This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the term “Cold War” being used to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. On April 16, 1947, Bernard Baruch gave a speech in the South Carolina House of Representatives, telling his audience, “Let us not be deceived—we are today in the midst of a cold war.”
Baruch, a financier and presidential advisor during the Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman administrations, was privy to the international tensions surrounding nuclear arms as a representative to the United Nations (UN) Atomic Energy Commission.
Bernard Baruch (Courtesy of CalTech Archives via Calisphere)
The UC Berkeley Oral History Center (OHC) has several interviews related to Bernard Baruch and the Cold War, including oral histories from Philip Read Bradley Jr., a mining engineer and family friend of Baruch; Charles Easton Rothwell, a State Department employee who contributed to the founding of the UN; and Roger Randall Dougan Revelle, a scientist and the former director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Rothwell and Revelle in particular are concerned with discussing the Cold War in general, including issues related to international relations and atomic energy regulation and testing.
In his interview Philip Read Bradley Jr.: A Mining Engineer in Alaska, Canada, the Western United States, Latin American, and Southeast Asia, Bradley says of Baruch’s character:
Afterwards I saw a good deal of Baruch, and came to enjoy him, and admire him very, very much. I was talking to him one day, and he said: “Back in my time, when things were good, I could look at the economy and make a prediction that I regarded as reliable, about what would happen next, or in a few years, and I could act on that. And that made me a good deal of money.” He said, “It makes a little difference who’s in the White House.” And I said, ‘What do you think of Truman?’ And he said, ‘He’s a nincompoop.” He says, “We’ve got a nincompoop in the White House now.” But anyhow, Baruch had lots of rules; my dad used to quote them. One of the rules was, “No use doing business unless it’s good business.”
Roger Revelle (Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, via Calisphere)
In the first of his four interviews (Roger Randall Dougan Revelle: Oceanography, Population Resources and the World, Volume 1: Preparation for a Scientific Career), Revelle discusses the early nuclear arms race, including fears about the control of nuclear weapons. Bernard Baruch himself was instrumental in the creation of the Baruch Plan, a proposal by the US government for decommissioning nuclear weapons and internationalizing and regulating atomic energy. Revelle mentions the Baruch Plan, and the related Acheson-Lilienthal Report on international control of nuclear weaponry, in his discussion of early nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll:
“The Russians didn’t have any atomic bombs at that time, and there were some people out at Bikini, Admiral Solberg was one, who suggested that— [brief discussion about a whale visible off the coast] —that we should tell the Russians that we would use our atomic weapons against them if they developed them. That we ought to decide right now to abolish the things on both sides. There was one famous Baruch plan, Bernard Baruch and [David E. ] Lilienthal, I guess, who was by that time the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, which had tried to reach an agreement with the Russians about atomic weapons, to not develop them, not have them. But this never got anywhere.”
When asked about the UN Atomic Energy Commission, of which Baruch was a part, Charles Rothwell said in his oral history Charles Easton Rothwell: From Mines to Minds, “I was aware of some of the problems. And I got to know Bernie Baruch, because I had to staff his operations too.”
Rothwell describes Baruch as dedicated to his work, claiming that, “He was very serious about wanting controls placed on the development of the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and would have preferred that it not even stretch nearly as far as it did in Europe. We’re the real culprits in the use of nuclear energy for war purposes because we did it.”
The mentions of Bernard Baruch in the Oral History Center are quite interesting to look back on as a marker of such an important period of world history. In particular, Rothwell’s and Revelle’s interviews discuss not just Baruch’s involvement in the quest for nuclear regulation, but the general climate of the United States and the UN in the period following World War II.
Shannon White
You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria.
Shannon White is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying Ancient Greek and Latin. They are an undergraduate research apprentice in the Nemea Center under Professor Kim Shelton and a member of the editing staff for the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics. Shannon works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
Related Resources from the OHC and The Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library contains hundreds of materials related to the Cold War, including illustrations, interviews, books, and speeches. For some items in the collection related to Bernard Baruch specifically, see:
Baruch, Bernard M., Freedom for Man: – a world safer for mankind. An address delivered … at a meeting held at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, May 25, 1955. Bancroft Pamphlet p E767.1.B3.
Baruch, Bernard M., The making of the reparation and economic sections of the Treaty. Bancroft (NRLF) D648 .B3
The Oral History Center also has many interviews that discuss the Cold War, including several from the Free Speech Movement Oral History Project, the Oakland Army Base Oral History Project, and the Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project. From our home page, go to “Oral Histories” > “Projects.” For a look through some of the oral histories concerning the Nixon administration, check out “The Week that Changed the World: Nixon Visits China,” by Shannon White. See also, “‘I take this obligation freely:’ Recalling UC Berkeley’s loyalty oath,” by Shannon White with research by Adam Hagen.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
Books line the shelves in the Main (Gardner) Stacks at UC Berkeley. A program, now underway, leverages the interconnectedness of the University of California’s libraries to strategically preserve and manage collections, and to broaden discoverability and access. (Photo by Violet Carter for the UC Berkeley Library)
The UC Berkeley Library has recently embarked on an outreach effort to spread the word about the University of California libraries’ shared print strategies program to departments, institutes, and centers across campus.
This program is not new and has been active for a number of years. Contacts at the California Digital Library’s Shared Print Strategy Team and UC campuses have provided this information to local campus contacts as well as UC system faculty committees, including the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Committee on the Library, or LIBR; the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, or UCOLASC; and the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee, or SLASIAC. The focus of the outreach is to convey that UC’s libraries are more interconnected than ever with one another, and with academic libraries across the country whose print collections augment and complement our own. This interconnectedness affords us an opportunity to redouble UC libraries’ efforts to engage in systematic and collaborative planning around print collection development and management.
The strategic goals are:
Preserving print resources to ensure the ongoing availability and integrity of that content.
Facilitating seamless discovery and access to content.
Enabling the collection of and access to more and unique content.
Even though our work is largely invisible to you, the UC Berkeley Library wanted to share some basic information around the UC shared print strategy.
In addition to preserving print resources and content for future generations, the program provides access and discovery within UC libraries’ collections as well as enables the exploration of unique content beyond our collections.
If you have questions about the UC shared print strategy, please email scholarly-resources@lists.berkeley.edu. We look forward to hearing from you and answering any questions you have as we continue to innovate around developing and providing access to print collections for current and future UC faculty and students.
Loyalty oaths have long been in use in the United States as a means of promoting social unity in the face of war, perceived security threats, or fears about waning political support. Even now, loyalty oaths are common as a condition of employment for many state workers. In fact, all employees of the state of California, including the faculty and staff members of the University of California, currently sign an oath of loyalty upon hire, stating that they will defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and that they take this obligation freely.
In particular, the idea of a governmental loyalty oath rose to prominence in the 1940s, when tensions between the US and the Soviet Union and growing fears about a communist infiltration of the government prompted President Harry S. Truman to establish a loyalty program for federal employees. In March 1947, Truman signed Executive Order 9835, which ensured that employees of the US government could be subject to investigation for potential involvement in “subversive” organizations.
In the wake of President Truman’s Executive Order, the California state legislature began to introduce its own policies in opposition to potential communist activity in the government. These proposals would have given the state authority over the University of California in matters of loyalty, prompting the University of California administration to act in response to prevent infringement on the institution’s autonomy. Furthermore, the university was at this time also facing financial difficulties, with the state threatening to withhold funding for the university budget due to worries about subversive activity within its community. As a result of these mounting pressures, University President Robert G. Sproul proposed his own loyalty oath for university faculty and employees on March 25, 1949. The text of the oath approved by the Regents on June 24 was as follows:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability; that I do not believe in, and I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath or a party to any agreement or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.
Almost immediately, the introduction of the loyalty oath garnered controversy. Many faculty members and staff refused to sign the oath, resulting in a rash of firings and resignations and a tense stand-off between the Board of Regents and university faculty, staff, and students. The oath was later declared unconstitutional in 1951 in Tolman v. Underhill, and many of the thirty-one dismissed faculty returned to Berkeley.
University of California Regents’ Meeting about Loyalty Oath Non-signers, 1950 August 25, BANC PIC 1959.010. San Francisco News-Call Bulletin Newspaper Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
The UC Berkeley Oral History Center has several interviews related to the loyalty oath controversy, many from UC faculty members who witnessed or were themselves involved in the response to the oath’s introduction.
Among these is a collection of interviews specifically concerning the loyalty oath, which features oral histories from Howard Bern, a UC Berkeley faculty member who signed the oath last-minute; Ralph Giesey, a graduate student of non-signer Ernst Kantorowicz; and Deborah Tolman Whitney and Mary Tolman Kent, the children of Berkeley professor Edward Tolman, a key leader of the faculty opposition to the oath.
These interviews reveal the fraught relationship between university faculty and administration after the instatement of the loyalty oath, with rampant fears about academic freedom and discrimination against potentially “subversive” faculty members. Here, Howard Bern shares his distaste of the oath and his moral grounds for originally refusing to sign:
I felt that it was discriminatory, that it was singling out university professors as if they were especially potentially evil. So on a civil libertarian ground I objected to this. And the second ground was my own feeling. I had been in the army for almost four years. What more manifestation of loyalty did they really want?
In the oral history of Charles Muscatine, who returned to UC Berkeley in 1953 after being fired for his refusal to sign the oath as an assistant professor, Muscatine recalls the most poignant moment for him of the entire controversy:
At a certain moment, [Malcolm Davisson, a faculty policy chair] contacted me. He said, “We have lost the moral right to decide.”
Other interviews offer more insight into the experience of witnessing the loyalty oath controversy firsthand. For instance, Ralph Giesey discusses the hearings he and his fellow non-signing teaching assistants had to undergo as a condition of their opposition to the oath. Howard Schachman, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley at the time of the oath, describes the moral compromise he underwent when he signed something he considered philosophically “abhorrent.”
Chancellor Clark Kerr (left) and Robert Gordon Sproul, November 16, 1953
The loyalty oath controversy at UC Berkeley is often viewed through the perspective of academic freedom amid anticommunist fervor, but an oral history of Clark Kerr, UC Berkeley faculty member at the time — and later campus chancellor and university president — provides another perspective. Kerr observed that the controversy must be viewed in light of the internal divisions in the Board of Regents that escalated in the 1940s over debates about centralization versus campus autonomy. According to Kerr, Regent John Francis Neylan and the southern regents tended to favor campus autonomy, while University President Robert G. Sproul and most of the northern regents called for a centralized system. This issue resolved itself with the creation of the post of chancellor for each UC campus, and Kerr himself was later appointed to the position at UC Berkeley in 1952.
According to Kerr:
As I understand it, Neylan really just seized on the oath controversy as a way of whipping Sproul around because he was unhappy with him on other grounds. . . . [Sproul] looked to me like a man who was just immobilized by the controversy. It was out of this, according to what I observed, that [Earl] Warren then came to take a position of leadership, which he had not taken in the regents before. Normally governors don’t. But the controversy was tearing the university apart. The president was immobilized. Warren stepped in, then, essentially against the oath, or at least against the firing of the non-signers, and took leadership of the more liberal elements of the board.
Howard Bern also recognizes Robert Sproul’s role in mishandling the loyalty oath controversy, stating, “Just as, although he would not admit it, the Free Speech Movement really broke Clark Kerr, I think the loyalty oath situation just destroyed Robert Gordon Sproul and his influence. I don’t think he was a bad man, a bad leader, but I think he made a very fatal error.”
All in all, these oral histories concerning the UC loyalty oath controversy are a great resource for understanding the climate at the University of California in the 1940s and ’50s. They offer a wealth of insight concerning the faculty experience at UC Berkeley, and since many of the interviewees went on to become involved with the Free Speech Movement and other political causes, there is a particular focus in these oral histories on the growth of social movements at the university. For more information about the loyalty oath controversy, check out the Oral History Center’s collection of interviews concerning the oath and other related resources from The Bancroft Library.
Shannon White is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying Ancient Greek and Latin. They are an undergraduate research apprentice in the Nemea Center under Professor Kim Shelton and a member of the editing staff for the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics. Shannon works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
Adam Hagen is currently a third-year history student with a concentration in modern European history. Adam works as a student editor for the Oral History Center. He is also a member of the editing staff of Clio’s Scroll, the Berkeley Undergraduate History Journal.
Related Resources from the OHC and The Bancroft Library
Oral Histories Cited
Clark Kerr, University of California Crises: Loyalty Oath and the Free Speech Movement.
The Loyalty Oath at the University of California, 1949–1952. Interviews with Howard Bern, Ralph Giesey, Mary Tolman Kent, Deborah Tolman Whitney.
Howard Schachman: UC Berkeley Professor of Molecular Biology: On the Loyalty Oath Controversy, The Free Speech Movement, and Freedom in Scientific Research.
Charles Muscatine: The Loyalty Oath, The Free Speech Movement, and Education Reforms at the University of California, Berkeley.
Related Oral History Projects
The SLATE Oral History Project documents the UC Berkeley campus political organization SLATE — so named because the group backed a slate of candidates who ran on a common platform for ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California) elections from 1958 to 1966. SLATE ignited a passion for politics in the face of looming McCarthyism and what many perceived as the University of California’s encroachment on student rights to free speech. See also, “They Got Woken Up”: SLATE and Women’s Activism at UC Berkeley
The Free Speech Movement Oral History Project documents the movement at UC Berkeley that began in the fall of 1964 from the perspective of the ordinary people who made it possible — and those who opposed it — including students, lawyers, faculty, and staff.
Related Resources from The Bancroft Library
Gardner, David Pierpont. The California oath controversy. F870.E3C4122.G3.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The fundamental issue : documents and marginal notes on the University of California loyalty oath. Bancroft F870.E3 K18.
Papers pertaining to California loyalty oaths, 1954. Bancroft BANC MSS C-Z 92.
University of California, Berkeley Accounting Office loyalty oath records, 1949–1964. UC Archives CU-3.11.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
The On the Waterfront oral history project is a collection of interviews from residents of Richmond, California conducted by the UC Berkeley Oral History Center in the 1980s. These oral histories span decades, offering an interesting glimpse into the history of the Bay Area in the early- to mid-twentieth century. This collection features interviews from shipyard workers, cannery employees, fishermen, and early residents of Richmond, many of whom have resided in the area for decades and have witnessed firsthand the city’s evolution over the better part of a century.
These interviews devote a great deal of time to talking about the development of the city as a result of World War II. Common themes throughout the On the Waterfront project as a whole include labor practices, race relations and discrimination, and industrial growth and urban development in the Bay Area.
Title: Workers (general photos). Identifier 35. From the Henry J. Kaiser Pictorial Collection, The Bancroft Library. Available on the Online Archive of California.
During the 1940s, Richmond experienced a massive influx of workers, many of whom arrived from the southern United States as part of the Great Migration, seeking wartime employment at local businesses or the Kaiser Shipyards. “I thought it was in the neighborhood of eighteen to twenty thousand. By the time Kaiser came in and all the shipyards moved in there, we were over a hundred thousand,” Joseph Perrelli, whose family founded the Filice and Perrelli Canning Company, says of the rapid population and industrial growth in Richmond as a result of wartime industry.
F & P Brand Solid Pack Tomatoes label, 1929. Courtesy of the History San Jose Research Library, via Calisphere. Identifier: F144A3D6-2ADB-4D06-9E10-193468533590 1985-95-34.
In his interview, Perrelli describes the history of the Filice and Perrelli Canning Company, which began in 1913 as a small family business and grew exponentially during the war.
They would ask us to bid on their needs to feed the army as far as tomatoes and fruit was concerned. We were competitive. We had to bid against each other. We bid against our fellow canners. But the percentage that the military allowed us was much greater than we could get in competition with our fellow canners. Naturally we made some money on the sales that we made to the government, to the military.
The increased need for labor during the war meant that job opportunities opened up en masse for women and people of color, many of whose testimonies were put on record by the Oral History Center. Here, Lucille Preston describes her experience working as a welder in Richmond during World War II:
We would have to punch the time clock at eleven-thirty. I would leave home around eleven-fifteen. . . .Then we would have to go and get our own welding lines. I’m sure you don’t know what that is, but it looks just like a water hose, these welding lines. I would have to have two, one on one shoulder and one on the other, and I would have to climb up a ladder or go down in a hold on a ladder and carry those on my shoulders.
Preston looks back on the hands-on work she performed as a positive experience, recalling, “We would have to go out in the water on the ship. The ship was floating while we were on there welding. So it was really fun. I really enjoyed it.”
Mollie Bowie, son Marvin Foster, Selena Foster, Richmond, 1947, following Mrs. Bowie’s move to Richmond
At the same time though, Selena Foster, the owner of the Oakland-based restaurant Selena’s Kitchen and an employee of Lou’s Defense Diner during World War II, discusses hiring discrimination for black women looking for shipyard work, saying:
There were blacks out there but mostly the white girls were the ones who got all the training. They all had to wear the same welding suits because this was a training outfit. So they would just try them for so many minutes, and then they would try the other. We tried the whole day to get fitted. Other girls kept coming, white girls. Alma was kind of chubby but she wasn’t fat and at that time I only weighed about a hundred and ten, and it seems that we were too big. This was just prejudice.
Marguerite Williams, a long-time Bay Area resident, also recalls an almost instantaneous increase in racialized violence and discrimination in conjunction with the growing black population in the Bay Area:
It seemed like overnight people on the street would be fighting with knives and everything. . . . When we first came to Richmond in 1946, [Harry Williams] and I and the kids, there was still a lot of that bad feeling, because you would go into the store downtown and the people wouldn’t want to wait on you.
Harry Williams, whose mother worked for the Filice and Perrelli Canning Company in the 1930s, discusses the lack of cannery employment for people of color in the decades following: “I don’t think they hired any blacks that I know of. If they did, they had menial work. They weren’t working on the line.”
Wartime industry in Richmond brought both economic success and population growth to the city, but at the same time brought with it a myriad of issues with racial discrimination and exploitative labor practices. For example, Joseph Perrelli discusses early anti-union sentiment in the canning industry, which led to protests and strikes among the Filice and Perrelli labor force, something Perrelli recalls as “labor activity that was inamicable to our interests at that time.”
Aside from these wartime industries, many other enterprises saw wild success in Richmond over the years, including several fishing and whaling operations.
Pratt Peterson, a lifetime fisherman and former employee of the Richmond Whaling Station, talks about the Bay Area whaling industry over the decades. Here, Peterson discusses the early days of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf:
That was a long time ago. You talk about San Francisco being a different town. When I was fishing shark, I lived on a boat at Fisherman’s Wharf. Fisherman’s Wharf wasn’t what it is now. There were a lot of vacant lots.
When discussing the current state of the Richmond Whaling Station, which closed in the early 1970s, Peterson recalls, “The slip is still there where they pulled them up, and some of the winches are still there. A lot of the equipment to cut the whale up is still there. Of course, it’s all rusted out now, but they haven’t moved it out.”
Dominic Ghio, a lifetime commercial fisherman, describes his family’s experience fishing and shrimping in the Bay Area for almost a century. Regarding his and his siblings’ work, Ghio says:
It was in San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay. We used to commute. We would park our boats in Richmond. That was in the 1930s. And we slept on the boat five days a week. Then, from Richmond we used to go commute home and get changed, take a bath and do what we had to do. Then on Sunday evening in the afternoon we’ll go back and do it all over again. Three hundred and sixty-five days of the year all around.
The stories in these oral histories span the better part of a century of Richmond’s history and include the interviewees’ perspectives on issues that are still very much relevant to the Bay Area of the twenty-first century.
Stanley Nystrom, a longtime resident of the city, discusses the widespread “drug panic” of the 1980s, noting that though these issues affected Richmond, they were not exclusive to the Bay Area:
Now it’s nationwide and worldwide. It has affected the economy, it has affected the crime, it’s affected people in such drastic ways. So you can’t really relate that to Richmond alone. It’s all over everywhere.
Lewis Van Hook, 1991. Photograph by Judith K. Dunning.
Lewis Van Hook, a member of the Singing Shipbuilders gospel quartet during World War II, gives his thoughts on life in Richmond over the years, mentioning the city’s experience with police brutality at the time of the interview in the early 1980s and the 1983 NAACP lawsuit against the City of Richmond in response to police behavior:
I think it’s still a good place to live, but I would say, in some ways, there’s lots of room for improvement. This problem that they’ve been having now with the police has been kind of disgusting. I think there needs to be some improvements both ways. . . .These lawsuits that they’ve been having—I don’t know, I think of it and think of both sides of it. I know you have some brutality on the police’s side. We’ve had some all right.
The interviews of this oral history project are vibrant and interesting, providing a wealth of information about life in the Bay Area during a time of massive population growth, industrial evolution, and urban development. The narrators for this project have unique perspectives on the changes that Richmond has experienced over the years, and many also share their hopes for the city’s future as well.
Shannon White
You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria.
Shannon White is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying Ancient Greek and Latin. They are an undergraduate research apprentice in the Nemea Center under Professor Kim Shelton and a member of the editing staff for the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics. Shannon works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
Related Resources from the OHC and The Bancroft Library
Henry J. Kaiser pictorial collection: Approximately 150,000 items (photographic prints, negatives, and albums). Bancroft BANC PIC 1983.001-.075–PIC and other locations. See especially Richmond Shipyard workers.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
We are pleased to announce that historian Paul Burnett has been named the interim director of the Oral History Center upon the retirement of Martin Meeker last month. Paul joined the OHC staff in 2013 and has been a versatile historian with a focus on science, engineering, and UC Berkeley history. He has published a number of academic articles, and has developed and directed several large-scale oral history projects: on economics, paleontology, Czech physics, the San Francisco Opera, and engineering, among other subjects. Paul has also worked to reach a wider public with a series of blog posts, a curriculum for high schools on epidemics in history, and podcasts on the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the contribution of UC Berkeley to the rise of Silicon Valley.
Prior to joining the Oral History Center, Paul was an assistant professor with the Science and Technology Studies Programme at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. Before that, Paul researched and produced museum exhibits for the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. He completed his PhD at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, where he developed his research on the politics of expertise — how scientists and experts of all kinds establish their credibility, and how people choose between different kinds of expertise to try to solve complex social, political, scientific, and technical problems.
Please join us in welcoming Paul Burnett to his new role.
February 2022 — This month marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s weeklong visit to China, a trip that resulted in the establishment of a formal diplomatic relationship between the governments of the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
The UC Berkeley Oral History Center’s collection contains several interviews discussing the event, as well as the political and public atmosphere that surrounded Nixon’s 1971 announcement of the impending trip. Included in these are the accounts of both Caroline and John Service, the latter a diplomat and member of the United States Foreign Service. The Services were among the few Americans welcomed back to the country in the early 1970s by Zhou Enlai, then the premier of the PRC.
President Nixon Shaking Hands with Chairman Mao, February 21, 1972 (Photo: National Archives. National Archives Identifier 194759.)
In Caroline Service’s oral history, she discusses the era of “ping pong diplomacy” in the early 1970s that occurred prior to the president’s visit to China. “We were all electrified one day. . . by seeing on television, reading in the paper, seeing pictures that the American ping pong team was going to Peking,” Service recalls of this turning point in the relations between the two countries.
In this interview, Service also discusses the public perception of Richard Nixon at the time of the trip, echoing the popular opinion that only Nixon, as a staunch anti-communist with the support of his fellow political conservatives, could make such a move without widespread criticism. As Service says:
Now I have hardly a good word to say for Nixon. I have disliked him intensely forever, it seems to me, since ever he appeared on the political scene. Yet, I suppose that only a Republican conservative, reactionary almost, president could have done this. I do not think a Democrat could have done this. I think it had to be done.
In his oral history, Dr. Otto C. C. Lin, whose career is in Chinese technological innovation and entrepreneurship, offers his perspective on Henry Kissinger and Nixon traveling to China. When asked about the effects of the visit on Taiwan, Lin said, “Republicans were always considered friends for KMT [Kuomintang]. Hence, Nixon was considered a turncoat and Kissinger an accomplice of Nixon in betraying his friend, the ROC [Republic of China].” Ultimately, though, Lin says, “I think history would say that Nixon and Kissinger did the right thing to help open up China.”
Cecilia Chiang, a chef and entrepreneur credited with popularizing northern Chinese cuisine in the United States, discusses in her oral history the buzz surrounding the state dinner attended by Nixon and Kissinger during their visit. “The menu was printed in all these newspapers in the United States and also the Chinese Newspaper,” recalls Chiang, “People called in. Called in from New York, from Hawaii, called me. ‘Can you duplicate that dinner? That dinner for us. We would like to just fly in just for that dinner.’”
Chiang remembers her surprise at the simplicity of the meal, stating that when she saw the menu, “I started to laugh. They said, ‘Why do you laugh?’ They put bean sprouts on the menu, because China is so poor at the time. No food, no nothing.”
These interviews contain a wealth of insightful information concerning not just the presidential visit to China, but also the general political climate of US foreign relations in the 1970s. Caroline Service offers the perspective of a family who had by this point been involved in US foreign diplomacy for decades. Otto Lin leverages the Nixon visit in relation to the modern political, cultural, and economic landscape of China. Cecilia Chiang’s oral history provides a glimpse into the culinary landscape of China, a country still struggling with rationing and food shortages in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.
Shannon White
You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria.
Shannon White is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying Ancient Greek and Latin. They are an undergraduate research apprentice in the Nemea Center under Professor Kim Shelton and a member of the editing staff for the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics. Shannon works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
Oral Histories Used Here
Caroline Service: State Dept. Duty in China, The McCarthy Era, and After 1933–1977
Otto C.C. Lin: Promoting Education, Innovation, and Chinese Culture in the Era of Globalization Volume I: Oral History
Cecilia Chiang: An Oral History
Related Resources from The Bancroft Library
Cecilia Chiang is included in the Chez Panisse, Inc. pictorial collection. BANC PIC 2001.192.
Caroline Service letters to Lisa Green : TLS and ALS, 1950 Sept.–1995 April. Bancroft BANC MSS 99/81 cz.
Caroline Schulz Service papers, 1919–1997. Bancroft BANC MSS 99/237 cz.
John S. Service papers, 1925–1999. BANC MSS 87/21 cz.
Once again, UC Libraries are collaborating on a UC-wide Love Data Week series of talks, presentations, and workshops Feb. 14-18, 2022. With over 30 presentations and workshops, there’s plenty to choose from, with topics such as:
How to write effective data management plans
Text analysis with Python
How and where to share your research data
Geospatial analysis with R and with Jupyter Notebooks
Data ethics & justice
Cleaning and coding data for qualitative analysis
Software management for researchers
An introduction to databases for newspapers and social science data
3-D data, visualization, and mapping
All members of the UC community are invited to attend these events to gain hands-on experience, learn about resources, and engage in discussions about data needs throughout the research process. To register for workshops during this week and see what other sessions will be offered UC-wide, visit the UC Love Data Week 2022 website.
We would like to congratulate Martin Meeker on his retirement as the director of the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library. As Martin put it, when you spend so much of your time listening to the stories of other people’s triumphs and challenges, at some point you want to focus on creating your own story.
Martin with Daisy at Dillon Beach
Martin has achieved much during his time at Bancroft. He started his career here as an interviewer/historian in 2004, after graduating with a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. Martin published Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s in 2006 with University of Chicago Press; The Oakland Army Base: An Oral History, an anthology of fifty interviews;along with a number of articles over the years. He served as acting associate director of the Center from 2012 to 2016 and became its director in 2016.
From the early 2010s, Martin built up the program, hiring four full-time interviewer historians and a communications director, managing and initiating large endeavors such the Freedom to Marry Project, and facilitating longstanding partnerships with the Getty Trust, the East Bay Regional Park District, and the National Park Service, to name just a few. Under Martin’s leadership, the OHC has continued and expanded its education outreach and public profile. An expert interviewer, Martin conducted interviews with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Governor Jerry Brown, along with many artists, financial experts, and vintners, to hint at the range of his interviewing.
Lisa Rubens, retired oral historian and longtime OHC interviewer, reflected on Martin’s appointment: “I worked closely with Martin after he joined our staff in 2003. He was a breath of fresh air — his scholarship, collegiality, and interviewing skills were immediately obvious. Once becoming director he created an environment which supported our staff in interviewing people in all walks of life, sustaining OHC’s deserved reputation as the nation’s leading academic oral history program.”
We thank Martin for his contributions to the growth and health of the Oral History Center, and we wish him the best in writing this next chapter of his own story.
An announcement about the interim director and director search will be made in our next newsletter.
On Jan 25, 1972, Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm, representative for New York State’s Twelfth District and the first African American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, announced her candidacy for president. With this announcement, Chisholm became both the first African American to run for a major party’s presidential nomination and also the first woman ever to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. The UC Berkeley Oral History Center has several interviews that address Chisholm’s trailblazing candidacy. In addition, the Center has numerous interviews with other ground-breaking female politicians.
Shirley Chisholm thanking delegates, Democratic National Convention, Miami Beach, Fla., 3rd session (Photo: Library of Congress)
“Anything that black women do like that, they’re pioneering; they’re the first, or one of the first. Because it takes a lot of guts and militancy and sacrifice to do those things when it isn’t popular.” — Frances Mary Albrier
Frances Mary Albrier was a woman of numerous accomplishments. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she was an indefatigable opponent of racism, a civil rights activist from the 1920s onward, the first woman elected to Alameda County’s Democratic Central Committee, as well as the first black woman hired by Kaiser Shipyards during World War II. She founded the East Bay Women’s Welfare Club, and her efforts led to the hiring of black women teachers in the Berkeley public schools. Albrier discussed Chisholm’s then-recent candidacy when she was interviewed in 1977 and 1978 as part of a series on women political leaders.
Frances Albrier leading picket at corner of Sacramento and Ashby, 1939. (Photo: Berkeley Plaques)
Mrs. Chisholm pioneered when she ran for Congress in New York as a black woman. Anything that black women do like that, they’re pioneering; they’re the first, or one of the first. Because it takes a lot of guts and militancy and sacrifice to do those things when it isn’t popular, and it wasn’t popular for a black woman in the East or anywhere. Now, when Mrs. Chisholm ran for president, she did it again. She’s pioneered the way for [others]. Eventually, we’ll have a woman president of the United States. Those doors have been opened. People had looked at her and they’ve talked about a woman running for president. They heard what she had to say. It will be much easier for the next woman who has the ambition to run for president to do so.
Janet West was also interviewed for the women political leaders series, focusing on her work as a Santa Barbara Board of Education member. In the multi-interview volume Women in Politics Volume II, West spoke about how her experiences as a parent influenced her desire to run for office, and both motivated and informed her decisions as a board member. In her 1972 oral history, West discussed the significance of Chisholm’s then-contemporary candidacy:
I think if you’re talking about a large political office, people have the idea that you know, a woman couldn’t stand up under the pressures and maybe couldn’t take all that guff or whatever it is. I think we really have to overcome that type of thing and I’m not sure how many votes Shirley Chisholm will get just because she’s a woman, certainly not because she’s black but because she’s a woman and I don’t think people really feel that a woman can do all that hard work. It’s a lot of hard work.
Professor Harry Edwards joined UC Berkeley’s department of sociology in 1971. He conducted scholarship in the area of sociology of race and sport and is also renowned for his involvement in the famous Black Power salute on the victory podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. In “Harry Edwards: An Oral History,” he discussed his early life and upbringing in addition to his role as a scholar-activist, his time at Berkeley, and his work as a consultant to national football and basketball teams. When he was interviewed as part of the UC Berkeley African American Faculty and Senior Staff oral history project in 2005, Edwards spoke of Chisholm with both the knowledge of a contemporary and the perspective of a sociologist. Edwards discussed Chisholm’s extraordinary independence:
Harry Edwards, 1984 (Photo: Toru Kawana, Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library via Calisphere)
Shirley Chisholm, first of all, she had one phenomenal liability, and what I call it is the Stevenson syndrome. She was extraordinarily bright. She was extremely intelligent. That’s a phenomenal liability in the convention of the American political scene. She also had an independence to her that put her outside of the authoritative black leadership influence and control circle. The authoritative black leadership influence and control circle tried to get her not to run. They did not feel that it was “time” for a black woman to step out and run for President. She ran without the endorsement of the NAACP, without the endorsement of the Congress of Racial Equality, without the endorsement of SCLC, without the endorsement of Operation PUSH and Jesse Jackson. She ran on her own.
Shirley Chisholm is one of many women politicians discussed in the Oral History Center’s collections. The Oral History Center contains a wide variety of interviews on women in local, state, and national politics. For more on ground-breaking female politicians, the Oral History Center’s Women Political Leaders collection contains interviews that cover almost the entirety of the 20th century, from the suffragists onward. Interviewees include March Fong Eu, the first Asian American woman in the United States to be elected to a state constitutional office; Helen Gahagan Douglas, the first Democratic woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; and Hope Mendoza Schechter, a member of the Democratic State Central Committee and an activist for both the labor movement and the Mexican American community. The Oral History Center continues to preserve the histories of women leaders in the political sphere and is currently conducting new interviews with female political leaders in the Bay Area Women in Politics and California State Archives projects. For those who wish to learn more, a good place to start is the Oral History Center’s Women in Politics podcast, which has episodes on a variety of important female political leaders of the twentieth century — at the local, state, and national levels — including Francis Albrier.
Mollie Appel-Turner
Mollie Appel-Turner joined the Oral History Center as a student editor in fall 2021. She is currently a fourth-year history student with a concentration in medieval history.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
It’s been a topsy-turvy couple of years. But it’s not the only time in recent memory that the world’s turned upside down. As the Omicron variant has once again derailed our path to normalcy, I decided to search the Oral History Center’s collection to see what our interviewees have described as topsy-turvy. Referencing the trivial to some of the most challenging times in recent history, those who used the adjective included household names like Chief Justice Earl Warren and California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, as well as artists, urban planners, venture capitalists, and Rosie the Riveters. Topics raised include the rise of Hitler, atomic weapons, the Great Depression, educational equity, campaign finance, messy houses, and downtown San Francisco. Here are the results.
See below for a detailed description of how to search our collection by a keyword like topsy-turvy.
Mannequin after the Operation Cue atomic blast, 1955 (Photo: National Archives)
The rise of Hitler
Betty Hardison: Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project
“The world was beginning to be topsy-turvy. That was around 1939, when Hitler was not being very friendly.”
During World War II, Betty Hardison worked at the Mare Island Naval Shipyards for the department responsible for repairing ships damaged during Pearl Harbor. Here she reflects on why she gave up her dream of university and journalism and took her first job.
Betty Hardison
When it was time to go off to school, I sold my clarinet and I went to Armstrong Business College in Berkeley. . . . It no longer exists, but it was a very prominent business school at the time. I took secretarial and all phases of business. But at that time, then, the world was beginning to be topsy-turvy. That was around 1939, when Hitler was not being very friendly. . . . Journalism was a strong goal. I had been editor of the yearbook and things like that, so I thought that I wanted to go to the university and take journalism. But then with the world being turned upside-down, I went for my first job.
Related discussion within the interview: educational expectations for women, life in Calistoga, California during the Great Depression
Downtown San Francisco
Robert Riley: 1988–2000 Curator of Media Arts, SFMOMA 75th Anniversary
“He found San Francisco to be completely topsy-turvy, vertiginous, and absolutely mad.”
Steve McQueen’s “Drumroll” on display (Photo: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art)
Robert Riley, the curator of media arts for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, recalled the inspiration for artist Steve McQueen’s work, Drumroll. McQueen had visited San Francisco during the exhibit of his work, Bear, in the early 1990s.
When he was in San Francisco, he experienced the hurly-burly, topsy-turvy development of the downtown—there was a lot of construction when he was here. There was traffic mayhem. . . . He found San Francisco to be completely topsy-turvy, vertiginous, and absolutely mad. He work-shopped an idea here of putting a camera lens into the drain hole of a striped orange construction barrel, which he borrowed. He’s a large man. He decided to start pushing the barrel down the street and just telling people to look out.
Related discussion within the interview: acquisition of Steve McQueen’s work, Bear; the development of Drumroll
Atomic bomb testing
Jean Fuller: Organizing Women: Careers in Volunteer Politics, Law, and Policy Administration
“Was that the mannequin whose head was cut off? Do you remember?”
Jean Fuller, director of women’s activities of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, 1954–58, was present at an atomic bomb test explosion in May 1955, dubbed Operation Cue. Conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission outside of Las Vegas, the test was designed to determine how the blast would affect people (represented by mannequins), food, and various structures. Looking at before and after photos of a test home, Fuller discusses the results with her interviewer, Miriam Stein.
Jean Wood Fuller, 1958 (Photo: Federal Civil Defense Administration/Internet Archive)
Fuller: Now, here’s the before scene of that living room where we saw the man all topsy-turvy. As you see there were draperies and there were Venetian blinds. Now, had they had the draperies pulled completely across, the blinds probably would not have done quite as much damage but they were only as people normally leave them.
Stein: Was that the mannequin whose head was cut off? Do you remember?
Fuller: No, he was upside down here someplace.
Stein: That’s right. He was hanging over a chair.
Fuller: Yes, but he undoubtedly would have been dead.
Related discussion within the interview: detailed account of the atomic test
Campaign finance
Earl Warren Sr.: Conversations with Earl Warren on California Government
“Some poor son of a gun with no money but with a great issue will come along, and he’ll just turn them topsy-turvy.”
Earl Warren, who attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and also received his law degree from Berkeley Law, was governor of California and chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Here he discusses campaign finance with his interviewer, Amelia Fry, and an editor from Doubleday and Company, Luther Nichols, who was assisting Warren with his autobiography.
Official paining of Earl Warren as governor of California
Nichols: I think Alioto spent half a million dollars—
Warren: More than that.
Nichols: It came out to something like six dollars a voter — six dollars a vote—
Warren: Well, I’ll tell you. Of course, it’ll go along that way and then some poor son of a gun with no money but with a great issue will come along, and he’ll just turn them topsy-turvy. Now, you take that fellow who was elected—was it governor or senator—in Florida this year [1971]. He was a little country lawyer, Chiles, his name is— He’s a little country lawyer, he had no money of any kind to spend, but he told them he was going to start in the north of Florida and was going to walk clear through the state making his campaign. And, by George, he did. He’d arrange every way that— To start in the morning where there was a television station, and they’d pick him up there, say something about him, and he’d always stop at a television station at night. [Laughter] He got publicity that way and never spent a nickel on it, and he went all through the state, and he beat the whole outfit. [Laughter]
Fry: And he got all that free TV time!
Warren: Oh yes, he got all that free TV time.
Fry: He must have had a million dollars of TV time!
Warren: [Laughter] And never paid a dime for it!
Related discussion within the interview: decision to run for governor, campaign finance
Education
Justice Cruz Reynoso: California Supreme Court Justice, Professor of Law, Vice-Chair United States Commission on Human Rights, and 2000 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
“Somehow those parents, when they have come to a meeting, have felt uncomfortable, as my parents did when they went to a PTA meeting.”
Cruz Reynoso, who received his law degree from Berkeley Law, was the first Hispanic California State Supreme Court justice. Here he reflects on race relations and parental involvement in schools.
Cruz Reynoso (Photo: UC Davis School of Law)
I will tell you a story because it turns things topsy-turvy. I may have told you about this. I was invited to go speak on a Saturday to a parent-student group in a school in the Los Angeles area. When I got there, I noticed that practically everybody involved was Spanish-speaking, and a great majority of the kids there were there, but the leadership of the PTA and practically everybody in charge was Latino. So I asked, “Is this an entirely Latino school? Do you have some other folk?” And they said, “Oh yes, about 20 percent of our students are Anglo.” And I said, “Well, where are the Anglo parents?” And they said, “We don’t know. We keep inviting them; they just don’t come.” I was bemused because I have heard that story told a hundred times about Latino parents by Anglo parents, “You know we keep sending these notices. They don’t come. They must not be—” They don’t say this, but the implication is “they must not be interested in education or must not be interested in their kids.” Well, I just said, “Maybe you ought to do something more so they feel comfortable when they come to these meetings and so on.” Something is not quite right when 20 percent of the parents don’t come to a Saturday function that is supposed to be good for everybody. I don’t know what they have done right or wrong, I really don’t. I nonetheless have the absolute sense that they haven’t done enough. Somehow those parents, when they have come to a meeting, have felt uncomfortable, as my parents did when they went to a PTA meeting. And we as human beings are smart enough to be able to figure things out on how to make those folk feel more comfortable and so on.
Related discussion within the interview: affirmative action generally, and in particular at UC Berkeley
Venture capital partnerships
Paul Bancroft III: Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists: Shaping the Economic and Commerce, Industry, and Labor Landscape
“Others are saying the world has kind of gone topsy-turvy today—I don’t mean today, but up until recently.”
Paul “Pete” Bancroft was an early participant in the venture capital industry and president, CEO, and director of Bessemer Securities Corporation. Mr. Bancroft also devoted considerable time to The Bancroft Library, which was founded by his great grandfather, Hubert Howe Bancroft.
Paul “Pete” Bancroft
It finally evolved, unfortunately, to the point where the venture capital partnerships were investing so much money that with the fees they were getting, the 1 percent to 2.5 percent of the assets, that they were making more money that way than they were on the profits that were being made when the investments were sold. It meant that they were really starting to lose sight of really making money on the companies they were investing in. Which is why Arthur Rock and others are saying the world has kind of gone topsy-turvy today— I don’t mean today [2010], but up until recently.
Related discussion within the interview: venture capital partnerships, CEO salaries, Bessemer Venture Partners
The de Young Museum. . . and the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Jim Chappell: Directing the Resurgence of SPUR & Urban Planning in San Francisco
“Who can hate a baby seal?”
Jim Chappell is a retired urban planner whose forty-year career focused on intertwining environmental conservation into urban design. As the director of the nonprofit SPUR (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association), he helped shape San Francisco into a modern city. Here he discusses design and structural problems with two California landmarks.
Jim Chappell
The de Young Museum harkens back to the Midwinter Exposition of 1894, and then opened as the de Young Museum in 1895. It grew topsy-turvy over the years and was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In fact, they built a steel exoskeleton around it to keep the walls from falling down. It had never been a great museum in terms of collection or building. And they are related. . . .
The [Monterey Bay] Academy was three or four years behind the de Young, so they got to learn from the mistakes, or at least knew what they were going to be up against when they started. Like the de Young, it was a building that had grown like topsy and was a mess of a building even before the earthquake. And then in the earthquake, pipes broke, which isn’t very good if you’re an aquarium. . . .
A baby seal
So in March 2000—this was three-and-a-half years after the first de Young bond vote—there was an $87 million bond on the ballot for the Academy. They needed 66 2/3 percent “yes.” They got sixty-seven. Phew. Just sneaked by. It was a different call than “old art.” It was “kids.” Their poster for the “yes” on the measure was a baby seal. Who can hate a baby seal?
Related discussion within the interview: California’s proposition system, the adaptability of Golden Gate Park, and the evolution of parks and recreation since the 1800s.
How to search for a keyword like topsy-turvy
You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. From our home page, I entered topsy turvy in the search box and clicked search. (I did not get a different result with/without a hyphen.) There were 18 total results, including when the interviewer used the term or it appeared in an introduction.
When you get to the results page, you might not initially see any oral histories. This is because the “full text” feature is off by default. On the results page, toggle on “Fulltext search.” A number of oral histories will populate on that page in a list. Please note that sometimes I get better results when I change the default “all the words” to “partial phrase.”
From the results list, click on any oral history. The next page will provide information about the oral history, such as interviewer, publication date, project, and so on. That page also enables you to read or download a PDF of the oral history. Without downloading, I entered the word “topsy” into the oral history search feature and selected “highlight all.” Then I just clicked on the arrow to be taken directly to the word. Repeat clicking on the arrow to see all examples of the search term within the oral history.
Jill Schlessinger is communications director and managing editor for the Oral History Center. She received her doctorate in history from UC Berkeley.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials, including our podcasts and articles, are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
In the wake of President Truman’s Executive Order, the California state legislature began to introduce its own policies in opposition to potential communist activity in the government. These proposals would have given the state authority over the University of California in matters of loyalty, prompting the University of California administration to act in response to prevent infringement on the institution’s autonomy. Furthermore, the university was at this time also facing financial difficulties, with the state threatening to withhold funding for the university budget due to worries about subversive activity within its community. As a result of these mounting pressures, University President Robert G. Sproul proposed his own loyalty oath for university faculty and employees on March 25, 1949. The text of the oath approved by the Regents on June 24 was as follows:
Lisa Rubens, retired oral historian and longtime OHC interviewer, reflected on Martin’s appointment: “I worked closely with Martin after he joined our staff in 2003. He was a breath of fresh air — his scholarship, collegiality, and interviewing skills were immediately obvious. Once becoming director he created an environment which supported our staff in interviewing people in all walks of life, sustaining OHC’s deserved reputation as the nation’s leading academic oral history program.” 
