Richard J. Cox
Newberry Library, Chicago
January 27, 2005
When I began my career as an archivist in the early 1970s, there were few opportunities for formal educational preparation for this profession. A graduate course, several multi-week institutes, and a devouring of the professional literature was as good as one could get in those days. To this day, I sometimes mention to students that one of my primary motives in designing and teaching in a graduate archival education program is to ensure that no one has to go through what I did in gaining a foundational knowledge for archival work.
I have always been an avid reader, and I thoroughly enjoyed my exploration through the much smaller professional literature that then existed. While exploring the journal literature, I discovered some authors and their writings that had a profound impact on my thinking about archives, including the articles of Lester J. Cappon. I was quite impressed with Cappon's essays, traversing as they did a variety of issues about the nature of archival knowledge and the responsibility of archivists to sustain that knowledge. Cappon was particularly astute in his ruminations about the role of historical inquiry in archival work, and since I was then working at a private historical society largely oriented to serving local historical researchers, his ideas were then particularly relevant to my own work.
Cappon, as I subsequently discovered, was at the end of his career while I was just starting my own. I met him only once, when I attended my first Society of American Archivists meeting, and talked with him just long enough to shake his hand and exchange pleasantries. I doubt I was ever on his radar screen, since he died (1981) just about the time I became active in SAA and other archival professional activities. However, Cappon's writings remain useful to my own work. When I heard about his death, I wrote to the director of the Newberry Library, Cappon's last professional home, and suggested that someone ought to pull together his various essays on archives and documentary editing (especially considering the successful publication of Margaret Cross Norton's essays only a few years before). There was interest, but as so often happens with good intentions, nothing came of this suggestion.
Cappon was born in Milwaukee , Wisconsin , right at the beginning of the twentieth century. His father, Jesse, was a prosperous Milwaukee businessman, the president of a bank and a lumber company. He was initially interested in music, earning a diploma from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in 1920, but he also manifested an interest in history and went on to earn degrees at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1922 and 1923 and at Harvard University, acquiring a Ph.D. in 1928 (concerning the southern iron industry in the antebellum period). Along the way he was an English instructor at the Boys' Technical High School in Milwaukee (in 1923-24) and an assistant in history at Radcliffe College (1925-26). At some point in the mid-1920s (probably in 1926), Cappon came to the University of Virginia where he worked with Dumas Malone on a southern historical bibliography with funding assistance from the university's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, eventually leading to a couple of massive publications on Virginia historical publications and newspapers. From what evidence we have, we know that Cappon was a serious scholar from his earliest days.
Cappon had a long career as both archivist and historical administrator, working as an assistant professor of history and archivist at the University of Virginia from 1930 until 1945 (and, like most archivists of this time and for a number of decades afterward, Cappon discovered the emergent profession quite accidentally). Not surprisingly, Cappon's work on the Virginia bibliography stoked his interest in the archival sources of Virginia (since he included what few manuscript materials were available in public archives and libraries) and brought him to the attention of the University of Virginia administrators who were then renewing their intention to build the school into a major research institution. In the mid-1930s, he turned down an offer to work for the newly established National Archives, being concerned about the larger bureaucracy, although he did briefly run (on a part-time basis) the Virginia Historical Records Survey (HRS) for the federally administered Works Progress Administration.
By 1940, and the end of his first full decade of work as an archivist, Cappon seems to have become interested in expanding his professional range of responsibilities, perhaps reflecting as much as anything the general nature of the still-emergent discipline, vacillating then between historians and librarians (much like today but with a much less well-developed body of knowledge or community). If his annual reports are any indication, Cappon was obsessed with matters like the proper education and status of the archivist, as he recognized the need for building a critical mass of working, knowledgeable archivists.
By the late 1930s, Cappon was trying to make a change in what he was doing in Charlottesville . In early 1939 Cappon wrote to the head of Virginia 's history department, where he had taught without additional compensation a course each year since 1929, asking to be promoted to an associate professor of history. While one interpretation may be that Cappon simply was asking for the recognition he thought he deserved for his decade of services in the history department, it may be that Cappon wished to position himself to play a greater role in the development of educational programs for the preparation of archivists (especially since archivists and historians were openly engaged in discussing the needs for such education). Nothing came of the request, although Cappon continued to have an interest in educating individuals as both archivists and documentary editors, giving guest lectures and seminars at a number of universities on the latter, doing sessions at Ernst Posner's famous archives program at American University, and running a six-week long summer institute at Radcliffe in the late 1950s on archival administration.
Education always seemed to signal a potential outlet for Cappon, suggesting something of the ongoing professional dilemma he felt about himself. When his effort to secure a position in the history department at Virginia failed, Cappon looked for other venues. In 1941, for example, Cappon applied for the position of superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, perhaps motivated by the fact that Wisconsin was his home state but perhaps also a result of Cappon's sense of needing another venue for pursuing his professional agenda. A few years later the opportunity he was seeking materialized.
In 1945, Cappon moved 120 miles eastward to become the editor of publications at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg , Virginia , a post he held until 1955 when he became its director. Cappon also functioned as the director of Colonial Williamsburg's newly established Archives and Records Department from 1945 until 1952. Whatever wanderlust Cappon might have been feeling in the late 1930s and early 1940s disappeared a few short years after his arrival in the old and under reconstruction former capital of the Virginia colony. Cappon similarly rebuffed later opportunities for other positions outside of the state.
In 1950, Carl Bridenbaugh, director of the institute, transformed Cappon's duties to be more focused on editing its publications. Bridenbaugh explained the change in this way: “For the past four years I have had the distinct feeling that you were spending too much time at your work, but would do nothing about it because the Institute did not command all of your services. I hope that from now on you will spend less rather than more time at your work; you should have leisure for contemplation and reading.” It is what most archivists wish their boss would say to them, I suspect. It is possible to interpret this in a couple of ways, either that Cappon was showing some strain and dissatisfaction with the burden of his responsibilities or that this was nothing more than the classic miscalculation of an administrator about the amount of time it takes to manage records (and Cappon certainly was not one to shirk such matters). Or, perhaps, Bridenbaugh knew that Cappon was receiving regular offers or expressions of interest in his service. Doubtless Cappon was straining a bit with his various responsibilities, as he turned down the editorship of the American Archivist in 1948 because the position was too “time-consuming.” Whatever the case, Cappon's primary writings on archival theory and documentary editing emerged after this change, suggesting that he did have a bit more time to reflect.
Cappon spent a quarter of a century in Williamsburg . In 1969, he went to the Newberry Library in Chicago to become a senior fellow there, and he stayed to edit the Atlas of Early American History and then held posts at the Newberry as a distinguished research fellow and emeritus research fellow until his death in 1981. Cappon's work on the atlas was the result of a long-term interest in maps as historical sources, dating back at least to the 1950s and probably extending back into his early fieldwork collecting for the University of Virginia reflecting his careful attention to the variety of historical sources available to the scholar. The atlas project became possible to Cappon as a result of a windfall estate gift to the Newberry and because the Newberry's director, Lawrence Towner, had been a protégé of Cappon's at the institute in the mid-1950s. To historians, Cappon is probably best known for his editorship of the aforementioned atlas and a two-volume edition of the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, published in 1959. Cappon decided to stay on in Chicago after the completion of the project because of the Newberry's immense research resources, the music performances, and general cultural attractions; to an outdoorsman like Cappon, the harsh Chicago winters did not seem to matter.
The end of Cappon's life came suddenly on August 24, 1981 . Lawrence Towner wrote in the program for Cappon's memorial service the following: “Striding briskly up Rush Street after dinner on August 24, twenty-eight days before his eighty-first birthday, Lester Cappon dropped dead on the sidewalk, we like to think in full stride, as usual: there was no way he would die in bed.” The broadside included a photograph of Cappon in his familiar outdoor hat, and Towner's reference was to Cappon's lifelong interest in horseback riding, hiking, and river trips (along with music and bourbon). Most of us hope we will be so fondly remembered.
Throughout my career I have found myself returning to Cappon's writings for one reason or another. In the mid-1980s, when a debate about the relationship of history to archival practice erupted in the pages of Archivaria , I made a small contribution to the debate by writing about Cappon's half century of musings about the identity of the archivist. I continued to cite a few of his other writings on a regular basis, such as his 1955 essay on manuscripts as archives when I engaged in a debate about the nature of the record during a visit to Australia in 1995. More importantly, I found some of his essays about the history of documentary editing and archival scholarship to be particularly useful for my students to read and to understand that some of the current concerns in the field had been issues for a very long time.
Cappon did not produce a voluminous body of writing about archival studies (the vast majority of it is in my book published by the Society of American Archivists last fall). Yet, each of his writings is a critical document in the most important period in the formation of the modern American archival profession, when archivists formed their main associations, produced their first theoretical manuals, and established a distinct identity.
Most of his substantive writings on archival theory and practice were composed from his early fifties to the end of his life. Prior to this period Cappon produced a modest, but interesting array of historical writings on newspapers as historical sources, historiographical reflections, and a variety of essays about aspects of early American history, reflecting a scholar who was far more engaged in administrative responsibilities than research. His archival writings ranged broadly over the landscape of debate, challenges, and issues in the American archival community of his time, including archival collecting and appraising, scholarship by archivists, the nature and substance of archival theory, the professional identity of the archivist, the use of archival records by historians and other researchers such as genealogists, documentary editing and its connection to archival practice, archival history, the nature of the record and documentary evidence, and archives and public policy.
Nearly all of these writings, many of them individually still remaining significant benchmarks in archival scholarship, were either solicited or commissioned as part of a conference or invited lecture or were the product of a presidential address to a professional association. Cappon was elected president of the Southern Historical Association (1949), the Society of American Archivists (1957), and the Association of Documentary Editors (1979), one of that small group who took leadership positions in both archival and historical associations (and of a kind we will likely not see again because of the continuing evolution of the disciplines). What comes clear in his writings and speeches is that Cappon was a zealous missionary for the cause of archives, and he would take every opportunity to preach. And, when one reads Cappon's essays, the lecturing of this kindly mentor still comes across, at least to me.
It is not my intent today to try and distill each of Cappon's contributions to archival knowledge and work. To be honest, these lessons are best learned by reading Cappon's own essays – and that is why I worked on this project and the SAA published the book. Indeed, each topic of Cappon's writings, take archival collecting for example, propels us into a rich and complex professional and scholarly debate that could entertain us for hours; I spend fourteen weeks every academic year discoursing about archival appraisal – and I could easily create an entire course just constructed about Cappon's contributions to the debates, research, and methodologies concerning archival appraisal and related matters.
An analysis of Cappon's career and writings, however, communicates to us some very interesting observations about our present era that we ought to reflect on. Namely, Cappon reminds us about our own mortality, the shifting generations of archival scholars and leaders, the role of history as the basis for archival theory and practice, the documentation of archival work itself, and important role of curmudgeons. Those of you who know me will realize that these are all concerns of my own life and work, especially the last one. In fact, in my introduction to Cappon's collected essays, I suggested that in doing this project that I entered into a continuous imaginary debate with him about many cherished notions of archival work. I felt as if I was talking with Cappon, becoming friends with him, and arguing with him all at the same time – and this seemed to reflect as much as anything the kind of contributions Cappon made and the kind of scholar and man Cappon represented.
Reviewing Cappon's life and writings is a process providing a window into our own lives and mortality. From the 1940s until well into the 1970s, Cappon was a constantly sought after speaker and the author of what must be viewed as a seminal series of essays about archival knowledge and practice. In these essays, and their usual original form as conference presentations or speakers, Cappon commented on virtually every pressing archival issue of the time, some, such as the role of the National Archives or the viability of the presidential library system, remaining controversial matters into the present. Cappon's 1952 essay on the relationship between the archival profession and the Society of American Archivists, for example, was the result of an invitation to speak at a conference, in this case at the SAA annual meeting. Leon de Valinger, extending the invitation in his capacity as the SAA program chair, asked Cappon to talk about professional identity because although most archivists had started as “teachers or scholars of American history,” things were changing. “In recent years there has been the entrance into our ranks a number of people who have had little or no scholarly background. Some of us feel that this has debased the profession and that, whereas an American archivist never achieved the status in his own Country as European archivists have, we were certainly more than file clerks.” Cappon was often thought of as the ideal person to take on such difficult tasks, to deliver critical comments in a diplomatic fashion, and to stimulate additional thinking and debate.
Yet, despite this role, his pre-eminence as an archival thinker and commentator, and his election to various professional associations' highest office, Cappon, just a little more than two decades after his death, is nearly forgotten. He is not cited very often. And, when the SAA Publications Board discussed the possibility of issuing a set of his essays, a number of its members had little or no sense of who he was or what he had done. This should serve as a reminder to us of a few things. Certainly it should humble all of us about whether our own sense of self-importance is reflective of any reality of what the profession thinks is significant or will remain significant for any amount of time in the future. It should also suggest to us one of the great ironies of working within the archival community, given its mission, namely, that it has a short memory. And, finally, Cappon's situation might also suggest something of one of his own failures – a nearly twenty year effort (and failure) to write a book on historical manuscripts administration – robbed him of a legacy of others who wrote a book (such as Jenkinson and Schellenberg).
Another lesson that emanates from investigating Cappon is the importance he provides for a link of one archival generation to the next. Cappon, born in 1900, was a generation behind Jenkinson, Leland, or the Dutch triumvirate of Muller, Fruith, and Fruin – the pioneering architects and disseminators of European archival theory that Cappon's generation responded to, argued with, and built into something of peculiar value to the American scene. Cappon was also born into the midst of the Progressive era, when the notions of scientific history with its characteristics of archives as historical laboratories and records as conveyors of truth were pre-eminent. Cappon also was of the same generation as Schellenberg and fit neatly between that of Jenkinson and Leland and the next represented by archivists such as H.G. Jones, Frank Burke, and F. Gerald Ham.
Why make anything of this generational positioning? Much of Cappon's soul-searching about his professional identity is as much a matter of his time as anything else. Cappon waffled between being a historian, an archivist, and an editor, while the generation after him struggled with the role of the archivist in the information professions, and the next generation – mine – has struggled with establishing the archival profession as a discipline with more distinctive qualifications. These varying perspectives are as much the product of their generational eras as any other factor one could point to as being instrumental.
What I must remember, however, is that the generation before me is as far removed from me as it was from the likes of Cappon and Cappon from the one before and as far removed chronologically as I am from the generation behind me, the one largely forgetting Cappon. While I don't want to play some kind of archival six degrees of separation game, I do want to make the point that many of the characteristics of our professional debates stem from factors unique to their time. The generation behind me, for example, has been immersed into the philosophical musings of postmodernist scholars who question truth and evidence, and who have expanded the notion of the document or the archive far beyond any traditional meanings of the terms. As we engage in such debate, we need to reflect on the meaning of these generational shiftings, perhaps making us a bit more understanding of the source of the debates.
Another lesson is how we see Cappon struggling with his professional identity. Educated as a historian at a time long before anything approximating graduate archival education was in existence, Cappon clung to history and historical scholarship as the core knowledge for archivists. Cappon may be the penultimate representative of the school of thinking of archivists as historians, although he was never afraid to criticize historians for not being well-versed in historical research methods or in understanding the full dimensions of archives and historical evidence. Ultimately, near the end of his life, Cappon seemed to align himself with the documentary editors as those scholars who linked together the best of both historians and archivists, applying the importance of historical knowledge to that of comprehending the nature of documentary sources.
What is crucial here is understanding the long and thoughtful journey Cappon embarked on in trying to understand his own professional identity. Today, archivists and others too often glibly identify themselves, without fully understanding the implications, as records managers, information professionals, knowledge workers, historians, or, yes, archivists, without an appreciation of the long professional and scholarly debate that others have engaged in before or without examining the reflections they have left behind in the form of a literature. Cappon was not afraid of expressing his personal doubts or strong convictions about what he represented. Today, unfortunately, too few of us are even willing to read across disciplines that are engaged in understanding the nature of the record and its evidence. In my own way, guided by Cappon's example, this reflect what I have been trying to do with my own research and writing, and one can only speculate whether any of it will remain after my career ends and I fade into memory.
The fourth lesson to be learned concerns the nature of documentation about the profession, perhaps one of the most interesting lessons emanating from my work on Cappon. Cappon was a meticulous documenter. His personal papers at the College of William and Mary are rich, comprehensive, and insightful. He was a lively and responsible letter writer. Cappon would write long and thoughtful replies to even the most minor request, such as a mother asking advice about how her son could pursue a career in history. He was a gentle advisor, delivering critical observations in a kindly and diplomatic fashion. Yet, Cappon also left behind some sharp and controversial letters expressing his personal convictions about the politics plaguing the SAA in the 1950s and 1960s. Even his annual reports in his University of Virginia career were a kind of letter to the university leaders, historians, and archivists about his advice on important archival matters, much more so than mere enumerations of his activities.
As I worked through the Cappon papers, I had a terrible thought. I began to reflect both on how poorly my own archival generation is documented, and the possibilities for how much worse this might become. And this nightmarish thought came to me in two ways. First, there is the prospect of how much is being lost to the profession because of our use of electronic mail. In Cappon's papers, I discovered virtually every reason that he wrote a particular essay or engaged in a certain activity in his long and detailed letters, and I reflected how many times my own documentation of such activities was almost exclusively conducted digitally and how inconsistent I am myself in trying to ensure that this is captured. Second, I thought about how few consistent commentators of our own generation we have, such as what Cappon represents for the 1930s through the 1970s; certainly, we have the likes of James O'Toole, Margaret Hedstrom, Terry Cook, and a few others who have written steadily over two or three decades about substantive and controversial professional issues. Yet, can we say that we see the next generation of equally astute or controversial commentators coming behind us? I have not seen a new set of commentators emerging that approximates what a Lester Cappon gave to us. Ironically, then, in this era of intense scholarly interest in public memory, a new scholarship promising new insights into the nature and importance of archives, we may have lost a real sense of any archival memory . And as the nature of digital information fragments knowledge and information in countless ways, our archival memory may be slipping faster than we imagine.
Finally, investigating Cappon taught that there is an important role for curmudgeons or skeptics in the archival universe. Cappon was always stirring things up, and his generation was better off for having people like him among it. Cappon was a traditionalist, with very traditional values. He disparaged some of the contributions of librarians and information scientists to the field, and while we can argue that sometimes Cappon missed some larger values to the perspectives of these other professionals, his constant questioning, in a way, reassures us. This is one of the matters that I wish I could now talk over with Cappon, as I am sure he would have raised many sincere doubts about placing the education of archivists mostly within library and information science schools (although, I sense that the two of us would agree more than disagree about such matters).
Cappon's curmudgeonly attitudes did not bode well for him in his last decade, as he began to seem more rigid as well as somewhat persnickety. He began to argue with archivists who thought that the new technologies were transforming basic principles, contending that the principles would not change. In fairness to Cappon, this is a debate without end, and some archivists today would probably agree with him, but his letters on such matters suggested that he was slipping. Whereas in earlier debates, Cappon provided much more detail about his position, by this point all he did was restate an assumption (albeit an assumption fully fleshed out in his decades of writing). Had the issue of machine-readable or electronic records emerged in full force a decade or two earlier, I think we would have seen Cappon delve into the history of recordkeeping as he had genealogical research or documentary editing or the administration of presidential libraries.
After a lifetime of trying to get historians to be more sensitive to the use of archival records, Cappon, by the end, also seemed to come across more as the slightly curmudgeonly traditionalist when considering newer historical scholarship. In 1978, he argued that history is narrative, “however much the historian may evolve theories, deal with problems, and revert to ‘scientific' history. The ‘quantitative' historians (God spare us from the terminology!) are assembling detailed data and arriving at new generalizations in local history; but they are the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water' for the historian with perspective who will write the history .”
Likewise, at the age of eighty years, Cappon was motivated to respond to Frank Burke's essay on archival theory. His published response suggests both how consistent he had been in his career about his notion of the archivist, and that, for as long as he would live, Cappon would be a participant in the debates about archival theory, knowledge, purpose, and practice. As he had throughout his career, Cappon stressed the notions of provenance and respect des fonds, and other such basic traditional principles. Cappon reiterated the importance of the authentication of records and their custody, as extension of these archival principles, arguing that “by this means the truth of the records is confirmed: the concern is with not the substance of the texts, but, rather, the genuine origin and continuous preservation of the records. This truth is the essence of archival theory.”
At times, it is difficult to see just what the issues were for Cappon about Burke's arguments, since much of what Burke was arguing for was a new and more rigorous scholarship into the nature of records and recordkeeping that would energize the work of archivists. Cappon's contention about the truth of records, perhaps, puts him into the older generations of historians and archivists with a Positivist perspective (although I feel more comfortable in this camp myself). Some of Cappon's other assertions seem to be a bit more convoluted. He re-emphasized his long-held belief that “by and large, the archivist is at heart an historian.” However, he also criticized Burke's questions by stressing that, in his opinion, they are not archival they are historical, inadvertently suggesting that archives are just there for historians and archivists are historians' helpers (views that Cappon did not seem to hold judging by his writings over the previous half-century).
It may be that Cappon's attitude about the direction set by Burke had more to do with the potential transformation of archival literature from scholarly into more technical or philosophical musings. Cappon took dead aim at two new developments – the “mounting invasion of the ‘information specialist' of little learning and the sociologist pursuing his studies draped in horrendous terminology.” Cappon's response to Burke did not show him at his best (except as a historical figure in the development of the North American archival community). Cappon's full stride was now a half-step, but his contributions to the development of the profession and the body of archival knowledge continue to reveal him as a figure that should not be ignored (except at the expense of not understanding the history of one's discipline).
I am not yet done with Lester Cappon, and not just because I figure I will be reading the reviews and critiques of my effort to resurrect his contributions to archival scholarship and practice. When I was engaged in my research on Cappon, I discovered that he had been a methodical diarist and that his diaries were sealed until twenty-five years after his death. In August 2006, when the diaries are opened, I will be in Williamsburg to use them. I already have planned an essay about Cappon as a records creator, and I continue to delve into the interesting scholarship about diaries and their writers. I am not sure, of course, just what form my use of his diaries will take. However, I am certain that, as with his writings and other personal papers, Lester Cappon will not be a disappointment to me and that the years between us will melt away and, once again, we will engage in dialogue, perhaps this time with a good Bourbon in hand.