The plain fieldstone building that houses Franklin D. Roosevelt's papers here cost $376,000. By contrast, the price tag on President Bill Clinton's proposed library in Little Rock, Ark., has been estimated at $100 million to $125 million. Following the precedent set by Roosevelt more than 60 years ago, construction will be financed with private donations.
Clinton's fund raising for his library, including a controversial $450,000 donation from the ex-wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich, has focused attention on the ever-increasing thirst for money to build these repositories of the momentous and the mundane. But unlike campaign contributions, donations to a president's library foundation, the nonprofit organizations charged with raising the funds to defray construction costs, are not public.
That was vividly demonstrated when Clinton's library foundation refused to turn over a complete list of donors to the congressional committee investigating Clinton's last-minute pardons, including one for Rich.
Despite the spectacle of a president passing the hat for his library, scholars defend presidential libraries as indispensable troves of information, even though some feature such things as a Wurlitzer jukebox and an automated statue of Lyndon B. Johnson.
"It's a shame that the interest in presidential libraries is coming about for the reason it is," said historian David McCullough, whose book "Truman" won the 1993 Pulitizer Prize for biography. "I couldn't have written my book without the aid of the people at the Truman library, and I don't think any presidential biographer would disagree with that."
Ten government-operated presidential libraries have been built since Roosevelt set aside a portion of his Hyde Park estate to house his papers and memorabilia. At a cost of about $38 million a year, the libraries maintain a staggering amount of material: more than 300 million pages of documents, 7 million photographs, 83,000 hours of audio and video recordings, and some 350,000 museum objects, including such things as FDR's specially designed 1936 Ford Phaeton, with hand levers so the disabled president could work the brakes and accelerator.
"President Roosevelt was very cognizant of the fact that he was making history," said library deputy director Mark Hunt, who until last year was director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. "He wanted to make sure there was a place where his papers could be made available."
Previous presidents took their papers with them when they left office, meaning that "pretty much whatever could happen to papers has," Hunt said. Some descendants cashed in on their family connections by cutting off presidential signatures and selling them to autograph collectors.
On the day before he died in 1886, Chester A. Arthur burned three trash cans of his official documents, a move hardly designed to endear him to historians, who habitually rank Arthur near the bottom on presidential performance charts.
Arthur's bonfire couldn't happen today, because in 1978 Congress declared that the paperwork a president piles up in office is not his personal property. It belongs to the government and, by law, must be preserved.
Abiding by that mandate has meant shoveling ever-higher mountains of memos into each new presidential library. The Roosevelt holdings, including 3 million personal documents donated by Eleanor Roosevelt, number about 20 million pages for FDR's 12 years as president, during which he presided over the birth of modern big government. Ronald Reagan, who sought to end big government during his eight years in the White House, accumulated about 70 million documents.
The advent of e-mail and faxes promises even bigger collections in the future. Last fall, an initial shipment of 50 tons of material was sent to Little Rock for the Clinton library.
Roosevelt began the practice of using private money to build presidential libraries and public funds to maintain them.
After he donated the land for the building, supporters raised the funds to pay for construction. Building upkeep and the salaries of the 32-member staff go on the government's tab.
"When he was conceiving of his library, there were political rivals who thought it was inappropriate to use public funds to build what they saw as a monument to one man," Hunt said of the private-public financing.
After Roosevelt, Harry Truman decided to build a library in Independence, Mo., his hometown. Herbert Hoover, the man Roosevelt defeated, built one in West Branch, Iowa, his birthplace. A federally run library became one of those things that every ex-president has, like an office and a pension.
But when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, Congress ordered that his papers be seized for fear he would destroy evidence in the Watergate scandal. The Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., is the only one that is privately run.
Roosevelt may have set many of the precedents for subsequent libraries, but they have not followed his example in size. They ballooned with each ex-president until the Johnson library in Austin, Texas, topped 130,000 square feet.
"It's big BIG," said McCullough. "You get the sense that nothing's too good for Texas."
After that, Congress slapped a size limit of 70,000 square feet on future libraries.
Every library also includes museum exhibits about the president's life and times. Those are the main attraction for most of the roughly 1.5 million people who visit the libraries yearly, because the presidents' papers are open only to researchers. The public displays often feature historic documents, such as Roosevelt's 1932 speech when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Chicago, which includes the handwritten lines that came to describe his government assistance programs to fight the Depression: "I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people."
The exhibits also include such circuslike attractions as the life-size statue of Johnson, and the Wurlitzer jukebox at the George Bush library in College Station, Texas, that plays popular tunes from the World War II era.
"They can be a little hokey," said Fred Greenstein, a Princeton University history professor.
Hokey is one thing. Well-rounded is another. Criticism of a president's foibles and blunders is so muted that one writer described the libraries as "sentimental mausoleums."
What lies in store at the Clinton library is already a subject of speculation and sniggering, but New York architect James Polshek said one reason his proposed design features vast expanses of glass is because Clinton wanted the building to convey a sense of "openness."
Many archivists and research librarians are opposed to these one-man libraries because they scatter across the country material that they feel would be easier to use if it were in one location, such as the Library of Congress, which has the papers of 23 of the first 29 presidents.
"We're always looking at things from the researcher's view," said Deborah Jakubs, an administrator at the Duke University library and an officer at the Association of Research Libraries. "From the standpoint of economy of scale, it would make sense to me to have things more centralized and afford researchers the right kind of access, rather than having them travel from place to place."
But others say you can't learn everything about a president from reading his papers. The setting where he grew up or spent time as an adult is also important.
"To be able to get a sense of the Hudson River, I don't how you replicate that at a museum in Washington," said Hunt of the Roosevelt library. "It's like the difference between a reproduction and the real thing. People go to museums to see the real stuff."
Regardless of the argument about the merits of presidential libraries, the current controversy over Clinton's fund raising shouldn't change the way future libraries are paid for, Princeton's Greenstein said.
"My feeling is that if you can get private money for something, that's all to the good," he said. "With Clinton, everything gets messed up, partly because he's so sloppy and chaotic and partly because his sloppy, chaotic performance gets magnified. I wouldn't try to set policy for the presidential library system based on Bill Clinton and his comic-opera exit from the presidency."
(c) 2001, Chicago Tribune.
href='http://www.newsmaxstore.com/nms/showdetl.cfm?DID=6&Product_ID=73&CATID=9&GroupID=12'>Get NewsMax.com's new book "Bitter Legacy" FREE
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.