TEAM INTERVIEWING AND THE MERGER OF THE AFL AND CIO IN 1955: NOTES ON SOME OPTIONS IN ORAL HISTORY.

Historians of organized labor in the United States have paid surprisingly little attention to the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955. Now, however, thanks to the "AFL-CIO Labor Movement Oral History Project," administered by the George Meany Center for Labor Studies at Silver Spring, Maryland, this landmark event is documented by interviews with 52 individuals who were concerned with it in various ways. The transcripts of these tape-recorded interviews total 2,200 pages, double-spaced, and most of them are open for research in the library of the Meany Center. Fortunately, this project was directed by one of the most experienced and respected oral historians in the United States-Alice M. Hoffman, Professor of Labor Studies at the Graduate Research Center of Pennsylvania State University. Due to her expertise the 1955 merger is amply recounted in the spoken memoirs she and the team of interviewers she coordinated were able to collect. No longer can labor historians neglect the process by which labor unions in America united, after 20 stormy years of rivalry often marked by bitter hostility, into a single entity, the AFL-CIO.