After a long hiatus I’m back in the research saddle. I’m in Abilene, KS at the Eisenhower Presidential Library. After a long flight to Kansas City, and a long drive down I-70, I arrived in Abilene, one of the smaller towns I’ve been to in quite some time. The Library sits on a pretty campus that also includes a museum, a welcome center, Eisenhower’s Boyhood Home, and a Place of Meditation. In the center of the site stands a statue of Ike himself, overseeing everything.
The Library is a giant marble building with exhibits on the first floor, and the research room on the second. So far researching here has been the most painless experience I’ve had at any of the NARA locations, though considering it’s a much smaller and more focused library, I guess that shouldn’t be overly surprising. On my first day in the archives there were only three other people doing research, and on my second, just one. The archivists and research room staff are incredibly friendly, and once they give you your orientation, they more or less leave you alone. That being said, when you do need help, they really know the collections. The best part though, is that just about all of the holdings are fully indexed, down to the folder level. Since most of the collections are individual people’s papers, I’ve been able to find some great stuff on immigration and refugee policy, but less about some of the important sub-themes I’m searching for, such as family reunification, refugees from Hong Kong, etc.
In particular the Maxwell Rabb Papers have been incredibly rich – he was Eisenhower’s point man on all things immigration (as well as civil rights, minority groups, etc.) and his confidential memos on the legislative process contain a lot of great Congressional and Bureaucratic gossip that you just can’t find in the official record. In general I’m learning a lot more about the political infighting around immigration policy during the 1950s.
(Other things are also coming together – going into the research I was looking for signs of a positive shift in policymakers’ attitudes toward East Asian immigrants and refugees in the mid-1950s, but I’ve now realized that the same shift applies to Italians, with conservative legislators still expressing their concern over Catholic immigration by 1953, but capitulating around 1957.)
More to come…
