This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of Ernst Posner, “What, Then, Is the American Archivist, This New Man?” American Archivist 20, no. 1 (January 1, 1957): 3–11, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.20.1.10h7186h04u21887.

By Emma Barton-Norris, Processing Archivist at Bowdoin College Library [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]

In Washington, DC, on October 12, 1956, at a turning point in both the evolution of the American archivist and capitalism, Ernst Posner, Society of American Archivists (SAA) president and dean of the graduate school at American University, gave his presidential “farewell message.” Posner titled his speech “What, Then, Is the American Archivist, This New Man?” rephrasing J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s observations on the post-revolutionary identity of the American populace. Posner delves into the qualities and characteristics of the American archivist in the age of capital, exploring the evolutionary nature of the profession and presenting an image that he dubs the homo archivalis Americanus.

Every species’ unique scientific name consists of two parts: a genus and an epithet. A scientific name is assigned to all identifiable and documented living things, including humans who are categorized as homo sapiens.[1] Just what, then, is the homo archivalis Americanus—the American archivist? Like other species on the planet, Posner argues that this “archival animal” can best be described based on the terms of the “environment and the forces that have shaped it” (p. 6). Although he emphasizes the impact of bureaucratic recordkeeping practices, scholarly involvement, and concern over current and semi-current records as forces shaping the American archivist, I contend that the most engrained environmental force the species encounters, one that has shaped the species’ evolution in the most direct and emblematic ways, is American capitalism. To fully understand the context in which Posner delivered his 1956 address and how the environmental forces he identified came to affect the American archivist so distinctly, the environment in which Posner gives his address—what I argue to be American capitalism—must also be understood.

The evolution of the American archivist in the age of capital is defined by the nation’s unique relationship to the capitalist epoch, that is, the historical era in which capitalism has reigned. As William Sewell Jr. argues in his 2014 presidential address to the Social Science History Association, capitalism is a “historically specific and temporally limited form of life,” with a beginning and end, and not simply an economic system.[2] Capitalism, I believe, should be seen as an age in human history, just as the Enlightenment or the Cold War are seen as eras in which humanity has earmarked our existence. Capitalism emerged at a specific point in a specific place, and while it seems utterly engrossing in its scope and power from our current point of view, the capitalist age is just another era within the Anthropocene.[3] However, the capitalist environment must be understood as neither eternal nor natural. Capitalism is defined as an unnatural and exploitative system of social relations based on the private ownership of the means of production (the land, labor, and capital used to produce goods and services).[4] To access these privately owned means of production, human beings must suffer commodification of their creative productive capacity—that which makes us human—and sell it as a thing, labor-power, for a wage. Karl Marx in Capital, Volume 1 describes capital as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”[5] It differs from money itself, as Marx details, in its role in human history: “If money . . . ‘comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[6] But it is clear that the establishment of this exploitative system was not natural: “This relation [between those who own commodities and those who possess nothing but their own labor-power] has no basis in natural history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development.”[7] An abstraction created by the commodity-owning class, capital is more closely defined in the American context, according to Jonathan Levy in Ages of American Capitalism, simply as capitalism. Levy further argues that capitalism has a special relationship with the United States of America.[8] US history and the history of capitalism are linked because of their simultaneous genesis, unlike the European world whose histories were largely defined prior to the age of capital.[9] Scholars generally agree that the seventeenth century was the uneven launch of capitalism, with some of the earliest documented enslaved individuals crossing the Atlantic and landing in the colony of Virginia in 1619 along with the rise of the English mercantilist empire.[10] “Land and slaves” were the two commodities that allowed for the creation and ultimate expansion of global capital, and both were most readily bought and sold in the New World. America became the land of capital.[11] The evolution of the American environment is therefore inherently linked to the evolution of capital. 

It is within this environment of American capital that Posner began his address by joking with the SAA members in attendance that, as with American presidents, SAA’s presidents ought not to become “public nuisances” and should rightly be eliminated at the end of their terms. In his opening, he specifically mentions the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an instance where this approach (literally shooting presidents once they leave office) would have stopped former president Harry S. Truman from becoming a nuisance. While not explicitly stated, Posner believed his audience to be aware of the situation he was referring to; therefore, it seems probable that he was referring to Truman’s hesitance to endorse Adlai Stevenson as the Democratic nominee. His comments allude to the ways in which SAA members and the archives they served were not removed from their larger political and economic environments. According to a Time article published during the convention, Truman’s unwillingness to endorse front runner Stevenson was all for “stirring up trouble.”[12] Stevenson was, at that moment, the last hope for New Deal Democrats. During the Cold War, American capital had long evolved from a market of land and enslaved humans into a new form of military Keynesianism that was in direct opposition to the New Deal’s social democratic policies and Keynes’s original theory of regulation and social spending.[13] Keynesianism, in theory, was an attempt to control the most horrific and damaging aspects of capitalism through aggressive regulation and government spending on social needs (education, infrastructure, unemployment benefits, etc.) that was never fully implemented during the New Deal. Following the second world war, Keynes’s theory was perversely manipulated into state support of the military industrial complex. This period (roughly 1947 to 1971) of extreme economic growth, high military spending, and intraparty turmoil became known as the “golden age” of capitalism.[14] The 1950s, specifically, also mark a “golden age” for reactionary politics where a heightened removal of anti-capitalist thought, named after the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, ultimately created today’s pervasive denial of capitalism’s historicity. This was the Cold War at home. McCarthyism created a domestic enemy—the “Commie,” in reference to the belief that all anti-capitalist thought was Stalinist or Communist—to justify the United States’ anti-Communist policy abroad, which included the murdering of land reform peasants across South and Central America and Southeast Asia.[15] Posner’s address is situated within this new period of the capitalist epoch when democracy swung in favor of capital.

Posner’s apathetic and joking attitude toward past leadership (both at the state level and the SAA level) also implies that he does not see himself—a soon-to-be past president, like Truman—as someone whose message should be seen as beyond critique in the decades to come. He realizes that, like most professionals in the archival field, history is in the eye of the beholder, and no one can dictate how the future will deem one president a “nuisance” and another a hero. With his outsider perspective, as a Prussian Jewish immigrant, he ponders, “am I equipped to handle so difficult and so delicate a topic?” as the future of the American archivist. It is because of this distance, Posner justifies, between himself and the American consciousness that it is easier for him to “grasp the picture of the wood than the trees that stand in the thick of it.” Posner believes he can shed light onto the “characteristics of our professional structure” that would escape others by answering the “basic questions” of the American archivist—where the “species” comes from, where it is, and where it’s going (p. 3). His first approach, the “visual method,” is unsuccessful. He lightheartedly attempts to create a mirage based on specific archivists to visualize the American archivist. However, no combining of individuals created the “ideal type of American archivist” Posner was after. His next approach takes lessons from Leo Lowenthal’s “Biographies in Popular Magazines” to interpret the ideal archivist through literature’s depictions of one. Like his first approach, Posner fails in his attempt to distill any sort of “image” because in America, archivists have not situated themselves in the popular imagination (p. 4).

Left with few other options for describing the American archivist, Posner turns to SAA’s 1956 survey of its members.[16] The survey, along with splitting up the profession based on gender (here, categorized as male and female), divides the profession’s work into archival, record, or manuscript work. This dividing of labor into categories and then again into subcategories, I argue, is both a uniquely capitalist trait and one that specifically defines the evolution of the American archivist from 1956 to today. The division of labor is defined by Karl Marx as a process of alienation whereby, as workers become more specialized in their tasks, they become more removed from the creation of a good or service. The worker, due to this division, becomes detached from their own production and “depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.”[17] These divisions have become a key force in the American archivist’s environment in the last seventy years. For instance, Posner notes the presence of “migratory workers” who switch between archival and record work, emphasizing the overlap between these roles, especially in record management centers where much of the work is of an archival nature (p. 5). Posner’s term, migratory workers, also defines a rising new subcategory of archival work in the last few decades of American archivists’ evolution. As noted in both the New England Archivists’ 2022 report and the 2023 A*CENSUS II Archives Administrators Survey report, work of a non-permanent, temporary, and moving structure has become an increasingly large portion of the archival landscape in the United States.[18] According to the 2023 A*CENSUS II report, an average of 30 percent of archival workers are contingent while an average of 34 percent of archival repositories plan to increase the amount of short-to-medium-term contract (less than one year to three years) positions in the next five years.[19] These new migratory workers are not only migrating between subdivisions of labor but are often forced to physically migrate to different places of employment once their nonpermanent position is over. This new evolution of the American archivist cannot be separated from the point and place along the evolutionary timeline of capital that it is from—the current age of monopolistic and oligarchical neoliberalism. It is no longer the “golden age” of capitalism that Posner’s address was given.

Along with the migratory worker, Posner also defines another category of workers, the “others,” a bouillabaisse made of historians, librarians, and academics (p. 5). In 1956, 20 percent of SAA’s membership, within America’s environment of stratified labor categorization, were labeled as “the historical fringe” by Posner’s survey (p. 6). This showcases how informal gaps between workers have been artificially created as a further division of labor. Posner describes the “sheepskins” that archivists must wear to conceal themselves as they cross these divisions into other work activities (p. 6). These sheepskins have taken many forms throughout the American archivist’s evolution, most recently in the case of the migratory worker taking on different positions as projects and contracts end or renew.[20] The pervasiveness of such precarious archival work is directly related to American archivists living in the age of capital.

Posner then moves on to his final and most successful approach to understand and define the American “archival animal”—an exploration of the “historical foundations of archival endeavor in this country and the conditioning effect they have had on our profession” (p. 6). This approach takes into consideration the social environment wherein the archivist evolved. Although Posner does not identify capitalism as a force shaping the American archivist’s development, the environment he describes is inherently a capitalist one due to the United States’ historical alignment with the capitalist mode of production. Posner believes that bureaucracy’s “favorite child” is logical record administration, that “poor record keeping seems to be the price of liberty.” It is against this backdrop of apathy, if not outward hostility, toward the preservation of records that historical scholars rose to prominence as advocates for archives administration throughout America’s early capitalist history (pp. 6–7). To maintain and manage the historical record, public administrators at both the federal and state levels were forced to “procreate machinery” in a process that Posner describes as artificial insemination. In this process, it is the workers themselves who, like Marx describes, become “depressed . . . to the condition of a machine.”[21] In addressing the characteristics of the American archivist, Posner points to the uniquely American aspect of the division of labor “between archives and historical manuscripts,” which he notes does not exist in countries outside of the United States (p. 7). This “artificial gulf between archivists and manuscript custodians” is created by the environment in which the American archivist live—capitalism.

Posner’s history of the American archivist continues with an analysis of what he terms “archival imperialism.” Calling attention to another unique point in America’s archival evolution, Posner argues that the individual archivist’s authority “far exceed the prerogatives of European” counterparts. Instead of the bureaucratic administrations of the Old World, the New World’s approach to records management is “concerned with the record from birth to box—that is the Hollinger box” (pp. 8–9). Posner examines the rates of professional archivists leaving one position for another, “with much talent and experience being lost to other ways of life and a variety of new talent without experience constantly coming in” (p. 9). This is Posner’s brief examination of a supposed modern problem in the archival field, the abundance of non-permanence. This phenomenon was also addressed in the 2023 A*CENSUS II survey report.[22] Reduced by the precarity of their labor within the age of capital, the American archivist is left with no other choice: as Posner says, “We had to be and we must still be effective salesmen of our cause, in a world that suspected us of being mere antiquarians, lap dogs that society could easily dispense with” (p. 9).

In equating the archivist to a salesman, Posner, while not explicitly, very aptly situates the American archivist in the context of American capitalism. In the age of capital, the American archivist must sell itself and its labor as monetarily valuable. Posner argues that, through the spirit and adaptability typical of Americans trained in the tradition of the American historian, archivists have “begun to force our way of thinking on a reluctant highly industrial society” (p. 9). But Posner makes clear that he believes archival organization in the United States has not progressed rapidly or systematically enough. For instance, Posner notes the National Archives’s dwarfing budgets compared to other archival agencies. He also comments on the expanding “gulf” that separates how archivists and manuscript custodians see themselves, making them “not sufficiently conscious of the similarity of their tasks” (p. 10). This demonstration of the disastrous effects of the capitalist epoch—viewing the archivist as a seller, the constant negotiation for funding, and artificial divisions of labor—displays how the American archivist cannot remove its species from the age of capital.

In his conclusion, Posner addresses the future evolution of the homo archivalis Americanus. He asks SAA members: “What have we done to record, to analyze, and to describe the growth of our profession? What have we done to facilitate the work of the historian-archivist of the year 2056?” (pp. 10–11). He proposes a set of seven suggestions that would allow for historians of the future to define just what the American archivist is. Posner’s 1956 proposals call to have access, in 2056, to a rich historiography of the American archival animal so archivists can better understand how the times this species has lived dictate how it functions.[23] It seems that Posner wants the American archivist to have the tools it needs to view how the age of capital has shaped the species’ evolution.

In 2024, sixty-eight years after Ernst Posner’s address, the homo archivalis Americanus is still a species situated within the unique environment of American capital. With its beginnings linked to the very start of the capitalist epoch, the history of the United States is the history of capital, and the American archivist, with its roots dug deep into American soil, cannot remove itself from this link. Throughout the phases of American capital, from its beginnings as a market of land and enslaved human beings, to the mid-twentieth century’s Keynesian period of regulation and the following decades of sharp decline into neoliberal and monopolistic capitalism, the American archivist’s precarious evolution has been directly connected to that of American capitalism. Instead of the homo archivalis Americanus, this species, which has evolved in an environment where “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” must be reclassified as the homo archivalis capitale.[24]

---

[1] Ronald M. Coleman, “Welcome to Introduction to Scientific Names,” Sacramento State, accessed December 13, 2023, https://www.csus.edu/faculty/c/rcoleman/natural%20history%20museums/sacramento_state_online_natural_history_museum/introduction%20to%20scientific%20names.html.

[2] William H. Sewell Jr., “The Capitalist Epoch,” Social Science History 38, no. 1–2 (2014): 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2015.3.

[3] I take my definition of Anthropocene, the era of human disruption to the planet, from Eira Tansey and Robert Montoya. See Eira Tansey and Robert D. Montoya, “Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene: An Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.156.

[4] This definition comes from the first uses of the word in 1850. Karl Marx never uses the word in any of his works defining this system, preferring to use capital and the capitalist mode of production. See Fernand Braudel, “Production: or Capitalism away from Home” in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce (United States: University of California Press, 1992), 237.

[5] Karl Marx, “Chapter Ten: The Working-Day,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 163.

[6] Karl Marx, “Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” in Capital, Volume 1, 536.

[7] Marx, “Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power” in Capital, Volume 1, 120.

[8] Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2021).

[9] Posner limits himself to these two opposing centers of focus. I want to make clear that I am also limiting my focus to the conceptual “New World” (America) and “Old World” (Europe). I am thereby excluding and eliminating much of humanity in my examination. This narrow scope and arbitrary boundaries allow for my statements to be more concrete and not create sweeping global generalizations.

[10] Olivia B. Waxman, “The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619. It Was a Turning Point for Slavery in American History—But Not the Beginning,” Time, August 20, 2019, https://time.com/5653369/august-1619-jamestown-history/; Sewell, “The Capitalist Epoch,” 3.

[11] Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism, 31; Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (United States: Basic Books, 2016).

[12] “Democrats: Harry’s Happy Hour,” Time, August 20, 1956, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,891726,00.html#.

[13] Levy, Ages of American Capitalism, 413–19.

[14] These dates signify the post-war period, leaving room for the wave of labor organizing that occurred in 1945 and 1946 (one of the largest strikes in US history took place in 1946) and ended with the US voiding the Bretton Woods agreements in 1971. See Marty Jezer, “Part 1: Repression at Home and Abroad” in The Dark Ages, Life in the United States, 1945–1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 78–106; Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, “The Golden Age of Capitalism,” in Rentiers’ Capitalism (2020), https://www.bresserpereira.org.br/papers/2020/Chapter-5-The-Golden-Age-of-Capitalism.pdf.

[15] Marty Jezer, “The Rise of McCarthyism,” in The Dark Ages, 98–99.

[16] I do not feel the need to examine Posner’s datasets or his gendered demographic surveys, as other scholars have already done this. See  Victoria Irons Walch, Elizabeth Yakel, Jeannette Allis Bastian, Nancy Zimmelman, Brenda Banks, Susan E. Davis, and Anne P. Diffendal, “Special Section on A*CENSUS (Archival Census & Education Needs Survey in the United States),” American Archivist 69, no. 2 (2006): 291–527, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.69.2.d474374017506522; Frank B. Evans and Robert M. Warner, “American Archivists and Their Society: A Composite View,” American Archivist 34, no. 2 (1971): 157–72, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.34.2.0x22g543tw113uq1; Alex H. Poole, “‘Be Damned Pushy at Times’: The Committee on the Status of Women and Feminism in the Archival Profession, 1972–1998,” American Archivist 81, no. 2 (2018): 394–437, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-81.2.394.

[17] Karl Marx, “Wages of Labour,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 4.

[18] Stephanie Bredbenner, Alison Fulmer, Meghan Rinn, Rose Oliveira, and Kimberly Barzola, “Nothing About It Was Better Than a Permanent Job”: Report of The New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study Task Force, February 2022, https://newenglandarchivists.org/resources/Documents/Inclusion_Diversity/Contingent-Employment-2022-report.pdf; Makala Skinner, “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey Report,” American Archivist 86, no. 2 (2023): 258–319, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.2.258.

[19] See Fig 6 and 34 in Skinner, “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey,” 272, 299.

[20] Skinner, “A*CENSUS II,” 272, 299.

[21] Karl Marx, “Wages of Labour,” 4.

[22] Skinner, “A*CENSUS II,” 272, 299.

[23] Posner suggests that SAA: (1) Create a sustained archives for SAA itself; (2) SAA’s archivist should also serve as SAA’s historian; (3) Create a volume of the ‘whose who’ in American archival history; (4) Create an oral history collection, recording the voices of archivists for future generations to study; (5) Write a history of the National Archives; (6) Perform a study of the histories of the various state level archival agencies; (7) While the leaders of the record management movement are still alive, document the movement’s philosophies and progress.

[24] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 536. Etymology of capital, coming from the Latin capitale, which means property or wealth. See Peter L. Berger, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 17–18.