Quick Kills @ Bancroft

The papers of sociologist and historian Franz Schurmann are now open to researchers at the Bancroft Library (BANC MSS 98/123 cz). Schurmann is best remembered as an expert on Communist China during the Cold War. He taught at UC Berkeley for 38 years, but he always identified himself more as an explorer-journalist. Indeed, Schurmann travelled widely and often, even spending two years in the late 1950s exploring a tribe in Afghanistan (and eventually publishing his findings in a 1962 book entitled The Mongols of Afghanistan: An Ethnography of the Mongols and Related Peoples of Afghanistan). Schurmann’s major work was his book Ideology and Organization in Communist China, which was first published in 1966 at the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The collection consists of correspondence, writings (many unpublished), research files, and professional and personal files. Among the personal files are journals Schurmann kept during the 1960s that document his personal life as well as his thoughts on his work process and on places and events. Of particular note are Schurmann’s journals of his trips to Vietnam and Cuba with political activist Mary McCarthy in 1968 as well as his journals from Paris in 1962 (in which he comments extensively on his work and identity as a scholar and on contemporary events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis). Schurmann called these journals his Selbstbeschauung or self-reflections. Journalist Richard Rodriguez, in his tribute to Schurmann, said that “the most important thing [Schurmann] taught me, by example, was that ideas were to be lived. If you want to know China, put Mandarin and Cantonese into your mouth. If you want to understand Afghanistan, travel on horseback through Afghanistan for two years. If you dare to have an idea, then dare not to be homesick.”

Lara Michels, archivist

Well known for penning the screenplay for Gone with the Wind, Sidney Coe Howard was a successful and well-loved playwright, novelist and screenwriter until his tragic death at his farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts in 1939. The Sidney Coe Howard papers (BANC MSS 70/185 z) bring a bit of Hollywood glamour and Broadway pizzazz to the dusty, yet hallowed halls of the Bancroft with their extensive documentation of not only Coe Howard’s writerly output, but, moreover, the early years of the film industry and the socio-cultural milieu in which he flourished. A native son of Oakland, California and graduate of U.C. Berkeley, Coe Howard went on to make his home and career in New York City, Los Angeles and Massachusetts. A writer and editor for such magazines as Life, The New Republic and Collier’s, Coe Howard staged his first play, Swords, in 1921, and had a successful career in the translation and adaptation of foreign plays until 1929, when he started writing for film in earnest. In 1925, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for the 1924 Theatre Guild production of his play, They Knew What They Wanted. Among his other plays, manuscripts of which are included in the collection, are Ned McCobb’s Daughter, The Silver Cord, Yellow Jack, Alien Corn, Lute Song and his adaptation of Carl van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, his final piece of writing.

Originally married to the actress Clare Eames, who herself died tragically at the age of 36, Coe Howard went on to marry Leopoldine (Polly) Damrosch, daughter of the New York Symphony Orchestra conductor, Walter Johannes Damrosch. Coe Howard had one daughter with Eames, Clare Jenness Eames Howard, who later changed her name to Jennifer, was herself a stage and film actress and, for a time, was married Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.

Mario H. Ramírez, Archivist

Beware the Cal freshmen! This little pamphlet is the program from the annual spring cremation and burial ceremony for two freshman textbooks at  the University of California: Bourdon’s Elements of Algebra and Minto’s Manual of English. Apparently, from 1890 until 1903, freshman gathered every spring to do away with their textbooks by burning them and giving them a ceremonial burial. During the later years of the tradition, the ceremony included a procession through campus and a large bonfire. By 1903, the procession and ceremony was spilling off campus and producing student injuries and damage to local properties, so the administration put an end to it. As you can see, the program is written in a sort of dog Latin. It comes from the Hart Hyatt North papers (BANC MSS 81/55), currently in process up at the quick kills desk.

Lara Michels, archivist

The papers of Art Hoppe, long-time reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, are now open to researchers at the Bancroft Library (BANC MSS 85/124). Hoppe was a fierce political and social satirist, but he started his career at the Chronicle as a copy boy in 1949. Shortly thereafter, he got some early reporting assignments. In 1952, Hoppe landed his first big story when he and a Chronicle photographer managed to ski to a snowbound streamliner train in the High Sierra, becoming the first reporters to reach the site. Later in the 1950s, Hoppe produced one series of stories on Skid Row and another on African-American crime in San Francisco. For the Skid Row series Hoppe lived among the residents of Skid Row for a brief time (see above photograph). In 1960, he was given his own column and the rest is newspaper history. In addition to writing his column, Hoppe published eight books (three anthologies, four novels, and one memoir) and even wrote a few plays. It was a pleasure to process the papers. Hoppe’s wit and biting humor made me laugh more times than I can count!

Lara Michels, archivist

Documenting the life and political career of the first African American elected to public office in Northern California, the William Byron Rumford papers (BANC MSS 73/112 c) are a great resource not only for local Berkeley and California political history, but moreover for the information they provide on the tenor and shift of attitudes towards race at the tail end of the 1950s and early 1960s. A California State Assemblyman for the 17^th District from 1949-1967, Rumford was a steely pioneer who constantly struggled against that obstacles that would bar him and other people of color from succeeding and attaining parity. A proponent of fair housing and employment legislation, Rumford equally concentrated his efforts on curbing youth unemployment and working towards a higher minimum wage. A pharmacist by training and profession (in fact he owned and ran Rumford’s Pharmacy in Berkeley), he also focused on a number of health issues including the effects of air pollution and tuberculosis. The collection also ably documents Rumford’s controversial and contested Senate campaign.

One of the outstanding curiosities of the collection are a number of broadsides, pamphlets and newsletters from white supremacists groups in California warning of the detrimental ramifications of racial integration. In tandem with other documents on civil rights, these materials provide a multi-faceted snapshot of the racial climate in the U.S. mid-century.

Mario H. Ramirez, Archivist

Photo Credit: Ebony Magazine, Tuberculosis & Health Association of California, Sirlin Studios

Unlike my dear colleague Lara Michels, I must confess that I have been reluctant to delve wholeheartedly into (re-)processing the papers of the science faculty at U.C. Berkeley that are on the list of collections for this project. I am a child of the humanities and have been silencing my inner scientist for some time now. When starting in on the Robert Bigham Brode papers (BANC MSS 98/71 c), I anticipated having to negotiate a mind-numbing patina of formulas and theories that would drive me to new states of archival madness. Suffice it to say, my ignorance could not have been more pronounced. Although, yes, the Brode papers do contain their share of material that only a fellow devotee of physics could love, they also speak to the rich intellectual life of an individual who, as it turns out, participated in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and helped create the first atomic bomb; he was in charge of the group that developed the fusing mechanism. One of triplets born in 1900 in Walla Walla, WA (Wallace was a chemist and Malcolm was a biologist), Brode taught at U.C. Berkeley from 1927 until 1967, and focused his research primarily on cosmic rays.

Mario H. Ramirez, Archivist

Photo Credit: U.S. Navy

I love it when a collection I am processing surprises me. That is what recently happened with a collection of student reports from the old Department of Mining and Metallurgy at the University of California. I thought it would be a rather humdrum collection (although I do admit to a certain love of all things mining!). Turns out the reports in this collection are great reads! They are informative but also often delightfully written and even laugh-out-loud funny at times. The reports were written by UC students in Mining 4: Summer Class in Practical Mining between circa 1902 and 1914 and document students’ summer experiences working underground in various mines in California and the western United States, Canada and Mexico. Some of these students had experience working in mines, but many had never worked underground. This made for quite an adventure for some of these relatively privileged students. The most interesting reports document not only the mining processes the students encountered but also reveal the students’ perceptions about local miners, the immigrant populations and workforces of the mining towns, the social and economic life of these towns, and even the difficulties of lodging in bedbug-infested hotels and barracks. Many reports also detail the modes of transportation needed to reach some of these remote locations. Some students carried cameras with them and took snapshots of miners and mining processes to use as illustrations in their reports and others provided drawings that demonstrate the considerable engineering drawing skills they acquired in their studies.

Lara Michels, archivist

I have processed the papers of a few mathematicians during my tenure at the Bancroft Library. It is always an experience to view and decipher, at least to the extent necessary to do my job, the output of these amazing minds. I am just now completing my processing foray into the papers of Alfred Tarski, a mathematician renowned for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic. Tarski, who from 1942 to 1968 was a professor at UC Berkeley, exerted profound influence beyond mathematical circles into the fields of linguistics and philosophy. The above photograph is of Tarski (left) and Kurt Godel (right) in Vienna, 1935. The sheet of notes is from Tarski’s notes on the foundations of Boylai-Lobaczerski geometry (obviously!).

Lara Michels, Archivist