Frank A. Golder

Golder is best remembered for his work in the early 1920s building the seminal collection of Slavic language materials residing today at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in California.

[2] It was in this way that he was befriended by a Baptist clergyman, who helped the boy escape life on the streets and to gain a first-rate education, including a stint at Georgetown College, a preparatory school in Kentucky.

[5] Golder was accepted for a position and in August of that same year he boarded a train to begin the 5,000-mile trek to a remote settlement Unga Island to teach the native Aleuts in a public school established there.

[9] Golder also managed to turn some of the historical knowledge which he gained in the process into articles in several of the leading academic journals of the day, helping cement his reputation as an expert in 18th and 19th Century Russian diplomatic history.

[11] Golder arrived to peruse the Bering papers in Petrograd (the past and future St. Petersburg) on March 4, 1917 — mere days before the eruption of the February Revolution which would rapidly bring an end to the Romanov dynasty and usher in the rise of a short-lived constitutional democracy.

Golder's Russian experiences made him a valuable asset to the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, and he was named to a committee of experts assembled late in 1917 to compile background information for a forthcoming peace conference.

[12] The committee, known as "The Inquiry" and headed by Wilson's close personal advisor Colonel Edward M. House, would remain active for two years, and Golder authored reports on Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, and two regions of Russia.

[12] That put the Russian expert Golder in the right place at the right time, as American Food Administrator and confirmed bibliophile Herbert Hoover had decided to transfer the mass of documents he had gathered during the wartime years to Stanford, his alma mater, as an archival collection.