Prologue in Perspective Records, Records, Everywhere Users Help NARA's Space Planning Eighty By John W. Carlin ighty years ago this fall, World War I ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Several articles in this issue of Prologue recall American participation in that war and draw upon records, both textual and audiovisual, now preserved in the National Archives of the United States. These records are available today for inquiries into the past only because the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) takes responsibility for preserving the documentary evidence of our history. In fact, we're bursting at the seams with it. The National Archives did not exist until nearly two decades after World War I, but the agency now holds more than twenty million cubic feet of original textual materials (which is more than four billion pieces of paper). In addition, NARA has thousands of reels of motion picture film, maps, charts, architectural drawings, sound and video recordings, aerial photographs, still pictures and posters, and computer data sets. When the agency began, there was one great building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Now there are thirty-three facilities across the country. And the volume of federal records keeps growing and growing. Many of the records NARA stores are temporary agency records in our federal records services centers. Each year, the centers' holdings grow by half a million cubic feet, and we are fast running out of space. Many of our facilities are at capacity now, or soon will be. In addition, NARA provides access to genealogical resources in thirteen microfilm reading rooms, most of which are not large enough to meet the demands for service that will occur when the 1930 census is released to the public in 2002. We are concerned not just with the quantity of space available but also with its quality. NARA is committed to providing appropriate environmental conditions for all the records in its care. Our goal is to place 100 percent of our holdings in appropriate space by the year 2006; right now only 21 percent of the more than 5.8 million cubic feet of permanent, archival holdings are held in such conditions. “Appropriate space" means not only proper environmental storage conditions for the records but also space that adequately meets the needs of staff and researchers and facilitates access to records. Therefore in March of 1998, I established a Space Planning Team to examine our current space use and make recommendations for improvements. Our space planning has four main goals: 1) to increase the quantity of space so we can continue to add historically valuable records to our holdings; 2) to increase the quality of space so they will be preserved for generations to come; 3) to enhance access to the records; and 4) to do all this in a cost-effective manner. One of NARA's strategic goals is to ensure that essential evidence will be easy to access regardless of where it is or where users are for as long as needed. In this major space-planning project, we are pursu ing that goal. The planning process did not start with predetermined decisions about the number of facilities we should have in the future or where they should be. And, whatever decisions we do make about records storage facilities, we are committed to retaining microfilm reading rooms for the use of genealogists and other researchers in every location where we have them now. These reading rooms also will provide full access to automated information online from NARA. Speaking of that, you can get information right now via the Internet about our Space Planning Team and its progress from a special Web page we maintain at http://www.nara.gov/nara/ spceplan.html. The information we are providing online via computers is continuously increasing. We are going forward with our Electronic Access Project (EAP), developing an online catalog of all NARA holdings nationwide. The current prototype catalog, the NARA Archival Information Locator (NAIL), already contains more than 340,000 descriptions and 60,000 digital documents, which are increasingly used by our customers. Listening to our customers has been the first part of our space planning process. From June through August of this year, we conducted a series of fourteen public meetings across the country, from Boston to Anchorage. Genealogists, scholars, government agency officials, and others who use the services and facilities of the National Archives and Records Administration came to discuss their needs and concerns. This input is helping us determine how we can best serve our constituents as we make space plans for the future. We are inviting further comment in a user survey that we are undertaking this fall, and we welcome suggestions and comments via e-mail at this address: space.plan@arch2.nara.gov. Or you can write the NARA Space Planning Team at Room 4100 (NPOL), 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001. We already are moving forward on one front to control space costs. In our fiscal year 2000 budget, we are planning for a completely reimbursable system for the cost of storing and servicing temporary and pre-archival records. This means that all federal agencies will begin to pay NARA for the cost of looking after such records, as some already do. Reimbursable program funds will help us finance adequate records center space. We are engaged in an immense task, one that will affect staff, researchers, and federal customers nationwide. But this undertaking is critical to the future of the National Archives and Records Administration and will determine how well we can serve our customers far into the future. We must take action to safeguard historically valuable records or they will cease to be accessible. Just as the authors of the articles in this issue of Prologue could be confident of finding the records they needed, researchers in years to come must be sure that we have preserved the documentary evidence they will require. W Cat Archivist of the United States AMERICAN FILM PROPAGANDA in REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA By James D. Startt OPPOSITE: The Committee for Public Information showed many American films at public movie houses such as this one on Soetlanslaja Street in Vladivostok, Siberia. Films were also shown at schools, the YMCA, and in many towns and villages. To the o the truism that modern wars are fought with words as well as weapons must be added “images,” especially moving picture images. Moreover, the fact that motion pictures were used as vehicles of propaganda in this century's world wars comes as no surprise. At the time of World War I, when propaganda in its modern forms came of age, film was leaping forward as a popular mass medium of entertainment and journalism. Films had appeared as vehicles of war journalism in the turn-of-the-century wars, but they were all limited conflicts.' World War I, by comparison, was a total war, and that made propaganda, in all of its possible forms, an imperative dimension of warfare. During the war the American propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information (CPI or Compub), conducted widespread operations abroad and in this country. Its international work, however, has attracted little scholarly notice.' The CPI carried on one of its most vigorous overseas campaigns in Russia, yet its activities in that vast land have been neglected by historians. As extensive records in the National Archives and elsewhere show, the CPI dispersed printed materials by the hundreds of thousands in Russia after the United States entered the war. Those records also show that the CPI made creative use of films in its Russian operation, but that part of its work has gone largely unheralded.' Its use of motion pictures, however, represents a fascinating effort to employ the film medium as an instrument of propaganda, and it is the purpose of this article to inquire into the why and how of its use and to consider the question of its significance. Since film was part of a multifaceted operation, an explanation of why the CPI became active in Russia is the logical starting point. The Case for American Propaganda in Russia From the beginning of the war, all the major belligerents created propaganda organizations to unify and mobilize their own populations and to influence those beyond their borders. As the war acquired a character of totality, the effort to control and influence civilian populations grew in importance, as did the need to inspire a nation's own fighting forces and to demoralize those of enemy countries. For these reasons, upon the entrance of the United States into the war in 1917, President Wilson ordered the formation of the Committee on Public Information and appointed George Creel, a liberal journalist and ardent Wilson supporter, to head it. Creel called the CPI's work "a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's News of the end of the tsarist regime and the establishment of a Russian Republic headed by a Provisional Government on March 15, 1917, at first exhilarated the Western Allies. The United States, then drifting even closer to entering the war, greeted the fall of the tsarist autocracy as "a political upheaval in the old American spirit; republican, liberal, antimonarchial," and it became the first nation to extend official recognition to the new Russia. When the United States entered the war a month later, pressure mounted immediately for it to become involved in Russian affairs by means of economic or military assistance. Pressure also grew for the United States to inaugurate a publicity campaign in Russia. greatest adventure in advertising." Any comprehensive study of its operations confirms the truth of that claim, for the CPI saturated this nation with its material and extended its foreign outreach across Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Prevailing circumstances conditioned that work in all instances, but in Russia it faced the challenge of operating amid swirling currents of revolution. Just a month before the American entrance into the war, Russia experienced its first revolution of 1917 with the toppling of the tsarist regime. After months of maneuvering and confrontation by various forces within that country, a second revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, occurred in October, establishing a Communist regime in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow. The Bolsheviks, however, had to fight a two-and-a-half year civil war to gain control of and spread their revolution across the remainder of the old imperial Russia. The revolutionary state of affairs in Russia had a great impact on all the major warring nations. They perceived the fate of Russia as crucial to their own hope for victory or fear of defeat. For this reason, both the Allied and Central Powers tried to influence and guide events and persuasions in Russia for the remainder of the war. At that time, the Allies thought the Americans might succeed where they had failed. As Russian morale deteriorated in February 1916, the British decided to initiate official propaganda in Petrograd under the direction of Hugh Walpole and Harold Williams and in Moscow under Bruce Lockhart. By June of 1917, however, they informed our State Department: "The United States is the best situated country from which to organize a counter-propaganda. The Germans have been able to make the Russian people somewhat suspicious of the aims of the French and English." In fact, after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign (1915-1916) and the shock of the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916, Russian confidence in the British waned, thus allowing German and Russian antiwar propaganda more opportunity for exploitation. Accordingly, the British believed the time had come for the introduction of American propaganda into Russia. The object was to mobilize an effective counter to German propaganda and to encourage the Russians to remain in the war. Another objective, the need to counter Bolshevik anti-American and anti-Allied propaganda, would be added later. Although Secretary of State Robert Lansing was emphatic in agreeing with the British assessment, President Wilson wanted more information before acting and decided to send a goodwill mission to Russia. Headed by the distinguished statesman Elihu Root, its purpose was to spur on the Russian war effort and to appraise the situation there. The mission's subsequent report urged the Wilson administration to wage a propaganda campaign in Russia. When George Creel analyzed the report for Wilson, he concluded that the work should be "done well and done quickly." He also recommended that the State Department should not be involved in the work as the report |