Radical Oral History

On December 13, 2023, Ronald J. Grele quietly passed away in his home in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. While not a household name even among his fellow historians, Grele was, by the early 2000s, very likely the most widely known and celebrated oral historian in the world. His eighteen-year directorship (1982–2000) of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office—the largest such institution in the world—contributed substantially to this recognition. But beyond his institutional role at Columbia, Ron’s work, originally that of a US-oriented scholar, came to involve him widely in many aspects of the field of oral history internationally as well as domestically. He traveled on six continents, where he presented and wrote on oral history, and he advised a great many people interested in or involved with the practice. He was especially active as an advocate and promoter of the life history approach to collecting testimony—long-form, open-ended interviewing, recorded if possible—of people from the widest range of ethnic, class, gender, and social backgrounds. And he not only advocated such interviews but conducted a great many of them himself. He is credited with at least 350 recorded interviews, many of which are archived. Moreover, he helped to launch and sustain oral history projects using open-ended interviewing in many places in the United States and beyond. His writings on the field are internationally influential.For some who knew of Ron in his later years, he sometimes seemed to be a very accomplished, very high powered, but rather conventional academic scholar, perhaps the product of a rather privileged educational and academic experience. This view sometimes seeps into statements—oral and written—that memorialize him. But in reality, Ron had deep roots among ordinary working people, where he early developed a democratic sensibility that nurtured him as a self-conscious political radical. The key to his view and practice of oral history is that he was self-consciously a radical oral historian. For Ron, oral history was perhaps the most democratic and potentially revolutionary of historical methods because it encourages people of all types to express, share, and test their own understandings of their experiences. Oral history offers insight into lived history on a personal, localized, molecular level. He often pointed out that this method lacked a specialized, arcane vocabulary and that was a good thing for it was widely accessible and understandable to everyday people. However, while he would often assert the particularly democratic capacities of oral history, he was no naive celebrant of a populist mentality where oral history was concerned. Perhaps some of his most striking interventions in the oral history field had to do with sophisticated social theory. Ron believed that to understand the depths of meaning in popular memories, and in the social ideologies that underlay them, one had to draw on the most insightful and challenging social analysis available. And he did: references to the likes of Louis Althusser, Jean Piaget, and Antonio Gramsci abound in his work.Ron Grele’s democratic inclinations were very much shaped by his early life among the ethnically diverse, working-class and lower middle-class people of the small New England mill towns of the mid-twentieth century. Ron was born in 1934 and raised in industrial Naugatuck, Connecticut, a city dominated by a group of pollution-ridden companies that formed US Rubber. In Ron’s characterization, “multiethnicity” was a way of life for those who lived there. Nonetheless there were rather strict boundaries to this ethnic diversity; there were no Black residents and very few Jews. Among the many other ethnic and nationality groups present, there were of course social tensions and hierarchies, one of the most prominent of which concerned the division between Protestants and Catholics, and correspondingly between Republicans and Democrats. Ron’s father hailed from the city’s considerable German American community and his mother from the community of what she called “swamp Yankees” (White Americans of modest means and long lineage in the United States). His parents were, however, united in their Protestant and Republican affiliations, minority identities in his immediate neighborhood.Ron’s father died when he was very young, and he and his older sister were largely raised by relatives on his mother’s side, mainly women. He referred to being brought up by a “neighborhood of women,” something that he knew was somewhat unusual, but, to him, not the least bit strange. He linked this experience to his later openness to feminism. As a child, from the time of grammar school, he always had a job. By his account, he was a “rebellious little kid,” and while he, like his youthful crowd, had intellectual pretentions, he had erratic attitudes toward his studies. He early came to love history as a means to developing independent understandings of the world, but was uninterested in and neglected many other subjects. In his adolescence, as he became increasingly independent, he abandoned his family’s rigid Republicanism and much of its rigid religion with little difficulty. Rather surprisingly, he began to fashion himself as a socialist—not so much because of the influence of the current social trends, but more because of readings and discussions with friends. While he developed a considerable network of acquaintances of various ages, he came to find “community” in Naugatuck to be stifling and restrictive (resulting in his lifelong suspicion of the word). By his early teens he badly wanted out, and “out” was higher education. He later remembered thinking that the day he went to college would be the end: “splitsville.” And it was.Ron’s life was transformed by his time at the University of Connecticut (UConn), and also by his brief stay in Berkeley at the end of the fifties. He was drawn into the massive, expanding postwar student body of UConn, which grew from some two thousand to ten thousand in just a few years. He became fully independent there for the first time and increasingly engaged intellectually. Nonetheless, he continued to neglect classes and subjects that failed to appeal to him. And he began dabbling in political activism. By his sophomore year he was involved in anti-fraternity activities and in student government. He also became caught up in the subversive, bohemian counterculture of the folk movement and the Beats. During this period, he and Gaile Anderson—who was particularly into Beat culture—married. Gaile was a slightly younger woman he had earlier known in Naugatuck, and they had reconnected at UConn. Ron and Gaile’s shared interests and their evolving relationship (which lasted nearly three decades) deepened both of their growing radicalism. They had something of a division of labor: he focused more on civil rights, she on the peace movement. He remembered that in this period he came to identify with Marx, Darwin, and Freud.In the late 1950s, before graduating from UConn, Ron and Gaile dropped out of college and traveled to the Bay Area to join the Beat scene. Living in Berkeley, they became culturally engaged, sought new experiences, socialized with new friends, read widely, worked at the jobs they could find (Ron was a painter on the Bay Bridge for a time), and had their first child, John. Then, in May 1960, they joined the large demonstrations against the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) hearings in San Francisco. This was a watershed moment for the early New Left and for the Greles. Ron later talked about it as his first real political involvement. In the aftermath of anti-HUAC movement, they returned to UConn. Ron completed a BA and an MA in history and started looking for a graduate school that could further his political and intellectual interests. He applied to Berkeley and was rejected because of his uneven undergraduate record—his impulsive study habits came home to roost—but he was accepted to the Rutgers University graduate history program.Grad school at Rutgers marked the real beginning of Ron’s career as a historian. Rutgers was an intellectually fertile ground for Ron. He called his time there a “yeasty period.” He found a politicized atmosphere, serious, socially aware grad students, and engaging faculty members—especially the cultural historian Warren Susman. Susman became a major inspiration to Ron, a key mentor and great friend for decades until his untimely death in 1985. Susman enhanced Ron’s growing enthusiasm for intellectual and cultural history, his predilection for theory, and his radical historical orientation.By 1964 Ron had completed his graduate course work and had his first experiences teaching college as a Rutgers grad student. As a grad student he had even coauthored a book on New Jersey urban history with the Rutgers political scientist John Bebout. Ron and Gaile’s family had by then grown to six, with four children (John, Michael, Eric, and Christine). Gaile was looking to continue her education in earnest. Ron needed employment, and over the next seven years he found a series of relatively short-term jobs teaching history at Lafayette College, California State College at Long Beach, and Kingsborough Community College. In the middle of these Ron held a nonteaching position at John F. Kennedy Oral History Project as an interviewer and archivist in 1965 and 1966. By no means his favorite job, because of its narrow restrictions, it was extremely consequential in that it introduced him to oral history. As Ron remembered it, he was told of an oral history position at the Kennedy project and replied, “What is oral history?” He took the job and found out that this field meshed well with his outlook toward politics and culture. From then on, it was a most important part of his life.During his years of short-term employment, Ron became more and more deeply involved with the burgeoning New Left. He attended the first big Students for a Democratic Society demonstration in Washington, DC, in April 1965, a watershed event. But Cal State Long Beach in the late sixties was the site of his most intense and most grassroots involvements. He advised and participated with the young antiracist and antiwar students and became faculty advisor to the local Black Student Union, the Mexican American Student Association, the Asian American student group, and the Students for a Democratic Society. (I met Ron during these movement years.) He was also a leader of the faculty peace committee, the ongoing effort to build the CSCLB faculty union, and local support work for the groundbreaking San Francisco State strike.Ron always marveled how easy it had been to get teaching jobs without finishing his PhD. In 1969 that era was ending. He found himself being pushed out of his Long Beach State job for largely political reasons, with few alternative prospects. He and Gaile decided he had to finish his degree, so they uprooted the family and moved back to New Jersey in the vicinity of Rutgers. He taught at Kingsborough Community College and finished a dissertation in less than two years. Then he had again to face the steadily worsening job market. He temporarily solved this problem with a short-term teaching job at Rutgers and some courses at NYU. He also received a year-long Fulbright to the University of Indonesia, where he set up an American studies program. Indonesia was Ron’s first sustained experience outside the United States, and it deepened and gave substance to his internationalism. It also further deepened his involvement in oral history through teaching the subject at the university and through the oral history workshops he conducted in several Southeast Asian countries.After his Fulbright, Ron was rescued from joblessness by his old friend and coworker from the Kennedy Foundation project, the historian Charlie Morrissey, who hired Ron as assistant director of the Ford Foundation oral history project. From this point on his employment was largely tied to his role as an oral and public historian. He was at Ford from 1971 to 1975. He then directed the oral history program and oversaw research at the New Jersey Historical Commission from 1977 to 1981 (a position he particularly loved). Moving back to California, he directed the Oral History Program at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1981 to 1982. Finally, he directed the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University from 1982 until his retirement in 2000.The time following his Fulbright in Indonesia can too easily be seen as a period when institutionally based professionalism came to dominate Ron’s life, and of course it did, in part. But he continued to teach and advocate in many venues, and his teaching drew on his radically democratic view of the world and of oral history. Apart from his two-term stint as Visiting Distinguished Professor at University of California, Irvine (January–June 1988), and his annual oral history seminars at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, his teaching only occasionally took the form of formal classes. More often his teaching entailed workshops (many of them), seminars or discussions, special presentations, and conference appearances. He became close to the Radical History Review and the Radical Historians’ Newsletter, and to the overseas British and the South African History Workshops. He worked with a plethora of community-oriented oral history efforts such as the Oral History of the American Left at NYU, the working-class history project headed by Herbert Gutman at City College, the work of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and especially the Chinatown History Project (later the Museum of Chinese in America). He was a leading participant in many oral history organizations locally, regionally, domestically, and internationally. He was particularly active in the US Oral History Association and served as its president from 1987 to 1988.Ron’s intellectual radicalism found its form most fully in his post-Fulbright period in the seminal essays he published in the original and much expanded editions of Envelopes of Sound (1975, 1985), which promoted new, sometimes subversive, directions internationally for oral history in what not long before had been a rather narrow, technical field. The International Journal of Oral History, created and edited by Ron (1981–85), published dozens of articles by intellectuals, often European, who took directions similar to and anticipated by Envelopes. Finally, moving from the theoretical to more directly political and social history, Ron and his colleague Bret Eynon worked with mainly European oral historians in a multinational interviewing project on the experience of activists in the events of 1968. This resulted in a large collection of testimony held in archives in several countries and a book, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (1968), collectively compiled and ultimately written by Ronald Fraser. Together the parts of this project offer a detailed, internal, intimate view from activists of that crucial year.The period beginning with Ron’s Fulbright was probably for him the most intellectually satisfying of his life. It was not just a matter of his great historical and theoretical production, through writing, presentations, and discussions. Because of these, he became an integral part of a community—an international community of radical oral historians and intellectuals who were close collaborators and also close friends. The core of this group probably numbered a score or so. Among those at the center of this group were Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli of Italy, Daniel Bertaux of France, Annemarie Tröger of Germany, and Paul Thompson and Sally Alexander of the UK.With these radical historical intellectuals Ron helped to form a real community. He repeatedly said as much. His rejection of the class-based, repressive “community” he experienced in Naugatuck drove him to engage in radical oral history, which ultimately provided him with a different kind of community, one that he avidly sought.