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Melissa Swank was the fact-checker for the award-winning Oregon Encyclopedia, a peer-reviewed reference work with over 1,000 entries by hundreds of authors. She has almost completed her master’s degree in history from Portland State University, with a specialization in Public history and Native American history and has also worked as a researcher at the Washington County History Museum and as a research assistant for the Confluence Project. In 2012, she was the first recipient of PSU’s Gordon Dodds Endowed Fellowship for the study of Pacific Northwest history.

EB: What does a fact checker do?

MS: Most simply put, a fact-checker does what I call “reverse research.” As a fact-checker, I begin with an entry submission that an author feels is complete. From that point, each statement or “fact” is checked against existing sources, primary evidence and secondary scholarship, to confirm that the information is either correct or that there are discrepancies in available information. If there is conflicting information it is noted and sent back to the author for clarification or revision.

EB: How did you become a fact checker? Background? Training? Personality?

MS: After my first year in the master’s program at Portland State University, I was selected as one of seven GTA’s (Graduate Teaching Assistants) for the following year. Having Bill Lang as one of my near and dear professors opened up the possibility of filling the GTA position through the Oregon Encyclopedia Project. When Bill approached me about the position I didn’t hesitate to accept.

EB: You are also a historian. Can you tell us a little about your interests there?

MS: As an historian my passions lie in research. I love research! It’s all the joy of being a detective with the flexibility of determining my own studies. Currently my work focuses on the Chinookan-American families in and around Pillar Rock, Washington near the mouth of the Columbia River. I am most interested in blended, bi-cultural and bi-racial families and the ways in which these families shaped the social, economic, and political life in the area during the nineteenth century.

EB: What attracted you to the study of history?

MS: I was attracted to history through an amazing high school history teacher. David Nieslanik was one of those rare and inspiring teachers that helped his students recognize how significant each and every event in history, and really how each life, impacts the world today. I wanted to be as inspiring to others as he was to us.

EB: What sorts of facts need checking?

MS: Everything! Everything from dates, directions, opinions, names, spellings, etc. needs to be fact-checked. In addition, the fact-checker insures that entries are free from plagiarism and original documents appropriate to be published in the encyclopedia.

EB: How long does it take to fact check an encyclopedia piece? Or does it vary?

MS: Since our entries vary in length and stylistic preferences, some entries are definitely quicker and easier to fact check than others. Also, over the past two years I have become more efficient in correlation with increased experience. In general, shorter entries take about an hour while essays can take up to three or four hours.

EB: What are your go-to sources for fact checking for the Oregon Encyclopedia?

MS: Ironically enough, I usually start with a Google search. From there I filter out my sources. For example, the National Park Service digitizes submissions to the National Register of Historic Places. These documents are usually prepared by trained historians who have spent much time in archives, libraries, and in the field to insure accurate information. Also, Google Books and Amazon have search functions for scholarly secondary sources which speeds up the fact check. It’s essential to evaluate the source. To have a peer-reviewed monograph published by a university press outweighs the accuracy of say a small, local newspaper. The more high-quality sources that agree with any given fact, the better I feel about the fact check.

EB: Do you fact check in your spare time? Like reading the newspaper? At movies? During elections?

MS: While I’d like to say that I do not fact check in my spare time, I truly feel that historical work in general is not only what I do, but part of who I am. So while I do not actively fact check, I have a naturally investigative and inquisitive mind that is just drawn to do such.

EB: Should publishers be doing more fact checking?

MS: I think this varies from source to source. Although published documents undergo a more thorough review than something that is self-published or published through a popular press, each and every one of us has the capability, and I might add responsibility, to check the accuracy of the content. If something seems to not line up, that’s probably because it doesn’t.

EB: What’s the hardest fact you’ve checked? Or the weirdest?

MS: Hmm. The hardest entry that I fact checked was my first one. I was absolutely clueless and had no on-the-job training really. I was teaching myself what it meant to fact check all while checking an entry that was absolutely inaccurate! I honestly thought I was being tested to see how many errors I would pick up on and how I handled the mistakes. It turns out it was simply not well-researched.

The strangest fact check by far was on Edmund Creffield and the Brides of Christ. Creffield and the Brides of Christ were an extreme charismatic sect of early twentieth century Oregon. The story involved kidnappings, nudist gatherings, and murderous activities. Because the story is so dramatic and outrageous, the fact check was very difficult. I do not believe it was ever published.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

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Earlier this year, Literary Ashland interviewed Diane L. Goeres-Gardner. Her book
Inside Oregon State Hospital: A History of Tragedy and Triumph has recently been published by The History Press.

Diane Goeres-Gardner is a fifth-generation Oregonian, with roots in Tillamook County as early as 1852. She has a master’s degree from the University of Oregon where she studied with poet Ralph Salisbury. Her book Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon, 1851-1905, was released by Caxton Press in 2005 and her Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon appeared in 2009, also by Caxton. Her book Images of America: Roseburg was published by Arcadia Press in 2010, part of its Images of America series, and for a history of the state hospital in images, see Goeres-Gardner’s Images of America: Oregon Asylum.

EB: How did you get interested in the Oregon State Hospital?

DG: While writing my second book, Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon I did some research into Oregon State Hospital (OSH) because before 1900 women prisoners were often sent to OSH in lieu of leaving them in isolation for so many years. The diagnosis female patients were assigned all seemed to revolve around the fact they were female, such as menopause, giving birth, and taking care of children, etc. I thought that was strange. My research also revealed that no one had ever written a history about the hospital. After that I was hooked.

EB: What was the research process like?

DG: The research was very sporadic and extremely difficult. The hospital itself had almost no archived information. Even the photos they had were mostly duplicates of photos held in other archives. I did find a file about the Calbreath family at the Oregon Historical Society, but they had almost nothing on the hospital either. That meant my main sources of information were the State Archives, the State Library, and the microfilm files at the University of Oregon, which stores copies of Oregon’s newspapers. When you look at the endnotes in the book, almost all are from those three sources.

EB: I want to ask about eugenics and sterilization. About 2,600 people were sterilized in Oregon between 1917 and 1983. Was Oregon typical in this? You mention some eugenics proponents like Bethenia Owens-Adair. What was her impact?

DG: Oregon’s enthusiastic adoption of Eugenics doctrine was not typical of other states. California sterilized over 20,000 victims and Oregon had the seventh highest number of victims (behind North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia and Kansas). Many states didn’t sterilize anyone. Only Oregon targeted the gay community so harshly. Oregon’s use of sterilization was a “perfect storm” created by the kind of people elected to office during those years, a backlash against the gay community after a particularly well publicized expose in Portland, and the bias of the state’s institutional superintendents. Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair was a persistent and influential proponent. She wrote the original bills Oregon’s legislatures finally approved. She just wouldn’t let it go. She was also well acquainted with the Applegate family and their mental illness problems. I believe that knowledge biased her toward the Eugenics philosophy.

EB: It was interesting that several members of the Applegate family were patients? How did so many Applegates end up in the asylum?

DG: I wanted the book to be more than just a collection of facts and figures. I wanted readers to feel the context of how patients experienced the hospital. To accomplish that, I needed to find patients in the hospital that I could research. The Applegate family was easy to research and had an extraordinary number of family members admitted to the asylum over a rather short period of time. I discovered and reported on eight members of the family committed to the hospital. There were actually two more that I didn’t mention in the book. Today we know that some kinds of mental illness do run through families. In the late 1800s people also knew from experience that some families had more incidents of mental illness than others. However they had extremely limited ways of dealing with it. Sending the patient to the Oregon State Asylum was just about their only option. There may have been other families with just as many patients in the hospital, however their names were less identifiable and harder to research.

EB: Funding seems to have always been an issue, as well as county-state disputes over funding. What did you conclude about the impact of funding on care.

DG: It is very costly to care for thousands, or even hundreds, of sick people who have no insurance and no way to pay for their care. Over the years funding issues have tormented not only the hospital, but all state institutions. Oregon is in a particularly vulnerable situation because the state’s only income is through property taxes and those have been capped. Also other states make the patient’s home county pay a portion of the expenses. Oregon doesn’t.

EB: You mention a celebrated 1914 dispute where a wife claimed that her husband was having her committed to gain control of her assets. Was this common?

DG: It may not have been common in Oregon, but it was always suspected. For many years Oregon laws protected women by prohibiting their husbands from divorcing them while they were in the hospital. The law made it very easy to have a person declared insane and a husband had greater power in front of a judge than a wife.

EB: The hospital changed its name from the Oregon Insane Asylum to the Oregon State Hospital? Did that reflect a change in its mission?

DG: Superintendent L. L. Rowland proposed changing the name as early as 1895 but it wasn’t acted upon until 1913 when a number of things changed. That year Oregon opened the Eastern Oregon State Hospital and the state discarded the old trustee system of supervision and changed to the Board of Control system. A new psychiatric and medical building was opened on campus in 1912 creating a more modern attitude toward mental illness. The mission was changed from warehousing people to trying to actively treat and cure mental illness. Certainly the term hospital had a more hopeful connotation than asylum.

EB: One long-time superintendent, Dean Brooks, allowed the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be filmed at the hospital, and even had a role in the film. Was the filming controversial?

DG: Dr. Brooks supported the project and wanted patients to be involved in all aspect of the movie’s filming. He believed it was beneficial for patients to be engaged in activities outside the hospital environment and that the movie would bring increased attention to the hospital’s needs. He did not think the movie attacked mental facilities as much as the authoritarian structure that so often surrounded them.

EB: I was fascinated by the various treatments: moral therapy, hydrotherapy, insulin and electroshock therapy, lobotomies. How did treatment evolve?

DG: OSH adopted various treatments as they developed across the United States. Treatments for mental illness went from basic incarceration to active remedies rather quickly. Soldiers returning from WWI and WWII with psychological problems created a need for better treatment modalities and OSH, like other hospitals, was eager to try them out. The need created the interest, and the interest created the cures.

EB: Funding, maintenance and staffing have always been issues, it seems. With the recent renovation, is the OSH turning a corner?

DG: Today the overcrowding is gone and instead of sharing a room with several other people, patients now live in private rooms. Their safety is no longer compromised by inadequate and outdated facilities. Staff can now focus on treating the patients instead of keeping buckets filling with rainwater from overflowing all over the floors. Superintendent Greg Roberts has reduced required staff overtime making the employees happier and healthier. All these improvements make it easier to focus on the important thing – helping patients get well and returning them to their communities.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.