Congressional Papers Movement: Cohen in Context

By Paige Lilly

Paige Lilly, a Maine native, came to Fogler in August as archivist for the William S. Cohen Papers. Her previous posts include archivist/librarian at the Shaker Library in Sabbathday Lake, and head of the research library at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport. She serves on the Maine Historical Records Advisory Board, a governor-appointed board that reviews grant proposals for archival projects funded by the National Historical Records and Publications Commission.

It may seem odd to think of the archival field as a movement. After all, archivists can be as forward thinking as the next person, but could we call our work revolutionary or radical? Well, yes.

The modern effort to document the activities of government and authority is exemplified by the aftermath of the French Revolution. In that new government "of the people," the need for accountability and the protection of public rights was a high priority, and they established a national archive in 1789. The United States, revolutionary in its own right, formally took up a systematic effort to archive its official records much later, in 1935, when the National Archives was established. Maine established its state archives less than forty years ago.

Attempts throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to provide for the maintenance of government records in the United States were largely unsuccessful. House and Senate committee records, the bulk of our congressional documentation, have been retained since around 1880. Some records were stored in the Library of Congress, but most found haphazard neglect in unstable storage conditions around the Capitol. Even after 1935, it took a decade to physically take the congressional records into the control of the National Archives. The Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress, formed in 1990, provided the impetus for the Center for Legislative Records within the National Archives. The Center preserves the records and makes them accessible to researchers, and it also offers outreach programs to expand awareness of the records.

Dedicated congressional archivists drive this movement to document our nation’s legislative branch. Concern for the papers of individual members of Congress, considered personal papers and therefore not under the jurisdiction of the National Archives, intensified in 1978 and again in 1985 with conferences which led to the Congressional Papers Project Report.¹ The Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress came out with its Third Report² in 2000, addressing, in part, the issues related to the preservation of member's papers. This year at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, the Committee, along with the SAA Congressional Papers Roundtable, held a Forum at the Capitol to incorporate ideas of the field into the recommendations of the report. It was a lively discussion of legislative staff members and archivists striving to standardize the management of congressional papers. We must raise awareness, among funding sources as well as House and Senate Members, of the need for better records management on the hill and collaborative preservation and outreach efforts among repositories nationwide.

Three public servants attend a press conference in Augusta, Maine, April 7, 1973, during a state Republican Party meeting. From left: George H. W. Bush (then Chairman of the Republican National Committee), James Russell Wiggins (then owner and editor of the Ellsworth American), and newly elected Representative William S. Cohen. Wiggins served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations 1968-1969 and Bush served in the same position 1971-1973. This photograph is from a contact sheet of press photos found in the Cohen papers and shot by the Maine News Service.

William S. Cohen was one of the first Senators to designate a repository before leaving office; fewer than fifty have done so. Muriel Sanford, then head of Special Collections at Fogler Library, and Dean Elaine Albright worked with President Fred Hutchinson to pursue the collection when they knew Cohen’s office was searching for a permanent home for his papers. Part of the University’s proposal for the acquisition was the establishment of the William S. Cohen Center for International Policy and Business. Cohen hired a Washington archivist familiar with Senate papers to appraise the collection, inventory its contents, discard case files, and transfer the boxes to Orono.

Archivist Frances O’Donnell was hired in 1998 to work with the nearly 1,200 boxes after they arrived on campus. Working with the collection in the Fogler Library Annex where the papers are housed, Fran accomplished a great deal in two years. She completed many things: an organizational scheme; the finding aid introduction, biographical note and scope and content notes for all record groups, series, and sub-series; arrangement for the private papers, U.S. House of Representatives Papers, and most of the U.S. Senate Papers; and monthly status reports including a detailed analysis of the remaining work. The finding aid is available on a well received and user-friendly website (http://www.library.umaine.edu/cohen/). Her work followed very closely the standards set by the aforementioned dedicated congressional archivists working in the Senate and in other congressional papers collections such as the George E. Mitchell Papers at Bowdoin College. She also endeavored to collaborate with other repositories in Maine by participating in the Maine Political Papers Network.

I followed in Fran’s footsteps in August of this year and brought to the job my own understanding of the archivist’s mission. At the Library Annex, I soon discovered the place Cohen’s legacy shares within the matrix of the congressional record. This collection is a significant example of the larger work set out by the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress. The remaining work fits neatly into this pattern: process the remaining Senate papers and multimedia materials, facilitate research of the unrestricted portions of the collection, improve access onsite and over the web, and launch outreach activities to raise awareness about this marvelous resource. Though many of the series will remain restricted for some time to come, we will focus our energies on the press papers, audiovisual materials, earlier U.S. House series’, and Department of Defense documents. Upcoming access projects include creating a collaborative database of digital holdings for the Cohen Papers and Special Collections. I would very much enjoy sharing more about this process with any members of the Friends, the UMaine community, and the public.

The Congressional Papers Forum at the SAA meeting in August emphasized one of the abiding and progressive objectives in preserving and providing access to the papers of our elected leaders. In the committee reports, transcripts of hearings, voting records, constituent correspondence, speeches, and issue research that constitute over 1,000 linear feet of Cohen’s papers, researchers can see the details of a life of civic involvement. Congressional papers repositories can work to improve civic literacy and make known the details of these collections as examples of participation in our democratic society.

1 Congressional Papers Project Report, Mackaman, Frank H., Project Director, Sponsored by The Dirksen Congressional Center and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, July 15 to November 15, 1985. Washington, DC: National Historical Publications and Records Commission, 1986.

2 Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress (Established under Authority of Public Law 101-509 November 5, 1990), Third Report, December 31, 2000 Compiled by Karen D. Paul under the direction of Gary Sisco, Chairman and Jeff Trandahl, Vice Chairman.