an ARTIFACT REPOSITORY
for DIRECTED FIELD WORK
by PETER RAMSEY
for the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
during SUMMER 2021
This Directed Field Work consisted of a nine-week internship at the Library of Congress. The purpose of the internship was to conduct research on a legal or law-adjacent topic of my interest, with deliverables of a Storymap and two blog posts. During research, I am to prioritize Library of Congress and government-adjacent resources, and the entries in the Storymap must be at least 80% sourced from Library holdings.
For the first five weeks of this internship, my chosen topic was a 1977 international incident wherein the West Virginia community of Vulcan solicited humanitarian aid from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Vulcan was surrounded by private property of the Norfolk and Western railroad, with the only legal means of access a footbridge which had collapsed several years prior. Vulcan residents resorted to illegal, dangerous, and sometimes injurious tresspassing on railroad property to conduct their everyday business while unsuccessfully petitioning state and federal governments and the railroad for a new bridge or some other means of access. West Virginia finally agreed to build a bridge after a Soviet journalist paid a widely publicized visit to Vulcan, but not before the community faced bomb threats for even asking for help from communists (Vulcan never declared any kind of allegiance to communism and the Kremlin itself never acknowledged or responded to the requests for aid). In addition to telling this story, my research focused on fleshing out the context of the Vulcan Bridge incident and the events which precipitated it, particularly the legal history of railroads, the Appalchian coal slump, and Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" program as it specifically manifested in West Virginia.
During the fifth week, I presented the above research to the team maintaining the blog I was writing for, the majority of whom expressed irreconcilable concern that writing about the Vulcan Bridge Incident carried too much risk of antagonizing the current government and people of that state. Following this, I decided to start from scratch with a new topic.
The topic of my final deliverables is the Brooks-Burlingame Affair, an abortive duel challenge between sitting U.S. Congressmen amidst the stormy antebellum political climate of 1856. The challenge originated from Preston Brooks, a South Carolina representative who had become a pariah even among his Southern allies after his infamous Caning of Charles Sumner, where he assaulted Sumner on the floor of the House in retaliation for a particularly forceful Abolitionist speech. The challenged party was Anson Burlingame, who subsequently insulted Brooks' character. As the challenged party, Burlingame had the right of selecting the venue for the duel; in a unique move, he chose the Canadian side of Niagara Falls (at this time Congressmen generally duelled at convenient sites just outside the District). Whatever the intention of this choice, Brooks responded by failing to show up for the duel he himself instigated, claiming that Northern States were "hostile territory" where he would feel in danger of public assault when merely passing through on the way to Ontario. This story provides and opportunity to discuss the social context and implications of interpersonal violence in the 19th century, particularly how U.S. Congresssmen used physical violence as a form of political theater.
Below are the Learning Outcomes for this Directed Field Work, adopted from the associated Learning Outcomes Agreement.
1. Fulfill the duties of the internship. The internship schedule is structured around the writing and editing of three deliverables: two blog posts and one StoryMap concerning a law-adjacent topic of my choice which can be researched primarily using sources from and adjacent to the Library of Congress. Following the internship, these deliverables may be considered for editing and publishing by the Library (after the internship term and without the my involvement) at the institution’s discretion. Regardless of whether the Library of Congress chooses to edit and publish the deliverables, at the end of the term I will add them to the "Internship Deliverables" section of this artifact repository as evidence that I fulfilled the duties of the internship.
2. Record incremental worklog & reflections. I will use a worklog and weekly informal reflections to assess and demonstrate my progress and document whatever emerges from my work. The "Worklog" section of this repository is divided into the nine weeks of the internship, to be incrimentally updated with a description of that week’s work and a tally of hours. The "General Reflections" section beneath it features corresponding qualitative evaulations of each week's work.
3. Gain experience in government/legal research. Both the stipulations of the internship and the nature of my chosen topic involve subatantive legal research (sourcing and reviewing laws, lawsuits, and histories of both) and government research (accessing government or government-adjacent repositories of documents and records pertaining to government, elected officials, politics etc.); both of these are research avenues with particularly unique quirks and challenges and I do not have substantive prior experience with either. The "Learning Legal Research" section of this repository lists government and legal resources accessed, along with a description of those resources, what I accessed them for, and a brief reflection on what I learned about those resources specifically and what they taught me about these avenues of research in a larger sense.
4. Gain experience navigating philosophical impasse in professional contexts. The deliverables of this internship feature an inflexible requirement that findings be presented with “neutrality,” and potential topics may be vetoed by the supervisor due to controversial, provocative, or loaded content. These conflict with my own professional (and personal) opinions, philosophy, and approach with respect to information and communications. I would like to approach navigating this divide with intention and contemplation, particularly as I expect that I will have to navigate it and similar divides later in my career. The "Neutrality Impasse" section of this artifact repository is meant to both detail and analyze related experiences from the course of the internship.
Week 1 (June 21-26): 5 hrs
- Attended orientation session (1 hr)
- Composed/revised intern bio for the Law Library of Congress’ blog (1 hr)
- Commenced initial topic research (3 hrs)
Week 2 (June 27-July 3): 7 hrs
- Filled out Learning Outcomes Agreement and created a previous iteration of this repository (4 hrs)
- Continued initial topic research (2 hrs)
- Composed/submitted topic proposal (1 hr)
Week 3 (July 4-10): 10 hrs
- Updated Learning Outcomes Agreement and created the current iteration of this repository (7 hrs)
- Continued topic research (3 hrs)
Week 4 (July 11-17): 8 hrs
- Continued research (8 hrs)
Week 5 (July 18-24): 8 hrs
- Attended a team meeting, pitching research and soliciting feedback (1 hr)
- Following aforementioned feedback, planning and executing a complete pivot in research, including preliminary research and pitching a new topic. (7 hrs)
Week 6 (July 25-31): 14 hrs
- Conducted research on new topic (14 hrs)
Week 7 (August 1-7): 16 hrs
- Attended a meeting of fellow interns for group feedback (2 hrs)
- Continued research (8 hrs)
- Began drafts of deliverables (6 hrs)
Week 8 (August 8-14): 16 hrs
- Completed and submitted drafts of deliverables (9 hrs)
- Additional research and writing following feedback on drafts (7 hrs)
Week 9 (August 15-21): 17 hrs
- Final revisions and submission of deliverables (7 hrs)
- Revised and updated this repository (8 hrs)
- Composed and submitted final reflection along with repository (2 hrs)
Week 1 (June 21-26)
I spent most of the first week on my abortive first attempt at a research topic. I had wanted to look into the '80s "Satanic Panic" - specifically at Patricia Pulling, the leading figurehead for the panickers' specific, ah, "concerns" about the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. Even more specifically, as a grounding constraint for my deliverables I wanted to focus on the lawsuits Pulling filed against the game's publishers and others she implicated in her son's allegedly D&D-inspired suicide. I wanted to extract the exact claims that Pulling made in legal documents and/or under oath about the game, and compare them against the actual rulebooks for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (the edition her son would have been playing) as a means of analyzing and perhaps fact-checking her interpretations of them.
While I think this was a very strong topic and my supervisor was on board with it, I unfortunately quickly found that there were absolutely no materials within the Library of Congress' holdings that remotely touch on it, or even really the Satanic Panic as a whole, in addition to absolute zero materials on Dungeons & Dragons. I suppose it's not surprising that the Library's holdings don't cover these topics, though I am personally disappointed. U.S. governmental and societal approaches to games as media is both a fascinating and deeply urgent field of inquiry (I couldn't even find much congressional record on video games even through all the post-Columbine controversies); and both Dungeons & Dragons and the unpublished fantasy roleplaying traditions that preceded it are a deeply and uniquely American invention.
Week 2 (June 27-July 3)
This week I hit on the Vulcan Bridge research topic as outlined elsewhere in this repository. It's a chewy, compelling story that's also a really great flashpoint for several different larger historical topics.
There are three major challenges I anticipate for this topic. The first is telling the story of the Vulcan Bridge effeciently. I have quite a bit of breathing room with the target length of the deliverables, but there are so many wonderfully rich illustrative details and sidebars (like the fact that the man who reached out to the USSR, John Robinette, was not only self-proclaimed as Vulcan's mayor but also the owner and tender of the community's only active business, its bar) with which I can easily disrupt the narrative flow if I'm not careful. I discovered this very quickly just trying to tell the story concisely in my email proposing the topic.
The second challenge is finding the right amount of the right sources. For one of the deliverables, the StoryMap, 80% of my sources (each source will be a "pin" on the map) must come specifically from the Library of Congress' holdings. This might be a little difficult given that a lot of my research will involve the kind of state and county level politics that are beyond the institution's scope. The Library of Congress does retain a copy of one of my most central resources, Huey Perry's "They'll Cut Off Your Project", but obviously I don't want to rely on that exclusively.
The third challenge is writing about the Vulcan Bridge Incident with the required degree of "neutrality." I will discuss this further in the Neutrality Impasse section below, but it's worth making two notes at this stage: 1) I did first hear this story in an episode of a podcast with a self-described (and modestly self-described at that) "leftist perspective"; and 2) no matter how I couch it, I fear that the very fact that this story involves the USSR and embarssment of the United States will prompt some readers to panic about encroaching communism - a phenomenon that the story itself illustrates. My supervisor has approved the topic and specifically assured me on this point, though I wonder how this will play out in the editing process.
Week 3 (July 4-10)
This week I reconstructed this repository as a page on my personal website, rather than its initial incarnation as a Google Doc. The feedback on the Google Doc directly said that a "standard" web page is "more professional" than a Google Doc. While I was willing to port my repository to a website, I feel totally disconnected from this. A Google Doc is an accessible, shareable, familiar, and flexible means of digitally disseminating information that comes with options for customization, navigation, and presentation; I don't really know how the presence of the Google Docs UI (which to me in 2021 seems like the water a librarian swims in) and a non-custom URL make a Google Doc less "professional", or even really overall less "presentable," especially given that, if I may be so bold, the presentation of the sample repositories (clip art, Squarespace transitions) felt ersatz to me; this repository is effectively identical to the Google Doc incarnation, except that it uses tabs instead of section breaks and making it took me several additional hours to reaquaint myself with HTML and renew the SSL on my personal website. Really, a Google Doc is, functionally speaking, a webpage, and at that one with lower barriers to effective creation, presentation, and usage - after all, nearly all of the most vital librarianship work and community engagement I have been involved with has involved a Google Doc. None of it has involved a Google Site - in fact I most strongly associate prefab websites of that kind with abandoned, badly laid-out research projects full of poorly implemented features and dead links.
Again, it is likely that there is something I'm missing - especially as a digital native and a novice librarian. Even before I entered this field I understood that the descriptor "professional" was a near-total black box to me, in some senses by design. I have made a mental note to observe this specific form of website semiotics in the future.
Week 4 (July 11-17)
At the start of this week, a $120 late fee was applied to my outstanding tutition balance for the Summer 2021 quarter, for which a Stafford loan was not offered. On Thursday of this week, in the interest of servicing this balance, I decided to continue working my job as a gig driver for another hour or so, despite the fact that it was raining so fiercely that some streets were flooded to over the curb. Shortly afterwards, while making a turn, I jumped a curb I didn't see. In Western New York, where the roads are coated in abrasive salt for half of the year, many curbs are made of granite, rather than less resilient concrete; they'll punch right through a tire if you hit them at the wrong angle.
On Friday of this week, I sat waiting in a tire shop, hoping I wouldn't have to overdraft my bank account to replace the tire (I would) and trying to distract myself by rereading "They'll Cut Off Your Project" on the lookout for allusions to other media or events I could use as starting points to expand my research. My schoolwork was reduced to a distraction from paying for the privelege of my schoolwork.
I bring this up not (entirely) to complain, but to illustrate (to myself maybe as much as the reader) why I have struggled to keep up with my work hours and deadlines thus far in the project. It's not just incidents like these, of course; incidents like these are just an acute form of the chronic grind and exhaustion I grapple with just to have the time and space to attend school, much less to actually attend, even when I am covered by a Stafford loan. I am never far from the precipice of financial ruin; I often come home too exhausted to do schoolwork; and even if I have energy for schoolwork I rarely have concurrent energy to maintain myself and my space. There have been soiled dishes covering my sink and counter for most of the period of this internship. Sometimes time I set aside to do schoolwork is swallowed by a sudden, unavoidable nap from which I wake up feeling even less refreshed.
I don't know how to work well around circumstances like this, not really. Every academic quarter is the quarter where I tell myself I'm going to be punctual and expedient. I still don't know how to communicate how debilitated I am to an instructor or supervisor without apologizing profusely and feeling like I've overshared, and I never ask for accomodations even when they're offered. How do you accomodate something whose entire raison d'etre is to not reciprocate? (Well, I can think of some ways, but they're the kind of thing large swaths of Americans would call unAmerican, unaware of exactly how right they are.)
As I write this I'm feeling really disheartened about my work on this project and my future prospects in the field, as I often do when I struggle to work despite wanting desperately to work. I don't really have a solution for that, but I know I'm holding it together than I feel that I am.
Week 5 (July 18-24)
This week, I presented my Vulcan Bridge research in a meeting with my supervisor and the other members of the team maintaining the Law Library of Congress' blog. As a group, this team immediately expressed concern that my topic could not be rendered in a sufficiently "neutral" way. As it turns out, the point of contention isn't actually Russia - it's that the Vulcan Bridge story casts West Virginian leaders and lawmen in a bad light.
I had made peace with discarding my research before the meeting had even finished. The blog team briefly (perhaps nominally) suggested pivoting the Vulcan Bridge research in a way that downplayed or entirely elided state governments' role in the story, but to me this is inherently disingenuous - the story unavoidably begins with corruption and negligence in Mingo County, and the entire impetus of contacting Russia was exasperation after years of suffering under the same. I would much rather do work I am willing to stand by even if it means starting anew this late in the term.
Week 6 (July 25-31)
When I first pitched the Brooks-Burlingame Affair as a topic last week, I was envisioning it as a springboard to discuss the formality of interpersonal violence in the 18th century that's a little touch to grok today - the rigid, almost litigous duelling codes among gentlemen and soldiers; the way different forms of honor became honorable and dishonorable because of the class status of the parties involved. But it turns out what I'm really interested in is violence as political theater - in the early 19th century as the Civil War brewed, congressmen publically duelled and brawled less out of their own personal passions and more as another way of expressing their political agenda and their constituents' will and values. The one time a duel between congressmen resulted in an actual death, it was an enourmous shock - it was a given that even as political cartoons reduced these legislators to animalistic caricatures for how often they assaulted one another, the fact of the harm wasn't the intent. This is still something that's a little hard to really internalize if you're trying to get a feel for that period in history from this period in history, even in the wake of the coup attempt in January of this year - which, well, I am going to point out that the 1850s were, familiarly, "troubled" and "unprecedented," but that next step is definitely ill-advised.
Week 7 (August 1-7)
As a cover image for my Storymap I selected this gruesome political cartoon concerning the battle over expanding slavery to newly formed Western states. Truth be told, it was one of very few available choices for images concerting antebellum congressional violence and the issues (really the one issue) that prompted it, because most of the extant images feature caricatures of Black people, and even the sympathetic ones feature bowlderized dialogue to go with them. But I do like this one as a cover image, because its ugliness reflects the ugliness of the congressional violence discussed in the storymap, and this era of politics in general. But here I get the feeling that "neutrality" is again intruding as a cover for something else - I have not heard back yet as to whether this is an acceptable cover image, but if it isn't, I think it gives the story too much teeth - cuts through quaintness of codes duello and underlines the timeless language of bodily harm - in other words, makes too real the horrible bodily atrocity of slavery which the performative white-on-white violence in congress abstracted comfortably into philosophy, an abstraction white America has yet to relinquish.
Week 8 (August 8-14)
I spent a far longer time than I needed to trying to figure out if one would say that Ontario "confederated" in 1867 because it was one of the four provinces created when Canada "confederated" then, or if a different term should be used. Canadian confederation is a part of the backdrop of the Brooks-Burlingame story; when Burlingame chose a duel site just beyond where Niagara Falls marked the U.S. border, that site would become the province of Ontario in just barely more than a decade. I live barely a mile from the border between New York and Ontario, and about half an hour from the site Burlingame chose (though until this very week that border was closed). So when I introduce that choice, it is very natural for me to say "the Ontario side of Niagara Falls," but that may not be a facile description for someone less familiar with the local geography. "By Niagara Falls in what would soon become Ontario?" "On British colonial territory that would confederate as Ontario just twelve years later?"
When I got notes back on the first draft of this blog post, they said it could use "tightening" and that it needed to focusing more on highlighting Library of Congress materials. Turns out, maybe I should just write "by Niagara Falls, in Canada."
Week 9 (August 15-21)
It is 2:50 AM, ten minutes to the submission deadline for this repository. I think the best thing I can do for myself after all that's happened in the past ten weeks is allow what I've done to be enough. I'm going to put this up and go to bed.
Final Reflection
The experience of starting my research again from scratch halfway through the internship term demonstrated that I work well under pressure: I am happy with the results of my work, and I do not feel its quality suffered much at all from the truncated timeframe; more importantly, I don’t feel that I had to exert myself beyond reason to do quality work - rather, under pressure I was able to find ways of being more resourceful and efficient. None of this is to say that I enjoyed the experience or prefer working under pressure, but the capacity to do so is inevitably useful.
During this fieldwork I encountered a pattern that’s common in my intellectual or creative endeavors: my tendency to prioritize what interests me about my work, sometimes to the point of neglecting the intentions of whoever I am working for. In conducting this fieldwork, my skills at finding and telling compelling stories were useful, but ultimately meant to be secondary; In Custodia Legis values a strong narrative as a vehicle for exemplifying Library resources, not the other way around. I conducted thorough research, but I got caught up in the story it told - my first iterations of the deliverables did not include enough entry points into Library materials, while highlighting story details which were narratively rich but ultimately extraneous to that same goal. While I do believe that it is sometimes appropriate to modulate, think beyond, or occasionally even work against one’s assignment or objective, this was not such a situation - my deviation from the task was an accident borne of distraction, not a deliberate and reasoned choice.
I struggled intensely with burnout and balancing my work with obligations and stresses beyond it, as I have for most of my work in librarianship. Resolving this struggle is very much the work of a lifetime for me, as I’m sure it is for most; I don’t know how I can significantly add to or accelerate that work any more than I already am. This work itself is, in part, an attempt to improve my wellbeing, even when it weighed on me - I am obtaining an MLIS in pursuit of more stable and, more importantly, more rewarding work creatively, intellectually, and ethically than what is available to me now. And, even when it weighed on me, this work validated that pursuit - it was far more rewarding and never anywhere near as demoralizing or dangerous as my current day job. I feel some hope in that I continue to do quality work even under duress; and in the final days of this fieldwork I finally obtained attention medication to which I had not had access in over a year and which already promises an improved quality of life during future academic endeavours.
A log of what I have learned and experienced while performing government and legal research will appear and update here as my internship progresses.
7/10: Local Politics A large portion of my research involves sinking into the local politics of Vulcan's county, Mingo. One of my main sources is Huey Perry's memoir "They'll Cut Off Your Project", which details Perry's service in the county's Economic Opportunity Commission, established to carry out the goals of LBJ's War on Poverty. Though the memoir does not cover the Vulcan bridge incident (though Perry does recount travelling to Vulcan to witness its residents futiley trying to get the bridge replaced prior to its collapse) it sets a rich backdrop of the economic and political state of Mingo County in the years prior, including naming several local politicians and figureheads.
Unfortunately, I am having trouble finding records of these people outside of Perry's book, particularly official records. As an example, consider Noah Floyd, who was state senator for Mingo and its neighboring county McDowell and emerges as Perry's primary antagonist, both the emblem and central force of a corrupt and complacent political machine whose coercion and abuse of welfare recipients is threatened when Perry teaches communities to organize. Floyd is omnipresent in "They'll Cut Off Your Project", but so far I have struggled to find him anywhere else. I have a report on his electoral defeat in 1970 and noted a couple of mentions of him in oral histories, but no official records of his period in office or activity there, much less a collection of his papers like those listed for most senators on Congress.gov. I would love to have some more context on his political career - for my own edification even if it didn't make it into the deliverables, precisely because I feel that I would have a much clearer idea of West Virginian local politics if I got the full story of someone who mastered them.
I suspect there are research avenues I would find more fruitful that I'm simply not aware of yet, and have reached out to my supervisor and others for advice. It seems to me so far that a common tradeoff with legal research is that the obscure information does actually exist somewhere more often than in general research, but it is much, much harder to find what you're looking for if you don't already know precisely where to look.
7/17: Mystery Newsreel Today I stumbled across this film documenting LBJ's publicity tour through Appalachia just prior to signing the monumental Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. It's from the collections of the LBJ Presidential Library at UT-Austin, and they've provided a lot of helpful information about it, except for one key detail - the film's original audience and distribution.
See, the film certainly watches like a midcentury newsreel of the kind often shown in movie theaters at this time, and while the narration and presentation seem to indicate that it's for mass consumption, I can't actually confirm that from the script, title cards, or the LBJ Library's metadata and catalogue record. I chose to trust my instincts here in that I really think I ought to be a stickler for due diligence regarding the film's audience and distribution if I'm going to use it for my deliverables, which I'd really like to.
And there's some clues here that muddy the waters just enough. The film is credited to the "U.S. Naval Photographic Unit," which is one of multiple names used by an organization that started out doing war photography and A/V tech internally for the Navy during WWII, and then expanded in scope to offer service to other government branches in the following decades - but I can again find no information about this organization which definitely indicates one way or another that it made materials for mass distribution and consumption, nor can I find any connections between it and the United States Information Agency, which I understand to have been primarily if not exclusively responsible for distributing government-produced newsreels. The ending title card also says that the film was produced "for the President of the United States" - this could mean just abount anything, but given that I personally (i.e. not in my deliverables) would call this film propaganda, I am not ruling out the fact that propaganda is sometimes made for the propagandist to convince themselves rather than someone else.
7/27: The Back-er Catalogues
The Library of Congress' holdings can be frustratingly scattered, but the resources that most surprised me in how difficult they could be to locate were pre-20th century Congressional records. The Library does have an enormous and public digital archive of official congressional documents spanning from 1774-1875, but the repository for them looks and operates like a relic all to itself. Navigation relies on "previous" and "next" buttons even though Legislative records like the Congressional Globe consist of 500+ page tomes for each session of Congress covered. I only went looking in these documents when I had an exact page number citation of them from another source - I shudder to think of the time the researchers behind those sources must have spent navigating these records, or even their physical counterparts. Although, really what most surprises me is that there doesn't appear to yet be any attempt to OCR these documents. The broadsheets in Chronicling America are OCR'd, and a lot of those are far more damaged and degraded than anything I saw here - but more importantly, aren't these documents of greater importance, or at least centrality? Despite the rudimentary depository, the materials here were incredibly rich as primary sources - exemplary of the wealth of information available in legal research - there's no non-military budget the federal government won't slash, but even so I was surprised that such a foundational resource seems to have not been afforded a refresh since 2003.
8/13: Citation Formatting
When I was looking up the congressional documents mentioned above from citations I found in secondary and tertiary sources - primarily Joanne Freeman's authoritative monograph on antebellum Congressional violence, The Field of Blood, I noticed that the citations bore unique formatting. This isn't surprising, nor is it surprising that the unique formatting includes a lot of specific shorthand; what's maybe more surprising is that there doesn't seem to be a definitive iteration of this formatting - Freeman's citation style is one of several.
I must admit here that I still have a little bit of the vestigial instinct of a high schooler or undergrad, where citations can register as ritualistic and strictly, almost legally regulated - you might spend more time carefully formatting your bibliography than writing the essay for fear of getting points off. Of course these centuries-old documents aren't going to immediately present infallible signposts for modern readers to navigate; and of course these documents are cited for multiple reasons in multiple contexts that merit differing approaches to reference; and of course the majority of people who are actually going to glance at citations of documents like these are already knowledgable in the field and won't require unyielding uniformity to know what they're looking at.
Citations are not necessary for the blog posts, but I had to include them with the storymap - in the case of congressional records, I worked off of Freeman's formatting, amending links to the relevant materials with an access date. I think given the context, this is a sufficiently useful means of directing a curious reader to the relevant source - there's certainly room to make decisions for oneself when even official U.S. Government websites recommend a wide range of divergent citation formats.
When communicating what to avoid in interns' research and writing, my supervisor said that she didn't want to use the term "neutral," because it wasn't exactly right - in fact she never quite settled on a term, cycling through "political" or "controversial" before discarding those as well. To me this is indicative of precisely one of my critiques of "neutrality" - the term is nebulous in a way that betrays how it means little besides how it reflects the observer who calls it so. And, in fact, whatever name it should go by, this iteration of "neturality" was not about ensuring fairness or integrity. It was about funding. The Library of Congress is beholden to Congress itself for funding and resources, and what my supervisor was trying to control for were topics, or angles on topics, that might provoke any sitting congressperson to slash the Library's budget or otherwise oppose or penalize it through legislation.
This isn't an unfair concern; whole segments of United States politics are driven entirely by petty grudges, and it's not implausible that the Library might follow the Postal Service and the CDC in becoming a beleagured, unwilling token in a culture war. But from my experience of it during this internship, framing this as a "neutrality" issue (by any other name) is not only euphemistic to the point of disingenuous, it's misleading. In my case, cautioning generally about "political" or "controversial" topics that might offend readers prompted me to regard the involvement of the USSR and communism in my Vulcan Bridge research as the treacherous part of my work, reasoning that this story of Russian adjacency to American moral embarassment would rankle many Americans' continuing investment in the country's total moral and humanitarian superiority over the USSR and communism. But it turned out that the actual problem was how the story reflected West Virginia, even though the circumstances of the Vulcan Bridge story are very specific to a previous epoch of American history and none of the politicans involved are still in office. I don't feel that I could reasonably have picked up on the actual risk factors of my research from the way those risks were originally described, and consequently had to discard that work and start from scratch with four weeks remaining in the internship.
I would have rather been outright informed of exactly what determined a research avenue's viability, even if acknowledging it directly would be unnerving. Because it would be unnerving - I don't think getting on the bad side of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene would be a fight worth picking for the Library, but I certainly don't like thinking about the fact that in the past nine weeks I did have to take what Marjorie Taylor Greene might say about my work into account. This is a troubling, unwinnable situation that we're all in, and I think it is reasonable to choose not to pass that weight on to interns - but it's not a reasoning I share.
In fact, I'm a little surprised about how I was able to approach my pivot topic in light of answering, if by the transitive property, to figures like Greene. On the off chance it might be approved, when pitching the Brooks-Burlingame research I floated the idea of including discussion of political theater like this incident typifying critiques of 19th century anti-slavery movements, in which actual aid to oppressed Black people often fell by the wayside while white people made a big show of congratulating and denigrating each other. These critiques aren't new, but of course they would be new to the same white people who think Critical Race Theory is new. But while I discarded this component of my research, I made a point in my writing of stating directly that the Civil War and all of its attendant conflicts - the shuffling of America's political parties, and just about every instance of physical violence between Congresspeople in the early 1800s - were explicitly about Slavery. I expected pushback on this that I did not recieve - while the assertion is true I can think of several sitting congresspeople who would balk at it. In fact, I can easily imagine that if the right congressperson caught whiff of this blog post and their team wrote the right Facebook post about it, euphemistic defenses of the Confederacy in the name of "states' rights" would rocket back into our public discourse and slot right in with Critical Race Theory panic and border walls in the widening foothold of overt American ethnonationalism.
I am coming away from this internship feeling an even further heightened sense of emergency about the state of information in America. As I was realizing that I was beholden to Marjorie Taylor Greene - actually - as I was reading 19th-century broadsheets that wholesale invented anecdotes about sitting congressmen, my city's paper of record print what they openly acknowledged to be unsubstantiated rumors about the opposition mayoral candidate on their front page; as I was studying how congressmen could secure a landslide election by beating each other bloody, the Israeli Defense Force swayed American sympathies by tweeting a wall of rocket emojis. In my brief time working on behalf of the U.S. government, I felt the way that government's systems and fundamental assumptions were failing to respond to this emergency. I think the blog team felt it, too. I wish I could have thought of something more to do than allude to the fact that the 1850s were also "unprecedented."