On the election night at the beginning of November, I found myself in New York City. I had travelled to the American East Coast to visit a series of different archives to gather materials for my doctoral thesis. It was quite a coincidence because my entire PhD project is very much motivated by Trump’s first period in office. And here I was, witnessing his second electoral victory. Trump’s first presidency and its consequences for the American-led international order left me wondering about the possible connections between the course of international affairs and economic intra-state inequality. Therefore, I embarked on my current doctoral journey, trying to answer the following research question: How does economic inequality within a hegemon inform its ability to act as the primary regulator of liberal international order? 

I approach this question historically with one of my cases being American hegemonic ascendance following the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Therefore, I travelled to Washington D.C. in October with the support from PSA’s American Politics Group as well as the University of Warwick’s Department of Politics and International Relations. The trip would take me from D.C. to Princeton, onwards to New York City and, finally, to Hyde Park in upstate New York. The aim was to investigate everyday perceptions of economic inequality in interwar America, and during World War II, and subsequently explore the policy positions adopted by American elite policymakers ahead of Bretton Woods to see if a possible link can be identified. Consequently, I got to explore the special collections of the Library of Congress, the National Archives in College Park, the University of Maryland, Princeton University, New York University as well as Roosevelt’s Presidential Library. 

Archives are a peculiar (for lack of a better word) place to research the everyday, because everyday people will rarely find themselves in archival collections. Elite policymakers, on the other hand, will often have a large staff around them to handle their official papers. Or they may keep their personal files themselves before their relatives ultimately decide to donate them to a certain archive where they are deemed worthy of preservation. Yet, everyday people and their experiences are often forgotten and lost as time moves on. This bias created the biggest challenge I had to overcome during my time in the U.S.: how to research historical everyday experiences in an archive? Is it possible at all? 

I tend to photograph lots of papers when I am in the archives, so I still have heaps of material to go through. But I am fairly confident that the answer to the ‘is it possible’-question is a resounding ‘yes’. However, there are quite a few caveats and limitations, because archival research is very much a treasure hunt. And, unfortunately, there is no way to increase the number of treasures to be discovered out there.  

While the archives’ biases persist, I managed to identify different windows through which I could get a glimpse into everyday life in the 1930s and the early 1940s. The Federal Writers Project (FWP), established as a part of the New Deal programmes in the 1930s, is probably the most astonishing one I have found so far. Through the FWP, unemployed writers were provided with all sorts of projects and jobs. The most well-known one is probably the American Guide Series, which essentially was a kind of Lonely Planet travel guide before Lonely Planet existed. However, the FWP writers also carried out thousands of interviews with everyday Americans across the U.S. Importantly, and quite remarkable in the context of the Jim Crow Laws, they even documented the experiences and histories of former slaves. The FWP interviews provide important insights into everyday life in the interwar years. Here is an example of clockmakers and workmen in Connecticut discussing conflict in Europe and aid to France and the U.K. in 1939: 

‘I see in the paper the other day, where England and France are fixing it up so’s they can borrow money in this country to pay off their war debts to this country. […] I bet this country will fall for it. This country was always a sucker for England and France. But this is the first time I ever see them try out right robbery.‘

It is rather exceptional to find such material on the everyday. However, I have previously had success in British archives when trying to find everyday experiences in the collections of different advocacy organisations. That strategy turned out to be fruitful in the U.S. as well. I spent time exploring different union archives and materials related to different civil rights groups. These included (among others) the collections of the AFL, CIO, National Women’s Trade Union League, NAACP or the papers of central figures in these organisations. Common to all these is how letters from local branches or local members occasionally would document experiences from their specific location. In 1933, for instance, the headquarters of the National Women’s Trade Union League requested local branches to forward information about unemployed women’s struggles in their communities and what they would need.¹ Letters subsequently arrived from the local branches, conveying descriptions of everyday struggle in their specific areas and how to overcome them. In Worchester, Massachusetts, it was reported that “Conditions are really serious, quite as bad, if not worse, than a year ago. (…) Very few we hear of are working full time. It seems in most instances they keep one or two older girls that can keep up the speed and can just about come to the minimum wage allowed”. Still, they reported, “the help most needed for the women here is actually Food, and Money for Room Rent”.² 

Observations like these capture everyday life amongst parts of the Americans during the Depression. The question, then, is how representative such often second-hand stories can be said to be. Are they just what a local trade unionist thought at the time, or can they be said to represent broader experiences of everyday life across the country? Honestly, it is rather hard to judge. There will always be more archives to visit, more boxes to open, and more pages to turn. Instead, I hope to reach a certain saturation point where the dynamics and tendencies I read in the archives resemble tendencies I have identified earlier. However, the crux of my thesis is not really about representativity. Rather, it is about bridging the levels of analysis between the everyday and the international. That, for me, is still an ongoing task. 

The morning after the election night, I jumped on a train at Penn Station that headed towards upstate New York as I would spend the next few days in Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park. I was – and still am – hoping that FDR’s personal papers will help me figure out whether such everyday perceptions mattered anything for elite policymaking at the time. It was the last archive I got to visit before I travelled back across the pond. On the train there, I got to sit next to a kind woman who was scrolling on her phone when she suddenly asked while shaking her head: Did he win the House as well!? I wondered what kinds of everyday perceptions future researchers might find in the archival records from our time. And, I pondered, might they resemble some of those I had been digging out in different American collections from the 1930s and early 1940s? 

Footnotes:

¹ Telegram, Rose Schneiderman to local leagues, 16 November 1933, reel 6, National Women’s Trade Union League of America Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, DC, US.

² Letter, Worcester’s WTUL to National Office, 17 November 1933, reel 6, National Women’s Trade Union League of America Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, DC, US.