“The National Archives Will Not Forget”
Evans went to the Committee hearing alone—he knew that many of his colleagues at the Library of Congress were overtly resistant to the idea of transferring the documents. They believed that the library’s prestige and reputation would be irreparably harmed without its two preeminent parchments.
The committee voted unanimously to direct the librarian to transfer the documents to the archives, but Evans requested a stronger resolution. He wanted the committee to “instruct or order” him to make the transfer—he needed the political cover both for the external record and to protect his flank from internal library staffers. The committee granted his wish. The Congressional Record of May 1 reads that congressmen “ordered the transfer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to the National Archives.”
In the Information Bulletin for the Library of Congress for May 5, 1952, Evans wrote that the transfer was required “according to the routine application of the statutes concerning the records of the U.S. Government.” Although it was an “emotional wrench to surrender the custody of the principal documents of American liberty, logic and law require it,” he said. “We can only join Dr. Wayne C. Grover, the Archivist of the United States, and his staff, in celebrating the occasion.”
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WITH THE FORMALITIES COMPLETED, Grover and Evans simply needed to agree on scheduling, logistics, preparing the shrine, notifying the press and the public, and organizing the ceremony that would commemorate the transfer. Both men were quite pleased with themselves and their efforts. “I don’t know what history will say about our friendly collusion,” Evans wrote to Grover on May 5, “but I can tell you that I feel darned broad-minded and just a wee bit righteous—something like a fellow who gave up his gal to an ugly clumsy younger brother who wasn’t very good at finding gals of his own.” Two days later, he sent Grover the formal and official letter declaring that he was “ready to transfer to you … the collections of records of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention now in custody of the Library of Congress.”
Grover, too, responded to Evans in a playful manner: “I hereby give you permission to use the line about an ‘ugly clumsy younger brother’ at all future professional gatherings we jointly attend. It’s a marvelous line and I guess I can bear up under it.” He added, however: “But what a price to pay for a couple of old pieces of parchment!” He turned serious in the same letter and assured Evans that “history is going to say good things about you. It startled my colleagues here somewhat that a man heading a great and powerful institution should be so reasonable and generous.” Evans’s behavior, however, came as no surprise to Grover. “I never was in doubt as to what you would do,” the archivist assured the librarian.
Grover concluded his May 15 letter by reverting to humor even as he cited the author of the Declaration: “Jefferson wanted on his tombstone that he wrote the Declaration. I want on mine that I saw it safely enshrined in the Archives of the United States.” And then he said to Evans: “If you’ll be satisfied with a footnote on a tombstone, I will certainly see to it that the source is properly cited.”
Later in the summer, the two men exchanged poetry about their successful collusion to transfer the documents. Evans wrote first in limerick form:
There once was an agency rich
Whose head had a terrible itch
To take all records over.
His name it was Grover,
A two-fisted son-of-a-bitch
Not to be outdone, Grover responded with his own brand of humor:
I have read your effusions;
I bleed with remorse
No further contusions
Will come from this source.
But to label us “rich”
Is outright deception.
Better limit the pitch
To unimmaculate conception.
Joking aside, for Grover and Evans the transfer of the original Declaration and the Constitution was serious and important business. Both men felt strongly that the founding documents belonged in the people’s archives, that the more Americans who could view them—under secure and protective conditions—the more deeply the citizenry would appreciate the country’s founding and its democracy.
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ONE OTHER FACTOR LIKELY convinced Grover and Evans that the National Archives was the place for the Declaration and the Constitution. Had they any doubts, both men would have been convinced of Americans’ affection for historical documents by their reactions a few years earlier to the nationwide travels of the Freedom Train.
For sixteen remarkable months during 1947–1949, the train, which carried 127 of the most important documents in American history—though neither the engrossed and signed Declaration nor the engrossed and signed Constitution—crisscrossed the country, covering 37,000 miles and 326 cities in all forty-eight states of the time, the only train ever to travel in every state, a feat that required the Freedom Train to use the tracks of fifty-two different railroads. Along the way, more than 3 million Americans waited hours in line to view documents such as the Bill of Rights, Jefferson’s original rough draft of the Declaration, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, Lincoln’s manuscript copy of the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the original manuscript of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Mayflower Compact. Included were more than twenty World War II documents, among them Hitler’s last will and testament, the surrender documents signed by both Germany and Japan, and Emperor Hirohito’s statement to the Japanese people at war’s end.
The brainchild of National Archives’ assistant director of public information William Coblenz, who sold his idea to his superiors and President Truman, the Freedom Train project was underwritten by the American Heritage Foundation and supported enthusiastically by the national archivist, Solon Buck, Luther Evans, and others such as business magnate Henry Ford II, publisher William Randolph Hearst, and songwriter Irving Berlin, who wrote an original tune for the Freedom Train.
The train began its journey in Philadelphia on September 17, 1947, the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. During its tour, hundreds of newspapers covered its stops and interviewed Americans who flocked in droves to tour the three Pullman cars filled with historical documents. Reader’s Digest reprinted 3.5 million copies of an article on the Bill of Rights that were distributed to visitors to the Freedom Train, and Look magazine published 775,000 copies of an illustrated thirty-two-page booklet entitled Our American Heritage, which described the major documents aboard the Freedom Train. A detachment of Marines traveled aboard the train and guarded the documents around the clock.
From the beginning, the train’s journey was a rousing success—Americans simply could not get enough of the Freedom Train, dubbed the “Spirit of 1776,” and the documents it carried aboard. Peak daily attendance during the tour exceeded 14,000 and the attendance low of just over 6,000 people occurred during a fierce snowstorm. In New York City, the line started at Grand Central Station and covered fifteen blocks, with people standing four abreast. In Cleveland, thousands stood in a serpentine line for four to five hours to board the train. Nearly half the population of Burlington, Vermont, turned out to greet the train, including 10,000 people in a single day; and thousands more congregated in a park in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to sign the Freedom Pledge Scroll that accompanied the train. In Boston, teachers adjourned classes as thousands of schoolchildren flocked to South Station to visit the Freedom Train. A two-hour parade, attended by an estimated 250,000 people, marked the train’s arrival in Dover, Delaware; in Elizabeth, New Jersey, thousands gathered in a rainstorm, huddled beneath umbrellas, to greet the train upon its arrival.
The one-millionth visitor was a sixteen-year-old Oklahoma girl who traveled sixty miles in a blizzard to see the exhibit.
Although 10:00 a.m. was the standard opening time for the train’s exhibits, lines in most cities began forming before dawn. In California, a thirteen-year-old boy got up at 2:00 a.m. to get in line early. Winston Luck, an African American from Chicago, left his job at 4:00 a.m. “to see the documents that stand for freedom.” As people moved from car to car, from document to document, most did so with a sense of reverence and emotion.
Marines reported that the World War II exhibits were most popular, but many documents left people with “tears in their eyes.” R. W. Stempfel confessed: “You got a deep emotional feeling as you go through the cars. I can’t explain it, but it’s wonderful.” Another visitor said: “They are really our moral background—The whole thing should make everyone more conscious of freedom and what it means.” Nor was it only visitors who felt the spiritual aura of the train. One New York Times writer described what it was like: “Inside, one has the feeling he is in church. The only light is the soft fluorescent glow reflected from the lighted documents. Parents shush their children and little school boys take off their caps without being told. People speak in low-guarded tones used by tourists in ancient cathedrals.”
The American Heritage Foundation did its best to maintain the spirit of the exhibit amidst racial tensions, particularly in the South. When the mayor of Memphis announced in November 1947 that the viewing day would be divided in half, six hours each for whites and blacks separately, the foundation canceled the train’s exhibit. The foundation also withdrew the train from Birmingham when city officials demanded two separate lines of visitors that would merge at the train’s entrance. After the Birmingham cancellation, no other city attempted to segregate visitors, although Selma, Alabama, withdrew its request to have the train visit.
After visiting cities and small towns, the Freedom Train’s tour ended officially on January 22, 1949, during President Truman’s inauguration week in Washington, D.C. More than 100,000 Washingtonians visited the train in the nation’s capital.
There was little doubt that the Freedom Train’s tour had captured the imaginations of Americans and reawakened them to the value of the documents that defined their history. In February 1949, Dwight D. Eisenhower, heroic World War II general and future president, wrote to the American Heritage Foundation, praising it for “instilling into the American people an increased consciousness of our manifold heritage.” Such an achievement, he added, “has been one of the outstanding and most satisfying phenomena of the postwar period.”
When the Freedom Train concluded its sojourn in 1949, Wayne Grover had succeeded Solon Buck as chief archivist. Shortly thereafter, Grover and Luther Evans began their quest to transfer the Declaration and the Constitution to the National Archives. Both documents were considered too valuable to accompany the Freedom Train on its odyssey across the United States.
Still, both men knew—in light of the exuberant response of the American people to the train’s contents—that placing the parchments in a permanent home, for all to see, would best illustrate their contributions and importance to the nation’s heritage.
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BY 1952, THOUGH, NOT everyone was pleased about the transfer of the Declaration and the Constitution. Of the library staffers upset about the move, David Mearns was particularly bitter. Mearns, who had been part of the team that secured the founding documents for their trip to Fort Knox in 1941, was asked by Evans to write two or three pages about the transfer for the library’s annual report. Mearns wrote almost seven pages, an emotional essay he called “Forever Is Twenty-Eight Years,” the length of time the Library of Congress had possessed the Declaration and the Constitution.
Despite his dismay when he first heard that the documents would move to the National Archives, Mearns concluded that fighting the transfer was futile: “The retired but retained records of the Government must be entrusted to the National Archives. Retired! Retained! They will never retire. They must always be retained. But they will be removed.”
A crestfallen Mearns added: “To have been host—even to have been host by sufferance—to these imperishable records has been to enjoy a transient prestige which the Library is unlikely ever to enjoy again.”
Mearns was wrong about the Library of Congress’s status—it still held (and holds) the original copies of the Gettysburg Address and countless other vital documents—but correct that his institution would never again be responsible for protecting and displaying parchments so priceless.