By Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus
The public archive is a sacred space; like any public
library, these spaces offer free, democratic access to information and are
staffed by trained professionals ready to help you turn that information into
knowledge. In our capitalist society, access to information usually comes with
a price. One must pay for Internet access, higher education, museum entrance
fees, journal subscriptions, but public archives are accessible for anyone, for
free. As amateur researchers, the California Historical Society archive was an
indispensable resource for us, a space of transformative discovery, where our
casual fascination with yesteryear lead us into a multi-year research process
that culminated in the publication of an award winning book, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute
(Heyday, 2016).
Neither of us had advanced degrees, but we are both the type
of people who become immediately excited by the smell of musty old paper. We’d
visited archives as college students, working on research papers. We’d done our
duty, using snippets of primary documents to assist our papers, looking for
something to give us a bump in grades. This felt professional, yet temporary.
Archives were for academics or students, we’d thought. We’d most likely move on
and have little future use for them. As historians working outside of academia,
we sometimes felt nervous about our access to archives. But as we went down the
rabbit-hole of discovery, neither of us could stop. We’d go to the CHS archive
on our weekends for the thrill of revelation; each slip of paper told a story,
held a clue, added depth to our own understandings of the past and thus the
present.
During our first visits to the archive as independent
researchers, we were admittedly a bit embarrassed about our inexperience. There
seemed to be a code of conduct that we weren’t yet aware of. When were you
supposed to wear those little white gloves while handling documents? Were you
always welcome to photograph the documents? It is laughable, now that we have
developed relationships with many of the librarians at the CHS archive, but
early on we were nervous to reveal our lack of experience to the librarians in
charge. We had unknowingly bought into a tragic myth of the archive: that it is
a pretentious space, a space meant for professionals and professionals only. It
wasn’t long before this myth was, thankfully, shattered.
Looking through the James Rolph Jr. papers, a collection of
one of San Francisco’s most colorful mayors (1912-1931), we were on the hunt
for information concerning the closure of San Francisco’s infamous vice
district of yore, the Barbary Coast. We had discovered evidence of a
prostitute’s memoir, published by the controversial newspaperman Fremont Older
in the San Francisco Bulletin at some
point during Rolph’s mayoral tenure. We were working through the early stages
of research, and still not fully comfortable. Instead of asking our librarians
for assistance, we confined our research to the names, dates, and files we
found in our own secondary research. As we sifted through folders, quiet as
church mice, we heard a loud man enter. His sharp boots, echoing his speech,
broke the cathedral-like solemnity of the room with an urgent request: he
needed to get to Bodie, a ghost town in the Eastern Sierras, that weekend, and
he needed information. What information, he wasn’t sure about. Could they help
him? We paused over the hand-written letters to Rolph in 1913 complaining about
interracial dancing in the Barbary Coast. His gregarious demeanor and eccentric
request seemed to break all of these unwritten “codes” of intellectual
propriety that we had tried to emulate within the holy archive. Would he be
shushed and shunned? Is that not what every librarian in every film depiction
throughout history would have done? Of course, the librarians were nothing but
helpful, warm, and knowledgeable. They were soon deep in conversation with the
Bodie-bound man. Advice and information was passed back and forth without a
single stroke of a computer button. This moment struck us as something
essential about libraries and archives that had been passed by in the digital
age. It made us feel much more comfortable working with the staff, where before
we had been perhaps too shy.
While we certainly did much of our research online, there
were several instances where the online materials were either non-existent,
incomplete, or simply inaccurate. None of the documents that lead us to our
ultimate discovery, the memoir of the San Francisco based prostitute “Alice
Smith,” written in 1913, existed online. Our project depended upon the diligent
preservation of materials by librarians. While we found one mention of Smith’s
memoir on a Wikipedia page, there were all sorts of inaccuracies in the
article. It appeared that few, if any, had actually read her memoirs since they
had been serialized in the San Francisco
Bulletin in 1913. Every book we had found that spoke of the publication had
either gotten the date wrong or didn’t mention a date at all. Many sources
dated the publication of her story to 1917, though we were doubtful. We
eventually found Alice’s memoirs on microfilm after scrolling for days through
years of one of the city’s most popular dailies, housed on the 5th floor of San
Francisco’s Main Library. We spent countless hours, days, and months, in cafes,
bars, libraries, and our living room transcribing the hundreds of pages of
Alice’s story from the scanned microfilm.
At the California Historical Society’s archives, we found
vital primary documents that helped us to unravel the story behind Alice. Letters written by 20th century
anti-vice reformers to Mayor Rolph were typed on stationery branded with an
iconic symbol of San Francisco’s 19th century vigilante gangs: the all-seeing
eye. We had the pleasure of digging through the meeting minutes of early League
of Women Voters organizers, in which they revealed the challenges they faced
trying to do outreach with sex workers who wanted nothing to do with their
anti-vice reform efforts. We had read letters penned to the Bulletin by sex workers in 1913, where
they discussed how suspicious they were of the women’s clubs and their reform
agenda. These handwritten meeting minutes, which were still being catalogued by
the CHS and thus had not been looked at for many years, if not decades,
contained admissions that reinforced our growing understanding of the complex
divisions between the feminist ideals of Progressive Era reformers and the
feminism of sex workers. At the University of Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, we
found unsettling letters sent to Fremont Older, who had published Smith’s story
in the San Francisco Bulletin,
threatening to dynamite his home and office, written in an unnerving scrawl
reminiscent of San Francisco’s own Zodiac-killer. We also, after a long search,
discovered the possible real name of Alice Smith, a pseudonym. In 1913, Smith
bemoaned the ways in which sex worker voices were marginalized and discarded by
society. If it were not for the due diligence of later librarians and
archivists, her story, too, would have faded away into obscurity. And if it
were not for the principle of the public library,
the public archive, us amateurs would have never had the opportunity to engage
in this work, work that has defined and shaped our lives, and, we hope, the
lives of our readers.
Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus are both writers, artists, and
activists based in San Francisco. Alice:
Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, which won the 2015 California
Historical Society Book Award, is their first book.
For more information about Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, please visit:
No comments:
Post a Comment