The Albany Collections

A couple of weeks ago, I was back in the US, in part to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Albany. The Special Collections Department there has brought together the papers of 23 former House members (and more than three dozen former New York state legislators), in what has become one of the most important legislative archives in the country.

Research in congressional archives has two significant drawbacks. First, papers tend to be scattered all over the country. With a few exceptions (the Albert Center in Oklahoma; the Southern History Collection at UNC; the University of Missouri's Special Collections Department; and Cal's Bancroft Library), most libraries house only one or a handful of House and Senate collections. Contrast that to presidential libraries, where researchers can get one-site access not only to presidential papers but often to collections of most of the president's key aides.

Second, even those collections that do exist tend to be processed incompletely--making research difficult.

The theme of the Albany conference was occasioned by the Library's acquisition of a major collection--that of recently retired upstate congressmen Sherwood Boehlert. The 500-box collection chronicles the career of a figure who chaired the House Science Committee and was active on intelligence issues as well.

Boehlert is hardly the only big-name House member to have deposited his papers in Albany. The collection also holds the papers of James Delaney, a Queens Democrat who was a major player on the Rules Committee in the 1960s and 1970s (and who was succeeded in the House by Geraldine Ferraro); Major Owens, who served 20 years as a Brooklyn Democrat; and John Goodchild Dow, one of the quirkiest members of the Cold War Congress. Dow was elected in a major upset in 1964 from a heavily Republican district, was re-elected in 1966, lost in 1968, but came back to win a final term in 1970 after the law-and-order GOP incumbent was investigated for tax evasion. In the process, he refused to bow to district opinion, and emerged as one of the few strongly liberal voices in the 1960s House on foreign policy questions.

Other collections housed in Albany include those of Leonard Farbstein (best known as the House member unseated by Bella Abzug in 1970); Seymour Halpern (a major player in 1960s liberal Republican circles); Normman Lent (who ousted Allard Lowenstein in 1970 and was a key GOP voice on defense issues in the 1980s); and Gerald Solomon (a leader in the caucus of upstate Republicans during the 1980s).

In a bonus for researchers, the Library is easily accessible--less than 15 minutes from the Albany airport, scarcely more from the Albany Amtrak station.

Given the breadth and depth of collections, it's definitely a congressional history resource worth increased usage.