Reviews in American History

When I first arrived at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to begin research in the records of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), I faced a daunting task. The collection is huge and poorly organized. Archivists encouraged me, as they do all researchers starting new projects focused on the OSS, to begin with the “Director’s Office Files,” which are contained on nearly 200 reels of microfilm. They also warned me that the quality of the slides is poor and some images are cut off or blurry. According to the archivists, when the director, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, learned that President Harry Truman was terminating his job near the end of World War II, he and some aides opened a bottle of whiskey, grabbed a camera, and began shooting images of his files as fast as they could, working through the night. Donovan then turned the photos into microfilm, which he kept for himself. He worried that without those files, the story of the OSS and its contributions to the war might be lost. Through a long and circuitous route, the microfilm went from Donovan, to his law firm, to his son, then temporarily to a historian, then to the Army Military History Institute, then to the CIA, and finally to the National Archives.

What I didn’t realize as I was scrolling through reel after reel of Donovan’s papers was that the existence of this microfilm tells another kind of story about the war beyond the particulars imbedded in the files it captures. In addition to documenting the history of the United States’s first international intelligence organization, this film also reveals secrets about how the war transformed recordkeeping, technology, and research. This is in part the focus of Kathy Peiss’s excellent and engaging new book, Information Hunters.

Peiss has published many important works of history. Her first book, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986), is now a classic used in history courses around the country. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998) and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (2011) are both excellent books as well. Information Hunters is a different kind of project for Peiss than her earlier work. Instead of leisure, she [End Page 83] focuses on war. Instead of beauty, she focuses on death. Instead of costumes, she focuses on uniforms. But as in all of her previous work, her analysis is smart, insightful, and compelling.

Peiss stumbled upon the story she tells in Information Hunters by accident. She found a short memorial, deep within a University of California libraries website, to her librarian uncle Reuben Peiss. He had died in 1952 at the age of forty. Kathy Peiss never knew him. The memorial mentioned that Peiss had worked for the OSS during World War II and continued working in Europe in the immediate postwar period.

Peiss was intrigued. Who was her uncle? What had he done during the war? She quickly realized that although her family did not know much about Peiss’s wartime work, he had left behind an extensive paper trail in government archives, and some of his letters were available in manuscript collections scattered around the country. Additionally, a few of his wartime colleagues were still alive and willing to talk. The deeper Peiss dove into her family history, the more she came to realize that Reuben Peiss’s story—and that of the hundreds of wartime librarians, scholars, archivists, book collectors, and researchers he worked with—needed to be told. “Reuben Peiss,” she explains, “loved mysteries, and he bequeathed one to me. Uncovering his life became an obsessive search for clues buried in archives and hidden in plain sight. . . . His life pointed me toward a bigger story, one largely untold, of American mass collecting missions and how they mattered in a cataclysmic war” (p. 5).

Peiss opens Information Hunters with some simple tallies...