Oral History Interview with Glenna Matthews

Oral History Interview

with

Glenna Matthews

Interview Conducted by Jennifer Paustenbaugh November 19, 2010

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

Interview History

Interviewer: Jennifer Paustenbaugh Transcriber: Ashley Sarchet Editors: Latasha Wilson, Jennifer Paustenbaugh

The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Project Detail

The purpose of the Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project is to document the development of the state by recording its cultural and intellectual history.

This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on April 15, 2009.

Legal Status

Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Glenna Matthews is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on November 19, 2010.

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

About Glenna Matthews…

Glenna Matthews received her bachelor’s degree from San José State University in 1969 and her master’s and PhD from Stanford University in 1971 and 1977 respectively, all in history. She came to Oklahoma State University in 1978 as an assistant professor in the history department, and it was here that she first encountered Angie Debo. She teamed up with her colleague Gloria Valencia-Weber to pursue funding from the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities for an oral history project with Angie Debo. Over the course of five years, the pair conducted seventeen interviews with Debo, many of which aired on public radio stations in Oklahoma and around the nation, and which provided insight to Debo as a scholar and advocate for social justice.

In 1983 filming began on Indians, Outlaws, and Angie Debo, an award-winning documentary about Debo for which Matthews and Valencia-Weber served as the principal consultants. The film was released in 1988 and was broadcast on PBS as an episode of the WGBH series American Experience. Matthews discusses the time she spent with Debo, her role model, and the influence Debo continues to have on so many people.

Since leaving Oklahoma State University Matthews has served as visiting associate professor at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles. She is the author of several books on the history of women in the United States. Among her major publications are Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (2003), Rise of Public Woman: Woman's Power and Woman's Place, 1630-1970 (1992), and "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (1987).

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

Glenna Matthews

Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Jennifer Paustenbaugh November 19, 2010 Stillwater, Oklahoma

Paustenbaugh It is Friday November 19, 2010, and I’m here at the OSU Library. This is Jennifer Paustenbaugh with Glenna Matthews and we are here to talk about Angie Debo. Thank you so much for agreeing to participate in an interview.

Matthews My pleasure.

Paustenbaugh Actually, I’m glad it’s a pleasure for you because it’s really a pleasure for me to get to sit down and talk with you about this. I wanted to ask you the first question to sort of set the context for today’s interview. This goes way back in time, but tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up at Oklahoma State University in 1978.

Matthews I started college when I was only sixteen, and then I dropped out to get married. My educational trajectory was extremely unusual for someone who wound up getting a doctorate. I had a year and a half at Pomona College, and then I dropped out to get married. I had one quarter at Denver University, one semester at UCLA, UC extension credits, UC correspondence credits, and then I finally attended San Jose State for three years. It took me fourteen years to get a BA. So when I entered Stanford, which is still miraculous as I think about it, because I was competing with people in my year at Stanford who had gone through in a very traditional way and came from elite universities: Johns Hopkins, Yale, Stanford itself. I was ten years older than all my classmates. When I had first started at Pomona, I was more interested in a good time than studying hard, and there’s nothing like life to teach you to be very hard working.

So I finished up my doctorate, and the job market sent me to Stillwater. I was newly divorced, my children were both in college at this point, and it was extremely difficult for me because I’d never lived alone in my life. All of a sudden I’m more than a thousand miles from anyone I knew

particularly well. I did, over time, form a very close circle of friends in Stillwater with whom I’m still close, even though I don’t live here any longer. But I think one thing that drew me to Angie was that I was looking for Oklahoma-specific projects. My dissertation had been on San Jose and the Great Depression. I researched that because I was at Stanford, I didn’t have to travel to conduct that research, I had kids in school, but when I got here, I was very much looking for Oklahoma- specific projects.

My first project was about Oklahoma coal miners in Krebs, and that led to an article in Labor History. So then when I began to hear about Angie, it really piqued my interest because I was a historian of women, and my mentor at Stanford was one of the real pioneers in the field. So when I heard that there was this woman historian who was so productive, but whose life had been anything but conventional, it really piqued my curiosity. So that’s kind of setting the stage.

Paustenbaugh So how did you end up becoming acquainted with Angie?

Matthews There are a few things that really set the thing in motion. A professor in the history department, a colleague, Doug Hale, came to my house for dinner. We had a visiting scholar, actually a Californian who had studied Oklahoma, her name is Sheila Manes, and Doug had kindly driven Sheila out to visit Angie. Then I had the two of them over to my house for dinner, and they were just full of how wonderful Angie was. This would have been probably 1979 or 1980. That set a train of thought going in my mind. Then in 1980, the library here, the Edmon Low Library, had a ninetieth birthday party for her and a reception. I shook her hand and I thought oh, she seemed… she had a twinkle in her eye. Of course, I didn’t know her at all, but I kept hearing more and more about the wonderful things she had done. Then my mentor at Stanford, Carl Degler, told me…apparently I can’t remember exactly the point at which I mentioned that I had been thinking about trying to do something about Angie, but he told me, “Oh, we all really admired her books when I was in graduate school.” He said that they speculated that they didn’t know whether Angie was a male or a female name, and there weren’t that many women publishing history, so they just assumed she was a man.

Paustenbaugh Really?

Matthews Yes. They knew her books well, they just didn’t know she was a woman. So that encouraged me. And then one night, I was at a dinner party at the Webers, Gloria Valencia-Weber and Bob Weber, and Earl and Bernice Mitchell were there also. Both the Mitchells and the Webers knew Angie very well, primarily through their work in the ACLU. I know you’ve

talked to Gloria, and Gloria probably told you about all the times she and Angie worked together and so on. A light bulb went off. I can’t even remember who thought of this first, whether it was myself or Gloria, but it just seemed like for my dissertation, which was about the Great Depression in San Jose, I had done quite a bit of oral history interviewing and here are people who know Angie, which I did not, and it’s difficult to approach a ninety-year-old person for interviewing purposes, and just, “Oh, wow, this could really work.” We have complementary skills here. So then Gloria and I, and again I have no idea who wrote the grant, I can’t remember that, but the two of us were co-PIs, co-principal investigators, on a grant from the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities [now the Oklahoma Humanities Council]. We got a thousand dollars and we paid ourselves nothing, but that paid for Aletha Rogers to come along with us and do professional quality taping. Then the challenge became to convince Angie.

Paustenbaugh So you got the grant before you had actually gotten her agreement to participate in the project?

Matthews That’s my recollection, although I could be mistaken. I think that we had confidence that somehow or another we were going to talk her into it.

Paustenbaugh So what were her initial objections to the idea?

Matthews She was a very proud woman and she did not want to be portrayed as an enfeebled old lady. And so, again, my recollection is that we went at least four times, just trying to get her to be comfortable with us and comfortable with the idea. Then, as I recall, what we were talking about is her master’s thesis at the University of Chicago. One of us said something about, “Well, could you tell us a little bit about your master’s thesis?” which was published, which was quite unusual actually to have it published. It was published I think within a year. Then she launched into this long, exquisitely detailed description. It was right after the League of Nations Treaty had failed before the U.S. Senate, and so the whole issue of isolationism was front and center in American politics. She studied the whole issue around George Washington’s farewell speech, no entangling alliances and so on. She proceeded to tell us about various treaties, and so somewhere in the process of this explanation on her part, either Gloria or I or both of us said, “You’re busted. You can’t tell us that you’re too feeble to be interviewed. You just gave us an exquisitely detailed, beautifully remembered account of something you wrote in the early twenties.”

Paustenbaugh That’s really astonishing, isn’t it?

Matthews Yes! And then as I recall, she was kind of sheepish and, “Well yeah,

maybe you’re right.” So she agreed at that point to cooperate and her stipulation was that if she became tired, we would quit immediately, which was reasonable because she was then in her nineties. She would sometimes, very abruptly say, “I’m tired, this is it.” But it was never within less than a half hour. It was always enough to make it worth our while to go there. She knew herself well enough that if she felt that she was on the verge of becoming vague or losing her incredible command, she stopped so there is not a single moment of the interview that I recollect, and I presume you’ve listened to them…

Paustenbaugh To some of them, yes.

Matthews She’s incredibly well-spoken and eloquent, and so we at no point ever took advantage of an ‘enfeebled’ old lady. She was in command, we respected her wishes, and she acquitted herself unbelievably well.

Paustenbaugh Was your goal when you wrote the grant to end up with a program on public radio? That was always the goal?

Matthews Yes, because when you get money from the [Oklahoma] Foundation for the Humanities, there has to be a public component. I still am astonished at how farsighted we were in our planning, that we didn’t just go and stick any old tape recorder in front of her, because what we got proved to be of the quality that was required for public radio. Then I believe some of it was used as voiceover in the documentary. So we got very high quality tape, and we knew we had to have something that was not just documentation, but really performance quality.

Paustenbaugh I believe your project went over a period of four years, is that correct?

Matthews Yes.

Paustenbaugh How did you know when you had reached the end of the project?

Matthews I think we reached the end of the project when… I could only interview her until I got this wonderful grant myself, an ACLS [American Council of Learned Societies] grant to write my first book, and so I left in the fall of ’82. I believe then Gloria carried on some interviews without me, but the radio programs had already been edited. So one or the other of us kept on… but I don’t think I ever went back with a tape recorder after I got that grant; I think Gloria may have. So it’s not like the well could run dry. I mean, she always had interesting things to say. And let me also say that there were many times that I went to see her without a tape recorder where we had incredibly memorable conversations, which I, if you don’t mind, since they are not documented any place else I’ll describe.

Paustenbaugh Oh, that would be wonderful.

Matthews One of the wonderful times, by this point, Gloria, of course you are aware, went to Harvard Law School, so we did it together and then Gloria went on her own when I had my ACLS grant. Then Gloria started Harvard Law School, so then I went a few times, but without a tape recorder. On my birthday, it would have been in 1984, I decided that I wanted to celebrate my birthday with Angie. I took a group of fellow women academics, because I thought it would be fun to have—this is the peer group that Angie never had, of women academics. The others were Dorothy Schrader, who is still in the foreign language department here, the late Etta Perkins who did Russian history, and a woman who is at OU, Martha and I can’t remember her last name, but she did English history.

We dropped by the home in Marshall, and as I recall we went on to have dinner in Enid, but what was really remarkable was when she met Etta and she was introduced as someone who did Russian history, Angie said, “Russian history! I’ve been interested in Russia ever since I was in high school. You see, it was right after the Russian Revolution of 1905 and everybody was wondering what was going to happen next in Russia. In high school debate we had a topic on ‘will Russia become a free and liberal society?’” And she started laughing, just giggling, she said, “And I took the affirmative.” (Laughs) And you know, she went into this whole long riff about something that had happened so [long ago], the dawn of the Twentieth Century. It was such a privileged experience to have conversations of this nature.

And then another time I had decided that I was just too homesick for California. I was the only child of aging parents and they were both in California, so I was going to give up my tenure and leave. I went to see Angie and I said, “Angie, as much as you love Oklahoma, that’s how much I love California and I just have to be there.” And she said, “Oh, California. The most I know about California is the years ’59-’64.” And of course, I thought she meant the free speech movement, the dawn of the ’60s, but she meant 1859. The reason she knew so much about it was that her grandfather had gone to California in those years and had regaled her with tales of crossing the plains. She told me that he had left for California from Illinois. I thought a minute and I said, “Oh, well if he was in Illinois and left in 1859, then he must have been there during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.” And she said, “Oh, yes, yes.” I said, “Well did he go to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?” And she said, “Yes, I think he intended to go, but it didn’t work out. Somebody was a no show or some such.” I’m sitting there pinching myself because here’s somebody who has… I’m getting second hand of something that happened, you know, it seems frozen in time and not something that

somebody would have almost living memories of.

She told me her grandfather never talked about the Indians, it was always tribe specific. Then she told me that she loved a book by George Stewart called The California Trail. She got out the book and we looked at it, and we were trying to figure out how her grandfather, what route he might have taken, and she lent me that book. Every night, as I drove across to go home, I sat in a motel and read that book. When I got home and finished the book, I mailed it back to her. But it was such a wonderful experience of kind of completing the circles that, you know, here’s something that her grandfather had done and I almost felt like I was reliving an experience with her as the medium. So I had some absolutely fantastic conversations with her, which were not recorded, but I am grateful for the opportunity to share these memories because now they can be part of the public record.

Paustenbaugh How remarkable. I was struck yesterday by something that you said in your presentation at the luncheon before the statue dedication when you said, “I can remember explaining to my historian friends in other parts of the country that it was if someone who had been at Jamestown or Plymouth was able to get a PhD in history and write on the basis of having survived the starving times as well as having professional experience.” So what you just described…

Matthews Yes, that’s what made it so remarkable to me that she had herself, or via her grandfather, was so much in touch with what seemed to me remote aspects of our national experience and yet, this is what I so loved about the interviews. She could put her personal experiences in a much greater context than most people can because of how she thought so deeply about American history generally.

Yesterday after the event, the film was shown again. I attended because I was hoping to meet some people from Marshall. I was sharing with the audience that after we did the radio programs, I just could hardly wait to play them for people. When I got back, I would go to California in the summer to see my family and so on. I played them for my parents who were mightily impressed, and then I played them for Carl Degler. I just felt like it was such a privilege for me and I really wanted other people, particularly people who cared about history, to have a similar experience. I remember Carl Degler saying, “I’d like to think I’d be that eloquent when I’m her age.” Her eloquence came through on the radio programs. It was pretty astonishing.

Paustenbaugh So was he impressed by anything else besides her eloquence since he was the one who had given you early encouragement?

Matthews Oh, he just thought it was a wonderful project, but I remember him in particular talking about the eloquence. He and his wife had me over for dinner and I literally was like this evangelist, I had these radio tapes that I took everywhere and I played them for people, you know. (Laughs)

Paustenbaugh That’s really nice to think about.

Matthews Well, it was just thrilling for me as a historian to have found somebody. It was like listening to American history talking. It was like listening to Cleo, the muse of history holding forth, though she was very modest, she didn’t pontificate. I have a very enthusiastic personality as various people have pointed out along the way. So then, while I was on this grant, I was researching a book, my first book, which is called Just a Housewife. I was in Chicago, New York, Washington, but the longest time in the Boston area so that I could use the Schlesinger Library at Cambridge. I had met this woman who, coincidentally her name is Deborah Gardner. She happened to be the cousin of my closest friend at Stanford, so we had heard about one another, and we happened to be sitting next to each other at a brown bag lunch. She started telling me who she was and I said, “I know who you are. You’re Dave’s cousin.” She said, “Oh, I’ve heard about you, too.” So I invited her over. I was in this garret. I was staying in this home in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was on the third floor and it was not well heated, and so when I say that it was a garret, I mean, we wrapped ourselves in blankets. I played the radio tapes for her and she said, “Glenna, we’ve got to make a movie about this woman.” Then she took the radio tapes to New York. She knew Barbara Abrash and that’s what got the ball rolling.

Paustenbaugh I’m assuming that Barbara contacted you first. What was your reaction?

Matthews Oh, I remember Barbara saying, “Would there be good visuals?” And I said, “Oh yes, because her home is just a period piece and her brother made some of the furniture and it’s just an exquisite, what should I say, it’s like you’re going into a house museum almost. I mean, it’s not fancy, but it’s just of a piece and it tells you something about life in a small town in Oklahoma probably in the 1930s. If you want to picture the wide open spaces of the west in the small town of Marshall…” I was very enthusiastic about that too, the visuals would be very good.

So then at some point, I apparently contacted Gloria and then Gloria really did the heavy lifting as far as writing the next grant, though I was listed on it, Gloria did all the work. I think we got $5,000 and then $38,500 or something like that. Though my name was on it, Gloria did the work. So again, we made a wonderful team because I was doing this travelling and I was meeting people in New York, but she was on the ground in Oklahoma to write the grant for the Foundation for the

Humanities.

Paustenbaugh Trying to keep things rolling there.

Matthews Yes.

Paustenbaugh So did you have any concern given that it had taken you four visits, or at least four visits, to get Angie to agree to the audio interviews that she might balk at having a film crew come to Marshall?

Matthews Well, that wasn’t really my concern, because it wasn’t up to me to talk her into it. It had been up to Gloria and me to talk her into the first instance, but she told me, and again it’s good to get this documented. She said, “Glenna, you might wonder why I’ve cooperated with the film and then also with the portrait.” She said, “It’s not vanity. It’s that, no author ever set pen to paper that didn’t want his or her books to be read, and I feel that this film is going to give my books a wider circulation, and that’s deeply gratifying to me.” At the time she had told me that I had never written a book, but now I understand, yes. I mean, you know you’re not going to make a lot of money; you just like to have some impact on the discourse. You’d like your books to become part of the record and so on and if they just sit there, and it has nothing to do with money really, you just want people to discuss them. So I understood at the time, but now that I’ve written books myself, I understand in a deeper way. I think by that time, the project had taken on enough life of its own and she could see that this was going to be good for the readership of her books, so I believe, I mean she said it in so many words, but I think that it makes a lot of sense.

Paustenbaugh Let me attempt to backtrack a little bit. You talked about taking the radio programs around, the recordings of them and then playing them for people, but they aired on KOSU and then they were picked up on the public radio networks and broadcast in other locations, so other than the feedback that you got immediately from people as you personally sat there with the recording of it and listened to them and then your meeting with Deborah Gardner, what other type of feedback did you get about the radio programs?

Matthews I can’t remember very much, but again, it’s like when you publish a book, sometimes its years before you… and then you find out that somebody or other, their life was changed because of something they read. I can’t remember getting feedback from the public radio programs, but that may be… Of course, I left Oklahoma fairly soon after they were aired, so that might be an explanation.

Paustenbaugh As an author of a number of books yourself, did it ever occur to you to

be the one to write the definitive biography of Angie Debo’s life?

Matthews It did. But I felt very strongly that, and I discussed it with Barbara Abrash too, our producer of the film, I loved her too much.

Paustenbaugh It would be hard to be critical.

Matthews I could not. And Barbara said, “Both of you deserve better,” and I thought that was a good way of putting it. I love Shirley Leckie’s biography. Shirley is deeply admiring, but she is able to be critical and you can’t write hagiography and have it taken seriously, but I would have been incapable of writing anything but hagiography. But I feel thrilled that Gloria and I created this body of documentation that has enhanced the biographical writings of others.

Paustenbaugh Well I think to me, one of the most striking contributions about it is that it makes her accessible, and it makes her work somewhat more accessible because she’s not an easy person to read in the sense that, if you’re looking for something that would be entertaining or a light read or something that you’re not going to have to devote a lot of intellectual energy to absorbing, she’s not the person for you if you’re not willing to do that.

Matthews Well, and I think she had a rich emotional and personal life, but that too was unconventional and so she could be stereotyped as a spinster stuck away in a small town. But then when you find out how much Marshall loved her and how much she loved Marshall and all the different things that… I mean, travelling around the world as much as she did and so on. She had a remarkable life, but I think our oral history has helped give a fuller picture of the human being than could have been possible to stereotype her. And one of the things that came to me, I mean the early generations—I gave a lot of thought because as we were doing this project, there had been so few women historians up until about 1970. There was a generation in the early Twentieth Century of women who taught at the women’s colleges, not so many at the co-educational institutions, but then that number was dwindling after the war, even at the women’s colleges. There’s a lot of historical study now of the lives of the women who were at the women’s colleges. They mostly had a pretty good community, but those few women who did teach at co- educational institutions were often very isolated, very lacking a community, difficult at that point to marry and so they often did have extremely spartan emotional lives, not through faults of their own, but because they lacked a natural community. When I started reading about some of the research on women academics of her cohort and what some of them had to go through, I really believe that there were gains as well as losses in her unusual professional life.

Paustenbaugh What did you learn from Angie that you weren’t expecting to learn?

Matthews Oh, there were a lot of things. One of the times she chided me, I have to bring up. I’m not sure whether this made it onto the tape, but I was talking about growing up in Marshall and coming from the Bay Area I had all the prejudices that anyone would likely have. I said something like, “Oh those rural teachers must have been…” I don’t think I used the word pathetic, but “they must not have been very inspiring” and she just bristled. She said, “They walked in glory among us. They represented the life of the mind.” No one was going to patronize those teachers.

Paustenbaugh Do you think that was in part because she had been one of those teachers?

Matthews Probably, but I think more strongly, here she is, this little girl in this really isolated rural area and then these teachers who had read and who had ideas and I think they must have just represented a whole world. I think that’s why she said ‘they walked in glory among us.’ When I was saying this it made me think of, you probably know Larry McMurtry’s wonderful essay about Angie? He says that one of her books came his way and he realized that people in his area could write books and that opened up a world to him and I think those rural teachers must have done that for her. I think that was the moment at which I got it that Marshall… that’s one of the things I learned from her, not to just assume that Marshall was a God forsaken rural outpost, but a community that enriched her life from start to finish. And of course, I was so impressed that as she got to be an enfeebled old woman, not enfeebled mentally, but obviously physically, that this small town cared for her in so many ways. Bringing her food, and I think Gloria was the one that told me that a team went through her house and tried to remove any obstacles to safe independent living and I mean it was a model of how to live quasi- independently, but with a support group and she had that because of Marshall. She didn’t have to go into a nursing home, whereas a lot of people aren’t so fortunate.

Paustenbaugh Right. She was very fortunate in that regard. You left Oklahoma in 1986, is that right?

Matthews Actually it was in December of ’84.

Paustenbaugh Since then, how has what you learned from Angie or her scholarly work informed your teaching or your own research?

Matthews (Laughs) That’s a huge question. Her books are beautifully written and while her books aren’t lollipop type reading, she modeled writing scholarly books that ordinary people could read with profit, that’s one.

But mostly it was that she kept her… I mean what inspired me the most with Angie, academia and I’m sure a lot of other professions, but academia is the one that I know the most, is populated with a lot of people who, I used to hear my colleagues and I’m sure they weren’t unique, but it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t get that grant. Well pooh-ey, why should I try hard?” or, “I didn’t get the raise I should have gotten,” and here’s a woman who got the short end of the stick professionally and was absolutely undeterred. The whole idea that she could go home to Marshall, teach in rural schools, which she had done without a PhD, without all the accolades that she had won, and instead of saying, “Well, life wasn’t fair to me and I’m not going to try anymore,” which people do. People defeat themselves that way. She just was so motivated to tell the story of the injustice to Indians that she was undeterred by things that would crush a lot of people.

One issue that Gloria and I discussed and I can’t remember whether we wrote about it or not, Gloria and I co-authored an essay that was in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians, but she had talked so positively about her life choices and then when I discovered these desperate letters in the OU Library where she was writing to her mentor saying, “Help, help, I’m starving to death!” not literally, but, “I’m desperate. Help!” there was such a disjunction, such a disconnect between the letters that she wrote and the pictures that she’s painting of “I made positive choices.” I mean, my interpretation was not that she’s willfully distorting, but that that was part of her survival technique is to just move on and think ultimately this was positive and therefore I’m going to depict it in terms of a positive choice.

There was a particularly low moment in my life. I had been teaching as a visiting associate professor in the women’s studies department at Berkeley and this woman had been chair who seemed to have a high opinion of me and then she stepped down or was replaced as chair, I am not privy to what was going on, but I had been scheduled and in fact did teach, it was the fall of 1993, in that department. The first day that I was going to teach, the new chair of the department took me out to lunch just before my first class and she said, “Well, it’s a new regime, we’re not a charitable institution. We’re not going to keep on employing you just because it’s convenient for you,” or words to that effect. It was just incredibly brutal and particularly since I was about to go and teach a class. This is just a really terrible thing to do to someone who is about to go and teach. And I looked at her and I said, “Well my role model is Angie Debo. (Laughs) She had things like this happen to her and she kept right on writing.” And I said, “She published her ninth book when she was in her eighties.” I didn’t go, “Pshhh,” but in essence that’s what I said. I didn’t say, “Take your job and shove it,” I finished out the term, but it was extremely unpleasant and painful. But I just said, “This is

what I’m going to do. I’m going to keep on writing and you ain’t discouraging me, lady.” I specifically invoked Angie. It was like she was my talisman.

Paustenbaugh And that would have been a really difficult situation to handle had you not had that role model.

Matthews Absolutely. She was completely my role model and I don’t think I’m going to reach her total, but I’m working on my sixth book now and I’ve taken her as my inspiration. Role model isn’t strong enough. It’s not just that she wrote the books, it’s the attitude that well you lick your wounds for awhile, but you don’t let this kind of garbage get you down very long because it will interfere with the main business at hand, which is, you have things you want to say and fortunately a way to say them.

One time, one of my friends said, “Glenna, for you, visiting Angie was like going to church,” which is not far from the truth because it was like the values that are the most important to me, she was the most wonderful embodiment of those values that I have met in my life. I’m sure she had all kinds of flaws and this is why I couldn’t have written the biography because it would have been too painful to me to go through the documentation. (Laughs) What? She’s not perfect!?

Paustenbaugh (Laughter) That would’ve been so disappointing.

Matthews If you love somebody, you’ve got to be able to handle the fact that they’re not perfect. By her late years, in fact, what I said yesterday to this group just on the spur of the moment, people were asking me about the film and this one man asked me if there were any unresolved conflicts around her work and I said that insofar as the Oklahoma history part, I’m not an expert there and I can’t really speak to that. I know that she had conflicts professionally with Muriel Wright, and Patti Loughlin is the one who is the expert on that. But I said, “When I knew her,” and I just thought about it and I said, “It was as if she was in a state of grace, because she had such a capacity… I mean when she was housebound, she would tell you that it was a privilege to look out the window and see the beautiful sights that she saw out her window.” Then she told me at least twice that—and she also modeled, who knows whether any of us is going to live to be ninety-eight, but she certainly modeled how to handle extreme old age because she said to me, “Glenna, there’s a point to getting old and feeble like I am because then you find out how good other people can be to you.” So when I say that she represented a lot of the values I hold most dear, that’s part of it, too. I’m sure she had all kinds of… She had to use a walker, she certainly saw her physical capacity diminishing and probably her ability to focus for any length of time, but she didn’t whine. She was obviously not a whining person.

Paustenbaugh I know that this has been so long ago, but did you return for her memorial service?

Matthews No, I didn’t. I was unable to, but I’d love to talk about my last trip there.

Paustenbaugh That would be great.

Matthews Well, I should talk about the Award for Scholarly Distinction and…

Paustenbaugh Was that your last trip there?

Matthews Just before that. The way that came about, there’s a wonderful, wonderful scholar of French history, Natalie Davis. She was at Princeton. I had heard her, she’s a dynamo. She [recently received the Holberg Award, a big award from the Norwegian] government. She’s a heroine in France, but in the ’70s, she was one of the few women, senior women, because the whole wave of getting women into the academy was of such recent vintage that she was one of the most senior women around. I had heard her and I knew that she was a dynamo, and since I was the only woman historian on the faculty, I was the only woman in the social sciences with a tenure track position for a while, and I wanted my male colleagues to see what a high powered woman was all about. So I called her. One of my former students had gotten on a committee that allocated university lecturing funds, so I think we had $500 to bring her to campus. I called her and I said, “We’d like to invite you to Stillwater from Princeton.” “Oh, well I don’t know that I could do that.” I said, “Oh, we really need you.” And she said, “I go up to see Chan [Dr. Chandler Davis].” Her husband taught at Toronto. She said, “I fly from Princeton to Toronto almost every weekend. How far out of the way is Oklahoma?” And believe it or not, I said, “Oh, it’s almost on the way.” God love her.

And so she flew to Tulsa, and I think I picked her up and took her there. This was right at the time the Angie project was starting. So I told her about the Angie project, I told her all the things that I was doing to not feel too overwhelmed by homesickness, because I was also talking in rural towns around the state and finding that very gratifying. I have a map of Oklahoma that I put a dot for all the small towns. I’ve talked in Woodward near the panhandle, Miami on the northeast corner, Wright City in the southeast corner, and I still have to go some place like Lawton. That’s the uncovered territory. But I told her all this.

Then the next time I encountered her was at the Schlesinger Library, she was being honored there, and the film project had been launched. I saw her and I said, “Oh, let me tell you,” and Professor Davis wrote a book called The Return of Martin Guerre, which was made into a commercial

movie, the French equivalent of a Hollywood movie. I said, “You’re not the only one that’s working on a movie.” I told her about Angie. So then she got up and she was given some award at the Schlesinger Library and she talked about her involvement and she said, to this audience, “And my friend and colleague Glenna Matthews is working on a movie about Angie Debo, and blah, blah, blah.” I mean, she was so generous, so we kind of kept in touch. Somewhere along the line, she saw a rough cut of the film because she maintained an interest and couldn’t have been more generous to me in terms of giving me encouragement and so on. She once said to me, I ran into her at some kind of a conference and she said, “Glenna, you’re my role model because you’re not letting yourself feel sorry for yourself, you’re trying to do what you can in Oklahoma, going to the small towns and so on.” And between Natalie Davis and Angie, I was pretty well… I would lie there and think, Natalie Davis’ role model can’t get discouraged.

Then Natalie Davis became the second woman president of the American Historical Association. The first one had been a woman named Nellie Nielson during World War II when all the men were gone. So effectively she was the first president in a time when women were beginning to take their positions in the profession and she decided that Angie should be nominated for the Award for Scholarly Distinction. She contacted me and she said, “Glenna, I need you to organize a letter writing campaign.” And so I did. I contacted people in the field of Indian History to write letters saying that this was appropriate. So that’s how that came about. And then I contacted Angie once it was definite and she asked me to receive the award in her honor.

Paustenbaugh What a great story.

Matthews Isn’t it?

Paustenbaugh I wondered how that had come to take place and how wonderful that she could receive… I don’t know if it was a requirement of the award that the person be a living person, but how wonderful that she was alive to receive it and to know that her work had received that recognition.

Matthews Then in December of that year, I came to Oklahoma and I happened to have broken my foot earlier, and so I was in some kind of a boot. I drove out to see her and we chatted, and I just remember holding hands. I said, “Angie, I love you very much,” and she said, “Well I love you oceans.” That was before cell phones and I left and I drove far enough to find a pay phone and I called my daughter. I was just sobbing, because I was so moved. And I told her about this conversation, and I was just crying and crying and crying. My daughter said, “Well Mom, maybe when you are in your nineties, someone will discover you.” (Laughter) At the time

I thought, Oh my god, do I have to wait until I’m in my nineties? But it was quite lovely. Then I did receive the award on her behalf and I gave it to David Baird, who brought it back to Oklahoma, and then of course as you know, Governor Bellmon delivered it. Then she died in her sleep a few weeks after that. If you put this in a novel, people would say it strains belief. It was just such a perfect way to end a beautiful life. To have the governor of her beloved Oklahoma personally deliver this award.

Paustenbaugh It is a remarkable story and it’s really fitting too because she was such a remarkable person.

I think that I’ve asked you largely all of the questions that I had planned to ask you, but I just wonder if there are other things that you wanted to tell me about that I didn’t ask you about? I feel like you have really richly enhanced this by sharing some of the things that you wanted to make sure were documented in some way.

Matthews It occurs to me that another part of the story is that Angie had her difficulties, of course, because of the Great Depression, and because of just blatant gender discrimination, but by the time our project was going, there was another issue. Gender discrimination, I think, might have played—well I’m not even sure that it did, but what did play a role was a terrible academic job market. So in the early ’80s, an organization formed in New York called the Institute for Research in History. I don’t know whether Barbara Abrash talked about that, but it was a group of independent scholars. It’s no longer in existence, but they were trying to come up with some kind of institutional framework. Some women who did have academic employment, and men were part of it to kind of provide haven for, the idea is, well, you might have to have a day job to support yourself, but you can still have your connection with the academic world and with scholarship and so on. So of course, Angie was a perfect patron saint for an independent scholars group.

Deborah Gardener was very active in the Institute for Research in History, and I can’t remember who, at what point, there might have been a fiscal agent for some of the grants, but a lot of the energy. I mean, this is why the film took off so quickly, I think. Deborah wanted the story to be told because it was so inspiring that this woman had published so much without a regular academic appointment. And of course, it’s so remarkable to me still that that initial, my playing the radio tape for Deborah took place in January. She went down to New York with the radio tape and lent it to Barbara. Barbara may have told you about Martha Sandlin, knowing someone who’s a director from Oklahoma. At this point it kind of left my control, other than the fact that Gloria was grant writing.

Well lo and behold, by April of that year, there was a film crew in Oklahoma, and we did not yet have any money in hand. So these New Yorkers, on their own dime, went to Oklahoma to film because they wanted to film Angie in the Prairie City Parade. I was just blown away by that. I mean, I was so moved by that, but again, at the time I first encountered Angie, I was not an independent scholar. I think I had the courage to become an independent scholar in large part because of Angie, because she proved that you didn’t have to do things the conventional way. And then I certainly had personally a lot of discouraging experiences with the academic job market, but as they say, “Keep your eyes on the prize.”

But another dear friend of mine, a woman named Karen Offen, who didn’t materially have really anything to do with the film, but just to tell you how inspiring Angie was, Karen and I are almost exactly the same age. I had my children first and then went back to graduate school. Karen went straight through and got her PhD from Stanford and then had children, and I still don’t know how many academic jobs she may or may not have applied for, but she is a married woman and her husband has quite a good job, so she’s had this amazing career of publishing in French history without an academic job. She and I have been quite close over the years because we’ve had really parallel situations, and Karen travels all over the world lecturing on European feminism and so on.

Well, while this was going on, in the early stages of the Angie project, we had gotten together over the years just to buck each other up, and I was telling her about Angie. She had tears just streaming down her face. I mean, it is so important to so many people that this woman was able to do what she did in the face of so much discouragement. And I mean, it was coupled with the Great Depression, and so I think that’s part of why so many people sprang into action right away to get this film told is that we all needed to know, in the face of a terrible academic job market, that it need not be fatal to our lives as historians. That needs to be part of the record.

Paustenbaugh It’s so interesting to me how her story resonates with so many people.

Matthews Yes. And then another thing I wanted to be sure and tell you is that I don’t know whether Gloria had this experience, but both of our names are on the film as principle consultants. But after the film aired, there was a period where I heard from people around the country. I remember some woman calling me from Ohio and saying her daughter was so inspired and various of my friends, I showed the film then; I have seen it, I think, maybe sixty-five times. But I showed it to classes repeatedly and my students loved it. I happened to be a visiting associate professor

at Stanford the fall of 1988, and so the department at Stanford was thrilled about it. They were just thrilled. In fact, I was teaching at Stanford when I flew back to Washington for the premiere at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And then we showed it to the Pacific branch of the American Historical Association I think in 1989, and people were thrilled. One of my close friends is a gentleman named Bob Cherny who teaches at San Francisco State University, and so far as I know, he shows it every term to his historiography class, and has since the get-go. So, just an enormous number of people really resonated to the film.

Paustenbaugh Well we need to know about some of those people so we can make sure that if we have DVDs that aren’t earmarked for someone that people like that that are actively using the material can have a more modern copy.

Matthews Well, I e-mailed Bob Adelia’s [Adelia Hansen] picture of Angie’s gravestone, which I’m planning to go and see this afternoon, “Historian discover the truth and publish it.” And he said, “Oh, I’ll fold this into my presentation.” And he arranged for me to come and show the film to a group at San Francisco State, and I remember one of his colleagues, we had a discussion afterwards, and the question came up about her personal life, and you know, did she have a love life. One of Bob’s colleagues said, “Well I know there was at least one person who loved her deeply.” And he pointed to me. Of course, it’s probably in the tape, and I did finally summon the courage to ask her about, these are the things I wanted to make sure are part of the record, but of course women in her cohort, just so few of them thought that they could combine marriage and family with academic achievement. When we asked her if she had ever had a boyfriend, as I recall, she said, “Well, there was so- and-so,” and then it turned out it was in the third grade. And she told us that she gently discouraged any interest, because she was so intent on her life of scholarship and writing, and it just wasn’t seen as possible. And in fact, it’s still darn difficult.

Paustenbaugh It is.

Matthews So it’s not that it was, you know, I’m certainly not wanting to criticize her choices, but that question has come up sometimes, and I do think, as I alluded earlier, that she had a very rich emotional life because of her community involvement. But anyhow, Bob is my friend that I know for sure shows the film the most regularly, but I did hear from people around the country when the film was on air, and that was fun.

Paustenbaugh I’m sure it was. I’d imagine that that whole process was like giving birth to a child in some ways, that you have so much invested in that. I hadn’t really seen the film since we did the [Oklahoma] Literary Landmark

dedication here in 2004, and watching it again, as we’ve started to try to prepare material for a website so the teachers will be able to easily integrate it into their classrooms, and that will be tied to the Oklahoma PASS curriculum, which seems to be just an essential thing if you want something that isn’t part of the textbook to actually be used in the class, I was just shocked that twenty-two years later, the film is every bit as relevant as it was when it was made. A lot of things don’t really stand the test of time that well.

Matthews It’s a beautifully made film, and I think the end of it, where she talks about dedicating her life to integrity and service, I mean, I pretty much cry every time I see that because I just think it’s so moving. One other moment, did Barbara tell you about any of the difficulties of getting the film made?

Paustenbaugh Well, a few of them, but not in any great detail.

Matthews There was a point at which, as it happens with documentary films, just before they signed the contract with WGBH, did she talk about that? Judy Crichton?

Paustenbaugh I asked her how the film had come to Judy’s attention.

Matthews And she certainly knows more about that than I but my input into that whole process was that they didn’t have money to pay the editor, whose name was Mona Davis, and who obviously did a beautiful job, and WGBH didn’t want to have the thing proceed unless they had the cooperation of Mona, and Mona didn’t want to cooperate until she got paid, and there was no money to pay her until they got the money from WGBH, so it was a complete standoff. This was in the summer of 1987. So I took $1000 out of my savings account and mailed it to Mona, and well, I can’t remember just how the sequence went, but Mona was calling me collect and telling me about her dental problems, and so I took $1000 and mailed it to her. This would’ve been August of ’87, I was going to see my parents in Southern California. I’m an only child, they were totally devoted, they lived through the Depression, they were very frugal, and so I pulled up and I said, “Hi. Your only child has come to see you. Some unusual things are going to start happening. We’re going to start getting collect calls from a stranger demanding money.” I said, “We’re going to accept the collect calls, and I want you to send her $500.” And they did.

Paustenbaugh Wow.

Matthews And one other friend of mine sent her $250. So then that bridged the gap, and particularly given that it wasn’t just me, it was my parents,

whose names were Glen and Alberta Ingles, and I think their standing up like that should be part of the public record, because this violated every instinct of their being to give money to a stranger. But my father had exchanged letters with Angie, and I have a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic that she signed ‘To Glenna’s parents.’ My father wrote her to tell her that he had briefly lived in a sod house in South Dakota, and so they had a lovely correspondence. And then my father found out that Bill Moyers was from Marshall, Texas, and so my father wrote to Bill Moyers and said he wanted Bill Moyers to know about his daughter’s involvement with this project that involved a woman from Marshall, Oklahoma, and I have a nice note that Bill Moyers wrote back to my dad. So my folks were very involved in the project, to the point that they were willing to, on my say so, send what—I mean, they quibbled about, my mother was of the generation where she would drive to three stores to get the best break on a can of peas or something, so it was pretty amazing that they dipped into their pockets, and I’m very proud of their generosity.

Paustenbaugh I saw a letter that was in the correspondence file signed by Martha. It wasn’t clear who it was addressed to, but it was about sort of the whole standoff with getting the film made and having to pay somebody, and the work couldn’t proceed, and she said, “I just don’t see a way forward, and we’ve promised too many people that this film will be made. We have to figure some way out of this.” So what you’ve told me really helps flesh out that letter and understand it.

Matthews And then I came to Oklahoma, I mean, I’ve come back. It’s interesting because I am a Californian through and through, but I’ve come back many times over the years, because I love my friends and obviously, as I was saying the other night at dinner, any state that produces Angie has something going. So maybe it was 1988, or even later in the year in 1987, because my first book came out about the same time, in the summer of ’87, and I came and had a book party here in Stillwater. I drove down to Oklahoma City and met with Pete Caldwell of the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities, and I said, “I just want you to know you have not put your money down a rat hole. We are going to find a way to get this to happen, and I am pledging myself to the fullest extent I can that this is going to happen.” And he was both surprised and pleased. I think they assumed that when I moved out of the state that I had kind of washed my hands of worrying about it, but you know, I was a signatory to those grants, and that’s too much money to have invested to have it all blow up. So I have no idea, I mean, there may have been other people that did what I did, so I’m not going to say that I’m the only one, but my parents came through.

Paustenbaugh That’s great. Was there anything else that…

Matthews I think those are the things that I wanted to cover.

Paustenbaugh Well thank you so much for your willingness to do this, and also for coming back to be part of this whole statue dedication event. I thought it was a wonderful day yesterday.

Matthews Oh, it was a peak day, and again, I cannot believe how beautiful the event was. I cannot believe all the planning, I mean, the menu was beautiful. The table decorations with the pictures of Angie as a young girl. The cookies that had the imprint of the medallion. I mean, all the speeches were, nobody tried to hog the spotlight, and they were additive. They weren’t redundant. It was absolutely magnificent, and I just loved the statue. I think that the sculptor, Phyllis Mantik, really captured Angie’s idealism, and that’s what made all of us love her so much.

Paustenbaugh That’s right. And I loved it that when Hugh O’Neill saw it before it had gone to the foundry, that he said, “Oh, that’s Angie.”

Matthews And he knew her really well.

Paustenbaugh And from a time when that’s what she would’ve looked like.

Matthews Yes. Well I’m glad, I mean, another one of my motives in the part I played is that there are so few representations of men or women, but more women, of extreme age of a positive nature in our culture, and I love it in the film that there’s this old woman silhouetted in speaking, and she just looks beautiful. Because I think when you live a life like Angie, you know, her goodness was written on her face. And I love the fact that the portrait in the State Capitol in the film portrayed a woman of very advanced years so positively. And I love it that now we see the young Angie. I mean, I think it’s great that both of them are being commemorated like this. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Paustenbaugh Well good. We’re glad you didn’t have to miss it either. Thank you so much.

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