Eric Wakin: In this case, we--
Russ Roberts: Many pallets.
Eric Wakin: Many pallets. So the first case, there's an interesting story. I saw a piece of them actually from a dealer. And I thought, this is really interesting: they are graphically interesting; they tell a story about politics. So I bought them. A small piece. And as we were going through preservation for them, we saw a stamp from a private library in Afghanistan, in English, on it. So right away I was worried I'd bought stolen material. And so I checked with the dealer. And he said it wasn't stolen. And then we reached out to the library, just to make sure: 'We have your stuff; we'd like to return it.'
Russ Roberts: Yeah, my dad sends m