bureaucracy Archives - Not Even Past

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer.

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765: by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food. Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

A Deportation Story: Russia 1914

On the same day the President of the United States announced that he was ending DACA (the program that provides some immigrants who were brought to the US as minors protection from deportation and eligibility for a work permit), this moving essay appeared on the Russian History Blog, which we re-post with their permission. In the context of our IHS annual theme and our film series on the FACES OF MIGRATION, this story offers a cautionary tale on bureaucracy and vulnerability. ~Joan Neuberger

The Failures of Arbitrary Mercy

Toward the end of a very long archival file, toward the end of a long research trip, I came across a letter that made me gasp and then tear up as I sat in the reading room. It was sent from the Minister of the Interior to the Minister of the Imperial Court on December 12, 1914, and then forwarded on to the Gatchina town authorities:

On October 26, Iuliia and Luiza Ruprekht, the first 71, and the second 67 years old, German subjects who lived in Gatchina and were subject to deportation due to the war, gave the Gatchina police chief a petition in which they asked to be allowed to remain in their place of residence in Russia, where they were born and had lived all their lives, and referring to their elderly years, illness, and material dependence on their sister, a Russian subject living in Petrograd. [The police chief] presented this petition to the Petrograd governor only after thirteen days, that is on November 8, with а favorable conclusion, due to which [the governor] placed a decision favorable to the petitioners on the report. But not waiting for notice of [the resolution of their petition], the aforementioned foreigners on November 9 ended their lives with suicide, having hanged themselves in their apartment; the reason for their suicide, according to the same police chief, was that they were dejected under the influence of the threat of the possibility of being sent, as German subjects, out of Russia. The police chief’s explanation of why there was such a delay in presenting the late Ruprekhts’ petition to the Petrograd governor does not hold up.

Where to begin? Well, there’s a horrible irony here, because the other actors were hardly themselves all Russians, even if they were all Russian subjects. The police chief’s name was Kavtaradze; the Minister of the Imperial Court’s name was Frederiks, the Petrograd governor’s name Adlerberg. The officials of imperial Russia were of its empire, not all of Russia. I could go on about the unfairness of former non-Russians turning on current non-Russians, particularly current non-Russians who had lived their whole lives in Russia, except that I think that’s not really the story here.

Let’s start instead with the specifics of the file itself. This letter comes at the end of a long file “with confidential correspondence on various questions,” the same file that had the many lists of foreigners that I mentioned in my last post. The reason for this letter being there was due not to the fact that it involved “foreigners” but instead to the fact that it involved criticizing the police. The Minister of the Interior, who had oversight over the governor, was writing to the Minister of the Imperial Court, who had oversight over the Gatchina authorities, because he was casting blame for this suicide on the Gatchina police chief. A number of the other issues that show up in this file also involve cases in which police officials are found guilty of some bad act—wrongdoing by the police had to be kept secret. So that means that this outcome was seen as a very bad thing, and that there was real worry that the police chief had failed to carry out his important duty of dealing with petitions.

The royal palace at Gatchina. Lithograph by K.K.Schultz from the drawing by I.I.Charlemagne, mid-19c. (Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia)

The Gatchina authorities investigated the incident, and believed that the police chief was innocent of any wrongdoing—if anything, they blamed the Petrograd governor’s office. According to their investigation, the two sisters had received notice that they were to be kicked out of Russia, much to their shock (after all, that’s where they’d been born), and decided to travel straight to Petrograd to petition the governor directly. Once they got there, however, they were told they had to follow the normal chain of command, which meant turning first to the Gatchina authorities. Only those authorities could then forward their petition to Petrograd. When the sisters returned to Gatchina, still upset, they went to see the police chief to make their petition. He was surprised that they had been sent notice of their deportation, because he had thought the lists of foreigners were in the process of being corrected and that their names oughtn’t to have appeared on it anyway (he apparently considered them non-foreigners even if they’d never formally taken on Russian subjecthood). He also advised them to get a letter from a doctor to bolster their claim of ill health. Once they got such a letter, he forwarded the petition, but before any response could come, the women were so overcome by the set of events that their fear took over.

Perhaps in part because I am a woman living and working in a country where I do not have citizenship, I find this story almost unbearable. Had Iuliia and Luiza’s father taken Russian subjecthood, they wouldn’t have had a problem. Had they married Russian subjects, they wouldn’t have had a problem. Instead, most likely, no one had ever really noticed that these two maiden ladies weren’t Russian subjects. They don’t show up on the lists of foreigners, probably because they were women, and the lists almost always only include men. They just lived their lives until suddenly their citizenship became meaningful in a most awful way. What must that have felt like? Well, we have the answer. It felt hopeless.

Even sadder is that clearly no one expected it to turn out this way. No one even expected them to be deported. The governor was going to grant their petition; the police chief supported them in their efforts, and gave them suggestions for how to make their case stronger. That goes back to the idea that the real concern for this case, the reason it ended up in the confidential file, was that it involved the system of petitions breaking down. The autocracy could make laws that were as harsh as it wanted to—like, say, deporting people based on the sheer fact of their citizenship, not because of anything to do with who they were as individuals—in part because it had the system of petitions in place to allow it to say, “oh, but we didn’t really mean you, you can stay.” Petitions allowed the autocracy to be merciful. So it could make laws that it knew were going to be bad for some people it didn’t actually want to hurt, because it knew that petitions could create those exceptions. Except of course that mercy was just as arbitrary as the autocracy’s punishment could be. It could not be relied upon, it could not be trusted, because the law was also the law.

(Letter from RGIA f. 491, op. 3, d. 279, ll. 480-80ob; Barbara Engel has written about the ways that petitions allowed the autocracy to be merciful in “In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital Conflict in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 1 (2005): 70-96.)

Alison Smith is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author, most recently, of For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Originally posted on Russian History Blog (September 5, 2017).

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Secrecy and Bureaucratic Distancing: Tracing Complaints through the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive

By Vasken Markarian

On June 1982, two pages of official letter sized paper marked by the symbol of the Ministry of Finance made their way across a network of various bureaucratic desks of the National Police of Guatemala. A rural farmer and grandfather from Uspantán in El Quiché, Julio Ortiz (this is a pseudonym for reasons of privacy and safety) was addressing a top-level Police Chief in the capital city about his deep concern for a missing grandson. Kidnapped by a certain state authority figure under the false accusation of subversive activity, Julio’s grandson was missing and Julio had no information as to his whereabouts. The letter was Julio’s plea to the Chief to find out what happened to his grandson, pointing out that such a disappearance was “unjust.”

El Quiché department (via Wikimedia Commons).

This and many other similar complaints to authorities, called denuncias, or complaint reports, flowed into the offices of police officials and clerks at an alarming rate during the 36 years of civil war in Guatemala. They represented the responses of people in Guatemala to the widespread political agitation and repression that in some way or another affected their loved ones and friends, a pattern of repression that was the staple of successive governmental regimes with heavy anti-communist agendas since 1954. Julio’s 1982 denuncia belonged to a period in Guatemala’s history when state authorities ignored legal due process, violated civil rights and constitutional guarantees, and maintained widespread impunity for Police and Military actors.

For historians of Guatemala, a document such as this may be only one of a large number of such denuncias, yet Julio’s letter nevertheless serves to help us make educated guesses about the nature of the State Police in Guatemala, about secrecy in the structure of institutionalized violence, and about the relationship between Guatemalan society and its authoritarian figures. What stands out about this document in particular is the number of possible intermediaries involved in producing it and passing it along. To better understand such a document, we can try to recreate the course it ran, before reaching a final audience and a final verdict.

The National Palace in Guatemala City was the seat of the Guatemalan government during the civil war and the target of several attacks (via Wikimedia Commons).

As we zero in on the finer details of Julio’s denuncia, three important trends reveal themselves. First, it is likely that a lawyer or clerk, rather than Julio himself, who was a farmer in a rural town, produced this complaint. The denuncia was typed on formal letter sized paper that had to be bought from the Ministry of Finance. It uses formal language that had to be typed by someone with the resources to do so. The guidelines for what was considered a proper complaint were strict; anything that violated the guidelines would be thrown out.

A formalized complaint-making process was not the only clue that sheds light on the complaint making process. Other traces point to the intervention of a host of different offices, officers, and clerks before the letter reached its final destination. For example, certain stamps and signatures suggest its passing from a local police station or lawyer in El Quiché to the Department of Technical Investigations in the capital, Guatemala City, and then back to the Chief of Police in El Quiché. The back and forth journey of Julio’s letter from the local town to the capital and back was a reflection of the centralized but also dispersed nature of the Police bureaucracy.

Indigenous Ixil people exhume the remains of their disappeared loved ones from a killing field in Guatemala (via Wikimedia Commons).

If Julio had known about the back and forth movement of his denuncia, he still might have hoped his complaint would remain intact. What he had no control over, however, was the fact that the content of his denuncia had to be diluted as it passed through Police offices. A separate cover letter attached to the complaint appeared in front of it. The Inspector General had stamped it, and it also included many clues to suggest that it passed through the hands of one or more clerks in the Inspector General’s office. For example, a one-sentence summary of the contents of the letter appears conspicuously scribbled sideways on the margins, indicating that some clerk in the Inspector General’s office or in the Chief of Police of Quiche’s office wanted to make approaching the document more efficient for the next person who was to read it.

What do these tentative conclusions say about the ability of Julio to make his complaint heard? Efficiency and conciseness were important priorities for police clerks. The diluting of his denuncia and its passing through dispersed offices created distance between the person making the complaint and the highest office where the record ended up. This gap then, contributed to the difficulty for people like Julio to reach authorities and be heard in a more authentic way.

The Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive was discovered in 2005 (via AHPN).

Julio was not likely to receive an answer to his complaint. Like many others, it passed through a complex process of formalizing and diluting while physically moving through a network of intermediaries that was hierarchical and centralized yet dispersed and secretive. Guatemalan authorities rarely responded to inquiries about disappeared or illegally detained family members or friends. This official silence by the police was not simply the product of inaction and indifference. It depended on a concerted effort by various bureaucratic actors to process information and, in so doing, alter its meaning and significance. Over the course of the civil war, thousands of heartfelt denuncias fed an enormous police archive that represented police repression and secrecy.

In a country such as Guatemala with a legacy of state institutionalized violence and impunity, the millions of denuncias such as Julio’s letter, uncovered in the National Police archive, are important tools for seeking justice. Sometimes, they can help uncover links to other documents that serve as further evidence. Thinking about how intermediaries are an integral part of institutional secrecy, we can deconstruct the image of the police state as a homogenous entity. We can locate the responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of important actors at different levels of the authoritarian infrastructure.

Sources:

Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive. For reasons of privacy and safety, I have chosen not to cite the specific location of this document.

Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, From Silence to Memory: Revelations of the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 2013).

You may also like:

Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war.
Great Books on La Violencia in Guatemala.
Virginia Garrard-Burnett on La Violencia in Guatemala.