The State Historical Society of Missouri

A Response to A Crisis

I want to begin by commenting on the fact that September 7, 2009, marked the fifth anniversary in my tenure at the State Historical Society of Missouri, and I am grateful to you to have the privilege of carrying on the legacy of my three most immediate predecessors: my good friend Jim Goodrich, Dick Brownlee, and Floyd Shoemaker. Those men served at the helm of this venerable institution for nearly ninety years. And while I know that I will not match them in longevity of service, I pledge to you and to them that I will continue to promote the cause that they, and you, hold so dear.

I want to remind you of some of what we have been through together in the last five years. Within months of my coming here in late 2004, we experienced a problem with vinegar syndrome in our microfilm, which threatened our entire newspaper collection, and you helped us raise $200,000 to address that problem – for which I am grateful. Then in the spring of 2005 it got worse as we were “zeroed out” of the state budget for awhile. That certainly got our attention in a variety of ways, but you helped us get back in and weather the storm. And then we had three remarkable years of growth in state support from 2006 to 2009, including a near doubling of our state appropriation and $600,000 in planning money for a new building.

And then the good times came to an end. The current recession has hit us hard, just as it has hit everybody in our state and our nation. In January 2009 we were notified that $400,000 of the $600,000 planning money was being withheld. And in February 2009 we were notified that 3 percent of our budget, $78,569, was being withheld. And then, when the FY 2010 budget was approved by the legislature and signed by the governor, we discovered that our budget had been reduced by another 10 percent or $161,960. And then on Wednesday of this week, we learned that our budget was being cut by another 25 percent, a total of 35 percent this year, an additional amount of $364,010. And so you must be wondering: “How will we manage?”

Yesterday the executive committee of the board of trustees made some decisions that were endorsed today by the full board. And I want to say, by the way, thank you to the executive committee, particularly President Doug Crews but also to the other nine members of that committee, and all of the trustees for taking their jobs so seriously, for supporting me, the staff, and the membership in the ways they have. Please thank them with me.

Here’s how we are going to address the challenge of having more than a third of our budget reduced this year. First of all, the use of state funds to microfilm newspapers has been suspended indefinitely. Second, the use of state funds to publish the Missouri Historical Review has been suspended indefinitely. Please don’t misinterpret this: we are going to find the money from private sources. We have weathered the Depression, we have weathered two world wars, and we’ve never missed an issue of the Review, but we need to find other sources than state revenue to publish it. I hope you will help us. Third, the use of state funds for travel has been suspended indefinitely. Those were the easy decisions.

The executive committee voted yesterday to eliminate three positions. One has been vacant since earlier this year in anticipation of this problem, and one was previously held by Peggy Platner who has decided to retire after nearly forty years of working at the Society. Peggy will retire December 1. A third position will be eliminated as part of the reduction in force, and a fourth had already been lost after last January’s cut.

Additionally, effective Monday, the staff of the State Historical Society has volunteered to take a 20 percent cut in pay for as long as is necessary to meet this financial crisis. I can’t tell you how important this is to me, and I hope you appreciate it as well. This will mean that, beginning next week, the Society will be limiting its hours of operation to four days a week. We will be open Monday through Thursday and closed on Friday and Saturday until further notice. I would like to say I think this is only going to happen for a month or two, but I think it’s going to be the rest of the year.

For now, we are also suspending a number of popular programs including the Missouri History Speaker’s Bureau and the MoHiP Theatre. We will continue our effort to place more material online, primarily because the funds for these efforts come primarily from outside sources and grants. By the way, we hope that before this year is out we will have loaded full-text searchable pages of the Review from 1906 to 2000. These will be available anywhere you can access a computer. This will be a great boon to Missouri history research.

Traditionally, the State Historical Society of Missouri has relied upon public funding for approximately 80 percent of its budget. Those days may be over, especially for the foreseeable future. We can and we must increase private financial support for this organization. That can happen in two ways.

First, we have to increase our membership and revenues from membership, and second, we have to increase donations to the cause that we all hold so dear. Our membership is roughly holding steady, but holding steady in an environment where public funding is decreasing is not good enough. We have a small endowment, whose principal in this economic environment generates a few hundred dollars a year. We can and we must do better than that.

Despite the setbacks and the challenges we’ve faced over the past five years and the ones we now face, I think I have a pretty good job. I get to hang out every day with an unbelievably talented group of people amidst fascinating historical documents, newspapers, rare books, and priceless works of art. It’s the kind of atmosphere that allows me on occasion to ask myself the question “What does it all mean?” “What does it mean to be a Missourian? Who are we as a people?” And for me the answer is simple and personal. I am who I am largely because of who I have been. To paraphrase the great Missourian Mark Twain: “All the me that is in me began in a little village in Missouri a long time ago.”

I come from a long line of working-class people who trusted God, their country, their community and each other – and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. My folks were awfully proud of the fact that Harry Truman was from Missouri.

I am the son of a woman who loved the color purple. Notice my shirt? I hated purple as a kid. We couldn’t afford what we called “store-bought shirts,” so my mother used to make our shirts, and she would often make me a purple shirt, which I would refuse to wear, except if I knew I was going someplace where my friends wouldn’t be. But the color purple comforts and inspires me as did the life of my mother.

My mom was a Depression-era child who in 1933 at the age of eleven lost her mother. She was one of seven children, young kids, of an immigrant father and mother who were trying to make a living off a hard-scrabble farm in Osage County, Missouri—a farm that my grandfather had already lost once by 1933. When my grandmother died unexpectedly at a young age, in her forties, there was no money to pay for her funeral, which cost $60. The neighbors took up a collection in the tradition of the time and collected $20 dollars in nickels and dimes and pennies to help pay for the funeral, but they still owed $40. And so my mom and her sister, who was thirteen, took a crosscut saw and went out and cut forty loads of firewood, and hauled them with a team and wagon to the undertaker to pay for their mom’s funeral.

Any time I have a bad day, I think of that and I say to myself: “Buddy, you ain’t never had a bad day. You will never have a bad day like that.”

The next year my mom graduated from the eighth grade—there was no high school to go to—so her father, a stern German patriarch whom I remember with not total fondness, sent her off to an extended family member in St. Louis to work as a domestic servant.

By the way, when she graduated from the eighth grade, she couldn’t afford a dress, so she made her own graduation dress out of flour sacks. She didn’t have any shoes, but when her mother died, in the collection from neighbors, was a pair of men’s work shoes and they fit my mom. So, she wore her flour sack dress and work shoes to her graduation. The other kids laughed at her.

At the age of fourteen, she was working as a domestic servant, caring for a family of four and a two-story house—cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids, and washing and ironing for the sum total of $2.50, plus room and board. Guess what she bought with her first check: a pair of shoes. My mother never complained.

I could go on with this . . . we all have stories like this. My point is not to suggest to you that my story is particularly different from those you could tell.

My mother never complained. She focused on what she had and what she had left, rather than what she had lost. She plodded on. I come from a long line of persistent plodders. My personal history is what I draw upon for perspective, for understanding, for strength, for inspiration, for wisdom—and isn’t that what we all do? Isn’t that our job at the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Western Historical Manuscript Collection? That is what we seek to do every day: to provide the necessary resources to people who strive to understand this state, its history, and themselves. When we are at our best, we seek to do more than that.

We seek to inspire our fellow citizens to appreciate the history of this great state as well as their own personal histories. There are few things more enduring and satisfying than feeling a kinship with the place you call home. Kinship in this instance derives from knowledge and understanding, and begets appreciation, which in turn fosters a desire to protect and preserve.

We who love the state of Missouri and seek to know it more deeply are fierce in our commitment to learn the secrets of its past, the possibilities of its present, and the promises of its future. That is why we exist. That is the noble purpose we serve, and we need your help to do it. Help us if you can; further our collective cause if you will.

Thank you very much for being here.