You're Keeping That?

The National Archives

One of the best things about moving into our big, old house was the big, old barn.  Finally a place to put all our stuff, I thought. When we started packing everything up to move, it was clear that we had way too much stuff (I started referring to it as junk after the first five boxes).  

We packed up photo albums, cassettes, extra dishes, tons of old baby toys and clothes, yearbooks and, of course, stacks and stacks of books.  Did we really need to keep ALL this stuff?

What’s actually worth keeping?  Which photos, letters and books will my great grand kids want to see and what will they just end up tossing?  What special events should I record for posterity?  

These are the questions that archivists at The National Archives, and archives around the world, ask themselves everyday.  According to the National Archives, located at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., only about 2% of the documents created by the government are actually worth keeping (big surprise), and even at that rate there are still 9 billion items stored away for safe keeping.

As far as I’m concerned libraries and archives are kissing cousins, both protecting text and photos for people to read and learn and discover.  They both support the desire to ‘find out’ about the unknown and reflect its importance.  And they are packed with really cool stuff.

The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) is our nation’s record keeper and hangs on to the really important documents of our country’s founding, like the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights - they are all on display in hermetically sealed cases in the lobby - but they also have millions of documents that help individuals trace their family roots.  Veterans records, census reports, immigration documents, land records, passport applications and bankruptcy records can all help families discover their past.

Online you can visit a handful of digital exhibits that are packed with tidbits of history and wonderful pictures.  I tried out the ‘Docs Teach’ section for fun and found:

Ernest Hemingway’s high school notebook, with notes from his teacher

A photograph of two Titanic lifeboats with their survivors before being rescued

A report from the Wright brothers about their crash in 1908 and their intention to go back for another try.

A caravan of 1925 tourists in horse drawn wagons on a trip to the Badlands.

Each document holds a piece of American history, ready to be peeled back, investigated and understood.  Learning history through these artifacts is engaging and interesting, the stories feel relevant and alive, they are the opposite of the history book we had in high school.

It is fitting that Herbert Hoover was the one to lay the cornerstone of the National Archives since he was one of the first Americans to understand the value of the preservation of documents.  When he gave $50,000 to Stanford in 1919 to begin a war archive, Ray Lyman, Stanford’s President, wrote back to him asking for clarification.    Hoover understood the importance of saving documents in order to preserve our history but, more importantly, to help us understand the lessons of the past.  In 1926, seven years before the National Archives opened, the Hoover Institution had the largest library in the world devoted to document and artifacts from the war.  Two weeks before Hoover left the office of the President he lay the cornerstone of the National Archives Building and said:

"This temple of our history will appropriately be one of the most beautiful buildings in America, an expression of the American soul."

-- Herbert Hoover, February 20, 1933

The Hoover Wilder Connection

Since I was riding along with Wendy McClure’s on her quest to find ‘Laura World’ (see yesterday’s entry), I decided to find out where Laura Ingalls Wilder’s archives really were.  There’s usually a pretty interesting story behind why an author picks a library as their archive site and Laura’s was no exception.  After a quick search, I found myself at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Burr Oak, Iowa.  Hhmmm.  What was the connection between Laura Ingalls and Herbert Hoover?  
Was it an Iowa connection?
nope.
Hoover left Iowa as an orphan when he was 10 years old and pretty much never looked back.  And Laura only lived in Iowa for a few years as kid.

Was Hoover a fan of the Little House books?
not that he admitted.
Hoover was working on world peace, saving war orphans from starvation, and trying to figure out what the heck happened to the U.S. economy - I can’t really see him tucking into “On The Banks of Plum Creek”.

Was Laura a Hoover fan?
not that she admitted
When Hoover was elected President in 1929 Laura Ingalls Wilder was churning out chapters about her childhood to be published as “Little House in the Big Woods” in 1932.  No doubt she was recovering from the death of her sister, Mary the year before.  And then there was bread to make, a garden to plant and cows to milk.  Any downtime was probably spent sleeping, not discussing politics..

Even though their life spans almost overlapped, 1870ish to 1960ish, the Hoover-Wilder connection wasn’t a Laura connection at all - it was a link to her daughter, Rose.

Rose Wilder was her mother’s opposite.   The Hoover Library describes her as “an author, journalist, world traveler, and Libertarian spokeswoman.”  But her life story is just as much a study in breaking boundaries,  risk taking and being true to yourself.  Rose began her career as a telegrapher for Western Union.  She moved from Kansas City to Missouri and then on to California where she eventually became a newspaper reporter.  She was married briefly and unhappily to Claire Gillette Lane, during which time she had a miscarriage.

Rose worked as a publicist for the American Red Cross during WWI, traveled across Europe and even lived in Albania for a while.  You certainly can’t get much farther away from log cabins and prairie dresses than Albania.

Rose found her greatest success as a journalist and an author of magazine articles and books.  In 1920 she wrote a series of articles with Charles K. Field, the editor of Sunset magazine, about the life of Herbert Hoover.  The articles were pulled together and published as the book, The Making of Herbert Hoover.    In retrospect, it seems like they were a little premature in their analysis but Hoover was already an well-known humanitarian by 1920 (see previous post).

Herbert Hoover and Rose did not work together on the biography, in fact, Rose heard that Hoover tried to “suppress” the book because of the dialogue she included. There are letters to Rose from Hoover’s relatives from that time period but Rose never spoke with Hoover.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder died in 1957 her papers went to Rose.  When Rose died in 1968 both of their   files went to Roger MacBride, Rose’s attorney, business manager and friend.  It was Roger who donated them to the Hoover Library in 1980, 12 years after Rose’s death.  The files include 30 feet of correspondence, diaries, book drafts, and other writings “rich in personal perspective and introspection”.

In the late 1930's Rose and Hoover did become friends and enjoyed a friendship that continued for three decades.  

So, in the end, neither Rose nor Laura picked Hoover’s library as the resting place for the papers that defined their lives, that choice was made by the mysterious Roger Lea MacBride and that story is for tomorrow.

The Real Herbert Hoover

photo from the Kalamazoo Public Library

I always learn something at the library.  That’s why I keep going.   And the more I learn,  the more I want to learn or, as Socrates said, “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know”.

Wasn’t that the truth at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa today.  Just getting to the library was a journey but when I started reading about Hoover’s life and work it blew my mind.

Before today’s ‘aha moment’, whenever I heard Hoover's name I sang the ‘Herbert Hoover’ song from Annie.  Remember?  Annie and Sandy at the hobo camp?
  
"We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover,
you made us what we are today...
today we're living in a shanty,
today we're scrounging for a meal,
today I’m stealing coal for fires,
who knew I could steal?”

I figured the lyrics to a Broadway show probably summed up everything I needed to know about Hoover; he was an unfeeling  President who mishandled the Great Depression and failed the American people.  Right?  

Turns out, Herbert Hoover was a little more complex than his song.  While it’s true that he might not have been the best leader during our country’s greatest financial crisis, he was a great humanitarian, famous and revered for his unrelenting assistance to people caught in the crossfire of WWI.  Not surprisingly, I learned all about Hoover’s heroic side in gallery two, The Humanitarian Years.

• When the war broke out in 1914, 120,000 Americans were literally trapped in Europe.  On August 3rd, Hoover got a call from the US Ambassador in England begging for help.  Hoover rallied his rich buddies and within 24 hours the Savoy Hotel was turned into a distribution center and cafeteria.  Hoover, his friends and the US Government loaned $1.5 million to the stranded travellers.  With the exception of $400, he was paid back every cent and the experience reinforced his faith in the American character.

• The next war related crisis was in Belgium.  Hoover created the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, a $12 million a month endeavor to save Belgians from starvation (thanks to its geography wedged between the Germans and the British Blockade).  He told a friend that his fortune could, "go to hell" and embarked on the great undertaking without pay.  He bought food from around the world, crossed the North Sea more than forty times to try to persuade each side to allow food to reach the victims and taught the Belgians that cornmeal was not just for cattle.  The CRB is estimated to have save 10 million people from starvation.

• Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry, didn’t stop in Belgium.  They went on  to feed millions of starving children in France, founded the European Children's Fund, the National Committee on Food for Small Democracies, the Finnish Relief Fund, the Polish Relief Commission and the Famine Emergency Committee.  Hoover even convinced Congress to spend $20 million to prevent famine in Russia under the new Bolshevik regime.  The exhibit shares a story from a Latvian child who had lived for a year on black bread and crackers. "It was like the sun coming out," she recalled of the Sunday morning she first sampled white rolls. "Finally bread, Hoover's bread. I will never forget. Whenever anyone mentions Hoover, I think white bread."

Hoover was a hero, known around the world for coming to the rescue of the neediest citizens in the world.  
Ambassador Walter Hines Page called Hoover "a simple, modest, energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in heaven."   
In 1920, the New York Times ranked Hoover as one of the ten greatest living Americans.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover’s D.C. neighbor, wrote, "He is certainly a wonder, and I wish we could make him President of the United States.  There could not be a better one."

And if I hadn’t been to the library in West Branch I would have missed the whole story.