Historians and reporters know the fascination — and frustration — of opening a file folder and leafing through somebody else’s business.
It’s a form of eavesdropping, of course, to dig through original documents, such as letters, reports, memos and notes, whether for the biography of a president or an investigation of a government agency. But nothing else gives quite so sharp an insight into a moment of history as the writings of participants as they were going through it.
Today, such eavesdropping is becoming more widely available to the public through a small but growing subgenre of publishing in which historical documents are reprinted in all their raw freshness.
Since 1999, Tim Coates has published 49 such books on British and U.S. historical events in a series called Uncovered Editions from The Stationery Office, the official British government printing agency, and there are more on the way.
For Coates, the attraction of original documents is the glimpse they give of the confusion of the moment, and the participants’ groping for clarity and understanding. “It’s the fact that they are real human beings, and not caricatures of history, that comes across,” Coates says.
In Chicago, Dempsey Travis, a historian of the city’s black community as well as a successful real estate businessman, has published two books filled with facsimile reproductions of documents he has collected from the FBI files on famous entertainers and other public figures, ranging from Marian Anderson to Adlai E. Stevenson II, from Groucho Marx to Billie Holiday. For him, they are evidence of the way the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover routinely violated the privacy of Americans with little or no investigative rationale. “It says we sometimes forget the Constitution, forget civil rights,” Travis says.
The right to know
Since passage of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in 1974, Americans have had the right to see government reports and files, with some exceptions relating to national security and personal privacy. And, using that right, Travis gathered tens of thousands of pages of documents in recent years on more than 300 public figures, including himself, at a copying cost of more than $10,000.
His two books — “J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Wired the Nation” and “The FBI Files: On the Tainted and the Damned,” both from Travis’ Urban Research Press — focus on documents relating to 32 famous people. The books, which together have sold more than 20,000 copies, reveal the FBI as an agency that was often small-minded, paranoid and racially insensitive — and one that played favorites.
An internal memo from 1951 summarizes two letters passed along by newspaper columnist Walter Winchell who was then in the midst of a vendetta against black singer Josephine Baker over her charges of racial discrimination against the Stork Club in New York.
One of the letters asserted that Baker was in the Soviet Union in 1936 as a guest of that government, and, according to the FBI memo, Winchell had written on the letter, “Hoover, can we check this please?”
Unlike Travis, Coates doesn’t print facsimiles, and he’s not interested in celebrities. Digging through the Stationery Office’s files as well as those of the FBI, he looks for documents that can be put together to tell a story.
In some cases, all he needs is a single document, such as Lord Denning’s wonderfully cogent and clear-eyed white paper report for Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on a sex scandal in his administration, published as “John Profumo & Christine Keeler, 1963.”
Many sources for material
Most of the time, though, Coates is working with many documents, as in “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, 1929.” This book, newly published in the U.S., tells of the FBI’s sometimes Keystone-Kops handling of newspaper reports in early 1935 that a hood, then in the agency’s custody, had identified the gunmen in the infamous murder of seven members of the Bugs Moran gang on Chicago’s Near North Side.
Initially, Hoover denies any knowledge of the confession. A year and a half later, though, in a report to the acting U.S. attorney general, the director goes into great detail about the hood’s charges.
Was Hoover lying in his initial denials of the confession? Coates’ book doesn’t deal with that question. It lays out the documents, and lets the reader speculate.
This, however, has been the subject of criticism leveled at the series, which has sold more than 200,000 copies. Some frustrated reviewers have complained that the books tend to be a mass of loose ends, never tied together.
But, Coates says, that’s the point.
“I find history fascinating for what people said and how they said it — more than for any answers,” Coates says. “What you don’t get from [books by historians] is the uncertainty of what’s going on. The thing about historical documents is they only tell you what they tell you.”
