Prologue: Pieces of History

Happy American Archives Month! Throughout October, we’re running a series of “spotlights” on the many locations that make up the National Archives. You can visit the exhibits or use the research rooms.

The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa, has an unusual location. It is within the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, a 187-acre park administered by the National Park Service. The location is meant to preserve the wildlife and nature in the site, and Quaker community in which Hoover grew up.

Permanent exhibitions are organized chronologically in a series of galleries that showcase Hoover’s fascinating life and accomplishments. They flow from Hoover’s orphaned boyhood and youth in Iowa, to his success as a global businessman, to his humanitarian efforts during World War I. There is a section that discusses the enormous cultural and technological changes in the Roaring Twenties, which then moves into Hoover’s time as Secretary of Commerce in the same decade, his presidential campaign and election, his role in the Great Depression, and his post-presidential life and work. There is also a gallery dedicated to Lou Henry Hoover and her role as First Lady.

In addition to Hoover’s own papers and mementos, the library also contains the documentary legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Lane wrote the first biography about Hoover, a work which led to their friendship. The papers track her impressive career as a journalist around the world and her work as a publicist during World War I. They also reveal her role in editing her mother’s “Little House on the Prairie,” as well as the rest of the series.

 

Educators and parents may want to check out some of the online resources for students and teachers. There are also family-friendly events at least once a month.

Visit the Library and Museum, and like them on Facebook!

Today’s post was written by Pamela Loos-Noji, a volunteer with the Civil War Widows Pension Project. The National Archives holds 1.28 million case files of pension applications from family members of deceased Civil War Union soldiers. A team of more than 60 volunteers, led by National Archives staff, is digitizing the files and placing them online. Pamela will be giving a talk on “The Real Widows of the Pension Office” on October 16 and 18.

The reason I decided to volunteer was an article written by a friend of mine about her experience working with the Civil War Widows Pension Project. She wove a compelling story of the person at the center of her file and brought the relationship between a mother and her soldier son to life in a way that surprised me. I was hooked. I, too, wanted to find stories, have people from the past speak to me of their lives, and to share what I learned.

The years after the Civil War were right in the middle of the Victorian era. In my mind, Victorians were uptight, straight-laced people who did not express strong feelings and who acted in a very proper manner. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

In fact, I learned a lesson I thought I’d already learned about history. People are the same as they’ve always been. In fact, the stories in the widows’ pensions run the gamut from love, hate, sex, incest, envy, cruelty, and abandonment to misguided kindness and self-sacrifice. Not too different from the headlines found in today’s more tabloid-like newspapers. Couples divorced, men beat their wives and cheated on them, and even in one case, killed the inconvenient husband of his lover. And, as today, good people take up fewer column inches.

I first fell in love with Henrietta Frances Kane (WC 49966), who was left a widow at age 21 with two children  in Ellsworth, ME, in 1862. She received a pension and moved to Boston in about 1871. Perhaps she made a few mistakes in her choice of the people she associated with, and she did have an illegitimate son in 1877, rumored to be the child of a fairly well-known baseball player of the day, James O’Rourke. But rather than censure her, I felt as if I wanted to champion her cause.

Her real troubles began in the late 1880s, when her enemies tried to take away her pension. They accused her of running a bawdy house, of having an illegitimate child (unfortunately true), and of “keeping company” with men who sometimes paid her bills. This kind of attack was possible because of the new pension law of 1882 that attempted to crack down on fraud, specifically the issue of women continuing to draw pension money while living with men who were to all intents and purposes husbands—though without benefit of civil or church ceremony.

If a widow remarried, she was not supposed to keep her pension because she now had someone to take care of her. Her primary accuser, Flora Bartlett, was angry because a friend of Henrietta’s had testified against Flora in an attempt to take away Flora’s Navy Widow’s pension!

Henrietta put up a pretty good defense in front of the special examiner who took the depositions about her case.  But Flora made a stronger one.  Henrietta’s pension was stopped. A few years later, Henrietta tried to reopen her case with new testimony from the washerwoman who admitted that her previous testimony had been coerced and not the truth. But, to no avail. Henrietta never did get her pension back.

Though temporarily triumphant, a few years later Flora had her pension stopped, when her sailor husband (who was in fact not dead) came back to find her drawing a pension on his service. He was so angry that he marched into the pension office and demanded that they not give her a penny more. Well, he used more colorful language: he “wanted to expose a d——d swindle on the government.”

However, if remaking a life is the best revenge, Henrietta triumphed in the end.

At first, it must have been difficult without the income from the pension, but it seems she took it in stride. She went back to her old profession as a milliner and dressmaker for a while, and then reinvented herself as an “electric physician.” Henrietta was riding a new trend popularized by Emma Britten, who thought that the electric current from batteries could cure illness. You have to hand it to Henrietta. She was nothing if not inventive in looking for ways to support herself and her son.

Her son, Harry, stayed with her until the end, moving them out to the suburbs in about 1906. A few months after Henrietta’s death in 1908, he married. Her final triumph was a son who had moved to the suburbs, had a job as a salesman, and had begun his own life with a young wife—in the end, the American dream!

This was quite a soap opera, and since much of the information came from depositions, some of the real words of the persons involved are passed down to us. It is possible to get a sense of a person’s way of speaking and his or her grasp of English grammar from the transcribed responses. Some very colorful language also brings these people to life.

For me the stories start here, but then additional research fills in details about the people’s lives before and after the specific time covered in the pension file itself.  That research places the people into the larger world of the historical period.  But it is the information of the individual lives in the files that bring that history alive.  I feel now that I “know” Henrietta and the people around her, and believe I’m the better for knowing her story of triumph in adversity.

Yes, I started out with a love of history, but this kind of intimate reconstruction of an individual life is something even historians don’t find everyday. To learn about specific events, told in the words of someone long dead, thrills me. And that it is women’s lives we’re talking about is even more special, as they often are sidelined in history, if only because it is believed that they left fewer documents. Well, the widows pension files redress that wrong by making these women’s lives available today, if we take care to listen.

It’s a puzzle to me why Hollywood has to do film series and remakes of fairly recent, well-done films as if there were no new stories to tell. If producers would look to history, they wouldn’t even have to make stuff up. There are stories already there to tell. Stories that speak in many ways to the human experience, that are instructive, and sometimes are just plain fun.

You can hear more colorful stories of “The Real Widows of the Pension Office” from Pamela on October 16 and 18 at the National Archives.

Watch the volunteers at work in our Inside the Vaults videos short.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, was the first Presidential library built in the United States. President Roosevelt led its conception and building, and he is the only President to have used his library while in office.

FDR decided to build the library in order to preserve the documents he had written and collected throughout his life. Before Roosevelt, Presidential papers were considered the property of the President. The documents were taken from the White House by the President when he left office and were later sold, scattered, or kept privately within families. Some Presidential records eventually landed in the Library of Congress, but not many, to the frustration of historians. The Roosevelt Library and all succeeding Presidential Libraries preserve Presidential papers for the public and educate the public about the past. The public is welcome to use the research rooms at all 13 Presidential Libraries.

But the library doesn’t only hold President Roosevelt’s official papers.

While the library undergoes a major renovation to bring its infrastructure up to the Archives’ preservation standards, the museum is presenting the largest photography exhibit ever assembled on the lives of the Roosevelts. “The Roosevelts: Public Figures, Private Lives” includes nearly 1,000 images of their childhoods, family life, and political careers, as well as candid film shot by the Roosevelt family and audio recordings of Eleanor speaking about her family life.

Fans of Eleanor Roosevelt will be interested in the South Wing of the library, where her papers are stored, and where there is a gallery showcasing her life and considerable accomplishments.

For teachers, the library has many developed many online and on-site trainings and resources, such as curriculum guides for topics of the Roosevelt era, a Day by Day interactive timeline of Roosevelt’s Presidency, and professional development workshops. Learn more here.

The library also holds the Tully Archive, a collection of FDR-related papers and memorabilia kept by Grace Tully—the President’s last personal secretary—and in private hands until 2010. The collection includes many of Roosevelt’s, Tully’s, and secretary Marguerite “Missy” LeHand’s private and personal documents, including a letter from Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd to Grace Tully arranging for portraitist Elizabeth Shoumatoff to paint the President. While being painted, Roosevelt suffered a major cerebral hemorrhage and died a few hours later, making the painting forever “The Unfinished Portrait.” The letter suggests that Tully played a key role in facilitating Roosevelt’s meetings with Rutherfurd, with whom he had a brief affair and continued to see occasionally throughout his life. You can learn more about the collection in this video or on the library’s website.

An impressive number of the documents in the library are also online. See what you can find on the website, visit the library in Hyde Park, read the blog, like its Facebook page, and follow it on Twitter!

Today’s guest post comes from Miriam Vincent, staff attorney at the Federal Register.

The founding fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. However, the term “electoral college” does not appear in the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment refer to “electors,” but not to the “electoral college.” —from the Electoral College website run by the Office of the Federal Register

Why do we have the Electoral College? There was a concern that even qualified citizens (generally white, male landowners) wouldn’t have the information necessary to make a truly informed decision.  Alexander Hamilton argued in favor of an Electoral College in Federalist Paper No. 68, with an opposing view coming from an anonymous source in Federalist Paper No. 72. (You can find both online.) Our Founding Fathers decided to give the States the authority to appoint educated, well-read electors to vote on behalf of their citizens.

As the Constitution makes clear, the States elect the President and Vice President; individuals don’t.

The Modern Day Electoral College: After only a few years, it became clear that that electing a President and Vice President from different political parties didn’t work as well in practice as it did in theory. In 1804, the 12th Amendment was ratified, which meant that the second-place Presidential finisher didn’t end up as the Vice President.

The states also decided to select electors based on the popular vote of the state’s residents and not based on what its legislature wanted. So, we now elect the electors, and they vote for President and for Vice President. Remember, your vote matters when it comes to choosing the electors from your state. And, almost all electors have voted for the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates they were supposed to.

You can learn more about the Electoral College by visiting our website. We have a new video (embedded below) that explains how the votes actually get counted.

Later this month we’ll have interactive and historical Electoral College maps. After the general election on November 6, we’ll post the actual Certificates of Ascertainment and Vote after we get them from the states.

You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter (@ElectoralCollge) for the latest updates.

 

Few of us will ever get to eat off of White House china, but here’s a chance to see how past Presidents dined.

White House china collector Set Momjian will be speaking at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum on October 6 at 2 p.m. about some of his pieces currently on display in the exhibit “Dining with the President.”

Momjian is well known for having the largest collection of White House china outside of the White House. He has pieces from every Presidential collection, which he acquired in a variety of ways.

A retired Ford Motor Company executive, Momjian served as a representative to the United Nations under the Carter administration. He would later serve as Presidential adviser to the past five administrations, starting with the Johnson administration. He has enjoyed personal friendships with Presidents and First Ladies.

But Momjian didn’t set out to be a collector of White House china. He began collecting china by accident in the 1950s, when dealers included pieces of china along with the Presidential letters and documents he was collecting. As his collection of porcelain pieces grew, he came to appreciate the historical significance and beauty of each piece. Eventually, he began to seek out the personal china patterns of First Ladies as well.

Momjian isn’t just a collector of items; he’s a collector of stories. For each plate in his collection, Momjian has an intricate tale about its origin and the public’s reaction. He will be sharing many colorful stories about his collections and his personal experiences with the Presidents and First Ladies.

He recently explained why Presidential china is so fascinating. “White House china shows the personal style of each First Lady,” he said. “They are the only items that remain in the White House to give us a sense of their tastes and the times in which they lived.”

If you’re in the West Branch, IO, area on Saturday and have an interest in Presidential dining sets, you won’t want to miss this event! The conversation in the auditorium is free, but regular admission will be charged to go through the museum galleries.