Up from the Basement: Archives, History and Public Administration

Abstract

In 1929 Margaret Cross Norton, Archivist of the state of Illinois, addressed the Conference of Archivists being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) on the subject of archives as an administrative function of government.The essential nature of.public archives was legal, she said, and the archivist's primary responsibilities were the promotion of admin istrative efficiency and the protection of individual rights, rather than the facilitating of historical scholarship.Although these remarks were greeted by the assembled h istorians with "stony silence," they corr:ectly foreshadowed the emerging differences between archivists and historians. 1 These comments on the nature and functions of government archives were made by way of explaining the slow pace with which public records programs had developed in most states.Although twenty-two states 2 had developed nominal programs by that time, Miss Norton expressed the belief that only about a dozen states were giving systematic and sustained care to their records.The principal reason for this, she alleged, was the popular misconception that archives existed primarily to serve scholarly researchers.This opinion, she argued, made legislators reluctant to appropriate funds for programs which seemed to duplicate functions already being performed by state libraries and historical societies, and which seemed to them to be of only marginal importance in any case.In retrospect, there are many reasons to explain the underdevelopment of the archival profession in the United States in the year 1929.The National Archives Act would not be passed by Congress until 1934, although $6.9 million had been authorized for a building in 1926.

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