Let’s Talk about Obama - Obama Presidency Oral History

President Barack Obama ’83CC stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and defined his vision for America. He had sung the melody before, but on this day, March 7, 2015, fifty years after police attacked a peaceful civil-rights march at the site, Obama embellished on the theme and made it opera. Quoting Baldwin, Emerson, and Whitman, evoking Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president paid tribute to the “ordinary Americans” who were willing to face “the chastening rod” and “the trampling hoof” to ensure that America lived up to its promise. 

“What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America,” Obama said, “than plain and humble people … coming together to shape their country’s course?”

Obama’s words touched the vault of American ideals and dug deep down to grassroots. “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we.’ We the people. We shall overcome. Yes we can. It is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”

For David Simas, this speech holds the key to understanding the Obama presidency. Simas, the CEO of the Obama Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit that sponsors civic leadership programs and is overseeing the creation of the Obama Presidential Center, says the philosophy of the forty-fourth president — his belief in the possibilities of democracy — can be detected in every stage of his political career. In his post-Columbia years, when he worked as a community organizer in poor neighborhoods of Chicago and would sit for hours in people’s homes, asking them about their lives; in his remarks in Athens in the last year of his presidency venerating the idea of demokratia (“Kratos — the power, the right to rule — comes from demos — the people”); in his postpresidential investment in the Obama Foundation Scholars Program at Columbia, which develops the problem-solving skills of young leaders from around the world, Obama has always encouraged people to use their power as citizens to make government work for them.

So when it came time for the foundation to produce an official oral history of the administration — something that has been done for every president starting with Herbert Hoover — it seemed essential to go beyond the standard recollections of cabinet members and legislators. “It’s important to reach into the lives of people who were touched in one way or another by the Obama presidency,” says Simas. “Only by getting the full expanse — from senior officials to midlevel and low-level staffers to ordinary people — can you truly tell this story.” 

In May, the Obama Foundation announced that it had selected the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) to tell that story. The match seems propitious: Obama is an alumnus with a keen interest in storytelling, and Columbia is the birthplace of the field of oral history. But what most attracted the Obama team was the Columbia program’s breadth, covering corporate leaders and organizations as well as activist movements and citizens. “We were impressed by Columbia’s experience at capturing this diversity, which we thought would be critical to the project,” says Simas.

The Obama Presidency Oral History Project is led by sociology professor Peter Bearman, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), which houses CCOHR. He will work with Mary Marshall Clark, director of CCOHR, and Kimberly Springer, curator of the oral-history collection at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Expected to take five years to complete, the project will include hundreds of audio and video interviews as well as a profile of First Lady Michelle Obama and interviews collected by the University of Hawaii and the University of Chicago on the early lives of the Obamas. Transcripts will be posted online, and audio and visual files and paper transcripts will be publicly available in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 

Of the four hundred people to be interviewed, about a quarter will be everyday Americans. The project will feature the principal actors around the president and also bring out the individual voices of the chorus. It will be a portrait not just of a president but also of a country.

Paul Hond

Originally published in Columbia Magazine.

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