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FORT Edwards perches above the Hudson River, forty miles north of Albany, at the juncture of the river and the Champlain branch of the State Barge Canal. Dominated by a large plant of the International Paper Company, even in the 1930s, the village had the appearance of an old and somber mill town. Apart from the gravesite of Revolutionary War martyr Jane McCrea, its only noteworthy feature was that it served as headquarters for the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite, and Paper Mill Workers, AFL (IBPSPMW). Even so, Fort Edwards was hardly a center of laborite activism. "Fort Edwards is a village of less than four thousand," observed the union's president, John P. Burke, and it had "no labor movement of any kind."' Yet it was from this isolated community that IBPS PMW responded to the organizational opportunities offered by the New Deal and by frustrated, resentful working people throughout the country. The brotherhood's efforts to tap this grass roots militancy and to build effective unions in the important converted paper industry-a field geographically and organizationally remote from the union's traditional sources of strength-offer important insights into the nature and significance of rank and file unionism in the 1930s. In recent years, the theme of grass roots militancy has attracted the attention of students of the labor movement of the 1930s. Perhaps stimulated by excellent narrative accounts2 and by the social ferment of the

7ITHUCYDIDES, in Book I of The Peloponnesian War, compares certain speeches included in his history to those actually delivered. On some occasions he had been present; on other occasions, he had had to rely on reports. In all instances it had been quite impossible "to carry them [the speeches] word for word in one's memory," and Thucydides adopted the scheme of having his "speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said."1 Pericles' funeral oration, and less familiar speeches designed for Brasidas, Nicias, Gylippus, and a host of others-many of whom are remembered only through the words Thucydides would have them say-have provided source material for historians for almost 2,400 years. Subsequent generations held Thucydides' judgment in respect, and no other available sources seemed so authoritative and complete. During the twentieth century, despite the availability of recording devices and the New York Times, Judge Samuel I. Rosenman emerged as the Thucydides of the New Deal. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately set in motion the machinery which established Rosenman's position, it is highly improbable that the President ever anticipated the full impact which Rosenman would assert upon New Deal historiography. During January 1937, Roosevelt directed Rosenman's editorial talents toward the preparation of a multivolume edition of the President's speeches and other public papers for the years through 1936. Roosevelt's private letters, papers, and memoranda were not to be included in the volumes. As conceived by the President, the publication was part of a larger decision to establish a library at Hyde Park, which would ultimately serve as a repository for all Roosevelt's papers and a center for the study of his administration and personal

Henry Agard Wallace was a geneticist of international renown, a prolific author, a groundbreaking economist, & a businessman whose company paved th way for a worldwide agricultural revolution. He also held two cabinet posts, served four tumultuous years as America's wartime vice president under FDR, and waged a quixotic campaign for president in 1948. Wallace was a figure of Sphinx-like paradox, a shy man, uncomfortable in the world of politics who only narrowly missed becoming president of the United States: the scion of prominent Midwestern Republicans and the philosophical embodiment of New Deal liberalism loved by millions as the Prophet of the Common Man and reviled by millions more as a dangerous misguided radical. John C. Culver and John F. Hyde have combed through thousands of document pages and family papers from Wallace's letters and diaries to previously unavailable files sealed within the archives of the Soviet Union. Here is the remakable story of an authentic American dreamer.

The attitude of historians toward business and its history reflects the state of the larger culture. During the Progressive period historians wrote about business villains who were responsible for a capitalism that exploited its workers, while in the New Deal era business was suspect because it had "caused" the Great Depression. In the aftermath of World War II, individual entrepreneurs portrayed as business heroes took center stage in the historiography, for they had been an essential element in the victory over Germany, Italy, and Japan. During the past twenty years business history has altered its emphasis, largely in response to the pioneering efforts of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Chandler's work stressed the changing nature of business organization, from a personal capitalism of unified enterprises dominated by owner-managers to a managerial capitalism of multiple operating units run by a group of middle and top managers. The latter stage has its counterpart in the larger culture where individualism struggles in an increasingly anonymous, bureaucratized world. In an attempt to understand business as a changing institution, the new business history has focused on corporate culture, the meanings and symbols shared by employees at all levels within an industry.' Oral history-with its ability to customize evidence by the careful crafting of questions and its emphasis on all groups within a population or organization, from the lowest to the highest is well suited to the study of business history through investigation of corporate culture. Oral history is a particularly valuable tool because it can fill in gaps in the historical record created by the practice of making important decisions without much paper documentation and can provide information about members of the work force for whom few archival records are maintained. This essay addresses three major points: the nature of existing collections of business oral history; the particular methodological and ethical problems that confront creators and consumers of business oral history; and the way future business oral history should be pursued.