DESMOND KING
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATIONS: WASHINGTON, D.C. AND U.S. PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES
I judged racial divisions to be one of the most important features of American politics and society, but this view was not widely shared by political scientists in the 1980s and 1990s. Although there were important historical studies on racism and segregation, there were few efforts to analyze how the federal government’s own policies purposefully contributed to racial inequalities and how lawmakers designed institutions such as federal labor market policy to create, maintain, or expand racial segregation. My expectations were confirmed in this research, and working from a non-U.S. university was an advantage. Notably, while pursuing this research, the most persistent and increasingly irksome questions I encountered as a non-American undertaking fieldwork in the United States were “How did you become interested in racial politics in the United States?” and “Why do you think that is important?”
Whether undertaking archival research across numerous presidential libraries (those of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter), in the National Archives in downtown Washington, D.C., or interviewing bureaucrats and politicians generous enough to meet with me, I learned to craft polite responses to these inevitable queries. I explained that taking a historical American political development approach to U.S. politics, elections, and public policy outcomes required understanding how constitutive racial divisions and politics are to the political system’s organization and outcomes. And I explained how enduring many divisions were and how consequential and purposeful federal policy was in shaping racial patterns in the United States. I would make the same claims today.
My years spent analyzing racial inequality in the United States taught me not only universal lessons about how best to conduct archival research and interviews but also how studying America’s most sensitive subject as an outsider could both raise suspicions and open doors in the field. For the most part, the suspicious stance was disarmed, but not always.
MY QUESTIONS
I conducted periods of research in Washington, D.C. and presidential libraries over ten years beginning in the mid-1980s. My interest was to investigate whether and, if so, how the federal government shaped racial segregation in its policy interventions in American society and within its own bureaucratic structures. The period of research interest was from the Pendleton Act of 1882, which introduced a system of merit exam–based entry in the federal civil service, through the early 1970s, when the effects of civil rights legislation began to materialize. Although many scholars of African American politics and history had a loose understanding of this issue, few had undertaken any detailed study of how and why federal bureaucracies segregated their employees and program—and the effects of this policy. Moreover, most still held the view that segregation was a southern phenomenon only.
WASHINGTON, D.C. AS A RESEARCH CENTER
In an era before the widespread use of mobile phones, digital cameras, and internet access, organizing visits to physical archival sources was necessary for any study with a historical perspective. Several centers were available.
First, and most important, were the records available in the National Archives and Record Administration on Pennsylvania Avenue. In this era, all the national archives were available in this building. Most records have since been relocated to the University of Maryland College Park dedicated site, a good hour’s shuttle from downtown Washington.
The National Archives were an exceptional resource; they were open until 10 p.m. four evenings a week and until 5 p.m. on Saturdays. I was able to conduct interviews often during the day and spend the evenings and Saturday working with primary documents in the National Archives. However, identifying and calling up records was not unproblematic in a number of respects. Archivists were weary and skeptical of the many “researchers” who trailed through their building, and they had to be convinced that your research inquiry reflected a real research interest rather than a family or genealogical obsession. Furthermore, it took several hours for the records to appear. Once requested, a trolley with twelve to fifteen boxes would eventually appear, and a trolley load could be ordered ahead of time and be ready to be consulted. Photocopying was liberally available. Somewhat dauntingly, the reading room was monitored by an armed police officer who checked readers IDs at the entrance and scrutinized materials on exit. It was not an arduous process of entry and exit, but it was a meticulously controlled one.
The contrast with the second center, the Manuscript Division in the Library of Congress, which was located nearby, was huge. This is a small archive with specialist collections and a high ratio of archivists to researchers. Requested material—for me the huge records of the NAACP—appeared with alacrity, and copying and note taking was undertaken in a comfortably spacious reading room.
Third, most government agencies had their own libraries and record centers containing invaluable records. Access to these sites was variable, often depending on goodwill. Being a non-U.S. citizen was commonly an advantage in persuading archivists and librarians to permit access, and many gave of their time generously to assist in research questions. First, there was genuine courtesy toward a visitor to the country who was undertaking serious research. Second, I inferred that many archivists assumed that the fruits of my research would probably not reach back into the United States because I was based at a university elsewhere (this was not true, of course, as my books are published through U.S. presses), and that they could therefore be more candid in identifying sources and noting the significance of some of them. As civil servants, archivists and librarians work under strict federal regulations about fraternizing and responding to the public; this approach relaxed a little with outsiders. This is a hypothesis only, but I have heard similar reflections from other non-U.S.–based scholars. Last, many were liberals who understood the significance of racial divisions in U.S. politics, and others—notably keepers of labor records—were keen for me to recognize the importance of the records they treasured. For example, I came to place more emphasis on the role of a senior AFL-CIO figure in making labor market policy because of the research materials I was directed toward by an enthusiastic archivist.
ARCHIVAL DISCOVERIES
The vastness of U.S. federal archives and multiple potential sources of information about government policy had some advantages. First, it was possible to cast a research net widely; for example, in addition to calling up records on individual government agencies, the records of congressional committees responsible for overseeing them were also available. This created many opportunities to confirm and cross-reference sources. It could also turn up gems such as unpublished memoranda, long forgotten or mislaid congressional reports on specific topics (such as the hiring of black workers in federal agencies), and correspondence about discrimination in dusty folders.
Second, archival records generated puzzles. For example, one of the main senior personnel I was tracking in the deeply segregated U.S. Employment Service (USES), created as a federal-state system in 1933, disappeared abruptly from his position running the USES. A small newspaper clipping in a folder referred casually to this departure and the reason behind it. This source provided a valuable clue to his role as a facilitator of further segregation in the employment service.
This experience of unexpectedly finding important primary material resonates with the recollection in Stathis Kalyvas (see chapter 4) of finding “tens of unopened, huge bags full of papers rotting away” in the basement of a provincial court building. These records proved important to how Kalyvas conceptualized and studied violence in Greece’s civil war for his influential book on political violence, and the documents I found proved similarly valuable in my own work.
Third, noticing that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons was created only in 1927 and was a driver of racial segregation in federal prisons, I tracked the bureau’s archives to the Department of Justice rather than to the National Archives. These agency archives provided a treasure trove of records with detailed minutes from the annual meeting of federal prison governors, including discussion about how they would grapple with the looming desegregation implied by the Supreme Court Brown decision in 1954. These records, in particular, encouraged me to think about how segregation existed across the whole federal government and about who maintained it.
ARCHIVAL FOOTPRINTS
Replicating the archival sources identified by scholars in their studies is a fruitful way to begin researching topics in archives. My surprise in using this strategy was the inaccuracies in primary source referencing in many existing scholarly publications. At the AFL-CIO archive in Washington, D.C.—another separate collection—the archivist could only locate the material I was seeking to examine by referring to the dates when the scholar had used the facility and the archival records listed under the visit. The reference, as given in the published account, was inaccurate, and such inaccuracy was surprisingly common. To overcome it, readers of my books will find overly long referencing—my intention is that anyone wishing to find the exact source I used to make a point or introduce evidence will be able to do so using my citation.
INTERVIEWING
To examine and investigate the more recent measures in federal agencies designed to tackle racial segregation in the workplace and the federal government’s impact on society, I interviewed senior personnel in a range of agencies including the now defunct U.S. Civil Service Commission. Many of the interviewees openly acknowledged that the issues were difficult and contested, and they were willing to discuss aspects of this contestation because they expected the materials to be used in publications outside the United States. An example of these sorts of issues is the post-1964 requirement that every government department and agency create an office of civil rights enforcement as a condition of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. These offices were supposed to conduct annual studies of progress in racial desegregation and racial hiring in their departments and agencies, and to report to the Civil Service Commission. Several departments failed to establish these dedicated offices, and many such offices acted in a desultory fashion despite the urgency of achieving equality of opportunity in employment for previously discriminated against groups. I had useful discussions about the causes of the cross-department variations and the generally slack approach to enforcement.
The historical context is worth recollecting. Progress in alleviating racial inequality took a severe beating during the Reagan years, and although the middle of the George H.W. Bush presidency and opening years of the Clinton administration recorded more positive trends to reduce racial inequalities, there were still searing problems. The Family Support Act of 1988 (although mild compared to its 1996 successor) had further eroded the federal commitment to the least well off, including African American recipients. This era predated mass incarceration.
I also conducted interviews about federal welfare policy, labor market policy, and equal rights with a range of civil servants. Again, many of these interviewees first responded by expressing their surprise that a non-U.S.–based scholar was interested in such issues, but they usually opened up expansively once the interview got rolling. There was variation between white and African American interviewees, the latter less surprised about my research interest. African American professionals were much more aware of the patterns of racialized inequality captured in federal welfare programs and about the barriers to racial equality in education and employment. Many white interviewees also knew the broad trends but wanted to place these beside other important pockets of white poverty and disadvantage. The same question about the source of my interest in racial inequality arose in interviews with interest group and think tank representatives.
LESSONS LEARNED
I learned a good deal from my fieldwork in the United States about both the specific research issues and the practice of research.
I have always preferred semistructured interviews in which I take notes by hand (now on a laptop) rather than recording the conversations. In my experience, especially on sensitive issues such as racial segregation and integration in government departments (or more recently interviewing financial elites in government agencies and banking institutions), not recording is essential to reach a useful level of frankness and depth with interviewees. Recorded interviews often become sanitized, or aimless. In the early 1990s, as I conducted this research, I was sufficiently disciplined to write up notes from interviews in detail each evening. This not only helped accuracy but also pointed to other issues and leads to follow as part of the research strategy.
I learned a couple of key lessons from working with primary documents in archives. First, many scholars give poor or inaccurate citations in their reference sections, so it is always worth following up the references and trying to identify the accurate source. Often this source material implies something different than the inference drawn by previous scholars—or at least interpretation of the material is contestable. Second, never hesitate to copy or photograph a source even if you are doubtful about its relevance—researchers rarely have time to physically return to sources, and the memory of which file it is located in is always shaky. Digital cameras now make it easier to record everything. Ideally, a scholar should have months to leisurely sieve through documents, deciding upon relevance and interest; such time is rarely available except perhaps to doctoral students. One of my worst experiences occurred at a presidential library. I was using another archive in the same city, and I missed a day in the presidential records. The archivists had cleared my desk, and I did not have time to find a key document I had been reading. Finally, primary documents will never be fully digitalized, so casting a wide net when consulting them in archives is crucial to stimulating research both for the project at hand and for future projects. As I studied state intervention in the U.S. labor market for my book Actively Seeking Work?, the scale of racial segregation of such intervention and of the federal government’s positive role in maintaining and fostering that segregation became more and more salient, which helped to define the core argument I developed in Separate and Unequal.
CONCLUSION
My preliminary reading about American welfare and labor market policy during the 1930s and 1960s, undertaken before conducting field research, struck me as underestimating the role of racial divisions in shaping federal programs and underplaying the active role of the federal government in fostering segregation. A decade of research in U.S. archival and government sources confirmed these observations. But the scale of this energetic and systematic policy effort to spread and defend racial segregation in American government was far greater than I or other researchers had expected. This takeaway about the value of detailed analysis of primary sources is a lasting one. Doing the research fed my developing ideas about the significance of the federal state in practice, contrary to many standard views about America’s “stateless” status.
These findings fundamentally challenged existing scholarship. Most scholars retained the precepts that (a) the federal government merely reflected society’s preference for racial segregation; (b) failed to acknowledge its role as an enforcer, facilitator, and creator of swathes of poisonous racial segregation in the United States; and (c) continued to treat racial segregation as a southern phenomenon. Scholarly research after my study has directly picked up on these themes. This work includes Daniel Kryder’s study of wartime federal mobilization, Robert Lieberman’s book on racial divisions in New Deal welfare policy, Ira Katznelson’s innovative study of white versions of affirmative action, Megan Ming Francis’s study of how civil rights shaped the American state, Daniel Kato’s account of the strong state used to prevent antilynching laws, Kimberley Johnson’s work on federal governing of the states, and Debra Thompson’s study of census classification and the state.1 Without archival fieldwork, this conversation in the study of American politics would not have been possible. It is an important conversation for which careful fieldwork will continue to play a key role.
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Desmond King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• King, Desmond. Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 (1st ed, 1995.
• ——. Actively Seeking Work? The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare in the USA and Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
NOTE
1. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2006); Megan Ming Francis, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Daniel Kato, Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kimberley S. Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Debra Thompson, The Schematic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).