The humble memo was a ubiquitous feature of American business life throughout the twentieth century, though it has faded in salience, if not necessarily in use, in the twenty-first as electronic media replace paper. Variations of this *genre existed before its American heyday, however, and have continued past it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the memorandum genre has been referred to in the English-speaking world since at least the fifteenth century, with its shortened name, the memo, appearing by at least the eighteenth century. The term can refer to several genre variants, with different socially agreed-on purposes and recognizable form features, however, and the preponderant variant has changed over time, at times reflecting organizational developments and at times technological ones. Its earliest purpose was as a note that served as an aid to the writer’s memory, whereas its primary use in the twentieth century was as correspondence to another person within the same organization, generally with a secondary documentary purpose. It has legal, diplomatic, and commercial senses, as well, with one of those acquiring renewed salience in the Trump era.
One early and basic use of the term memorandum was to refer to a note a person made about something he or she wanted to remember in the future—for example, a shopping list, observations, or an account of an event. Although some memorandums were written for a single occasion (such as a note about a single important event), others were more regular. On the title page of the fictional Moll Flanders (by Daniel Defoe, 1722), for example, the subtitle claims this account of her life was “Written from her own Memorandums,” apparently referring to an ongoing series she (putatively) wrote during her lifetime. A daily entry in a diary was often referred to as a memorandum, too, and both individuals (e.g., Clarissa in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel by that name) and commercial entities (e.g., Hudson’s Bay Company) referred to memorandum-books in which regular notes of events were recorded. Such memorandums included a date and possibly time of day as a standard form feature. The term memorandum has been used to refer to this version of the genre much less frequently in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than in earlier centuries.
Since at least the sixteenth century, another variant was the legal memorandum, a type of legal document that recorded an agreement or transaction for future reference. In this case, the genre was more formal and intended not just to help the person writing it to remember its contents later, but also to attest to the agreement for other audiences, including courts. Such use required specificity in dates and details of the agreement, as well as more formal, precise language. Although this legal memorandum variant existed almost as early as the personal memorandum for use only by the writer, it has survived more visibly and is still used for some legal matters, particularly when combined with other terms, as in memorandum of understanding or memorandum of agreement.
The world of diplomacy adopted a related version of the memorandum genre. According to the OED, in this sense the memorandum might summarize a question or issue, or recommend a course of action (e.g., the 1876 Berlin Memorandum between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia). Its purpose was less formal than that of a treaty. Like the legal memorandum, the diplomatic memorandum was not written solely for the benefit of the writer, but for others, as well.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the genre most familiar to most of us emerged in the realm of American business. The business memo, as it was most often termed, did not exist in the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, most firms were very small and could be managed by word of mouth, supplemented by correspondence over distance. Letter correspondence in American firms communicated information, opinions, and instructions between partners when one was traveling, or between an owner and sales agent at a distance. The form of the business letter genre included conventional openings (e.g., “Your esteemed favor of the 16th ult. duly to hand”) as well as elaborate sign-offs (e.g., “Most humbly and devotedly yours”) and tended to be long and wordy. Letters of this form were also used between firms.
By the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, many American business organizations had grown and acquired more hierarchical layers. A new philosophy of management, systematic management, was developed and expounded in articles appearing in engineering and management publications. Proponents (sometimes called systematizers) advocated (1) depending not on individual initiative or memory but on systems mandated and documented by management, to be communicated in writing to those at lower levels; and (2) monitoring performance by recording data regularly at the lower levels and passing it up to higher levels for comparison and evaluation. This movement created new demand for written correspondence and documentation within firms. At the same time, technologies of written communication, many of which had been available for some time, were adopted to make creating such written documents more efficient. Typewriters, carbon paper, and stencil copying, along with new methods of storage such as vertical filing cabinets, facilitated the creation, distribution, storage, and retrieval of internal correspondence.
The philosophy soon extended to making the correspondence itself more efficient, by stripping away the opening and closing flourishes of traditional letters and developing a new format for internal memorandums or memos, as they were called. This format included the now familiar to, from, date, and subject lines, intended in part to aid clerks filing this internal correspondence for later reference. Systematizers within firms as well as textbook treatments outside them advocated brevity and conciseness that contrasted with the old norms for letters. The increasing numbers of managers within firms also used memos to communicate and document lateral, as well as vertical, interactions and relations. Indeed, a cynical view of memos, captured by the description of their primary function as “CYA” (cover your ass), was that their authors wrote them to document a particular view of an event or interaction for later defensive use rather than to communicate with the recipient in the first instance. For better or for worse, memos became a ubiquitous feature of twentieth-century organizational life.
By the end of the century, however, the advent of electronic mail, followed by other electronic media in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, challenged the dominance of the memo, in name if not in function. Although the format of electronic mail adopted the now traditional heading of the memo, many in business saw emails as a genre themselves, and one that drove out the memo. Reflecting a more historicized view, we can say that the memo genre migrated into the email medium, but not every email message exemplifies the memo genre. Businesspeople can use email (and now increasingly other messaging applications) for quick, coordinating messages that they would once have conveyed in person or by telephone, as well as for more extended messages with the same purpose and even form as paper memos, but now sent electronically. The increased linguistic informality introduced in many personal emails has bled over into what used to be a more concise, business-like style in memos. In addition, many other genres of external communication (e.g., the sales letter, the fund raising letter) now take the form of email, as well. So all email messages are certainly not memos, but memos are still one genre seen among the many email messages in our inboxes.
The legal memorandum has also undergone changes from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. During much of the twentieth century, long and relatively formal typed legal memorandums analyzed the issues in a case for clients. Law students were taught to write such legal memorandums, just as business students were taught to write business memos. By the early twenty-first century, however, such documents have given way to email communication with clients, along with occasional informal (and electronic rather than paper-based) memos.
Another use of the memo genre in law and government that has received considerable recent attention reflects both the memo as a record of an event to augment the writer’s memory and the memo as documenting an event for others. James B. Comey, at that time director of the FBI, wrote a series of memos, the first of which was addressed to three colleagues at the FBI and the others (as released) not including addressees, to document his conversations with President Donald J. Trump about the Russian dossier and other issues. Comey wrote these memos immediately after each of his meetings with Trump in January 2017 and intended them as contemporaneous documentation, to be used defensively if needed. As such, they were much discussed in the news after Trump fired Comey a few months later. This use of the memo to document a person’s view of what happened, like the business use of the memo, is unlikely to go away, whether the document is paper or electronic, suggesting that the memo still has an important future.
JoAnne Yates
See also diplomats/spies; governance; letters; merchants; observing; office practices; photocopiers