the history of interviews and history in interviews
Sojourner Truth is taken to see President Abraham Lincoln, October 29, 1864:
The president was seated at his desk. Mrs. C. said to him, “This is Sojourner Truth, who has come all the way from Michigan to see you.” He then arose, gave me his hand, made a bow, and said, “I am pleased to see you.”
I said to him, Mr. President, when you first took your seat I feared you would be torn to pieces, for I likened you unto Daniel, who was thrown into the lion’s den; and if the lions did not tear you into pieces, I knew that it would be God that had saved you; and I said if he spared me I would see you before the four years expired, and he has done so, and now I am here to see you for myself.
He then congratulated me on my having been spared. Then I said, I appreciate you, for you are the best president who has ever taken the seat. He replied: ‘I expect you have reference to my having emancipated the slaves in my proclamation. But,’ said he, mentioning the names of several of his predecessors (and among them emphatically that of Washington), ‘they were all just as good, and would have done just as I have done if the time had come. If the people over the river [pointing across the Potomac] had behaved themselves, I could not have done what I have; but they did not, which gave me the opportunity to do these things.’ I then said, I thank God that you were the instrument selected by him and the people to do it. I told him that I had never heard of him before he was talked of for president. He smilingly replied, ‘I had heard of you many times before that.”
I’ve been reading oral histories of the American Plains. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, several amateur historians like Thomas Marquis, Eli Ricker, and Eleanor Hinman realized there were people alive on the vanishing frontier who’d seen events and known people of historical interest yet never had their memories recorded. They conducted interviews with Indians and others who’d experienced the Plains Indians wars of a few decades before, creating something like what we might call an oral history.
When did we get the idea of the interview? So far as I know no one really ever “interviewed” George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. The concept would’ve seemed presumptuous or impolite perhaps. Monticello has some examples of people recording memories of conversations with Jefferson, often in letters or diaries close to the event, but none of these seem to fit the modern idea of an interview, they mostly don’t even record specific statements.
Plato’s dialogues of Socrates have a sort of interview format, but those seem more like a literary form than a record of a conversation. There are court documents and records, the trial record of Joan of Arc might be an example, it’s almost in a question/answer format, but that’s not really an interview like we think of one.
Did the idea of an interview require the invention of technology to record a conversation? Eli Ricker had no mechanical device, he wrote in shorthand. Was even the idea of shorthand related to the invention of recorders? Eli Ricker was a newspaper man, did the interview come with the expansion of the newspaper? The need to fill pages?
These days there are oral histories of everything. Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine probably pushed the idea forward.
In looking into this question I searched for an interview with Abraham Lincoln. After he was dead people like Carl Sandberg interviewed people who knew him. But a quick search doesn’t turn up anything like a modern interview. People recorded memories of their encounters with Lincoln, often close to the event. But no one seems to have sat down with him the way people do with any modern candidate for office.
In looking into the interview question, I found a conversation between Sojourner Truth and Lincoln, which she must’ve dictated to someone who wrote it down. It was published in letter form in some newspapers.
