The Stowe Papers are organized as BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL AND GENERAL PAPERS, CORRESPONDENCE, SPEECHES AND WRITINGS, DIARIES AND NOTES, and TEACHING FILES. The papers held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin represent only a portion of what once constituted Stowe's papers. Over the years Stowe deposited portions of his papers at several archival institutions in addition to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, photocopying many items so that several institutions (as well as many friends and family) received copies of some part of the whole. The collection in Madison, which is probably the largest Stowe collection, suggests no consistent pattern about the way in which the material was distributed. Some portions of the collection at SHSW are represented by original documents; some are represented only by photocopies. It is possible that other institutions may hold originals of the documentation for which SHSW has only copies. In addition, internal evidence suggests that portions of the collection may have been lost prior to donation to SHSW.
Stowe himself assembled much of his collection into packets, some organized by name, some by thematic subject, about which he prepared handwritten or typed comments. Many of the packets have been disassembled in the archives in order to improve the overall arrangement of the collection and eliminate duplication, but all of the explanatory notes have been retained because of their biographical and personal insights.
The BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL AND GENERAL PAPERS series consists of alphabetically-arranged background information about Stowe as well as papers that were not appropriate for the other series in the collection. Included are anecdotes, awards, biographical clippings, memorabilia, transcripts of interviews, replies to biographical research queries, photographs, and travel information. The photographs include formal and informal portraits of Stowe and his second wife, travel pictures, and snapshots related to his career as a journalist and public speaker. Of special interest among the last named group are the wartime photographs. The general career papers consist of one folder of reports for Radio Free Europe and one folder of editorial reports for Max Ascoli of The Reporter.
The largest section of the biographical miscellany, several packets that Stowe entitled “Between the Crossfires,” concerns the FBI file that was created about him presumably because of his reporting on the Spanish Civil War and positive statements about the Soviet Union during and immediately after World War II. Under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act Stowe obtained a copy of his file, and he attempted to place a lengthy correction (presumably the “Between the Crossfires” manuscript) in the official FBI file. Ultimately, when this effort failed, Stowe authorized the destruction of the official FBI file. This section of the collection also includes correspondence with FBI and National Archives staff, photocopied pages from Stowe's FBI file, explanatory narratives, and documents and correspondence gathered to support his position.
The CORRESPONDENCE series is arranged as general and special files. The general correspondence is chronologically arranged; the special correspondence is arranged alphabetically by name or topic. The general correspondence includes many letters and telegrams from fellow professionals, friends and former students, radio listeners and readers of his books and articles, as well as some outgoing letters. The early correspondence is quite spotty, but it includes several letters to and from Editor A.R. Holcombe about his stories in the Herald Tribune and from Carroll Binder about his stories for the Daily News. Later there are letters to and from Max Ascoli of The Reporter. There are also letters from Harold Peat and Helen Rogers Reid on professional matters. Several prominent individuals who appeared in his news stories wrote to thank Stowe for his reportage: they include Walter Lippmann, Raymond Poincare, Theodore Roosevelt, Hjalmar Schacht, Herbert Bayard Swope, Arthur Vandenberg, Sumner Welles, and Owen Young. Additional interesting letters in the prewar correspondence come from Leon Fraser and Gene Tunney. Carbons of some outgoing letters are included, one of the most interesting being a letter to Marvin H. McIntyre, a member of the White House staff, which presents a vivid picture of the response of Americans abroad to the early days of the New Deal.
During the 1940's Stowe's general correspondence becomes increasingly dominated by letters from the general public about his writings and broadcasts. In addition, Stowe often sent inscribed copies of his books to many public figures, and he received correspondence in response. As a result, there are letters (although they are chiefly of autograph value) from individuals such as Dean Acheson, Cecil B. DeMille, Paul H. Douglas, Dwight Eisenhower, Clifton Fadiman, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Oveta Culp Hobby, H.V. Kaltenborn, Trygve Lie, David Lilienthal, Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Sherwood, Henry Wallace, Wendell Willkie, and Darryl F. Zanuck. Stowe sometimes addressed long letters to other journalists or prominent individuals about matters of public policy, but the responses he received are also primarily of autograph value. Among the correspondents of this type are Stewart Alsop, Turner Catledge, Walter Cronkite, Milton Eisenhower, John Gunther, Edward P. Morgan, Edward R. Murrow, and Raymond Gram Swing. Stowe's later correspondence tends to be dominated by letters of recommendation written by him for former students or letters to aid other asssociates.
The special correspondence includes both personal and professional mail. The personal files include wartime letters to his first wife and his two sons and a separate file of letters to his parents and siblings. The letters to his wife contain detailed information about his reporting during the early years of World War II, while the Stowe family letters also provide strong coverage of events in his earlier career. A third set of personal correspondence with his second wife Theodora (“Dollika”) is arranged separately in the speeches and writings series because of its extent and because it formed the nucleus of his abortive “D Book” writing project.
Several boxes of the special correspondence are devoted to Stowe's correspondence with the Reader's Digest and its editors, 1951-1988. This correspondence concerns article proposals, story development, reports on potential authors that he met, descriptions of international locales visited for the Digest, and general discussions of the editorial process. Most notable is his correspondence with DeWitt Wallace, mainly 1951-1982, but there are also substantial files concerning Hobart “Hobe” Lewis, president and editor-in-chief, and Executive Editor Walter “Bun” Mahoney. Other segregated Digest files concern The Last Great Frontiersman and an article about Hungarian refugees. Some additional correspondence with the Digest is filed in the TEACHING MATERIALS series, as Stowe used these experiences to instruct his students about freelance journalism.
Other important files pertain to his friends Harold “Barney” Graves, Curtiss Johnson, and Morrell “Bo” Heald, Wesley Maurer of the University of Michigan Journalism school; Dinah and Vincent Sheean, Adlai Stevenson, and former student Karsten Prager. Also segregated with the special correspondence is a folder of reports or annual Christmas letters describing travel during his retirement years, and the congratulatory letters he received for his Pulitzer Prize in 1930.
Stowe's SPEECHES AND WRITINGS are organized alphabetically by genre as articles, books, lectures, news stories, poetry, and radio scripts, as well as files on the “D-book.” Stowe began contributing articles to magazines on a freelance basis as early as 1927. Over the years he contributed to a number of serials, but only regularly to Argosy (from 1943 to 1947), The Reporter (from 1949 to 1950), and the Reader's Digest. The collection includes manuscript and printed articles. The articles are arranged together chronologically except for his Readers Digest work. The latter include published articles and manuscripts for both published and unpublished stories, allowing the researcher to examine the way in which the Digest abridged his submissions. Also of interest is Stowe's essay, “The Courage to Grow Old,” and a file of book reviews.
Documentation of Stowe's books is disappointing. Of his published writings, the collection includes draft materials only for The Last Great Frontiersman and Crusoe of Lonesome Lake, although there are extensive clipped reviews of all his titles. The unpublished writings are of considerable interest, nevertheless. In addition to “What is a Frenchman?” which Stowe penned during the 1930s based on his observations as the Herald Tribune's Paris correspondent, the collection also includes draft chapters for a memoir that was left unfinished when World War II began and “Newspaperman,” a novel based on his early journalistic experiences apparently written about 1930. The memoirs are arranged by chapter number, but inconsistencies in the internal narrative suggest that some chapters may actually represent multiple drafts of the same material.
Almost an entire cubic foot of the collection refers just to Stowe's abortive “D-book.” These files are actually the personal letters of Leland and Dollika on which the book was to be based, as well as notes, Dollika's amusing quotes, stories, and even her “morning messages” to her husband. About the book itself there are only a few draft chapters here entitled “Tell Me That You Love Me,” although an additional short work also filed here, “The Wooings and Doings of Adam and Eve: A Fancy-Full Chronicle,” presumably also relates to their love story.
The D-Book correspondence is arranged in two parts: Dollika's letters to Stowe and Stowe's letters to her. Of her correspondence, the most interesting are the letters written from Bucharest during the period 1944 to 1947. Fortunately Stowe transcribed these letters for the book project, as no originals are included. Dollika's post war correspondence is less extensive, and none of these letters have been transcribed. Because Stowe was more often away from home, his letters are more extensive, dating from 1940, when they first met, to 1987. Most of his letters are present as either typed or handwritten originals, with only occasional handwritten items also represented by transcripts. Despite their relative volume, the Stowes' letters are somewhat disappointing to the general researcher. While they present an intimate portrait of their life together, the letters are largely concerned with their relationship. This contrasts with his letters to his first wife and to his parents which contain many informative details about his career experiences. Nevertheless, the Stowes' story ranks as one of the great love stories, certainly of interest for its fervor and long duration.
Stowe began presenting his ideas and observations about world affairs on the lecture circuit during the 1930s, and the collection includes advertising brochures, audience comments, contracts, and itineraries that provide good evidential documentation of this aspect of his career. Unfortunately, the speeches themselves are primarily documented by the typed outline cards from which he spoke, and there are only two folders of full transcripts in the collection.
Of his news dispatches and stories, the collection includes many clipping scrapbooks. The early scrapbooks include all of the stories he wrote for the press whether they appeared under his byline, a pseudonym, or without attribution and regardless of whether they appeared in domestic or foreign papers. The earliest scrapbooks are consequently most valuable because they identify much career work that would otherwise not be known. (Because the Herald Tribune and Daily News are elsewhere available on microfilm, these scrapbooks have not been scheduled for microfilming at this time.) Loose clippings provide coverage for the periods not covered by the scrapbooks, but it is unlikely that this section is complete. In addition, the collection includes files of manuscript news stories. The dispatch files are very incomplete, but they include a notable series of articles about Spain, 1931-1939, not found elsewhere in the collection, several stories about corruption in the Chiang Kai-Shek regime in 1941 that were suppressed by the American government, galleys of his frontline coverage of the Russian army in 1942, and numerous mimeographed releases distributed by the New York Post Syndicate, 1944-1949. The last named are a mix of eyewitness description and opinion about conditions in post-war Europe.
In 1931 Stowe began broadcasting by radio from Europe. The collection includes annotated manuscript and/or mimeographed copies of these broadcasts, as well as copies of the broadcasts he made during the Second World War. From 1944 to 1945 Stowe broadcast for ABC; in 1947 he transferred to the Mutual Broadcasting System. About his program of news commentary which was the first such union-sponsored program, the collection includes two folders of annotated scripts dating from 1947.
NOTES AND JOURNALS. This series includes documentation in several formats: notebooks, typed journal pages, and loose notes. Much of the series consists of the small notebooks that Stowe carried during his overseas assignments and travel. Sometimes the volumes contain rough handwritten notes arranged in chronological order. Other notebooks are more diary-like, containing brief, readable narratives. (The reader is warned that the pencilled entries are somewhat smeared and difficult to decipher.) It is likely that Stowe himself thought of the notebooks in two categories, for in referring to his 1938 notebook about the Pan American Conference, he informed SHSW that the “main” (presumably the notebook of a true diary like-character) was missing.
The chronologically arranged notebooks cover five time periods: 1915 during which Stowe recorded life at his parents' home, Mulberry Farm, in one volume; nine volumes about the Spanish Civil War; a large number of books about his reporting of World War II, particularly 1939-1942; 19 volumes about post war Europe that were used for his freelance writings, 1945-1949; and the remainder concerning his travels for Reader's Digest, 1955-1983.
The notebooks of the narrative type relate to typed journal pages in the series, accounts that are sometimes referred to internally as “Leland Stowe's Journal.” It is not clear what Stowe meant by the “journal” designation because of its fragmentary representation here. This journal seemed to have been of a composed literary character, similar, but by no means identical to his published wartime books which are also journal-like in character: No Other Road to Freedom and They Shall Not Sleep. These books also overlap with the notebooks in subject and date, but the typed journal for this period is much less complete in its chronological coverage than the notebooks, primarily dating from the years 1928 to 1931 when Stowe was in Paris and the years 1939 to1940 when he was covering the Russo-Finnish War and the Greek and Albanian front. The typed journal pages dating from the early 1930s, which are clearly identified as a journal, are of special interest because they include extended comments on interviews with world notables in Paris such as Aristide Briand, General John Pershing, and Raymond Poincaré. Coverage within the loose notes in this series is spotty, with those about the Spanish Civil War and interviews of Gamal Abdel Nasser and General Pershing being most important.
The TEACHING MATERIALS consist of information on awards, honors, and the personal library donated to the University of Michigan, as well as instructional materials. The latter, which are partially arranged by course number, includes lecture outlines, handouts, sample student papers, and student evaluations. Most useful is the material about Stowe's innovative “foreign assignment” and the packets of correspondence and draft materials that he assembled to illustrate typical experiences of a freelance writer.
