An Interview with Douglas Greenberg

Robert Cherny

Our series of interviews with historians continues with Douglas Greenberg, director of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Doug spoke at length with Robert Cherny (San Francisco State University) about his stewardship of the Chicago Historical Society and the opportunity that brought him to Los Angeles.--Eds.

Robert Cherny (RC): What led you to a career in public history?

Douglas Greenberg (DG): I was led to a career in public history both by serendipity and intention. I began in the early '70s with a perfectly traditional career teaching and writing about early American history in a small liberal arts college. Over time, as my career and my life began to shift, opportunities to do public history came along, and I took them. When I was at Princeton in the early '80s, for example, I got involved with the New Jersey Historical Commission and eventually became its chair. I think I always felt very strongly about the responsibility of historians to communicate with the public, and even when I thought that my career would have followed more conventional lines, I thought I would always have some role as a public historian. I was actually trained as an early American historian in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history, but because my doctoral dissertation was on a topic in legal history, I became a self-trained legal historian as well, and over the years taught not only in early American history and American social history but also legal and constitutional history.

RC: Did your interest in legal history have any implications for public history?

DG: I don't think so actually. I think that the nature of my academic specialization was not terribly connected to the fact that I was also interested in public history. I think I always took it as a general principle that all historians had a responsibility to the public. I think that perhaps we're especially sensitive in these days of impeachments and contested elections to the significance of legal historians as public historians, but those two things were not connected in my mind when I was first starting out.

RC: Let's talk a bit about the time that you were head of the Chicago Historical Society. I think of that as the leading such city history museum in the country.

DG: Well, we always liked to think that we were the most innovative and the leading history museum in the United States. We always said we'd leave it to others to judge for certain, but we certainly liked to think that way about what we did, at least as an institutional goal.

RC: What were you trying to accomplish there?

DG: When I first got there, I had a relatively short list of things that I thought were especially important. The first was to extend the reach of the Historical Society, both in terms of the subjects of exhibits and programs and in terms of participation and audience, to the entire city of Chicago. The by-word of the institution while I was there was that we were the historian of all the people of Chicago. Like many historical societies, the Chicago Historical Society had been founded by the white male elite of the mid-19th century, but over time actually had been very catholic--small "c" catholic--in its collecting policies. The collections, in other words, could support a much more wide-ranging and diverse set of activities than one might have suspected. They included many materials on the history of the African-American community in the city and country, for example, but they had not always been used as frequently or as effectively as they might have been.

By the time I arrived, a very important shift had already occurred in the mission of the institution to reach out beyond the ordinary constituency. It was very important to me to extend that commitment. The way that we tried to do it was primarily through a series of documentation projects and exhibitions on the history of Chicago neighborhoods, which I thought were very successful. They were exhibitions and also programs in which people who lived in the neighborhoods actually worked with us on the exhibitions that went up in the gallery and the public programs that accompanied the exhibitions. There was real participation from the community in the work of the institution, and I hope that gave us more respect from a more diverse community in Chicago and a feeling of communal ownership of the institution.

The neighborhood projects, as we called them, we followed with another set of projects on the rubric of "My History is Your History," which attempted to show that there were common issues in the history of Chicago neighborhoods. In that second round of projects, people worked across neighborhood lines on common problems. And the Historical Society has now begun a third round of projects of this kind; this one is on the impact of world migration on Chicago's social and cultural life. Again, staff members are working cooperatively with the people of the city to document its history. It's an incredibly exciting kind of work to be doing.

The second thing that was extremely important to me was to find ways to use technology to advance the mission of the institution. When I arrived at the Historical Society in 1993--and this is now ancient history in technological terms --the institution had no e-mail, people could barely get a glimpse of what the World Wide Web might be and do. We immediately set technology as a very important institutional goal, and we invested a lot of effort and money in building what we thought was an extremely interesting and robust website, doing online exhibitions, digitizing pieces of our collection, building an online public access catalog to those digitized materials, and advancing our collecting of potentially electronic materials like the Studs Terkel archive (which became part of the institution's collections while I was there). Technology is a particularly fantastic tool for public historians because it permits them to reach beyond the ordinary audience, and the Internet connects us right into people's homes. We had a fair amount of success actually in the application of technology to the mission of the Historical Society. By the time I left, the website was getting about 150,000 distinct visitors a month. In two months, we had more visitors to the website than came physically to the museum in an entire year! I was lucky to have a group of very talented colleagues; I was very proud of what they accomplished in the technology area.

We were especially proud of the exhibit on "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory", and then we followed it with another on the Haymarket tragedy, both of them curated electronically by Carl Smith of Northwestern. We also built a wonderful site that got a little less publicity on the cloak that Mary Lincoln was wearing the night of the assassination. It was stained with something that we believed was Abraham Lincoln's blood, and we used the web to show how forensic science and history can work together. We did a whole thing on how to do DNA testing and showed people, on the web, how that works. That exhibit was called "Wet With Blood," which is how Mrs. Lincoln's maidservant described the cape after the assassination.

In addition, each of our neighborhood projects was accompanied by a website, and that tied the technology effort to the diversity effort. All of that material is on the CHS website http://www.chicago history.org/.

The third thing about the mission of the institution that was very important to me is that we be thought of as an educational institution with a real commitment to K-12 education and adult education; that people see us as a history education institution. We did many programs with the Chicago city schools and with suburban schools. We linked the technology goal with the education goal by building a separate section of our website called "Just the Artifacts" that actually had lesson plans on various aspects of American and Chicago history making use of materials in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society. By the time I left, there were twenty or twenty-five of those monthly curriculum packets on the web, and they were being used all over the city of Chicago.

That was it really: diversity, technology, and education covered almost everything I wanted to do there. And, of course, they were all interrelated as well. By the time I left, I felt the team we had built was making marvelous strides in each of those three areas--and others too.

RC: One of the things that I remember from going through an exhibit there was the extent to which you drew upon the expertise of historians around the country for some of your exhibits.

DG: That's something that began before I got there. The Historical Society, for complicated reasons, has extraordinarily good collections both on the American Revolution and on the American Civil War, and there were two very important exhibits done there in the late '80s and early '90s, one on the Revolution called "We The People" and the other on the Civil War called "A House Divided." Alfred Young curated the first, and Eric Foner the second. My predecessor, Ellsworth Brown, really initiated a tradition of engaging scholars in the work of the Historical Society, and we certainly continued that during the period that I was there, although we also did some things slightly differently. While I was there, I determined that we needed to hire more people who were trained historians on the staff. Most of the people on the staff were trained curators, but not necessarily as historians. So while I was there, we built a new department, called the Department of Historical Documentation, populated entirely with people with Ph.D.s in history. In that way, we built a public history capacity with people who had advanced doctoral training in the discipline. And as we did that, we required less outside scholarly advice, but we never abandoned it entirely. It was always a very important part of what we did. While I was there we also became a more active institutional member of AHA and OAH, and sent more staff members to annual meetings to participate in panels and the like. We also changed the titles of all the professional members of the staff to "Public Historian." That was a pretty important innovation, in my opinion. I would like to see more history museums do it.

There is also on the drawing boards--planning was nearing completion when I resigned--a huge, new exhibit on the history of Chicago, a core exhibit that will undoubtedly involve many, many scholars on the city's and the nation's history. And then after that's done, the two core exhibits on American history, which are now ten or fifteen years old, will probably be taken down, or at least that was the plan before I left. They will do another big exhibit or two on the history of the United States, and all of that is going to take a lot of scholarly expertise as well as museum expertise--to say nothing of money!

RC: What persuaded you to leave the Chicago Historical Society and come to the Shoah Foundation?

DG: It was a very difficult decision to leave the Chicago Historical Society. When I left, we had just completed a $35 million fundraising campaign. I spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears raising that $35 million, and I was very tempted to stay so that I had the opportunity to spend it. But when the call came from a headhunter who said "I'm calling on behalf of my client Steven Spielberg and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation," my first reaction was: "Who is this really?" I had no idea how they found me or why they would be calling me. At first, I thought it really wasn't right for me. I think of myself as a reasonably serious historian, and I thought that while the work here was well intentioned, it was probably a little on the Hollywood side for someone of my ilk. But once I came to visit the place and saw what was being done, I was persuaded that this is the single most serious video history archive in the world, and that the technologies and cataloging and indexing techniques that are being developed here eventually are going to be extremely important well beyond the history of the Holocaust.

So that was one reason. Another reason was that all of my administrative jobs have had a sort of natural half life, and I was at a point at the Historical Society where, if I were going to stay, I would really have to reenlist for another six or seven years to accomplish all the things that we had on the menu. So it was a natural dividing point for me and for the Historical Society.

And the third reason is a much more personal reason having to do with my own powerful emotional connection to the Holocaust and with my certain knowledge that many members of my family died in the Shoah. This was a way of reconnecting to something that had been very important to me personally when I was younger and over the years had become more important. Although I wasn't looking for another job, in other words, lots of things sort of conspired to make this seem like the right choice. I don't want to seem too pompous about it, but I thought that if they wanted me for this position, I had a moral obligation to take it on.

RC: Many of the people who will be reading this interview will be specialists in U.S. history. Could you provide some general information about the work of the Shoah Foundation?

DG: The Foundation was founded in 1994 because, when Steven Spielberg was making Schindler's List in Poland, he met many Holocaust survivors who told him that they felt that their stories, just like the story of "Schindler's Jews," needed to be told. He was so moved by these people that, when he came back, he provided some seed money to establish an organization that, at the beginning, had a very simple if ambitious goal--to collect 50,000 oral histories of the Holocaust from people who had survived the Shoah. They consulted with oral historians, people in library science, and a variety of others and then went about collecting. We now have almost 52,000 interviews in the collection, including not only Jewish survivors but also Gypsies, homosexuals, and all the other groups targeted by the Nazis as well as liberators, rescuers, and other witnesses. It would take about 14 years if you were to watch them all 24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week.

That was the initial goal, and along the way people came to realize that it wouldn't be much good just to have 50,000 testimonies. Most of us can't even find a videotape of our kids when they were five years old, much less identify specifics within a given video. So the Foundation set about creating what is really a digital library system for video. That also attracted me to the work. I've written and thought quite a lot in the last 10 years about libraries and technology and the impact of technology on scholarship, and I was very interested in this as a real cutting-edge technology with very broad potential application. The technology and cataloging is extremely powerful. It will allow searching within the entire database. That is, the entire 14 years of video can be searched. When our cataloging is done, you'll be able to search through the entire 14 years and actually pull out clips that address various and sundry scholarly subjects, so if you were interested in women from Bialystok, Poland who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and wound up living in Jerusalem, and you not only were interested in that category, but were also interested in their descriptions of their first day at school, you'll be able to search the whole archive and get clips back in which such people describe their first day at school. It is the first system for searching video with keywords in the world. And we actually have five patents on it.

RC: That's quite amazing.

DG: And very expensive and labor intensive to do it as well. So that was very attractive from the point of view of libraries and scholarship. And then beyond that, there's the public history element. Here is a subject of obviously compelling power. I hope we can use the materials in the archive to educate people about hatred and violence in the twentieth century, not only about the Holocaust. We've done documentary films and two CD-ROMs, one in German and one in English. The opportunity to use this archive to make a difference in society in some ways is the capstone for me of a career that one way or another was always headed in the direction of finding a way to make history a lever of change.

RC: Tell me more about the actual collection of these oral histories

DG: The collecting was done in 57 countries, not just the United States, and in 32 languages. The Los Angeles-based staff went about identifying people who could undertake these interviews, many of them historians, some of them journalists, and conducted training sessions in each country to train the interviewers on how this was to be done. They then had to identify videographers because all of this was done on video. A very elaborate system for tracking each interview and the tapes as they came back from around the world had to be established, again using what I think at a museum we'd consider collection management software. And the interviews were done in a very systematic way. The word was put out in the survivor community, which is actually highly elaborated all over the world, and in organizations where survivors were likely to know about it, saying that the foundation was beginning a project to interview survivors of the Holocaust for the purposes of scholarship and education. And every single one of the almost 52,000 people in the archive volunteered to be interviewed. Nobody was ever called and asked to be interviewed because we felt that we had to respect people's privacy. I wasn't here during that phase, but I'm told that it was an incredibly exciting time, as phone calls and e-mails and faxes came in from all over the world of survivors who wanted to take part in the project. And in the space of a little bit more than five years, the initial goal of 50,000 was reached. We're still interviewing people, but at a much slower rate, because we feel it's important at this point to put as much of our resources as possible into the cataloging and the indexing and dissemination of the archive.

RC: And so once the cataloging and indexing is complete, what are your plans to bring all of this to the public?

DG: There are a variety of plans. Some of this is dependent on money. Steven Spielberg has been extremely generous to us, but I have a big fundraising task. Steven thinks, and I agree with him, that he shouldn't bankroll the entire thing. It ought to be something the larger community of donors feel some ownership of, so I have a lot of money to raise over the next five or six years to get all of this done. But the plan is, in the first instance, that there will be five institutions where access will be available to our archive. The Museum of Tolerance here in Los Angeles, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and Yale, which has its own very distinguished Fortunoff collection of survivor interviews. That's the first round. But over the long run, we think that the principal mechanism to get this out to the scholarly community and to some extent the educational community, is going to be Internet 2, and we have had very good and very fruitful conversations with the people who are building Internet 2. And that will connect us to 180-200 research institutions and universities around the world. We are building both the underlying database and the user interface with an eye toward providing access through Internet 2.

That's the scholarly side, but since we also have a public history mission, there are a variety of ways in which we hope to use the materials in the database to advance the educational mission of the foundation. That includes continuing to do CD ROMs (we have one in progress on children in the Holocaust). We've done eight documentary films, five of them in European languages, and we'll probably do more of those. We're working with several universities around the country on programs to train teachers to make use of the archive. We've got a pilot program running in five urban school districts in the United States to test the existing educational products and to help us to design new ones.

So over the long run, the way we're going to get this out is much like what I was trying to do at the Chicago Historical Society--we wanted to enhance scholarly access to the collections there and make better use of the collections for educational purposes. That's really what we're going to try to do with our archive here at the Shoah Foundation as well. The other piece, of course, is always to remind ourselves that the Holocaust was an event in the history of Europe. We have an office in Berlin, and we hope to expand the work we are doing there and throughout Europe and in Israel as well.

Over time, we also hope to work to make our technology available to others to do similar collections so that we can work together to extend both the scholarly and educational power of what we have accomplished.

RC: What difference does it make for the work you're doing now that you are professionally trained as a historian rather than, say, a corporate CEO?

DG: I think that's actually an interesting question. I think it makes a big difference, and I think that the members of the board who were involved in selecting me thought it would make a difference. Quite apart from my own qualifications, that was the right thing for them to do. They believed that they needed someone who understood the implications of an important collection, both for scholarship and for education. Because I had experience as a teacher and scholar and as a public historian, it seemed to them that I fit that set of qualifications. It also makes a difference because I think I understand the larger significance of this kind of history--video history, video sources--which, by the way, is going to become increasingly important in the twenty-first century. And I think they felt--and we'll find out whether they were right or not--that somebody who could talk about this archive from the point of view of scholarship was someone who would be successful at raising money. The Foundation also needed someone with experience in management and strategic planning, which I also had, but that would not have been enough. I think a corporate CEO might well have handled the management questions that any large organization has, and we have 160 employees here, about the same size as the Chicago Historical Society, and a budget of about $15 million. Certainly a corporate CEO could handle that part of it, but I think they felt it was very important for somebody who came here to be really tied to the mission of the institution, to understand the mission, and also to be able to articulate that mission for others. I hope to be able to do all those things.

RC: What are the implications of this collection for specialists in U.S. history. It sounds as though it may be possible for them to identify Holocaust survivors who became U.S. residents, their roles in their communities, and that sort of thing. What can you suggest along those lines?

DG: This is a very important resource for historians of postwar America. Each interview is divided into three sections. The first part of the interview is about what life was like in pre-Holocaust Europe. That's going to be very important for people who are writing about Jewish life and the political cultural life in Europe between the wars. The second is about the Holocaust itself and the experiences of the survivors in the Holocaust. But the last part of the interview is about what life has been like for the survivors since the Holocaust, since the war. Given the way the database is set up, it'll be very easy for researchers to pull out the survivors who now live in the United States. There's an opportunity, for example, to use this material to reflect on what America signified to people coming out of World War II in Europe. There's a sense in which, when you look at the interviews that were done with people who eventually came to live in the United States you understand in a new way what the perception of the United States was at the end of World War II. At one level, it's very moving, because the Holocaust survivors in particular had very clear ideas about American freedom. But there are a variety of other topics that come out of the interviews as well, bearing on such things as the organized Jewish community in postwar America, or social mobility in postwar America, since most of these people came literally penniless and you get an insight into how they "made it" in America after the war. I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity for American historians to make use of the archive.

RC: The OAH is going to be meeting in Los Angeles in April. Should the American historians come and visit you? What would they find?

DG: We are not set up as a museum able to take large numbers of visitors. We work in a group of trailers on the back lot of Universal Studios, but we do give tours. If people get in touch with us in advance, we can arrange tours for limited numbers of people, especially to see the way our cataloging technology works. That's something of which we're very proud, so if people get in touch with us in advance, we will certainly be able to arrange tours. If we were visited by the entire membership of the OAH, I think we'd have some trouble accommodating everyone! But OAH members should feel free to contact me at doug@vhf.org, and we will do our best to accommodate them.

RC: Is there anything you'd like to add that would be of interest to OAH members?

DG: We all look back on our careers and wonder how we wound up doing what we are doing. As I said, in my case it has been a combination of serendipity and intention. But one of the things that I feel very strongly about is that I hope that graduate students who are considering conventional careers in teaching and scholarship will think very hard about the possibility of doing public history, and not as a second choice because they couldn't get a job at a major university, but rather because the responsibilities of doing history in public are so incredibly important to civic life in the United States. I can't say that I set public history as a goal. I came to it in some ways by accident, although it was always going to be an important part of what I wanted to do. I could have easily stayed in a life of teaching and scholarship in a college or university if I had wanted to, but I'm so glad that I made the choice that I did. Now, it's certainly not the right choice for everyone, but I believe the graduate schools are filled with people who have really something important to contribute to American civic life by being public historians, and I really would urge graduate students in particular to consider careers in public history. I would not trade the career I have had as a public historian for the career I thought I would have as a university-based teacher-scholar. This work has unique satisfactions, which do not preclude continuing to teach and write as I have over the years. It is not the same as full-time teaching and scholarship and not everyone is suited to it, but it is terrific nonetheless! I've been very lucky.