| | Abstract: | The Cleveland Area Leadership Studies were produced by Dr. Klain, a political scientist at Western Reserve University (Case Western Reserve University since 1967), as a scholarly project to identify, describe and analyze leadership, decision-making, influence and power in Greater Cleveland, Ohio, during the 1950s and 1960s. The people interviewed were eminent figures in the business and professional life of Cleveland, prominent in government, law and politics, education, journalism, religion, philanthropy, non-governmental civic institutions, ethnic communities and social activism. The collection is therefore critical to the study of Cleveland in the 1960s. Because the collection was produced on the eve of the racial conflicts which shook the U.S. in the 1960s and which erupted in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood during 1966, Klain has characterized such interviews as "conversations on a powderkeg." The collection is comprised of the second drafts of the interview transcripts. The Klain research papers constitute an extensive and massive body of information about the Cleveland metropolitan region, its leaders, groups and interests. The heart of the study is embodied in over 700 transcripts of interviews conducted by Klain and his graduate students from 1957 to 1965. Included are a number of interviews with members of the exclusive Fifty Club and the founders of University Circle, Incorporated. | |
