The Iowa Labor History Oral Project

One of the ultimate joys and biggest challenges facing labor historians is connecting their work with the people about whom they write and teach. In Iowa, multiple generations of labor scholars and educators have been fortunate to be part of a labor- initiated partnership aimed at preserving and sharing the history of workers and their unions: the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP). During the mid-1970s, the Iowa Federation of Labor (IFL) established ILHOP as a freestanding nonprofit dedicated to recording oral history interviews with Iowa workers. ILHOP was led by a statewide advisory committee of labor leaders, history faculty, and University of Iowa Labor Center staff. IFL delegates voted to fund the project through a $0.01 (and eventually a $0.03) per capita dues assessment, further linking the project to the Iowa workers who were at the core of its mission.

Using IFL funds and additional donations, ILHOP hired a series of oral history interviewers who, between the late 1970s and early 1990s, recorded approximately eleven hundred interviews. ILHOP partnered with the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City to ensure the preservation of and access to these materials, with the society taking the lead in organizing and indexing more than seven hundred interviews. During this period, ILHOP interviewers and society staff also collected some eight hundred linear feet of materials regarding the Iowa labor movement, including meeting minutes, correspondence, financial records, and photographs, all of which became part of the society’s Iowa Labor Collection.

Advisory committee members actively shaped the project’s practical and intellectual goals. They initially focused on the impact of the Great Depression on Iowa workers but also directed interviewers to collect information on a broad range of subjects, including labor politics and ethnic, racial, and gender relationships. Moreover, they gave project staff some freedom to follow their own research interests, sometimes leading interviewers to previously unknown or little-explored aspects of Iowa labor history. Taken as a whole, these efforts, in the words of University of Iowa (UI) labor historian Shelton Stromquist, created “one of the most impressive collections of interviews with workers in the country.”¹

ILHOP’s founders initially hoped that the project might promote the teaching of labor history in the state’s public schools. The committee developed and attempted to distribute curricular materials during the 1980s, but outside a handful of individual teachers, the materials were never widely adopted. In 1993, however, ILHOP achieved its other initial goal of publishing an edited volume of the ILHOP interviews chronicling Iowa labor history for public audiences. Authored by Stromquist, Solidarity and Survival: An Oral History of Iowa Labor in the Twentieth Century was purchased in bulk by the IFL for discounted sale to union members and has become an important touchstone for many Iowa labor activists and their families. Stromquist in turn arranged for royalties from the volume to be returned to ILHOP.

Today, it is clear that the project has arguably had its widest impact in two areas that exceed the boundaries of its founders’ original vision—labor education and scholarship. Over the last two decades, labor educators at the UI Labor Center have developed numerous workshops using the interviews in sessions ranging from labor history to internal organizing and steward schools. Likewise, generations of labor historians have drawn on ILHOP interviews and Iowa Labor Collection materials for use in hundreds of dissertations, journal articles, and scholarly books.

Perhaps ILHOP’s most unexpected feature has been its longevity. After a period of relative inactivity since the 1990s, IFL leaders have worked with university and state historical society partners to revive and chart new directions for the project. Since 2013, John McKerley has served as the project’s newest oral historian, bringing ILHOP’s collection and access procedures into the digital age and collecting interviews focused especially on documenting dramatic changes in Iowa’s labor movement since the 1970s (including the rise of public-sector unions) and diversifying voices in the collection. To further these goals, in 2015 ILHOP pursued and won an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the...