FDR Set Precedent for Presidential Libraries

Roosevelt was an amateur historian and avid collector who saved documents throughout his political career as a New York State Senator (1910-13), Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-19), Governor of New York (1929-32), and President of the United States (1933-45). He gave his personal collections, including memorabilia such as his desk from the Oval Office, to the government in order to create the library.

In 1938, Roosevelt privately raised about $450,000 to build the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum on 16 acres of land that was once part of the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, NY. The library, which opened in June of 1941, was completed under budget and on time.

"Every library since then has been established based on the same model," Clark said. In 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act, which formalized the procedures Roosevelt initiated for privately built and federally maintained presidential libraries.

In 1978, another important law was passed. The Presidential Record Act, which was enacted after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, states that all official presidential documents belong to the federal government. So, now, regardless of whether a president wants to build a presidential library, his documents and records remain in the custody of the U.S. government, Clark said.

Many of Roosevelt's collections were available to the public when the library first opened. However, with the onset of World War II, the official opening of the library as a research facility was postponed until 1946. By the early 1950s, about 85 percent of the presidential materials were available for public research, Clark said.

Information can be withheld from the public for a number of reasons. "There are some materials that are restricted statutorily or by executive order because of the nature of information in them," Clark said. For instance, military information cannot be released if it poses a potential threat to national security.

Some of the classified materials are housed at the National Archives, Clark said. All documents are regularly reviewed to determine if and when it is appropriate to declassify the information.

Clark, who supervises the Roosevelt Library's research facilities, including the archeological, printing, and photograph collections, said the library contains about 17 million pages of documents. About six million pages are from Roosevelt's presidency, and about three million pages are documents covering Eleanor Roosevelt's entire life, Clark said.

The Roosevelt Library is a unique research facility, Clark said, because it is a "one-stop shop for studying Roosevelt." The library was built with enough room to house papers from his cabinet members, including New Deal and wartime administrators, and diplomats, he said.

The library's extensive collections attract large crowds of visitors. About 250,000 people visit the museum each year. "We are consistently one of the top two busiest libraries in the presidential library system. We see about 600 on-site researchers a year doing about 1,500 visits, and then we receive about 8,000 research inquiries being emailed, telephoned, and faxed," Clark said.

The presidential libraries are administered by the Office of Presidential Libraries at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). According to Clark, the Roosevelt Library and the NARA are "committed to making sure that the young people in the United States have a real understanding of the country's history."

Therefore, presidential libraries strive to develop strong educational programs, Clark said. The Roosevelt Library staff and the library's website offer educational resources to people of all ages.

"You don't need to be an eminent scholar to use the research room," Clark said. Anyone, from a Boy Scout looking up information about a badge to a Ph.D. student working on his or her dissertation, has access to the archives. "Our research rooms are open for anyone [researching a] topic that we can help them with," he added.

"I just want to encourage everyone to take advantage of our holdings," Clark said. Presidential libraries can be great resources for legal professionals in particular because they contain so much information about how the U.S. government functions, he said.

Roosevelt, who signed the legislation to establish the National Archives in 1934, believed that it was important to learn from history. "A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people to learn from the past so that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future," Roosevelt said in his dedication speech at the library's opening.