“They Are Not Important As Manuscripts, They Are Important As THEMSELVES”
December 13, 1952, Washington, D.C.
The clock struck eleven on this Saturday morning, a signal to Brigadier General Stoyte O. Ross that the delicate transfer should begin. With the crisp precision of a man accustomed to issuing orders, the commanding general of the U.S. Air Force Headquarters Command gave the signal. Twelve members of the U.S. Armed Forces Special Police carried six pieces of priceless parchment in helium-filled glass cases, enclosed in wooden crates, through a cordon of eighty-eight servicewomen, who stood at attention down the Library of Congress steps. At the bottom, an armored Marine Corps personnel carrier awaited the cases.
The original engrossed Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were leaving the care of the Library of Congress and, after years of bureaucratic wrangling and often contentious foot-dragging, were headed to their new and permanent home at the National Archives.
Pennsylvania Avenue had been—and would be—the site of many parades, marches, and processions, but the resplendence and pomp that accompanied this ceremony was a sight to remember. When the six boxes—containing the Declaration, plus the four leaves of the Constitution and its separate transmittal letter from the Federal Convention to Congress—reached the bottom of the library steps, military personnel carefully placed them on mattresses inside the personnel carrier. Once stored, the carrier started to move, accompanied by a color guard, ceremonial troops, the U.S. Army Band, the U.S. Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps, two light tanks, servicemen carrying submachine guns, and a motorcycle escort—a parade down Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues to the National Archives building. Along the way, U.S. Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marine, and Air Force personnel lined both sides of the street.
At 11:35, General Ross and the twelve special policemen arrived at the National Archives and carried the containers up the steps, where the U.S. archivist, Wayne Grover, formally took custody of America’s two most important founding documents. They would finally be displayed at the National Archives, along with their sister document, the Bill of Rights, which the archives had held in its custody since 1938.
Grover had waited a long time for this moment; in fact, he had been the driving force behind making it happen.
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SOME OF THE MOST important deals in American history have had their general structure hammered out over lunch, and the agreement between the National Archives and the Library of Congress to finally transfer the Declaration and the Constitution to the archives was no exception.
In September 1951, the Library of Congress hosted a ceremony, attended by President Harry S. Truman and other dignitaries, to celebrate what was called the “permanent” encasement of the Declaration and Constitution in helium-filled cases. It was a frustrating day for Wayne Grover, who had been appointed archivist of the United States in 1948. He reported later that it was impossible to “go on indefinitely with ceremonies which gave the impression that the documents would remain everlastingly in the Library of Congress.” Since 1933, there had been numerous unsuccessful attempts to relocate the documents to the National Archives, though officials had expressed the will and inclination to move them. On February 20 of that year, at the laying of the cornerstone of the National Archives, President Herbert Hoover dedicated the building and announced: “There will be aggregated here the most sacred documents of our history—the originals of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution of the United States.”
Because of that presidential declaration, the archives built special cases in the exhibition hall to someday display the original documents, along with patriotic murals to accompany the founding documents. Since then, a combination of turf battles, political gamesmanship, world war, governmental inertia, legal machinations, and recalcitrance on the part of key players had prevented the transfer from occurring.
With a new Librarian of Congress, Luther Evans, taking the helm after MacLeish’s resignation, Wayne Grover detected renewed interest by the library in relocating the Declaration and the Constitution. At the September 1951 ceremony, Evans escorted President Truman to his car, and as he returned to his office, he passed Grover on the stairs. Evans stopped and said, “Wayne, the next ceremony for these documents will be when they’re transferred to the National Archives.”
With Evans making the first move, Grover took the opening. The next day, he invited Evans to lunch to discuss the entire issue, and the two agreed to meet at the Cosmos Club about a month later.
In the meantime, Grover turned to his staff for information.
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GROVER ASKED THAD PAGE, head of the National Archives’ Legislative and Fiscal Records Branch, to gather background material on the legal status of the Declaration and the Constitution, including their transfer to the Library of Congress, and their possible future move to the archives. Next, he asked preservation chemist Arthur E. Kimberley to compare the safety of the documents in the Library of Congress with their possible level of safety at the National Archives.
He received the answers he expected.
Page submitted two lengthy memos, the gist of which said that the transfer was in accordance with the Federal Records Act of 1950, which provided that all “federal records” not in current use for research, lawmaking, or other reasons, should go to the National Archives for storage or display purposes. The Declaration and the Constitution certainly fell into this category. (In fact, this was the main reason that Archibald MacLeish later explained why he did not think the Library of Congress was the right place for the documents. “They are not important as manuscripts, they are important as themselves,” he declared. “Not to use; to look at.” For that reason, they belonged in the National Archives.)
Kimberley’s report on safety and potential threats to the documents was perhaps more compelling. The chief chemist pointed out that the “unique character” of the two documents and their “peculiar relationship to the morale of the United States” made their preservation and protection “imperative … against any contingency whatever.” He noted that the Declaration was currently fastened to a second-story exterior wall “of an old masonry building,” while the Constitution was displayed in a floor case within a dozen feet of the same wall. “In the event of a sudden bombing, or other shock, little or no protection could be expected from the present structure.” In addition, virtually no protection was afforded against fire. In the event of a calamity, the Declaration and the Constitution would have to be immediately removed from the Library of Congress premises, “which would expose them to all the hazards of hasty handling, especially in view of the fragile nature of the glass cases.” Further, there was no close temperature control at the library—whereas the entire archives were air-conditioned—meaning the parchments “are continually expanding or contracting as the temperature rises and falls.” Such movement against the glass protective plate “cannot fail to cause damage with the passage of time.”
Consider the alternative scenario: transferring the two documents to the archives in the rotunda that was designed for them. The Declaration would be mounted on a retractable steel frame that would allow it to be exhibited and, when retracted, “would carry it into an insulated steel blast shield much as one slides a letter into its envelope.” In addition, at closing time or in a sudden emergency, “a steel panel carrying the documents could be rotated downward … and then lowered into a blast shield.” Moreover, inserting the documents into the blast shield would be accomplished mechanically, “thus eliminating undesirable manual transfers.” The same protections would shield the documents from fire and, in tandem with the archives’ air-conditioning, guard them against abnormal temperature variations.
Kimberley was not shy in his conclusion: “Architecturally, there can be no comparison between the two exhibit sites, for the present scene of exhibition is an obvious makeshift while the recommended place [the National Archives] was designed as a setting for these gems.”
The reports were good enough for Wayne Grover. Armed with legal and safety data from his experts, he was ready for lunch with Luther Evans.
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AT THE COSMOS CLUB, Evans and Grover shared a table near the fireplace, but their lunch generated little heat. Both men shared a fundamental belief that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States belonged in the National Archives.
Grover—whose strengths included his persuasive one-on-one skills, a superb sense of timing, an affinity for people, and a deep belief in the mission of archivists—did the bulk of the talking, sharing his reports and making his case. The “only business” of the Declaration and the Constitution was to be on exhibit, he pointed out, and even Evans admitted that the National Archives had better exhibition facilities and better protection capabilities. Grover said that, “sooner or later,” the document would have to be transferred, that Evans was “a generous soul heading a great institution,” and that the Library of Congress would remain great even without the two founding documents. Evans concurred and also acknowledged that, under the Federal Records Act, he could not justify keeping the Declaration and the Constitution by claiming they were needed for “current business” at the Library of Congress.
By the end of lunch, Evans had agreed to the transfer, but he was concerned about political protocol. The two executives might be legally permitted to make the transfer, but Evans wanted them to consult with the president and congressional leaders. In addition, he wanted it stressed—for both the public and his own staff’s sake—that he was under legal obligation to transfer the documents to the archives. Grover agreed with the approach Evans outlined.
Over the next several months, Grover and Evans collaborated—even conspired—to build a rock-solid and unassailable legal, moral, practical, and national security argument to transfer the documents from the Library of Congress to the National Archives. Grover was the primary driver of the effort, but without Evans’s cautiously enthusiastic support, the transfer likely would have been thwarted for years to come.
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GROVER ASSURED EVANS AND other officials in numerous written communiqués that the decision to move the documents was on solid legal grounds, but he focused most of his energy on two other arguments: the American people’s right to view the documents in the institution constructed for that purpose, including the morale boost this would provide; and, especially, the far greater physical protections the documents would receive at the National Archives.
With the United States at war again—this time in Korea—with World War II and the atomic bombs still fresh in the country’s memory, with cold war tensions heightening between the United States and the Soviet Union, fear of an attack on Washington again factored into the collective consciousness of the people most responsible for securing America’s priceless records. Even though an attack was not imminent, Grover continued to build on the security arguments that chemist Arthur Kimberley had highlighted in his report.
“The National Archives building is the most invulnerable building to shock, blast, and bombing in Washington,” Grover wrote to Evans in a January 1952 memo. Indeed, the archives was referred to as “Fort Archives” during World War II for the quality of its construction. Grover even quoted the opinion of an army engineer who believed that “barring a very near miss or an explosion at ground zero, we [the Archives] should come through an atomic attack in fairly good shape.”
Such protections made the archives the natural home for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as did the matter of “public morale,” in Grover’s view. “It is desirable and necessary to keep the document on display … until some overt act takes place which would signal the outbreak of a large-scale war.” According to Grover, the overt act could be “a bomb dropped on Washington.” Barring such a catastrophe, the documents belonged where the American people could most easily and safely view them. “The National Archives of the United States will never be complete without the records of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention,” Grover contended, of which the Declaration and the Constitution were the most critical components.
Grover made similar arguments to the White House and Congress, training his rhetoric mostly on Senator Theodore Green, chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library. “These two documents, together with the Bill of Rights … already in our custody, are the most basic of our official records, and certainly belong with other official archives of the United States Government,” he wrote to Green. He urged him and the committee to support “the Librarian of Congress and myself in our mutual desire to see this transfer accomplished.”
True to his word, librarian Luther Evans fulfilled his pledge to support the transfer. He wrote a letter to Green listing the items he wanted to present to the committee at its April 30, 1952, meeting. Item 2 was “Transfer of certain documents to the National Archives,” to which he attached Grover’s letters and his own letter to Senator Green. He wrote that the Declaration and the Constitution could be better preserved in the National Archives; they were not needed in the Library of Congress and they should be relocated.
If the congressional committee concurred, he would transfer them.