Source-Saver

At Columbia University, Historian Allan Nevins is known as the man who is always writing a book. But "every time I start to write one," says he, "I get annoyed." The trouble is that many of the most important men of U.S. history have died without ever telling the full story of what they did, thought and saw. They are the presidential advisers, the party bosses, the behind-the-scenes movers and shakers of business and politics. To Nevins, this has always seemed a tragic dissipation of source material.

By last week, Historian Nevins was making progress in stopping the waste. He had started a special project for collecting interviews and papers from people around New York City who had played a big behind-the-scenes role in history. His first target two years ago was a man who had never written a page of memoirs and had been all but forgotten by the public. Yet 78-year-old George McAneny, a political power for four decades, was able to tell Nevins more about New York City politics than almost any other man alive.

Sox to Socialists. Since then, Nevins and his assistants have interviewed more than 100 businessmen, politicians, judges, friends and relatives of the great and near-great. The interviews take as much as 15 hours apiece, spaced over several days. When completed, they are transcribed, indexed and filed. But they are for the use of historians only. For all others, they remain top secret.

The history that Nevins has collected so far flows through Cabinet meetings and conventions, peace treaties and panics, big-business deals and back-room intrigue. It ranges from the inside story of the Black Sox scandal to a prominent doctor's recollections of Henry James, from Norman Thomas' story of the Socialist Party to the last days of President Harding, from the Wilson campaign of 1916 to the fabulous machinations of Tammany Boss Charles Francis Murphy.

Unburied Treasures. Along with his interviews, Nevins has also collected more than 25,000 documents--letters to & from Presidents, diaries, private records of events of every sort. He has also obtained some older treasures. Dr. Haven Emerson was able to produce 30 letters from Ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chemist William Jay Schieffelin reached into a closet and pulled out the seven letters that John Jay wrote to Major General Philip Schuyler after the fall of Fort Ticonderoga.

This week, as Nevins and his staff started on their 105th interview, he felt that he had a fair idea of what his project might mean. For present textbooks, there would be dozens of corrections; for those of the future, there would be new descriptions of important events and public figures. It is a project, says Nevins, that could be widened out indefinitely, extending to interviews during elections, hearings or important trials. Will historians ever be able to use such a mass of material? Says Nevins: "Historians never have enough material. They are never satisfied."

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