Transcript of National Archives Office Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Rebecca Brenner
Interviewee(s): Rod Ross

Rebecca Brenner: This is Rebecca Brenner from the National Archives History Office interviewing Rod Ross, part II. Today's date is August 6, 2015, and we are in room 400 at Archives I. So, could you speak to your involvement with the Oral History Project?

Rod Ross: The Oral History Project, actually, we could either talk about my involvement with the National Archives leading up to the Oral History Project.

Rebecca Brenner: Whichever starting point you think is best.

Rod Ross: Yeah, it puts it in context. So, I was with the Nixon Presidential Materials project and I had the brilliant idea for an SAA session to have an update about where things stood. And it turns out that, as the GS-6 in the office, I really wasn't the appropriate person to speak and they already had that idea covered. But Trudy Peterson, who was on the program committee on the SAA that was going to have a program about founding fathers of the archival profession, basically came to me and said, “Oh, you were interested in doing something for a program. How would you like to do a paper on Ernst Posner?” And since I needed, I guess I was already in a kind of the equivalent of the CIDS program, you know the archival training program and I needed a paper, Maygene Daniels, who was my supervisor basically said, “Why don’t we substitute the SAA paper that you'll do, or did, for the required archival paper?” So back in 1981 I gave the SAA presentation and then it got published in the American Archivist. Then went on to do something on Leland and it too was published in the American Archivist and then a spinoff of that was a American Historical Association presentation that I gave that Bert Rhoads had organized on Waldo Gifford Leland and the preservation of documentary resources. So with those as background, I was asked to do an article for the 1984 issue of Prologue that was for the 50th anniversary of the National Archives. And that Prologue article then was republished in a handout that the Archives gave away for a good number of years, Guardian of Heritage. So, just as Trudy Peterson had been involved with my getting into the writing field, she had been an assistant to George Scaboo, Deputy Archivist under Robert Warner, and this was about the time, in the mid-1980s, that the National Archives was successful in getting legislative re-establishment of itself out of GSA as an independent agency. And basically the Archivist Robert Warner wanted to have oral history interviews done with those people with the National Archives that had been most active in the quest for independence, so there was a feature, an entry in the staff information bulletin, and oddly both Jessie Kratz and myself have searched in vain for what I definitely remember there in 1984, announcing that I would be head of National Archives oral history program, and that was how I learned about the program and my appointment. So I was working at the Records Center in Suitland at the time and in effect I could have lots of time release, I could have lots of cassette tapes, and I was pretty much on my own. Since the discussion, the marching orders were, do basically the people on this list and retirees. And I expanded that just a little bit. So the first, who was a technician at the Washington National Records Center since I wanted to have something of an overview of the staff. Last week, when I signed the legal agreement giving rights for presumably this presentation as well as last week's, it was a form that I'd be interested in having tiny bit of a discussion on how you came up with the text of the form, because I came up with my own form for these close to oral history--

Rebecca Brenner: General Counsel Chris Runkel came up with my form.

Rod Ross: That's what I should have done also. Kudos to you.

Rebecca Brenner: I didn't do that, Jessie did.

Rod Ross: Well, kudos to Jessie, if it could have been well aware that I basically had moderated a form that Presidential Libraries used for oral history interviews. And I should have run it by the General Counsel's Office and did not. So my hat is off to you on that score.

Rebecca Brenner: Actually, the only reason I know that is when I handed the form to Chris Runkel when I interviewed him, he said, “Oh, I made this.”

Rod Ross: Oh, so you think that Jessie asked him?

Rebecca Brenner: Jessie sent me all the information that I needed. Maybe it was someone who asked him originally, I'm not sure, but it's that one in the oral history file in the Y drive. I just printed several of the form to use.

Rod Ross: Excellent.

Rebecca Brenner: When you signed it last week does it becomes public domain?

Rod Ross: Right, so the way the current form is read, one really wants to be careful of what one says if one is a current employee. So of the people that I interviewed, oddly, there is a kind of relevance for today. You know, recently you may have heard also the Archivist of the U.S. at the last town hall meeting giving an update on what was what. And one of the what was what is it appears there will be yet another attempt to legislate out of existence the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. And in doing one of the initial oral history interviews, it was with Charlene Bickford, who has a role as the with the First Federal Congress project as an editor. But she was one of the key people in the lobbying efforts to retain funding for NHPRC. So I'm not sure how much is her oral history interview, others who also similarly were influential. Page Putnam Miller was one of the people that I interviewed who was the liaison for basically lobbying activities for the Society of American Archivists. So of the people that were on the list, Mary Ann Chaffee—so this is by memory so I might not have things exactly right. Mary Ann Chaffee, Stephen Daniels, Stanley Falk, Edward Gleiman, Page Putnam Miller, Marion Morris, Tom Persky, and Ira Shapiro. And these were people who either worked in congressional offices as staff people or were agency historians, or in one way or another played a role for the National Archives independent movement. And basically the project sort of just petered out. You know, there were archivists like Gerry Haines who I interviewed, John Porter Bloom who I interviewed, but there was an immense number of former archivists or even current archivists that were on tap. You know, I expanded my purview to interview a fellow with IRS and a fellow with Justice Department because both had been prominent, not always in a complementary way, for the National Archives in the way the independent legislation got created.

Rebecca Brenner: If I might ask, when you were managing the Oral History Project, what was your process of identifying people to interview?

Rod Ross: Good question, and I don't have a good answer. So, there was the initial listing of people that were initial memo and then just using my own judgment. So one of the things that I did was grandfather into that collection an interview that I had done. My wife and I had been at Sara Dunlap Jackson's apartment and I done an interview with her two years earlier in 1982. So, basically I grandmothered that interview into the collection. But in some ways my beginning with the National Archives was a high point in my career. Because I was basically the GS-6 office gopher in the Office of Presidential Libraries, and as such was rubbing shoulders with the top people in the agency, so I had some idea who the key people were. And just having an interest in history, there were people like Jimmy Walker, who was the key African American genealogist, and in effect the key genealogical expert for the National Archives; so I wanted to include him. Harold Pinkett in the founding generation of archivists and the key African American Archivist of the initial years of the agency, so I wanted to include him and the opportunity came up to do a second follow-up interview to the one Phil Brooks Sr. had done with Bob Bahmer, the fourth Archivist of the United States. Bob Bahmer and Wayne Grover having brought on Bert Rhoads as basically their successor. And I interviewed Bert Rhoads the former Archivist, and that was the one that George Scaboo had said, “Oh, there's lots of unused secretarial help in the National Archives, getting transcriptions won’t be any problem.” And in point of fact his secretary did the transcription for the Bert Rhoads interview. But for the other ones, my hat is off to you, Rebecca—

Rebecca Brenner: [Interposing] That's what interns are for.

Rod Ross: For not only taking on this project but doing transcripts as well. So I was basically collecting cassette tapes, and cassette tapes sitting on the shelf are of little or no use, so I took advantage of two interns. And they created transcripts by disguise, so multipage basically summary what was spoken of so that one could basically follow in order, so then if one wanted to then hear the actual text basically to make one's own transcript that at least became a doable project. So eventually I stopped and nobody seemed to notice, and that was the end of the project. So if that seems like if my career at the National Archives if we're simply focusing, when we had a brief discussion. Yes, we will focus on that, we will not focus on my Black History Month presentations and arrangements with the Illinois State Society, other than those that were filmed by C-SPAN. And we won't talk about things like through the Illinois State Society putting on the program and the Lithuanian embassy after going on a Jewish heritage tour of sorts to Lithuania in 2012. But rounding out the National Archives picture I came back to the Oral History Project in a sense. A year or two ago I had applied to membership in a club here in Washington, the Cosmos Club, and Meyer Fishbein in his late 90s was my second sponsor. So there was a kind of direct link that Ernst Posner had been Ira's sponsor and Ernst Posner, you know the esteemed German refugee that I had first done my publication on. It sort of all tied in together, so in re-listening to the Meyer Fishbein interview I arranged with Jessie Kratz to basically do a program at Archives II that became a National Archives YouTube, “Meyer Fishbein Remembers,” so it was a very warm, not too many people in the main theater there of the National Archives but a very warm time for Meyer speaking to a whole new generation of archivists. There are two other sort of National Archives-related things that in very, very recent years I've done. One was a 2013 Prologue, Pieces of History bit, “Death Takes No Holiday: Full Military Honors at Arlington in 2014.” And that really highlighted the work of Bill Seibert, chief of archival operations at the National Archives in Saint Louis. A fellow in my building had died, Odis Quick, I learned about it in kind of a roundabout way and found that his body was still, months later, in an Arlington funeral home. And I ended up signing off on the papers for the cremation. And through Bill Seibert got paperwork that would allow burial in the columbarium at Arlington—

Rebecca Brenner: [interposing] That's like straight off a West Wing episode.

Rod Ross: Well, sometimes if only one person hears you, that's all you need. And the one person who heard me was Claire Kluskens, who's the genealogy expert here at the National Archives, and she took it really upon herself to locate the heirs of Odis Quick, and by golly she did. And, you know, so there were two sisters who were nieces of Odis Quick. One in Colorado, and one in California, plus there was a cousin of theirs who had converted to Islam and was living in Mali. So the two sisters here in the United States basically came to Washington. They took care of disposing of the apartment, the co-op apartment, and some months later they decided they were not going to opt for an Arlington Cemetery ceremony and instead quietly did a dispersal of ashes. So if anyone is curious to the follow-up that Prologue article, the Arlington Military Honors never came to be. So there was one more fairly recent sort of National Archives military-related thing I was associated with and that was being a YouTube for Memorial Day, Memorial, say 2015.

Rebecca Brenner: Before we get to YouTube, there was one more publication I wanted to ask about, didn't you write something of use on congressional records for Western History?

Rod Ross: Yes.

Rebecca Brenner: Could you speak to that for a second?

Rod Ross: Okay, so let's go back, because I wasn't sure whether we wanted continue, since I'd done a little bit of speaking at the last interview on my career with the Center for Legislative Archives. But I'm delighted you raised that topic, because I in fact at one time did want to talk about that. So if we talk about publications that I've been associated with at the Center for Legislative Archives; if we start out with the Guide to the Records to the House of Representatives, that the National Archives published, that guide in 1989 for the Bicentennial Congress, and then a companion work that Bob Coren was pretty much the sole editor and compiler for the Senate equivalent. So I was working with the Library and Printed Archives Branch and decided I wanted to leave. I had talked to Trudy Peterson, who sort of serves as my guardian angel, while she ended up her career at the Archives as an Acting Archivist of the United States, and wrote a support letter for the Cosmos Club application for me. So, I went to Trudy and basically said, I think I want out. And, by an odd coincidence, the day before somebody associated with the Center for Legislative Archives to-be, had told her that they needed more assistance for writing chapters for the House guide, so I went on initially a detail, I served as author for the chapters on the District of Columbia Committee, on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on the Space Science and Astronautics Committee, and for the last committee I found it gratifying because during my two-year career as a legislative assistant, in the 94th Congress to a one term Democrat from Illinois, Tim L. Hall, I was his liaison for that committee, so I had a chance to sort of see things from both sides. So my first publication of sorts with the National Archives relating to the Center was that guide. The second one was my publication in the Journal of Western History in the Serial Set “A Source for Western History,” which was my excuse to explain what the serial set was and its wonders. So that I still continue to think of that as, if I'm going to cite one single publication, that would be the one that I would think would be the greatest contribution, period. So there was a follow-up publication, so the Serial Set article was in 1994, the follow-up publication was in 1999 in the Journal of Government History, and that was basically a discussion of the Su-Docs. The Superintendent of Documents Library Classification System, since I had been working with Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government, and then in 1988 that record group's responsibilities were folded into the newly created Center for Legislative Archives and I basically moved along with it. So I moved from being on detail with the Center to going off for a month to Ann Arbor having a Bentley fellowship and having my topic on Early Administrative Histories in the Age of Computers that actually got published in India. So when I came back, I was sort of now a part of the Center for Legislative Archives, and I switched from doing projects to basically reference, and that's been my career with the agency ever since. So knowing something about government publication was which was now a part of the responsibilities of the Center for Legislative Archives, I was happy to be available to do that article, it was an issue that I think Kris Wilhelm had an article in that same magazine on legislative materials relating to the creation of what eventually became the Department of Defense, and Richard McCauley, the historian with the Center, had something about the history of that movement. So that particular article of mine looked at this two-year period between the demise of the War Department and the Navy Department before the creation of the Department of Defense that 1947-48 time period. There was something called the National Military Establishment, because it was a very small entity it was able to talk about the totality of the records, the publications that were associated with that Su-Docs class. So that largely is for publication at the Center. In 1992, I was part of OAH program on Indian-related records and basically talked about the things in the Serial Set as well as this marvelous collection from the mid-1920s; there was a Senate investigating committee that looked into the Indian question in the United States. And half of all Indian-related record the Center has a part of that collection of materials. So the final thing I want to talk about relating to the Center responsibilities was I came up with a paper in 1994 for an Illinois history symposium on records relating to documents in the House and the Senate before the Civil War that highlighted the history of Illinois, and from that I ended up having this as a slide presentation, I ended up giving the slide presentation to the Illinois State Society. Went to a board meeting to explain what I would be doing, essentially never left. So, much of the things I'm most proud of are actually activities I've done with the Illinois State Society. Which you had mentioned that for this interview we could talk about C-SPAN presentations, and I was especially prominent in putting together Black History Month presentations and I soon realized that there would be hardly anyone from the membership who would go to such things, that if I could basically put on presentations for other groups, it would be the other group's activity. So one of the first such things with the National Archives volunteers, and there had been a Prologue article on Ida B. Wells Barnett, who had ended up her career in Illinois, so basically had the Prologue author speak about Ida Wells Barnett and had that open to the Illinois State Society. Then I hit into doing things with the U.S. Capitol Historical Society and especially Matt Wasniewski as House Historian. So, one of the C-SPAN programs that's filmed is my giving an introduction to a historian in the office, Laura Turner O'Hara, in February 2011. That was her talk on Senator Hiram Revels, who had an Illinois education, he went to a kind of preparatory school associated with my college, Knox College, in Galesburg. And then a year later there was a program that I put on John Willis Menard, who had he been seated would have been the first African American in Congress. And Philip Magnus talked about his early career, especially going to Belize and then—you look like you don't want me to finish.

Rebecca Brenner: I'm really interested, but it just occurred to me that I'm not on topic. So, if I could ask you to move on to the Memorial Day Video.

Rod Ross: Okay, let me just finish John Willis Menard and say for that C-SPAN program. So there are three things that if you Google C-SPAN and Rodney A. Ross come up, I end up reciting a love poem as a kind of transition between the two persons by Menard. So moving on to the Memorial Day program, which really fits in with this interview series, because Jessie Kratz, the Historian, had talked about doing an oral history interview with me.

Rebecca Brenner: And from what I've heard when you interviewed with her originally you talked about what you were going to do for the Memorial Day project, so if I could ask you what you did for the Memorial Day project?

Rod Ross: Well, again, this becomes interesting. So basically, instead of doing the oral history interview, she had arranged for John Heyn, H-E-Y-N, to tape the presentation and she had agreed to let me basically redo, recreate the 1978 text of a talk I gave in my hometown in Batavia on men from Company B of the 124th volunteer regiment and their service in the Civil War, largely using records and especially with guidance from Mike Musick, who was the Civil War expert at one time here in the agency. So it was 18 minutes, it was not terrible, but it was not anything for appropriate for a YouTube presentation, and subsequently John Heyn and I both spent a whole lot of time. Both my re-working the text, my liaison Amy, with the curator at the Batavia Depot Museum for photos from Batavia and the YouTube that we finally, finally ended up with was something entitled "Memorial Day 2015: Why it Matters." So it started out with the presentation that I had written for the Archivist, introducing me, indicating that I would highlight one National Archives record, if you Google me, Rod Ross Memorial Day, it's easy to find the YouTube.

Rebecca Brenner: I've watched it.

Rod Ross: And one thing that John wanted to do was do it outside by the G.A.R. monument that is kitty-corner from the National Archives Building. And eventually there was a wonderful spring day, the magnolias were in bloom, we did it outside at noon-time filming. And I'm very, very happy with the result. Since it basically did tie in with my things with the Illinois State Society, since one of the key things I've done with the Illinois State Society is not only bring about a remembrance of John Willis Menard but especially one of the most prominent Americans of the late 19th century, John A. “Black Jack” Logan. So if you listen to one of the verses of the Illinois State Song, it refers to Grant and Logan and Lincoln. So, Logan's key credit is as commander of the Grand Army of the Republic he issued to the general order establishing the end of May for what became Memorial Day, Decorations Day.

Rebecca Brenner: So what exactly was that document that you used?

Rod Ross: The document was a record from the compiled service order—

Rebecca Brenner: [interposing] What's that?

Rod Ross: So, in terms of military paperwork, especially in this case, Civil War military paperwork, there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers, North and South, in the Civil War, if not millions. I'm not sure whether it would have been the Adjutant General's Office established a way of grouping together paperwork on individuals, and there was one fellow from Company B of the 124th Illinois Volunteer Regiment who was killed at the time of the siege of Vicksburg. So, basically I got the page that had his name and then killed Vicksburg and the date in 1863 and that was the document, was the featured document. So it was sort of like, yes—and there was a picture of the Civil War Monument in Batavia something dedicated in 1918. It had his name. So I don’t have a picture of him and I don't have his signature, but it was like bringing an unknown soldier to life. So yes, and part of the tie-in was the Memorial Day observance, and ended up quoted part of that general order that relates to it being incumbent upon comrades to honor their fallen comrades. “Their soldier lives were a reveille of freedom to a race in chains and their deaths a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.” I found it dramatic and I ended my presentation with that dramatic reading.

Rebecca Brenner: Are there any other presentations that you want to highlight that you've done that are telling of the National Archives as an agency?

Rod Ross: Okay, there's one more that relates to workings of the National Archives, sort of, and that was a presentation last June, a year ago, June 24, 2014. That was a presentation of the Afro-American History Society and that was in Archives II and it was filmed by the society, so it's not a National Archives YouTube, but it has been filmed. A close friend of mine, a neighbor, is Dr. Ezra Naughton, who was born in St. Croix, and his talk entitled "The 1848 Emancipation of a Slave Population: US Virgin Islands as a Mirror on America." So it was a National Archives group that hosted that presentation, you know the National Archives does have a record group for the Virgin Islands, and so I think that counts. There have been a couple of times that I've done introductions of speakers, there was one twice this year, as a matter of fact. William Marvel had a talk here in the theater, "Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton," and then last month in July, Anthony Pitch talked about his book, Our Crimes were being Jewish.

Rebecca Brenner: I went to that.

Rod Ross: So, you heard me?

Rebecca Brenner: And I've read it.

Rod Ross: So, I've known Tony Pitch for a number of years, and I'd once told him that I wouldn't be able to go to a presentation he was giving because I had put together a field trip for myself to go to the Eisenhower and Truman libraries, which I did. Because I had arranged for my sister-in-law's mother, Joyce Wagner, to speak at the Eisenhower Library on her self-published memoir: "A Promise Kept." So as a Holocaust survivor, survived two years in Auschwitz, she ended up in her book quoting General Eisenhower and his becoming overwhelmed with emotions on seeing those survivors and those who did not survive the death camps, and the ones the Americans liberated were not really the death factories that Auschwitz and other places were.

Rebecca Brenner: Did you help Anthony Pitch with finding documents here?

Rod Ross: I was instrumental in his using some quotes from Joyce Wagner. The first time I worked with him was on his War of 1812 book. And for that there was, I think, a House of Representatives investigation into the war and I had provided those to him. So that was the beginning of my assistance to him. I did not work with him on his second major book, that of, They Killed Poppa Dead on the Lincoln assassination.

Rebecca Brenner: I'll end with the same question I ended the last interview. Are there any other anecdotes or words of wisdom that you want to share before we conclude?

Rod Ross: Well, I appreciate having the chance to do this follow-up interview. And I guess there is, if I'm talking about oral history interviews, there was one that doesn't count that I'd done for a labor oral history interview project at Roosevelt University in the early ‘70s with one of father's first cousins who left Zarsas, Lithuania in the same emigration group as my paternal grandfather, which does sort of tie into a National Archives record, because subsequently I found the passenger manifest for that emigration group and it's interesting that none of the names jived. So my last name is Ross, and by the time of the 1910 census my male relatives and my direct ancestors were using the name Ross. But the passenger manifest gives the name as Resch, R-E-S-C-H. Now, my grandfather was Louis, he's listed as Laib on the manifest. It helps bring to life an individual story of the story of America. So I was happy with that effort when I worked with the two years in what was a proto- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s office, last two years of Reagan's first term, I did a number of oral history interviews with staff members that are findables there at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. So rather than talk about other aspects of my life, I will close and thank you very much.

Rebecca Brenner: Thank you very much.