This week, a story I wrote about a shadowy Seattle historical figure, Lou Graham, was published online. I believe it will be in the upcoming version of Seattle Met and will be on news shelves at some point in the near future.
I' wrote an entire book about Graham and this story, but the publisher shelved it because there wasn’t enough primary information. Which is infuriating, because the lack of primary information is exactly what keeps the stories of marginalized people from seeing the light of day.
Why Primary Sources Can’t Always Do The Work
Often, when I write these newsletters, I go feeling around for information about subjects or people or places and find next to nothing. I’m honestly not sure what’s worst — the brick wall of nothingness or the fact that often, the only information available comes from decades-old blogs filled with sensationalism and broken links.
Trying to find factual records about residents of state hospitals, the treatments they received, or the reasons why doctors with God complexes were permitted to practice barbaric experiments is an uphill battle every time. Because the reality is that once the the people who lived these lives and felt these pains and endured the long days staring at the wall die, their stories die, too. Barring a great reveal of old journals or writing on walls hidden under peeling latex paint, people take their stories with them. And it means that the stories we’re left with, a hundred or more years later, are the ones written by the survivors and the educated ruling classes. And those stories, I think, are rarely sufficient.
Our desire to cling to primary sources in historical research and writing is kind of silly, when you get right down to it. As though people never lied about themselves or their achievements. As though men are always honest.
Imagine a historian in the year 2122 confronted with information gleaned from a Tinder profile and a series of emails his ex wrote to a friend about him. Tell me the primary is more reliable.
On top of that, over reliance on primary sources if a kind of massive, overarching erasure of the billions of people who have lived and died without the ability to tell their own stories. Requiring first-hand accounts all but eliminates the voices of so, so many individuals and cultures.
People who spoke languages other than English.
People who weren’t literate.
People with disabilities.
People who couldn’t afford the time or resources required to journal.
People who lived and died without ever having a photograph made of their face.
People who didn’t have children or whose children didn’t survive and thus, didn’t keep their stories alive.
People who were deemed unimportant.
People who were kept from dictating their own stories — those who were incarcerated or, for the purposes of this newsletter, were in a mental health setting which didn’t permit paper, sharp objects, or personal belongings at all.
Telling Our Own Stories
Much of my research comes from newspapers, government documents, estate records, and the occasional contemporaneous historical documents. These can sketch the outlines of a person or their situation; they may help reveal the circumstances that landed them in the pages of the paper or the environment at the time that they existed. But these, too, are imperfect, because they’re being told through someone else.
This is one of the primary reasons that Nellie Bly’s Ten Days In A Mad-House is so absolutely critical in the historical arc of mental health and healthcare is because it is one of the few first-hand accounts of such an establishment — even though Bly came with her own views and position of privilege, being a white working woman.
Which is of course why storytelling in our modern age is so ruthlessly important. As we decry the dead of the newsroom, we must also train our eyes on the kinds of stories that are being told. Young people are expressing their own realities on TikTok, for better for worse, and millennials are still tweeting their way through life. But so many of us — myself included — are writing for money or clout, not just for the purpose of having our stories documented in some fashion.
I don’t have a thesis for this, really. Mostly I just never want us all to stop talking about the important of stories written by people who are living, as they’re living, with the express purpose of telling the truth, or their truth, or a truth. Because this is a snake that eats its own tail — we learn about the histories of men like Alexander Hamilton but never about the people who worked for him, clerked for him, or drove him around. The people who were able to leave enough of their own stories behind — a privilege in almost every instance — get to be remembered in their own words, in their own ways.
Meanwhile, the people who languished in mental hospitals or lived, mutilated, by lobotomies, become caricatures and background figures. And the question really is, I think, can we ever figure out how to deal with the problems at hand if we’ve never examined the problems that were, in the words of the people most impacted?
How can we rewrite our own futures if we continue to pretend that that so much of our collective past just didn’t exist?