Interview
It was the interviewees' suggestion to hold this joint interview, and I [interviewer Jim Cavanaugh] agreed only after they agreed to hold separate interviews first. This joint interview took place in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1978, two days after I had first met and taped Rogin, and a month after I had first met and taped Fiester. The session lasted for four hours and the discussion ranged far and wide. Because each had been interviewed at length earlier, facts and chronology in this interview took a definite back seat to spontaneity, thought, opinion, and interpretation. A good deal of the interview was devoted to character sketches of TWUA, CIO, and AFL leaders. Another large segment of the interview dealt with the directions, problems, and possibilities of the American labor movement. Also, there was much discussion about what TWUA was like in its heyday and why the heyday did not last. The interview was definitely a think session. The character sketches, although often incisive, are, of course, only the personal opinions of these two men. The interview's greatest value to historians of the TWUA and the labor movement in general lies in the interpretive leads it provides and the thought it provokes.
Abstract
The tapes for this interview have two tracks: a voice track containing the discussion and a time track containing time announcements at intervals of approximately five seconds. The abstract lists, in order of discussion, the topics covered on each tape, and indicates the time-marking at which point the beginning of the particular discussion appears.
Thus, the researcher by using a tape recorder's fast-forward button may find expeditiously and listen to discrete segments without listening to all of the taped discussion. For instance, the user who wishes to listen to the topic on “Emil Rieve” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 00:35 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Thirty-five seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Emil Rieve” continues until approximately 04:40 at which point discussion of the next topic (“Salary Levels within TWUA”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Emil Rieve” give further details on what appears on the tape between 00:35 and 04:40.
The abstract is designed to provide only a brief outline of the content of the tapes and cannot serve as a substitute for listening to them. However, the abstract when used with the index will help the researcher easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
Index
There is a master index for most of the TWUA Oral HIstory Project interviews in the collection-level finding aid.
