Hadley Robinson

Michael Lewis

Sarah Vowell

The National Archives might seem like a distant trove of documents and arcane laws for Americans far from Washington. But many of these national treasures are actually relevant to our lives. Author Sarah Vowell found the people inside the Archives who are making sure everybody can access these documents and find their stories.&nbsp; Read Sarah Vowell’s full story here: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/sarah-vowell-national-archives-digitization-records-smartphones/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Equalizer</a> And check out the rest of the “Who is government?” series.<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Canary</a>, by Michael Lewis<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/casey-cep-ronald-walters-the-sentinel-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Sentinel</a>, by Casey Cep<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/dave-eggers-jet-propulsion-laboratory-nasa-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Searchers</a>, by Dave Eggers<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/john-lanchester-consumer-price-index-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Number</a>, by John Lanchester<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/cyber-sleuth/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Cyber Sleuth</a>, by Geraldine Brooks

The National Archives might seem like a distant trove of documents, but many of these national treasures are actually relevant to Americans' lives.

‘I exist because of this piece of paper’

David Shipley:: This is "Impromptu" with Washington Post Opinions, and I'm David Shipley, Opinions editor. We've got another bonus episode for you this weekend that's part of our series "Who Is Government," where seven writers venture deep into the wilds of the federal bureaucracy to bring back fascinating stories from inside the capital. This week, Michael Lewis speaks with the wonderful Sarah Vowell about the Archives and the people there who have devoted themselves to making our national treasures available to all Americans. Enjoy. 

Michael Lewis> It's Michael Lewis here again, author of some books -- "Moneyball," "The Blind Side," "The Big Short" of the movies, and I'm here, to my delight, with Sarah Vowell. Sarah's part of our series "Who Is Government," where we've airdropped six of my favorite writers into the federal government and really just ask them to find a story they wanted to tell. And Sarah's great. She's an actress. She's the voice of Violet in "The Incredibles." She is a historian. She's a nonfiction narrative writer, author of "Assassination Vacation" and "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," and five others, I think, so, Sarah, welcome. 

Sarah Vowell> Thank you. 

Michael Lewis> We haven't really talked that much about your piece. I've been watching from a distance. And I'm curious, like, in the first when -- when you accepted the assignment. 

Sarah Vowell> Which was 11 months ago, almost to the day. 

Michael Lewis> There you go. How did you figure out what to write about? What did you consider? 

Sarah Vowell> Well, I was just looking for someone of distinction. I had a couple of other criteria. One of them was I needed the person to be from west of the Mississippi. Part of that was when I was young, like more than 30 years ago, I was a Smithsonian intern. And, you know, I live in Montana. I grew up in Montana. People out here, the government -- "government" -- "Washington" is a dirty word. And then I got to Washington, and everyone was from somewhere else. There were people from America working there, and I wanted to talk about one of those people who had come to Washington because for me, I took the train from Montana. I arrived. Rabin and Arafat shook hands the next day. It was such an exciting time to be a provincial person in Washington. And my other one was the person had to be a graduate of a public university. 

Michael Lewis> Why? 

Sarah Vowell> I graduated from Montana State. And I noticed around the pandemic a lot of the -- a lot of the governors who are really effective were public university graduates, like Gretchen Whitmer or Larry Hogan or Jay Inslee in Washington. And I think there's something about those universities that make for good public servants because you're kind of between the real world and academia. And I'm also just interested in how -- how mobility happens and how someone from nowhere becomes somebody. 

Michael Lewis> So you did kind of what I did. You decided what kind of pond you wanted to fish in. Then you go fishing. But it's kind of arbitrary who you pull out of it. And you pull this woman, Pam Wright, out of it. 

Sarah Vowell> Mm-hmm. Her title is Chief Innovation Officer of the National Archives and she's from Conrad, Montana, which is a completely different Montana than the one I'm -- I'm from like city Montana, really. And she's from this ranch, from this town of like 2,000 people, you know. But because I grew up in this college town and went to college here, I met a lot of people like her. So I know not to underestimate them, but it does take a while to draw some of them out. She's not a natural braggart. 

Michael Lewis> What interested you about what she was doing? 

Sarah Vowell> I mean, as a -- I write books about history, and I do spend a lot of time in archives. And one thing that appealed to me is -- So, she's in charge of sharing the contents of the National Archives online with the public, and I've spent a lot of time in archives, traveling to archives. There's always a bunch of rules. It's really expensive. That was my main interest. I'm not very interested in the Internet per se, but it's the best way to share the contents of the National Archives with everybody in America, especially people from where she's from, from where I'm from. It's been kind of her life work -- life's work, just to make as many records available as possible to as many Americans as possible. So there was -- that was like a democratic spirit to that and public service in the most basic sense. 

Michael Lewis> What is the hunger appetite for access to the National Archives in the country? 

Sarah Vowell> A lot of it is military veterans who need their service records or their discharge papers. A lot of it is genealogy -- people searching for their families' records, for passenger manifests, and immigration paperwork. 

Michael Lewis> It's personal? 

Sarah Vowell> Yeah, it's personal. 

Michael Lewis> It's personal. And you had your own personal moment. And you play it very tautly in your piece, but I want you to describe it for me, this treaty that you see, I don't want to mispronounce the name of the treaty. 

Sarah Vowell> Oh, yes. Trevor Plant, who is -- He's the guy at the main archives in D.C. who's in charge of all the national treasures. And I hadn't even requested to see that treaty, but he had read one of my books where I talked about being Cherokee, and I had driven the path of the Trail of Tears, which is how my Cherokee ancestors got from Georgia or North Carolina or Tennessee to Oklahoma at the request of the government. And I had read the treaty a bunch of times because it's the treaty that gave the government the reasoning for the Trail of Tears. Like, it was signed by some unauthorized representatives of the tribe. And once the government had this treaty, they started rounding people up and marching them cross-country at gunpoint. Some of them went by water, but he showed it to me. I, you know, recognized a lot of the names. One of them was my great, great-grandfather's commander in the Civil War. And I just immediately started weeping because it was a death warrant. 4,000 people died because of this piece of paper, and I exist because of this piece of paper. All of my relatives exist because of this piece of paper. And it was just incredibly primal to see that paper and see those names. 

Michael Lewis> When you describe that, I thought, "This is happening over and over and over in the country, when people access this archive." People are having this emotional connection to the past. 

Sarah Vowell> I mean, I was honestly very embarrassed to just start [laughs] crying as a reporter. You don't want to do that. But I had no control over it. It was just kind of instantaneous. But I mean, that was another reason that Pam appealed to me because I knew I could tell her story through other documents in the archives. And that's what we do. Like, when I was talking to you about people who went to public universities, we look at the Higher Education Act of 1965. And I had asked her, "Were you a work-study student?" Because she's just from some ranch somewhere and she has this big, fancy job. How do you get from that -- from A to B? 

Michael Lewis> Yeah. 

Sarah Vowell> And because I was a work-study student. We had almost the exact same, you know, experience with that. And she answered, "Yeah." 

Michael Lewis> Explain that. Explain your experience. 

Sarah Vowell> What it is, it's in the Higher Education Act of 1965. The most famous of the provisions in that act is the Pell Grant, which is, you know, just free money. But work-study was about giving needy students a way to earn extra money, because a lot of us put ourselves through school, and also to get work experience. And so she was hired as a work-study student at the Mansfield Library in their archives to transcribe oral-history interviews with smokejumpers. They're the wildland firefighters in the West, and that was her first middle-class job experience. It was her first work experience. After she graduated, she started working for a research firm in Missoula, Montana, that would send her to the National Archives. And that's how she ended up at the National Archives. For me, it was at the Museum of the Rockies, also in an archives cataloging photographs of trains. And I ran into my old work-study supervisor last year, and I asked him like, "What was I like, you know?" And he said, because I had had such a blue-collar life with so many blue-collar jobs, he said, "You were really excited to have a job you didn't have to take a shower after." 

Michael Lewis> [laughs] 

Sarah Vowell> I had never had a job where I didn't need a shower after. You know, I'd worked in food service and I was a maid. I was, you know, childcare and I was a waitress. And so that program, I think, gives a lot of working-class kids a chance at imagining a sort of professional life. And that's what happened to her, you know? And me. So, we're standing there, we're looking at Higher Education Act of 1965, and she wouldn't be standing there without that law, and neither would I probably, you know, so there was a kind of circular thing about the National Archives, how all of these random documents and laws and decisions by presidents or Congress, like, go thundering down the ages. And I think every American can find their story there, whether we want to or not. 

Michael Lewis> I understand why you care so much about it. Explain to me why she cares so much. 

Sarah Vowell> I think when she thinks about who she's serving, when she thinks about the taxpayers, she thinks about the people she grew up with. And I think a lot of people with, especially with a working-class background, feel that way. Like, I remember once Bruce Springsteen talking about how he feels accountable to the people he grew up with. That's why he tells their stories. 

Michael Lewis> It's not hard to see why the work is important. 

Sarah Vowell> No, not at all. Some of this stuff is really like live or die, especially the military records. I mean, people who are looking for their discharge papers or service records because they need insurance or they have cancer. You know, some of this stuff is just really basic information that they need to access and they don't know how. I mean, one of the great programs she started is called History Hub, and it's just a pure public service where anyone can type in a question to the National Archives and get it answered. And a lot of those questions are like, "Where are my Air Force discharge papers? How do I find that?" You know, some of them are like really deep questions they ask like, "What were the Founders' intentions?" It's like, whoa. 

Michael Lewis> Is it a human being that's answering those questions? 

Sarah Vowell> Yeah, it's people who work at National Archives, other government agencies. And another one of her great contributions were her volunteer corps. They're called the Citizen Archivists. A lot of them are retired. There's this one guy. His name is Bernard Weintraub. He's a national treasure. He's just a retired zoology professor in California who probably answers more questions than anyone, as far as I can tell. And he's helped thousands of people. And he was just sitting there and, you know, she started these volunteer programs because she actually believes the people of the United States have knowledge and she had a hunch they would want to share that knowledge. 

Michael Lewis> This was great. I hope if you find yourself anywhere near the Bay Area, you will let me know. 

Sarah Vowell> I will. I mean, this has just been such a pleasure, so thank you. 

David Shipley:: Thanks for listening to "Impromptu." We'll link to Sarah's article and all the others in this series in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson, edited by Mili Mitra, and mixed by Emma Munger. And for "Who Is Government" fans, we have one more coming your way very soon -- W. Kamau Bell on the next generation of bureaucratic heroes.


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/20e2bfdc-eabc-4ab3-8eca-ae67fa5ba23a_6709365aa9100727f00b45cb-transcript.txt

Damir Marusic

Chris Suellentrop

Emma Munger

Eavesdrop on Post Opinions columnists as they have frank, thoughtful conversations about the news and cultural debates on everyone’s minds. 

Impromptu: The conversations before the columns 

The National Archives might seem like a distant trove of documents and arcane laws for Americans far from Washington. But many of these national treasures are actually relevant to our lives. Author Sarah Vowell found the people inside the Archives who are making sure everybody can access these documents and find their stories. 


David Ignatius

Josh Rogin

As tensions between Israel and Iran soar, columnists David Ignatius and Josh Rogin talk with Damir Marusic about the broader forces at play in the conflict, the lack of plans for a stable future and what a Trump victory would mean for the U.S.-Iran relationship. Read more from David Ignatius on this issue:&nbsp;“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/05/israel-gaza-hamas-oct-7-terrorist-attacks-war/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">What the Oct. 7 attacks didn’t change</a>”“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/04/trump-iran-assassination-risk/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Trump courts disaster by underestimating Iranian death threats</a>” ﻿Subscribe to The Washington Post<a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> </a><a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.

As tensions between Israel and Iran soar, our columnists discuss the broader forces at play in the conflict. 

Just how bad will the Middle East get?

https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/75ebeb80-a237-492e-9891-4eb1fed58d25_67058c0cc5312347c989da3a-transcript.txt

As tensions between Israel and Iran soar, columnists David Ignatius and Josh Rogin talk with Damir Marusic about the broader forces at play in the conflict, the lack of plans for a stable future and what a Trump victory would mean for the U.S.-Iran relationship.


A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday. 

Washington Post Opinions columnists offer frank commentary in conversation about the latest news moments

Impromptu podcast from Washington Post Opinions

A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday.

Frank, thoughtful conversations on the news and cultural debates we can’t stop thinking about, from Post Opinions columnists.

‘I exist because of this piece of paper’

‘I exist because of this piece of paper’

Just how bad will the Middle East get?

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