Air-raids, looting, oral histories–and a lesson about Wikipedia

In Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik’s excellent book about his time as an American living in Paris, he has a chapter on how French people whom he interviewed (he’s a writer for the New Yorker) simply didn’t understand the concept of a fact-checker. He writes, tongue firmly in cheek, that a French equivalent to the New Yorker would have not a fact checker but a theory checker. A fact checker, of course, calls back interviewees and makes sure that the reporter has all of his or her facts correct. A theory checker, Gopnik suggests, would make sure that the theory held up–and the facts are only secondary.

As I hinted in a comment to my post last week, I have a correction to make about the substance to my post about oral history and scripts, but like Gopnik’s hypothetical French magazine writer, my theory, at least, holds up. Herein lies a tale of the historical research process, of how people remember things, of looting and — perhaps most relevant to most blog readers — why Wikipedia is dangerous. I’ll explain after the jump. It’s long, but there’s a picture!

I spent most of this week going through materials collected and written by Archibald MacMechan (pronounced mick-MECK-an), a Nova Scotia man of letters and professor of literature at Dalhousie University here in Halifax. In the weeks after the explosion, someone decided that it would be a good idea to keep track of what happened when, so the Relief Committee asked MacMechan to open the Halifax Disaster Record Office and collect written and oral recollections of people’s experiences. (MacMechan was going to turn this into a book, but then he couldn’t find a publisher. It was finally only published sometime in the 1970s, long after his death.) Most of what MacMechan did was interview his friends–middle-class and rich Haligonians–about what they did on the day of the explosion and the following few days. It’s a very rich collection, but also very flawed, precisely because it is so intensely middle class.

One thing I discovered in these oral histories that MacMechan took is that many people–although by no means most–thought there was indeed a German attack going on. There seemed to be three schools of thought, in ascending order of frequency: that an ammunition magazine had blown up (with or without German assistance), that there was an air-raid (from either airplane or airship), and that there was naval shelling, probably from submarines. A very common thought seems to have been “The Germans are shelling, and I have the bad luck to have had the shell land on my house/office”–and then to get outside and realize that it was something much bigger. Returned soldiers from France seemed to know immediately that it wasn’t an air-raid (I guess they knew what arial bombardment was like?) but the assistant adjutant general, the second in command of the Halifax Fortress, thought it was a submarine bombardment, and more than that, said in January that he thought it was likely that there’d be an actual submarine attack that summer. (Of course, he also said that his first thought was pleasure that there was an attack, since now people would finally understand that there’s a war on–so he was clearly a bit nuts.)

So, apparently, I was wrong in thinking that fear of air-raids was only a World War II phenomenon. But air-raid did have a different, or at least less specific, meaning in World War I. Among other things, it did not have the present-day connotation of an attack on civilians. Searching the Times Digital Archive for “air-raid” between August 14, 1914 and November 11, 1918, and you get 314 articles; but search for “air-raid and bomb*” [meaning any word that starts with “bomb”] in that same time period, and there are only 49. “Air-raid,” then, meant literally an raid from the air, so it included non-bombing air attacks, which were more common. Indeed, one of those bombardment air-raids happened in December 1917, at Padua:

RAIDS ON SUCCESSIVE NIGHTS
December 29. — Yesterday evening at 9 p.m enemy airmen, true to their innate barbarian impulses, which have been revived by the defeat they suffered on December 26 at Reviso, bombarded the inhabited parts of Treviso, Montebelluna, Castelfranco, and Padua all open cities…
In the centre of Padua, where the population is densest and the finest monuments are more numerous, eight bombs were dropped, killing 13 persons and wounding 60. Among the casualties, for the most part women and children, there are only six soldiers. No monument was damaged. There was no damage done or casualties caused in the (? other) cities.
(The Times, 31 Dec 1917, p6 )

So how’d I get it so wrong? Well, for one thing, I assumed I knew better than my sources, which is always a mistake–and unlike with looting, I didn’t second-guess my sources because of actual knowledge I had, but merely a hunch. That hunch was confirmed by Wikipedia, which was the source I linked to in my original post.

Wikipedia gets a lot of scorn, of course. The idea of college students citing it in a paper makes my skin crawl. And for some things it’s terribly unreliable–mostly things over which there’s some political, religious, nationalist, or other controversy. But I usually think that it’s useful as a reference for topics that are uncontroversial and that have a large group of dedicated amateurs devoted to them. I would have thought that strategic bombing and the history of World War I would fit in that category. So I think of this as a warning about Wikipedia–that it’s not even safe for uncontroversial, high-traffic articles.

But, actually, how wrong was I? Obviously, to dismiss the idea that people were afraid of an air-raid was incorrect. Some people were. But whereas almost everyone among the interviewees in 1985 and 1988 mentioned it, comparatively fewer contemporary interviewees said it. The idea that it could have been a submarine or other naval attack seems to have been forgotten. This, I would argue, supports my notion that people unconsciously imposed a World War II script on a World War I event.

So what about looting, then, which was the original point of the original post? Tori asked in a comment to the original post whether newspapers would be a good source for documenting potential incidents of looting. The short answer is that I don’t know, because I haven’t looked through the newspapers yet. But the longer answer is that newspapers are only somewhat helpful here. Remember the contemporaneous news coverage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. For the first week, we were treated to stories of people gone wild in the absence of a functioning state: rampant rapes, murders, and looting; people shooting at helicopters; crazy, violent anarchy. Of course what emerged afterwards is that none of this was actually true. There was, in fact, very little violence, and mostly organized looting for essentials. (This disconnect between the original stories coming out of New Orleans and the subsequent counternarrative is what inspired my dissertation project.) Even at the moment that an event is happening, we experience it through a script. People saw violence and looting in New Orleans because that’s what our script says, whether or not it actually happened.

Let’s go back to to the winter of 1917-18 in Halifax. For one thing, it appears that I’m not the only person interested in the topic. I found this when I opened one of the MacMechan files.

You can’t see it here, but what the previous researcher (and I think I know who it is) was marking was a newspaper article reporting an instance of “marauders” robbing a relief station in March–more than four months after the explosion. Indeed, I can find no contemporaneous evidence that there was any looting in the period following the explosion–the time when the oral histories taken in 1985 and 1988 claim there was. Not a single one of the middle-class women who worked in hospitals or men who worked digging the dead and wounded out of collapsed houses mentioned any looting whatsoever to MacMechan. Colonel Ralph B. Simmons, who took charge of securing the devastated area on December 8 (the second day after the explosion), claimed that there was no way that after he took over there could have been any looting. He credited his bravado in spreading the rumor that he had shot a man he caught looting–a story he admitted to MacMechan was entirely fictional. The night after the disaster, American sailors off the USS Von Steuben and the USS Tacoma patrolled the city, giving the Canadian soldiers time to rest. I hope to find records from those two ships in American archives to see if they reported any looting–but if I do (and it’s a big “if”), I don’t expect to find that the blue-coats caught any looters.

The closest thing I can find is the story of a soldier named Burpee, who was assigned to the ad hoc morgue in the Chebucto Street School. Here’s the story as told by Professor McRae, one of the middle-class men who ran the executive side of the morgue (the voice is MacMechan, who is paraphrasing his friend and colleague):

Sergeant Burpee, conscripted in California was in charge of the bags of effects. McRae did not know from whom he received orders, but found him opening the bags and making lists of contents. In this way Burpee became well acquainted with the contents, and on Christmas Eve disappeared with $200.00 cash, which he spent in a drinking bout. Burpee now in jail. Money not recovered. McRae of opinion that money and valuables were taken from the dead.
(PANS MG 1, vol. 2124, item 203)

And here’s the same story as told by Police Officer Leo Tooke, who ran the less genteel side of the morgue (material within quotation marks is Tooke’s own writing, the rest is paraphrasing by me):

“On Christmas Even when I with-drew, as night policeman from duty at the morgue, Mr. Barnstead thought he had two good, reliable soldiers in charge of the citizens property, and I told him, if so, we did not need any more police that night, as there was nothing for them to do, that they were better needed somewhere else to protect the citizens property. I was not to return there to the morgue until Christmas day at 12 o’clock” to relieve the soldiers for the rest of their holiday. Christmas morning, “Chief of Police Hanarhan [later spelled Hanrahan] called me up by telephone asking me if I was sick. I told him No, that Mr. Barnstead and I agreed that I was to come at 12 o’clock Christmas day, and let the soldiers go. Well he told me that the morgue had been burglarized the night before, by one of those men that had charge of the citizens property, and said that he wanted me to go right out there.” Tooke investigated and found that Burpee had “burst the trunk open, and stolen about $200.00 belonging to the dead bodies, and gone in town.” He went off looking for the soldier, but apparently did not find him. When the money was out, the solider went back to the Armouries, where he was arrested by Assistant Detective Collier.
(PANS MG 1, vol. 2124, item 258)

Two things to note here: first $200 was a lot of money. A well paid, skilled worker would make about $20 a week, and a more common weekly wage was $15. Enlisted men in the Canadian Army made $7.70 per week. It’s hard to imagine even the most hardened soldier drinking away that much money in a single day. Second, McRae and Tooke tell subtly different stories, even though they told them to MacMechan on January 27 and March 12, respectively. I doubt that the extra month and a half Tooke took to write down his story is responsible for the different details, though. There’s something else at work here.

And here, finally, is the lesson, and the answer to Tori’s questions in her comments to my original post. She asked, “How does a historian decide which archives to explore and which materials from that archive are relevant and which to ignore or dismiss?” One of the nice things about being a historian is that methodologically, we’re very catch-as-catch can. I’m happy to use any method and any source that helps me answer my questions. Usually, there isn’t so much that get to pick and choose. The MacMechan files are deeply flawed as sources, but it’s what I’ve got, so I’ve got to use it. I would be happy to read literally any document produced by someone who was in Halifax on December 6, 1917. How do I read it? How do I balance it? That, of course, is the heart of the art of history. This isn’t gospel at all, but I’d say with sources you have to balance two things: perspective and accuracy. Some things are inaccurate because they’re wrong–because they lie, or because they’re based on misrememberings, or because they were based on a false source earlier. The general in charge of of the Halifax Fortress–the highest ranked military man in Halifax–wrote to the minister in Ottawa that he had tried mightily to stem rumors of a second explosion, and to urge people to come back to their houses. He blamed the rumor on “nervous” civilians. But every single other source says that it was uniformed soldiers who went around warning people that the magazine was about to explode, at times even forcing reluctant survivors to leave their houses. His letter is inaccurate because he was embarrassed that the Army spread misinformation. The reports in the oral histories of widespread looting are, I think, misrememberings. Obviously, I want to find things that are as accurate as possible.

But the question of perspective is perhaps just as important. There is stark disagreement among MacMechan’s sources about the extent of “organization” in the early hours and days. People who were at City Hall, who were involved in creating the relief committee, thought things were disorganized, chaotic, a mess, proof that what Halifax needed was more organization and expertise. People who were in the hospitals thought (to quote one college woman) that there was “organization without organization”: volunteers trained and untrained showed up at the hospitals and got to work, and everything just worked, even with the hospitals gruesome and grostesquely over-crowded. People just did what needed to be done; patients were stoic and selfless; doctors, nurses, and lay volunteers all got along–and and all without anyone telling people what to do. Neither of these types of informants are wrong, they just had radically different perspectives based on their positions.

The trick for the historian is to find the right balance. For me, the oral histories taken in the 1980s have the benefit of being a perspective I’m interested in (mostly working-class people from the North End) but the disadvantage of being long removed from the original event. In contrast, MacMechan’s oral histories have the benefit of being fresh, but they have the disadvantage of being nearly blind to the experience of working-class Haligonians. In the end, everything is a compromise, and my job as a historian is to fit all the sources together to tell a coherent story and answer the questions I want to answer.

-jacob