The Equalizer: Pamela Wright and the Fight to Make Government Records Belong to Everyone
This is part 8 of my series on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis.
Here’s something nobody tells you about the National Archives: if you live west of Pittsburgh and east of Guam, chances are the records that document your family’s story are roughly 2,000 miles away from you.
That’s the situation for the people of Conrad, Montana, a town of about 2,300 people near the Canadian border. Those taxpayers help fund the National Archives. Their history lives inside it. But actually getting to the building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC? That’s a 32-hour drive.
Pamela Wright grew up on a ranch outside Conrad. Today she’s NARA’s chief innovation officer, and her entire career has basically been about solving that one problem: making government records actually available to the people they belong to.
The Gap Between “Open” and Actually Open
The National Archives has a stated mission to provide “equitable public access to high-value government records.” Sounds great. But until recently, “access” mostly meant you had to show up in person. In Washington, DC. Or College Park, Maryland. Or maybe Seattle if you were in Anchorage and really needed military records.
Here’s the problem with that: the records in those buildings are not the government’s property. They belong to the American people. But for most of American history, only Americans who could afford to travel to the right city at the right time could actually use them.
Wright’s job is to close that gap. And she’s spent decades doing it.
So far, about 300 million of NARA’s more than 13 billion records have been scanned and posted online. That sounds like a lot, until you remember: 13 billion. They have a long way to go.
A Montana Rancher Running a Digital Revolution
Sarah Vowell, who wrote this chapter and lives in Bozeman, traveled to Washington to spend time with Wright. The two are both University of Montana graduates, and Vowell clearly delights in finding someone whose rural, working-class origins shaped a very unlikely career at the center of American history.
Wright is blond, in her 60s, the daughter of Scandinavian settlers in north-central Montana. Her childhood ranch had a party-line telephone shared by multiple households. It also happened to sit on top of a Cold War missile silo. And now she’s trying to fit 13 billion government records into the smartphones in her old neighbors’ pockets.
Here’s the thing about Wright: she talks like a Washington bureaucrat, but she still thinks like a Montana rancher. She grew up hauling water from a cistern because it was precious. She canned berries, kept a root cellar, knitted mittens. Making do with limited resources was just how her family survived. That’s exactly how she approaches her federal work. “We are stewards of resources that belong to the American people,” she says. And: “Innovation is often about figuring out how to use what you have to accomplish something that’s never been done before.”
Her NARA salary does not come close to what a tech executive would make doing the same work in the private sector. But Wright took the job because the records matter, and because she understands what it feels like to be far away from the things that are supposed to belong to you.
The Citizen Archivist Program
One of Wright’s most important contributions is something called the Citizen Archivist program, which she founded in 2011. The idea is simple: enlist ordinary people to help digitize and transcribe records.
NARA has scanned millions of pages that are now online but aren’t easily searchable, because handwritten text from the 1800s doesn’t respond well to automated tools. Someone has to read it and type it out. NARA doesn’t have the staff or budget to do that at scale. So Wright opened it up to volunteers.
The results are real. Citizen archivists have transcribed more than 3 million pages of the NARA Catalog. Volunteers have added 10 million searchable tags to existing records. A nine-year scanning program added more than 800,000 pages, including pension records for the Buffalo Soldiers and Indian Scouts who served out West after the Civil War.
The volunteer recruitment slogan: “Is reading cursive your superpower?” Which is funny but also genuinely what they need. A lot of these documents are faded, handwritten, and hard to parse. Archivist Cody White described it as “more often like code-breaking than anything else.”
But here’s what this program is really about: Wright intentionally broke the old model of archives as a priesthood. For most of the 20th century, archivists stood between the public and the records, maintaining careful control over what people could touch and see. Wright says that system worked fine for the 20th century. In the 21st century, archives “should be in your pocket.”
History Hub: A Corner of the Internet That Actually Works
In 2016, Wright launched something called History Hub, a free public platform where anyone can submit a historical question and get answers from NARA archivists, federal employees, and trained volunteers.
The questions are great. Were Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover related? (No, but they kept getting each other’s mail.) Does any photograph of Crazy Horse exist? (No.) Why did so many early 20th-century Ohioans get married in Indiana? (Fewer restrictions, apparently Indiana was “the hot destination to elope in the eastern Midwest.”) One person asked whether fruit flies launched into space in 1947 were preserved anywhere, and an archivist replied that NARA does not consider “deceased insects” to be federal records.
Vowell tested History Hub herself, asking about Air Force crews that trained for the Berlin Airlift in Great Falls, Montana. Her niche question took a few weeks to get a response, but eventually an archivist came back with 46 catalog citations and a note that some documents might still be classified 75 years later.
The thing about History Hub that Vowell keeps coming back to: it is on the internet, but it does not feel like the internet. The contributors are courteous and curious. The moderators screen for inappropriate content. Everyone is genuinely trying to help. It is, she writes, “rigged” in the best possible way.
What Those Records Actually Are
Vowell and Wright spent time in NARA’s vault, looking at the actual documents. The Louisiana Purchase. The Homestead Act. Lyndon Johnson’s signature on the Higher Education Act of 1965.
That last one is personal for both of them. Wright got her start in archival work through the Federal Work-Study Program, a section of that law that provides part-time campus jobs for students who need financial help. The University of Montana’s library hired her as an undergraduate to transcribe oral history recordings from wildland firefighters. That job gave her her first professional credential. Her father had hoped she’d stay in Conrad and marry a local farmer. The Higher Education Act is part of why that didn’t happen.
Vowell captures a strange, almost sci-fi moment: Wright standing in front of the Higher Education Act of 1965, knowing that she would not be standing there without the Higher Education Act of 1965.
But the hardest moment in the chapter is when archivist Trevor Plante shows them the Treaty of New Echota, the 1835 agreement that empowered the U.S. government to march the Cherokee Nation off their lands on the Trail of Tears. Vowell’s ancestors were among those forced to walk. Four thousand died en route. She had read the treaty text before, many times. But seeing the actual document, up close, made her cry.
And that’s why it matters. The document is not just data. It is the thing itself. Digitization helps you find it, lets you access it from Montana or Sitka or anywhere. But sometimes you need to be in the same room with it to feel the full weight of what it means.
The 1950 Census and the People in It
NARA manages all U.S. census records. Wright led the team that got the 1950 Census online the moment it was legally allowed to be released in 2022 (census records are sealed for 72 years to protect privacy). Their release used AI for automated digitization, a first for NARA.
Vowell looked up her late father in that census. He’s 8 years old, listed on a page for Muskogee County, Oklahoma, and she says he’s “alive forever.” Louis Armstrong in Queens. Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico. Duke Kahanamoku in Honolulu. All of them there, all of them 8 or 35 or 60 and alive, on pages that anyone can now search for free.
But here’s the catch: census takers made errors constantly. Names misspelled. Race recorded by appearance rather than self-identification. Vowell found her Cherokee grandfather listed as “W” for White in 1950, though the same man had been listed as “I” for Indian in 1940. The Census Bureau didn’t allow people to identify as more than one race until 2000.
The records are full of this stuff. They’re not clean or impartial. They reflect who was doing the counting and what they thought they saw. But they’re still the closest thing we have to a complete snapshot of the country at any given moment. And Wright has spent her career making sure more people can look at them.
The Oath and the Pencil
At the end of Vowell’s visit, she’s taken to a storage room holding Mathew Brady’s Civil War glass-plate negatives. On the way in, an archivist noticed she was holding an ink pen. They had to stop and find her a pencil, because ink can permanently damage records. Wright handed her a blue NARA pencil stamped: HELP US PROTECT THE RECORDS.
Vowell connects that moment directly to the archivist who insisted the previous administration turn over documents stored in a Florida bathroom. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires administrations to hand over records to NARA. That law is one of the 13 billion records in NARA’s care. And the people who handed Vowell that pencil are the same people who take it seriously.
Wright remembers swearing her government oath and describing it as “simple and powerful.” She said it made her realize that federal work is “fundamentally important to the country, no matter what capacity you are in.”
Vowell is more skeptical, she has cable TV and has seen too much Congressional nonsense to fully agree. But she closes the chapter with a line that lands: “I found what I was looking for: an inventive civil servant who answers to her people. I was looking for a country I want to live in.”
That’s Pam Wright. Ranch kid from Conrad who hauled water and knitted mittens and figured out how to make 13 billion government records searchable from your phone. Not for profit. Not for a Silicon Valley valuation. Because the records belong to everyone, and everyone should be able to reach them.
Book: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis | ISBN: 9798217047802
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