"Oral history tends to be subjective and partisan. Worst still, it is based on little more than people's stories about the past, rather then reliable sources. The historian should therefore avoid it in favour of a more "objective history". Evaulate this statement.
Some historians such as A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper have viewed Oral History as unreliable, partisan and subjective. While others tend to regard Oral History as a relatively new method of reconstructing the past, consequently they are skeptical of its validity. After all, Oral History, a term coined by Allan Nevins in the 1940s, came in the wake of post war cynicism. Traditional Ranken methods were deemed inadequate to account for social changes, the current focus for many post war historians. Moreover, its main practitioners such as Paul Thompson who hailed from the then newly established University of Essex, advocated political purpose for Oral History, namely social empowerment.
This inevitably provoked criticisms from the incumbents. So much so that Arthur Marwick have stated that, "History based exclusively on non-documentary sources…may be sketchier, less satisfactory history than one drawn from documents." Anthony Seldon felt that this is uncalled for because critics such as Taylor conducted little interviews in his works. Such criticisms from non-practitioners, in the words of Seldon, might signal, "…evidence of shallow comprehension."
This paper will argue that Oral History is a valid source for any practicing historians to use. The paper attempts to do so by looking into the origins of "objective history". Next, it will ponder over the issue what makes Oral History seemingly "unreliable". After which, it will examine the subjectivity of Oral History. It will then discuss the central issue of Oral history: the reliability of memory. This is followed by a careful consideration about the technicalities of collecting oral history. Finally, the paper will come to an adequate conclusion.
I
The desire for reliable sources sprang from the convictions and practices of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) towards history. Historians, according to Ranke, should dig into the archives savoring primary sources and not depend completely on secondary sources. Additionally, one had to test the internal and external consistency of the documents and weed out forgeries just as Lorenzo Valla had exposed the Donation of Constaine to be forgery. With all these at hand, a historian should then become, as Geoffrey Elton had advocated, servants of the sources and read the documents without prejudice. Thus, will the historian objectively understand the past Wie es eigentlich gewesen. (how it essentially was) It basically means that historians' time are taken up with the study of written documents, which is what they are trained for, and their existence confined to the library and archive.
II
It is no surprise that in face of all these requirements that oral history seems inadequately unreliable. A. J. P. Taylor reportedly snorted at oral history reliability, "Old men drooling about their youth?" But just as one do not take flu medication for a bad case of diarrhea, similarly, whether oral history can be consider reliable depends on what the historian is looking for. For example, when French historian Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie used interrogation records of some 500 suspected heretics obtained between 1318 and 1325 from the Vatican archives for his Montaillou, he chose to write about the intricacies of human relationship instead of the standard history of the Inquisition. Elton thought that Ladurie should stick to the Inquisition, not adhere to present day concerns such as behavior in the Cathar village of Montaillou.
That is just Elton's view because in reality there is no one way in reading documents. Diversion from Eltonian way of looking and interpretation of facts does not mean that Oral evidence is unreliable. Interpretation of facts, as Carr mentioned, is an 'unending dialogue between the present and the past.' The truth does not just emerge virginally untouched by the historian's present day concern and prejudices. In fact, oral history could be use to open new areas of inquiry as Ladurie did. Therefore, it would appear that oral history gives a different kind of credibility that strives on subjectivity.
III
That oral history is subjective does not mean that it is unreliable. Seemingly authentic and objective written documents such as the Hitler's Diaries could be false. While Hugh Trevor-Roper could sneered at Africa's lack of history and even if its oral traditions could qualify, he saw it as ,"…unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes," he could do better than to, on the strength of his scholarship on Hitler, authenticate the false Hitler's diaries. In this case, this particular written record was wholly unreliable. Similarly, marriage registers of England's late nineteen century did not reflect the true age of the participants as objections might come from their parents. They simply misstated their age. The discrepancies were only discovered through interviews.
Oral history's subjectivity is its main strength and uniqueness. How else would Elizabeth Roberts seek to "investigate empathetically the historical roots of some of the issues which affect women today" if she was to dig in the archives? By looking into the fabric of ordinary social relationships, routines of daily life and its essential connectedness of human experience, she is looking for subjectivity and her usage of oral history seeks to give social history a human face. At the same time, Paul Thompson's The Edwardians accurately portrayed the inequalities in the society and how the cliche of rosy romanticism of the pre WWI years was only true for a few. Such vivid illustrations from snippets of life could only come from oral history.
This of course flies in face of the kings and battle historians. John Vincent advocated for a return to traditional English political history (shared by Elton) and he even went so far as to say that," We do not understand Asia and will not need to", presumably he might have the same stance for oral history. Perhaps it is not the irrelevancy of the masses history that irritated Namier, but its social purpose that frightened the incumbent such as Elton, who in Jenkins' view, sees the historian's raison d'être as sitting in a well paid and pleasant occupation. Not only does oral history empower the people, but also it brings recognition to the ignored. Without oral history, the sorrowful plight of the Korean women would never have come into light so vividly. The fact that interviewees had to control their emotions to give the objective truth is a parody of truth. If Ranke's maxim is to be followed strictly, to tell history as it really was, then one could hardly stop a victim from sobbing for the sake of objectivity if she was recounting the fact she was raped 40 times a day. Similarly, Dori Laub described the ludicrous search for the objective truth when historians wanted to reject the oral testimonial of an Auschwitz survivor who mistakenly recounted the explosion of four chimneys instead of the historical one. At the same time, the experience of Kim Tokchin having to "serve" 30 to 40 Japanese soldiers a day at the expense of adequate sleep can hardly be found in written archives. Thus, oral history has allowed these hapless victims to shame the government of Japan and forced it to resolve its post war issues. It does not merely functions as ornamental fixtures.
IV
Nevertheless, just as Oral history could bring a nation to her knees, its reliability must be horned by the strength of any methodologically competent history. One of the main criticisms on the reliability of Oral history is the memory of the interviewees. John Blassingame even rejected oral evidences for his book, The Slave Community, as hopelessly impaired. Nevertheless, most of the evidences for the decline in memory stem from researches on short term memory and they were conducted in an artificial environment. Moreover, such experiments lack the motivating factor that is so important in provoking interest for the interviewees to remember.
What is most frustrating was that early American immigrants might not remember their children's telephone number, but they could recall with vividness that particular moment when they step onto America. However, Lois Moss suggested that interviewees' long term memories could at best provide "suggestive evidence". Albeit the fact that the general thrust of long term memory researches have highlighted the weakness of long term memory, the issue is far from conclusive. In 1992, Howes and Katz was able to show that recall of autobiographical events by interviewees from the earliest period was not a problem. Hence, the issue is at a stalemate.
The phenomenon of interviewee's ability to remember the earliest period of their life is astounding. For example, Adm. Harold Stark's flag lieutenant, H.D.Kirk could remember the telephone call by President Roosevelt in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. This is especially significant when Adm. Stark himself could not even recall this incident. Kirk explained, " Because I was a small fish, and great things were transpiring and you don't forget that sort of thing." Paul Thompson explains that how a person remembers is based on his perception which means that a person has to categorizes the information into recognizable units for future usage. Factors affecting this process are interest, the willingness to recall and the context of the situation. These three conditions were evident in Lt. Kirk's testimonial. Thus, oral evidences from the aged poses no fundamental difficulties that are not experienced with interviewing in general.
Whilst vivid incidents could dredged up memories, silences are not the product of inadequate recall. One, it could be the Holocaust victim uses the silence as a source of protection to the pain threatening to overcome the rational mind. For example, Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim, survivors of the holocausts, both were established in their respective careers, literature and psychoanalyst, committed suicide in their old age. Prins suggested that the burden of survival was too much for them to bear. Also this author would like to suggest that their recollections of the horrors were liken to the effects of total recall pointed out by David Lowenthal. Two, the silence could be used a sign of respect to those who had so needlessly sacrificed and forfeited themselves. For instance, one holocaust survivor insisted," It has nothing to do with anyone else." Three, the silence might be the effects of censorship. Passerini's Fascism victims had the habit of jumping to WWII without describing the years from 1930-39. Four, the events simply do not impinge on personal narrative or chronology. For example, women from the British towns of Preston, Barrow and Lancaster seldom mentioned strikes. Roberts proposes that the women's chronic poverty prevented them from participating in strikes and remembering such an incident. Moreover, the same women expressed indifference towards suffragette movements as they felt that its interests were remote from theirs. Nonetheless, holocaust survivors have been known to grant interviews as a way of reconciling a hunting record, and also of ensuring that future generations do not forget. Elie Wieesl succinctly concluded, " I will tell my son that all the pain, will be meaningless, if he in turn will not transmit our story to others…For a moral society must remember…if we stop remembering, we stop being."
This conscious decision to voluntarily remember for the sake of posterity or as a round up of one's small personal achievements has been recognized by psychologists as 'Life Review'. Its importance lies in the sometimes candid and lack of inhibition accounts that could be culled. But critics often point out that such oral evidences appear as blurred fragments which are not constitutive by itself. Myth and reality seems to have merged together making it unreliable. For example, the death of Luigi Trastulli and the accompanying three days of barricades and street fighting were placed by nearly half the retired steelworkers in 1953 rather than 1949 when they were interviewed by Sandro Portelli. Yet this myth is the constituent of their human experience. Accuracy of facts is not so important as the insight one gains in comprehending this rationale of their unconscious error. If one is to understand the larger historical causation of certain events that appears irrational, say the Holocaust or the violence in Ulster, society's myths are the keys. Consequently, the very subjectively of the evidence signals that one might look for meanings than events in oral history. 'Old man droolings' might reveal more about the society than the official records would care to give.
V
Closely related to the reliability of oral history is the nature of interview methods and the sampling. These two issues would be touched on successively. That Oral evidence is the joint product of the narrator and the researcher is highlighted as one of its major weakness. The choice inherited by any oral historian to choose what to ask and who to ask, seems very un-Eltonian. Elton comments," That partial and uneven evidence must be read in the context of the day that produced it; reading it must never be governed by any desire to justify or explain or even to understand the present." Given this it seems that the question asked by the interviewer might be hopelessly biased. Oral evidence might even be manufactured to suit the interviewers' stance as he could choose to interview only those he favours. Ron Grele laments, "We begin to ask questions which we know our respondants are going to want to answer, and they begin to give us answers which they know we are going to hear." Even more alarmingly, Paul Thompson, a socialist, wants to use oral history to "change the world." Surely such politically motivated historian's interviews would be very far away from the "objective truth."
But this problem of biased questioning is another version of an archive digging mole of a historian choosing facts for his interpretation. The problem does not lie with exclusively with Oral sources, but the way historian approaches a source. One would have thought that Elton, the advocate of historical objectivity, would reinforce his numerous maxims in his first book , The Tudor Revolution in Government, but nay it is not so. Instead of springing from naked sources, his interpretation reflects strongly held conservative political beliefs. More serious charges were to come from Lawrence Stone who found out that Elton distorted his reading of a primary document to fit into his thesis of strong government in another book Policy and Police. Could the fact be that Elton is sub-consciously practicing what Carr have advocated,"History therefore is a process of selection in terms of historical significance…the historian selects those which are significance for his purpose…fit them into his pattern of rational explanation and interpretation." Paul Thompson might have a political axe to grind in his avocation for Oral history as he states explicitly in his preface of The Voice of the Past that his first chapter is written from a socialist point of view, but this is surely way better than a tome written by someone who does the very opposite from what he preaches.
The choice exercises by the oral historian does not necessarily led to unreliable information. Conversely, oral sources could correct other perspectives just as much as other perspectives correct it. This was the very reason Jules Michelet used oral evidences as his purpose was to counter-balance the evidence the evidence of official documents with the voice of the people. For example, battle field military records often does not reflect true battle conditions. This could be the actual conduct of events or its physical conditions. Sir Peter Gretton confessed,"…very often the main motive behind the Report of Proceedings will be to show the actions of the ships or squadron concerned in the best possible light." Rhodes James added," The very nature of war means that, very often, the truth of what really happened is known to the dead." Another example would be Sir Frank Simpson's oral recall. He left no written accounts on his crossing of the Selle, understandability so, as he accomplished the mission by disobeying orders! His impromptu decision to lay the bridges before the artillery opened their barrage was disapproved by headquarters, but he went ahead anyway and got the job done. Thus, oral evidences appear to allow a historian to access a topic where there is scanty evidence from any other source.
Its flexibility, as one could always question the interviewees, could aid the historian to pin down evidences. For example, as mentioned earlier the marriage statistic's misleading information could only be corrected by oral evidences. But just as written sources could be written to be misleading, oral evidences suffered from this no less. Additionally, oral evidences could be changed by the especially by the race of the interviewer. A good case point would be the opposing viewpoints given by a same ex-slave, one Susan Hamilton to a white interviewer, Jessie Bulter and a black interviewer, Augustus Ladson. In Bulter's transcript, Hamilton only heard of second hand accounts of lynching and whippings: I hear 'bout all kinds of t'ings but you don't know whether it was lie or not. Hamilton also takes for granted the superiority of the whites and the blacks should be under the whites to 'get dere brains right, and honor God, and learn uprightness.' However, in Ladson's transcript, most of the cruelties recounts were in first hand: All time, night an' day, you could hear men an' women screamin' to de tip of dere voices…people wus always dyin' frum a broken heart.
Yet this very distortion might be more important than to accurately remember how many times a slave was whipped. The fact that this discrepancy was discovered was due to the careful recordings of the original verbatim. Recordings would therefore help to solve this kind of social bias. More importantly, this distortion is suggested by Davidson to be a reflection of the social structure of the Deep South in America. As elements of racism and slavery were so deeply rooted, deception become almost naturally to Hamilton. As mentioned earlier, this is also part of the myth of the America South during and after the Civil War era. The myth of distrust and deception was produced to enable one to live in a fiction of a tolerable, normally functionally society.
But such difference in oral evidence was due to Ladson being a black interviewer. Hamilton called him 'my son', this signifies that Ladson was seen as an insider. While, an insider could understand the nuances and could be less easily fooled, but an insider might also accept the community myth at face value. Likewise, in Roberts' A Women's Place, women were found to be happy and were dominant personalities in their families. This itself might be a social myth taken by the very women who would like to see their life as achievements rather than as a nonentity. Thus, they might adapt their views about the past to fit a stance they have adopted later. Just as previously Sandro Portelli's rioters tend to see the period between 1949 to 1953 as a continuum of industrial struggle rather then distinct periods. Hence, interviewees were players and partisans in events and often have positions and reputations to defend. The onus is on the oral historian to demonstrate scholarly skepticism.
Thompson gave a good discussion on the sort of evaluations which could be carried out on oral evidences. As it has been mentioned that oral evidences at times reflect myths of the community then actual events, this sort of evidences must be read as a whole and its internal consistency has to be assessed. Once again depending on what the historian is looking for inconsistencies and silences may reveal about the changes a member of the society is experiencing. Next, oral evidences could be checked against other evidences such as written sources to confirm their validity. Thus, for Liddle & Richardson cross-checking is often the best acid test available for their oral evidences on WWI trench experiences. Like any other historical sources, if oral sources contradict with written sources, the historian must dig deeper to conclude which is more exact. Lastly, based on the historian's understanding of that period concerned, specific detail could be checked against the wider context.
The sampling issue in oral history is another minefield for historians. Later historians who go over the same materials need to know if the interviews are representative or typical of the group they are studying. Thompson's The Edwardians, in order to ensure that the research was broadly representative of the social structure of that period, was based on the census categories of 1911. Most oral projects do not fill a quota but trace and interview those who participate in the particular circumstances. This raises some question on their strength as a sample. The other problem might be the reluctance of witness to be interview. For example, in Keith Howard's True Stories of Korean Comfort Women, 40 women agreed to be interviewed and only 19 were finally accepted. Even those women who went public were initially under tremendous pressure not to reveal," You know how the case of the Survivors Association of Pacific War led to nothing. You will only bring trouble on your family and your children will be traumatized."
But this criticism of selective sampling can also be leveled against users of written evidence as one could see from the example on Elton. Again the size of the sample depends on what the historian is researching. If the research is on an event or a particular group of people, the issue is about who knows best. Therefore, validity would be more important than reliability. Carr said," …no sane historian pretends to do anything so fantastic as to embrace 'the whole of experience'; he cannot embrace more than a minute fraction of the facts even of his chosen sector or aspect of history." No one method of sampling can claim to be the best for all situations. The oral historian must actively adapt to situations and needs.
VI
In the final analysis, the oral sources that made up oral history should have the same treatment written sources undergo. Oral sources could undergo tests for internal consistency, cross checking and weighting against a wider context. The same test recommended by Ranke for written sources could be applied here. Different sources have their strengths and weakness, the same goes for oral sources. In some contexts, oral evidence is the best; in others it is supplementary, or complementary, to that of other sources. It does not hold that history that uses oral sources is necessarily unreliable. If they appear subjective, it is a unique feature to be exploited not shunned upon. Historians would do well, tapping into this trove of raw data, noting its peculiarities and adapt research methods accordingly to it.
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