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Since 1903, the day’s premier leaders, crusaders, and elected officials have spoken at the Commonwealth Club of California, with many such talks subsequently broadcast on the club's nationwide radio network. Sound recordings and scripts of these speeches on political, economic, technological, social, and recreational matters, along with the club's reports, minutes, correspondence, and other records, are in this collection.
An announcer asks the club's audience to turn their faces toward the camera in the balcony.
Digitized copies of more than 4,600 sound recordings in the collection
Guide to the collection
It's no secret that Herbert Hoover talked to Commonwealth Club audiences at nine "off- the-record" events between 1936 and 1947. Read more.
Howard Jarvis debates California's Proposition 13, May 12, 1978. Weeks before the election, Jarvis asserts that Prop 13 will cut property taxes and keep the elderly in their homes
To purchase recordings, please contact the Commonwealth Club at club@commonwealthclub.org.
Users may listen to recordings in the Hoover Archives reading room at no charge. Please contact hooverarchives@stanford.edu at least two weeks before your visit to ensure that use copies of the recordings are available.
Eleven more historic California recordings from Hoover collections have been digitized for California Light and Sound, a project of the California Preservation Program.
Over the years, the Commonwealth Club of California has featured such noted speakers as Milton Friedman, Cesar Chavez, William Shockley, Tony La Russa, Dusty Baker, and Billy Beane. Because the club is interested in all aspects of life, its collection here at Hoover includes materials related to some things one might not expect, such as professional sports in the Bay Area, especially baseball.
The speeches of the 2008 presidential hopefuls are well represented among the thousands of sound recordings of Commonwealth Club of California events stored at the Hoover Archives.
More than two thousand sound recordings of speakers addressing the Commonwealth Club of California are housed at the Hoover Archives and described in a searchable database.
Sound recordings of Commonwealth Club programs for 1980 have now been fully cataloged, bringing the total of all cataloged programs in Hoover's database of club recordings to more than one thousand.
Nine hundred and fifty sound recordings of programs presented at the Commonwealth Club before 1980 are now fully described in Hoover’s database of club recordings.
All digital audiotapes (DATs) of unique Commonwealth Club programs—that is, programs not also recorded on some other audio format—at the Hoover Institution Archives have been reformatted for preservation.
