Harvard man, American dough boy, Mississippi Jew: the papers of Samuel (Sam) Leyens Switzer in Virginia

Abstract

Archives function both as repositories of documents and materials and as sites of memory collection and classification. This article explores the provenance and process of collecting and archiving through the lens of the collection of personal papers of Samuel Switzer, a Northern educated Southerner, World War I soldier, and a Jew. It examines how the interplay of Switzer’s various identities affected the donor’s and archivists’ perspectives on the collection’s importance and relevance and demonstrates the impact of these viewpoints on the collection’s presentation and use by scholars.

Keywords:

• Archives
• Jewishness
• national identity
• collective memory
• Southern Jews
• World War I

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank B. Minette Cooper for making her uncle’s papers available, for sharing the rich history of her family, and for reading a draft of this paper with a keen, critical eye. The author also acknowledges the gracious assistance of former Special Collections Librarian and University Archivist Sonia Yaco at Old Dominion University, now at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. The Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town and the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton provided a climate conducive to sharing and refining this work.

Funding

The Institute for Jewish Studies and Interfaith Understanding at Old Dominion University provided travel monies and support for this research.

Notes

1. Special Collections and University Archives, Patricia W. and J. Douglas Perry Library, Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, VA 23529 (hereafter SCUA-ODU), Papers of Samuel Leyens Switzer (MG 37), (hereafter Switzer Coll.), letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, April 14, 1919, Box 2, Folder 11.

2. Richard Cox, No Innocent Deposits: Forming Archives by Rethinking Appraisal (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004).

3. Ibid., 31.

4. Consistent, although by no means constant, references to Jewishness and Switzer’s ties to Jewish social and cultural networks throughout his life justify the reference to acculturation rather than assimilation.

5. The Haases were the father and brother of Cooper’s Aunt Bertha, the wife of her uncle Sam Kleisdorff. Author’s interview with B. Minette Cooper at her home in Norfolk, Virginia, March 20, 2011 (hereafter Cooper interview); email communication from B. Minette Cooper to the author, May 17, 2012 (hereafter Cooper email).

6. The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, “About the AJA: General Information” and “About the AJA: AJA Collection Policy,” http://americanjewisharchives.org/.

7. Cooper interview; Cooper email.

8. Switzer was awarded a special AB degree from Harvard University in 1919 that recognized those who had volunteered for war service after completing most but not all of their degree requirements. Switzer’s experience at Harvard and information on the awarding of the degree in absentia appear in SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., Box 1, Folders 4–14, passim. Frederick S. Mead, ed., Harvard’s Military Record in the World War (Boston: Harvard Alumni Association, 1921), lists those who earned this degree. The entry for Switzer reads “(war degree)18(19),” 928.

9. “Southern Jewish Historical Society: Archives,” http://www.jewishsouth.org/archives.

10. Laura A. Millar, Archives: Principles and Practices (London: Facet Publishing, 2010), 42–4.

11. SCUA-ODU, Papers of Dudley Cooper and Ocean View Amusement Park (MG 31). Minette Cooper also donated, in 2012, a collection of Virginia Squires programmes from 1970 to 1976, relating to the American Basketball Association team on which Julius Erving played from 1971 to 1973, and correspondence relating to Young Audiences of Virginia, SCUA-ODU, Papers of Minette Cooper (MG 110).

12. Cooper interview.

13. SCUA-ODU, Archivist’s Control Folder (MG37).

14. The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, “Oversize Photograph,” http://americanjewisharchives.org/catalog/Record/vtls000007467.

15. Millar, Archives, 37–9.

16. Cox, No Innocent Deposits, 234.

17. Old Dominion University, “Special Collections and University Archives,” http://www.lib.odu.edu/specialcollections/manuscripts/index.htm.

18. Cooper interview.

19. “The Papers of Samuel Leyens Switzer (MG 37),” http://www.lib.odu.edu/special/manuscripts/switzer.htm.

20. Quoted in Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009), 215.

21. “The Papers of Samuel Leyens Switzer (MG 37),” http://www.lib.odu.edu/special/manuscripts/switzer.htm.

22. Elisabeth Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,” The American Archivist 63 (2000): 127.

23. On archivists’ professional responsibilities, see Millar, Archives, 46–7.

24. On social memory see Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 97–101.

25. Cooper interview.

26. SCUA-ODU, Archivist’s Control Folder (MG37), letter, Minette Cooper to University Archivist James Sweeney, September 10, 1980.

27. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., Box 1, Folders 4–14, passim.

28. Marianne Sanua, “Jewish College Fraternities in the United States, 1895–1968: An Overview,” Journal of American Ethnic History 19, no. 2 (2000): 10. The initials ZBT originally referred to the organization’s Hebrew biblical motto Zion Be-mishpat Tipadeh (Isaiah 1:27).

29. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, May 2, 1915, Box 1, Folder 12.

30. Sanua, “Jewish College Fraternities,” 11.

31. Joan Hedrick, “Harvard Indifference,” The New England Quarterly 49 no. 3 (1976): 352, 357, 379.

32. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, April 14, 1919, Box 2, Folder 11.

33. Leonard Rogoff, “Is the Jew White? The Racial Place of the Southern Jew,” American Jewish History 85 no. 3 (1997): 212.

34. Oliver Pollak, “Antisemitism, the Harvard Plan, and the Roots of Reverse Discrimination,” Jewish Social Studies 45 no. 2 (1983): 114. Pollak quotes Lowell.

35. Joseph M. Proskauer, “Southern Boyhood,” in Autobiographies of American Jews, ed. Harold U. Ribalow (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), 133, 137. Proskauer was an appellate court judge then entered into private practice. He served in various political positions. From 1943 to 1949, he was president of the American Jewish Committee. “Appellate Division First Department, Joseph M. Proskauer,” http://www.courts.state.ny.us/courts/ad1/centennial/Bios/jmproskauer2.shtml.

36. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, undated, Box 1, Folder 2 and letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, September 22, 1914, Box 1, Folder 4.

37. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, April 14, 1919, Box 2, Folder 11.

38. The book is preserved in SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., Box 4, Folder 2.

39. Jessica Cooperman, “‘A Little Army Discipline Would Improve the Whole House of Israel’: The Jewish Welfare Board, State Power and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in World War I America” (PhD diss., New York University, 2010), 174–8.

40. Lee Shai Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 40.

41. “Vicksburg: Anshe Chesed Cemetery,” National Park Service US Department of the Interior, Vicksburg National Military Park, http://www.nps.gov/vick/forteachers/upload/jewish%20cemetery-2.pdf.

42. “Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities: Vicksburg, Mississippi,” http://www.isjl.org/history/archive/ms/vicksburg.htm.

43. As described in a report in the 1890s from a congregation in District 6 (the northern Midwestern states), quoted in Edward Grusd, B’nai B’rith: The Story of a Covenant (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966), 113.

44. “Vicksburg: Anshe Chesed Cemetery,” “Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities: Vicksburg, Mississippi,” http://www.isjl.org/history/archive/ms/vicksburg.htm.

45. Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America, 229, 234.

46. Stanley Brav, Dawn of Reckoning: Self-Portrait of a Liberal Rabbi (Cincinnati: Sholom Press, 1971), 141–2.

47. “The Papers of Samuel Leyens Switzer (MG 37),” http://www.lib.odu.edu/special/manuscripts/switzer.htm.

48. Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 12–13.

49. Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 24–6.

50. Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith, 29, 254, and “B’nai B’rith Roots,” http://bnaibrith.org/about_us/bbi_roots.cfm.

51. “Our History,” Hadassah – The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., http://www.hadassah.org/site/c.keJNIWOvElH/b.5651301/k.AE75/Our_History.htm.

52. Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith, 251; and Brav, Dawn of Reckoning, 160.

53. Quoted in Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect,” 133.

54. Quoted in ibid., 127, 142.

55. Eli Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 38.

56. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 11–12.

57. Evans, Provincials, 41.

58. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 36.

59. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, April 30, 1916, Box 1, Folder 14.

60. Rogoff, “Is the Jew White?,” 209.

61. Ibid., 204–7.

62. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, Sam Switzer to Flora Switzer, December 8, 1914, Box 1, Folder 7.

63. The American Jewish population grew from 1,777,185 to 3,390,301 according to Pollak, “Antisemitism,” 114.

64. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 31.

65. Ibid., 59–63.

66. Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America, 162.

67. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, Sol Kory to Sam Switzer, April 16, 1919, Box 2, Folder 11.

68. The contours of the debate are outlined in Mark K. Bauman, “Introduction,” in The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s, ed. Mark K. Bauman and Berkley Kalin (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 4–12, 16–18.

69. Cooper interview.

70. “Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities: History of Anshe Chesed Congregation, Vicksburg, Mississippi,” http://www.isjl.org/history/archive/ms/HistoryofAnsheChesed.htm.

71. “Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion: History,” http://huc.edu/about/history.shtml.

72. A description of Stanley Brav appears in Theodore H. Wohl and Amiel Wohl, He Really Had Something to Say: The Ideas of Rabbi Samuel Wohl: A Biographical Presentation and World Perspective of Scope and Compassion (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2005), 97–8.

73. Brav, Dawn of Reckoning, 175.

74. Stanley Brav, “Mississippi Incident,” American Jewish Archives (June 1952): 59–65, http://americanjewisharchives.org/journal/PDF/1952_04_02_00_brav.pdf. Bilbo was not re-seated in Congress. He died in August 1947.

75. Brav, Dawn of Reckoning, 178–80.

76. Ibid., 167–8, 181.

77. Marvin Braiterman, “Mississippi Marranos,” in Jews in the South, ed. Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 351–9. He describes a Mississippi Jewish community he visited while working for civil rights and desegregation. See also, Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 52.

78. “Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities: History of Pine Bluffs Congregations,” http://www.isjl.org/history/archive/ar/HistoryofPineBluffCongregations.htm, and Carolyn Gray LeMaster, A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s–1990s (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 57.

79. Rogoff, “Is the Jew White?,” 213 n. 41 attributes this to Harry Goldin.

80. Brav, Dawn of Reckoning, 143.

81. Ibid., 144.

82. Cooper interview, and Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith, 228–9.

83. Cooper interview.

84. Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Braided Identity of Southern Jewry,” in Dixie Diaspora, ed. Mark K. Bauman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 431, 446–7.

85. Mead, Harvard’s Military Record, ix–xvi, outlines the typical path for Harvard students.

86. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., letter, H.G. Hooker, Training Camp Division to Sam Switzer, July 7, 1917, Box 1, Folder 23.

87. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., Box 2, Folders 15–39, passim.

88. On culture and the memory of World War I, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2–5.

89. SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll., DVD, Interfile. A copy of this DVD is also available at the AJA archives in Cincinnati in 2008, “Trip Around the World 1937,” http://americanjewisharchives.org/catalog/Record/vtls000017281.

90. On archivists’ mediation and activism in shaping archives, see Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 143–8.

91. William R. Ferris et al., “Regionalism: The Significance of Place in American Jewish Life,” American Jewish History 93 no. 2 (2007): 113–14.

92. Ibid., 115–16.

93. Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America, 342.

94. Elliott Ashkenazi, “Jewish Commercial Interests between North and South: The Case of the Lehmans and the Seligmans,” in Dixie Diaspora (see note 84), 195, 203–5.

95. References to relatives in the north-east appear in Switzer’s Phillips Exeter and Harvard letters in SCUA-ODU Switzer Coll. See also mentions of North/South family networks in Leo Turitz and Evelyn Turitz, Jews in Early Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 54.

96. Proskauer, “Southern Boyhood,” 138.

97. Ashkenazi, “Jewish Commercial Interests,” 206.

98. Ferris et al., “Regionalism,” 127.

99. Turitz and Turitz, Jews in Early Mississippi, 53.

100. Cooper interview. The Valley Dry Goods Company remained in the Switzer Leyens family until 1985. See David S. Sampliner and Mark I. Greenberg, Discovering Jewish Heritage Across the South (Jackson: Goldring Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, 2001), 35.

101. Quoted in Jimerson, Archives Power, 215.

102. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), xiii.