“Nothing that Men Have Ever Made Surpasses Them”
September 19, 1944, Fort Knox, Kentucky, 3:35 p.m.
The provost marshal of Fort Knox, Major W. C. Hatfield, ordered the heavily armed convoy to move out. Slowly, the vehicles began rolling, led by Hatfield’s car, whose occupants included a lieutenant and three rifle-carrying military policemen. Bringing up the rear was a Secret Service car. In the middle was a large truck guarded by a sergeant, two corporals, three privates, and several military policemen. Inside the truck were the containers that had been removed from the bullion depository vault a short time earlier.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Gettysburg Address were going home.
The Allied landings at Normandy—D-day—had occurred three months earlier and British and American troops were now pushing across Europe toward Germany. Months of hard fighting lay ahead in both Europe and the Pacific, but President Roosevelt, the Joint Chiefs, and the War Department had decided that bombings or sabotage on the U.S. mainland were now unlikely. It was time for the most valuable of Library of Congress documents to return to Washington. Most of the other nearly 5,000 boxes had been moved during the previous two months. “They see no need,” Archibald MacLeish wrote of military commanders, “to keep materials of this kind in the woods and hills any longer.” MacLeish and his staff agreed; they were anxious for the documents to return to the library but had deferred to military leaders on the appropriate time.
The Library of Congress made no announcement of any kind, though MacLeish eventually lauded in his 1944 report the efforts of “those responsible for the transportation over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies of 4,789 cases of books and manuscripts valued in uncountable millions of dollars.”
The final transfer, the return of the documents from Fort Knox to Washington, was the most sensitive operation of all. Preparations at the bullion depository had been meticulous.
The convoy reached Louisville’s 7th Street Station and entered through a rear entrance “without any public notice or knowledge.” Agents placed the cases aboard a Pullman sleeper car—number 42—of the 5:30 p.m. Baltimore & Ohio train to Washington.
Harry Neal met the train and he and several other agents quickly removed the containers to an armored and guarded truck, which arrived at the Library of Congress annex just before noon. MacLeish met the documents and supervised their transfer to the vault. There, MacLeish, Alvin Kremer, Clapp, chief assistant librarian Luther Evans, and Reference Department director David Mearns opened the containers and examined the documents. “The contents were found to tally with the list previously given … and to be in good condition,” Clapp noted, “whereupon they were immediately removed to the Librarian’s safe.”
MacLeish insisted that the Declaration and the Constitution be placed in their shrine so that the public could view them and to publicly memorialize the moment, declaring that the documents’ return had “the same spiritual and intellectual symbolization for the people of this country that the return of the lights to London [after years of blackout] had for the people of London.” On Sunday, October 1, 1944, the doors of the library were opened at 11:30 a.m. Beside the shrine stood a Marine guard of honor, which, in rotation, would be relieved in succeeding weeks by army and navy guards.
Secret Service agent Harry Neal, who had been invited by MacLeish, was one of those in attendance at the ceremony.
MacLeish wrote and spoke often about what the Declaration and Constitution represented, but at no time more passionately and evocatively than when he delivered his instructions to the Marines guarding the shrine. “Our nation differs from all others in this—that it was not created by geographic or by racial accident, but by the free choice of the human spirit, conceived and founded by men who chose to live under one form of government rather than under another,” he said. “The sheets of vellum and the leaves of ancient paper in those cases which you guard are the very sheets and leaves on which [our] form of government [was] brought to being. Nothing that men have ever made surpasses them.” It was appropriate that the documents should be guarded by men who fought against “the enemies of everything this Constitution and this Declaration stand for.”
With that, the captain of the Marine band, in position nearby, raised his baton and the Great Hall resonated with the sounds of the national anthem.
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ONCE THE DOCUMENTS WERE safely returned to the Library of Congress, MacLeish would tell lawmakers that the collaboration from the repositories that stored his library’s collections was heartening, especially the cooperation his staff had received from Fort Knox personnel. “No mere words of gratitude can begin to express our sense of obligation to the officers of these various institutions,” he said.
To this point, they had done their duty under the shroud of secrecy; it was forbidden under the “code of voluntary censorship and by military regulation” to acknowledge their contributions. But in his 1944 annual report, MacLeish wrote, “It is now possible to announce” which institutions had provided safe harbor for the documents. He described the specific buildings and rooms in which boxes were stored at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, Washington and Lee, VMI, and Denison University. Their “patient and uncomplaining acceptance” of twenty-four-hour guards in their buildings and stacks of boxes in their halls spoke “eloquently of their generosity, their devotion, and—for no other word that is wholly expressive—their patriotism.”
Perhaps the most remarkable and gratifying expression of patriotism was the fact that townspeople, librarians, custodians, shippers, domestic help, truck drivers, railroad personnel, and curious onlookers alike—in every case—maintained the secret about the largest single relocation of priceless documents, books, and artifacts in American history.
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ARCHIBALD MACLEISH SUBMITTED HIS resignation on November 8, 1944, the day after an ailing President Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term. MacLeish informed the president that his most important work was done—he had completed an administrative reorganization of the Library of Congress, and the exhausting and emotionally draining mission of securing and protecting the nation’s most important documents had been successfully carried out. MacLeish was tired—tired of war and tired of Washington.
He expected that his days in the nation’s capital were over, but Roosevelt had other plans. He nominated MacLeish to be assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs, where his first responsibility would be to persuade the American people on the concept of a United Nations. MacLeish concurred with Roosevelt that only through a strong United Nations could a lasting peace be maintained. After a contentious series of confirmation hearings in the Senate—MacLeish’s left-wing leanings were objectionable to many conservatives—the former librarian reported to the State Department on December 19. “I think it is thrilling that you are not leaving us,” FDR wrote to MacLeish. “The only trouble is that you jump from one mausoleum to the other.” In reply, MacLeish could not resist a pun, pointing out to the president that “a rolling stone gathers no Mausoleum.”
MacLeish’s legacy was one of leadership and decisive action. He was the “most articulate librarian we’ve ever had,” noted Frederick Goff, head of the Rare Books Division, and it did not hurt that he had a direct line to the White House. Staffers were struck by his speed of thought, movement, and expression. As a boss, MacLeish “wanted it done now,” said one library executive, and another noted that in reorganizing the library and broadening its services, MacLeish “plunged boldly ahead at a pace that few, if any, trained librarians would have attempted.” In addition to his streamlining of the library’s operations, his protection of the documents and his transformation of the library to a war-time footing, MacLeish appointed the library’s first woman and first African American department directors.
After recounting MacLeish’s achievements in the 1945 annual report, Luther Evans, who succeeded him, wrote: “In these, and in a myriad of other ways, the brush of the comet gave a new dimension to the Library. But the outstanding characteristic of that brilliant episode is not the fact that so much was consummated in so short a time, but rather that there is now so little to repent.”
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HARRY NEAL WOULD RISE through the ranks to become assistant chief of the Secret Service before his retirement in 1957. Along the way he prepared the service’s budgets, wrote articles on counterfeiting, and—in what he called a “highlight day in my life”—stood next to Harry Truman when the president signed a bill that officially defined the duties and powers of the U.S. Secret Service. It was Harry Neal who believed that the service had to be given its own designation to reflect its growing gravitas and responsibility—something it could not achieve by being buried as a mere “division” within the Treasury Department. Throughout his career, and during his retirement, he dedicated himself to cultivating, preserving, and writing about the service’s history. He wrote more than thirty books and was one of the founders and long-time editors of The Pipeline, the quarterly newsletter of former agents of the U.S. Secret Service.
His contributions to the Secret Service earned him the prestigious five-pointed gold badge—an exact replica of his sterling silver agent’s badge—one of a handful that have been awarded in the 150-year history of the service. Hand-engraved at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the front of the badge is stamped with US in the center, the word SECRET above it and SERVICE below. The back of the badge is engraved with his years of service: HARRY E. NEAL, ASSISTANT CHIEF, 7-1-1926 TO 4-30-1957. The Secret Service honored Neal again when it dedicated its Exhibit Hall to him.
In the biography plaque that graces the room, the final sentence reads: “Until his death in 1993, he always spoke of his pride in being a member of the Secret Service and the ideals the agency represents.”
To this day, Harry’s children—Harry Jr. and Barbara—are honorary members of the 3,500-strong fraternity of former agents. When they attend Secret Service events, they are seated at reserved tables and introduced as dignitaries along with other VIPs. Harry Neal Jr., who is the steward of his father’s gold star, normally stores it in a safe-deposit box, except when he and Barbara attend these functions. Then he brings the badge with him to honor the contributions and the memory of his father.
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NEITHER ARCHIBALD MACLEISH NOR Harry Neal ever forgot the events of the 1940s.
In 1970, Neal wrote to MacLeish—now retired at Uphill Farm in Conway, Massachusetts—to convey his regards and reminisce about the heavy burden he felt during the transfer of documents to and from the Library of Congress. MacLeish expressed his gratitude for the letter and began his response: “I have never forgotten that momentous occasion and it is a pleasure to have an opportunity to send my thanks once more to the man who mastered the difficulties so brilliantly.”
Then MacLeish added: “Whenever I think, now, of the terrifying responsibility of shipping the Constitution and the Declaration to Fort Knox, my appetite suffers for days. I am glad you remember it with the same emotions.”
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ARCHIBALD MACLEISH DIED ON April 20, 1982, seventeen days short of his ninetieth birthday, and was buried in a family plot at Pine Grove Cemetery in Conway. Later that month, at a memorial service at Harvard, one friend eulogized MacLeish as “one of the great Americans of our time.” He mentioned the lyricism of MacLeish’s poetry and the depth of his compassion, and though he did not specifically mention Archie’s tenure as librarian of Congress, his language seemed appropriate for those wartime years, when MacLeish was responsible for protecting America’s priceless documents.
Archibald MacLeish, his friend declared to the assembled mourners, represented “an imposing part of the landscape of this republic.… Where he stood and what he stood for will remain with us for the rest of our days.”