Writer Sarah Vowell, the memoirist whose personal essays have aired on "This American Life," is one of many contributors to a new collection of essays called “Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service.”
Vowell’s piece profiles a woman named Pamela Wright, the chief innovation officer of the National Archives and Records Administration. Contrary, perhaps, to her high-falutin’ title, Wright was raised on a ranch in Montana. As Vowell writes in her essay, Wright's hardscrabble upbringing informs her values as a public servant.
The “Who Is Government?” collection has been in the works for a long time, but its publication coincided with the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of government workers as a result of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Vowell says part of her goal with her essay — as well as the many others in the book — is to reframe many Americans’ perceptions of government workers as remote bureaucrats doing meaningless work.
Vowell joined The Show to discuss how that’s an experience she had firsthand in reporting the piece, as she and Pamela Wright looked through old census records.
Full interview
SARAH VOWELL: The reason, obviously, that we have a federal census is because it's in the Constitution to enumerate the citizenry, in order to apportion the House of Representatives. Which doesn't sound super sappy, but obviously people look up their own families, and I did that too. And my mother comes from a really, really, really poor famil. And with, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't the happiest family. I had this grandfather, her dad, who — well, I don't want to go into it — but I was surprised to see, I looked at them in the 1950 census, and then I went back in the 1940s census and found him. He worked on a WPA (Works Progress Administration) road crew. And I didn't know he ever held a job. He was kind of this mean drunk who just sort of sat in a corner ruining everyone's lives. And I asked my mom, and she said he broke his back working on that job. And that affected the next several decades of this family's life, just because he was, he was literally broken, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's programs. Which is hard for me as a Democrat to make peace with, you know, the WPA ruined our family, oh no. it's the story of the American people and their government, so careful what you look for.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a little microcosm of a broader experience that you're writing about that is available to people by consulting this extraordinary resource of the digitized National Archives. The totality of people from history who you might otherwise not view in full light, you write in particular about "the full Nixon."
VOWELL: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, the National Archives has been was transformed by Watergate. Like one of the main focuses of the National Archives for the last half century or more is providing the people access to these records, in order to hold our government to account. So there's plenty, you know — especially in the, Nixon archives and, and his presidential library and those tapes — where, you know, all the things you think about Nixon. You can find those things. But I mean, you can also like we looked at his signature on the Clean Air Act that has saved tens of thousands of lives. I mean, we looked at the Blue Lake Law where he returned land to the Taos Pueblo that had been taken from them.
DINGMAN: Yes — 48,000 acres.
VOWELL: Yes, and that was the first time that had been ever done. So, I mean, it's a very like — the National Archives is a Very non-fiction repository. And by that I mean, you know, there's there, there are never these like clean-cut, black-an-white instances with American history. There's a lot of murky stuff in there and, and we have to grow up as a people to accept these things and try and understand them.
DINGMAN: Yes, well, as you write, there's this way in which — and this is actually my favorite quote from the piece — these documents stick to you.
VOWELL: Yeah, I mean, the first document from the National Archives I ever received was my great-great-grandfather's Confederate Civil War record. He was in the Confederate Army in a Cherokee regiment. My family is Cherokee, and the Cherokee government sided with the Confederate States of America. I mean, one of the probably the most emotional moment in the piece was when, the archivist Trevor Plant, he whipped out, the Treaty of New Echota. Which was the treaty that gave the government kind of legal cover, to send my ancestors on the Trail of Tears at gunpoint. And they were able to do that because a few unauthorized members of the tribe had signed it. And I saw that and I burst into tears, because, you know, what happened on the Trail of Tears, about a quarter of the tribe died.
But another reason I cried because one of those signatures I saw was my great-great-grandfather, Stephen Carlyle's, commanding officer in the Confederate Army, you know, 30 -something years later. I saw his actual signature. Seeing the paper, seeing the signatures, there's something kind of mystical about it. That said, I mean, one reason I was going into all that in the piece is because Pamela Wright, one of her projects, she started a project to, preserve all those treaties and then put them all online in one handy website. So, that anyone, including, you know, members of those tribes, can access those treaties right away.
DINGMAN: Right. One of the other things that really does come through in the essay — and I'd love to have you talk about this a little bit more — is this idea that for a lot of people there is a "psychological estrangement from Washington." You talk about how Pamela, may talk like a Washington bureaucrat, but she still thinks like a Montana rancher and that —
VOWELL: Yeah, I mean, one of the things, you know, that now that the federal workforce is under threat and and being fired en mass, one of the criticisms is that they're wasting our money, right? Well, the National Archives doesn't have any money to waste. They're like pretty much chronically underfunded by half of — especially in the digital age, to like, catch up and try to digitize these 13 billion records. I think they're at 300 million or so have been digitized. But one way she got around not having any money was to start these citizen archivist volunteer programs, where she was bringing people in to scan documents. She also has thousands and thousands of people who work online to, transcribe documents. A lot of them are in cursive, and people under 40 can't necessarily read that. So, these people, you know, transcribe them.
And, you know, she had grown up on this ranch and north-central Montana. And, you know, I asked her how her background affected how she was using her resources. And she said, "Well, when I was growing up, we hauled water from a cistern. In winter, we knitted our own hats. We like canned, you know, carrots and vegetables and stuff and saved them for the winter." So she had grown up in this really thrifty, harsh environment, and ... that served her well in the federal government.
DINGMAN: Yes, well, and part of her framing in talking about these documents is that they belong to the American people, like —
VOWELL: Yeah, they're our stuff. One of the things we, I think I mentioned, we looked at the Louisiana Purchase. Like, that's the moment when America becomes way too big. And a lot of our problems have to do with that distance. And, you know, it became her life's work to try to shrink that distance down.
DINGMAN: Well, I mean that makes me think about the way that you close your essay, Sarah. You talk about — if I could just quote from from what you wrote — you say, "I'm no different than any other citizens searching the National Archives. I found what I was looking for: an inventive civil servant who answers to her people. I was looking for a country I want to live in."
VOWELL: Yeah, aren't we all?
DINGMAN: Well —
VOWELL: Well, some of us.
DINGMAN: [LAUGHS] Well, Sarah Vowell is one of the contributing essayists in the book, "Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service," and we've been talking about her essay, "The Equalizer." Sarah, thank you so much for this conversation.
VOWELL: Thank you, Sam.
