Libraries & the Cultural Record

A simple postage stamp commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the National Archives of the United States played a significant role in the long and ultimately successful campaign to return the National Archives agency to independent status within the executive branch. It had lost that status thirty-five years earlier as a result of confusion over the role of an archives in government.

Designed by Michael David Brown and issued in 1984, the stamp utilizes two historical and cultural icons to capture the administrative and cultural missions of the archival service of government. Central on the stamp are profiles of presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (Washington in front of Lincoln, who is wearing his famous [End Page 80] stovepipe hat), men revered and respected in the national culture. Their images suggest the National Archives' dual roles as both the "keeper of the nation's memory"—maintaining records as an administrative service to government officials and citizens alike—and a cultural agency facilitating study and understanding of the American experience.¹ Flanking the profiles are the archives' motto, "What Is Past Is Prologue," the words "National Archive," and the dates 1934–1984.

Before its official creation in 1934 the National Archives was at the center of a debate over its mission. President Herbert Hoover advocated an egalitarian purpose. He saw the proposed National Archives as a repository for documents in which elite as well as mundane history was recorded. All documents were to be housed together in one building, appropriately expressive of the greatness of them all in their unique contributions to the national fabric. Hoover's successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and others in the government felt that two repositories should be constructed: a hall of records to house ordinary federal records and a National Archives building for valuable documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.²

R. D. W. Connor, Roosevelt's appointee as the first archivist of the United States, argued against the hall of records idea, believing it demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a government archives. He emphasized the importance of ordinary records in their often close relationship to the great documents of American history. Connor also worried that were a hall of records established, the National Archives itself would become nothing more than a "mausoleum" rather than the "major research repository widening access to federal archives [and] a force in the government's records preservation practices" he envisioned.³ Further, a hall of records also would allow the creating agencies to retain partial control of their records, severely limiting the power of the archivist over those documents. Ultimately, Connor convinced President Roosevelt to abandon the idea of a hall of records.

During the 1940s the National Archives emerged as a leader in archival innovation, developing new methodologies for professional practices and a records management program for handling the glut of records created in prosecution of the Second World War. An emphasis on streamlining government operations characterized the federal government in the closing years of the 1940s and centered in the work of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch ofthe Government. Led by former President Hoover, the commission in 1949 recommended sweeping the National Archives, the Smithsonian [End Page 81] Institution, and the Fine Arts Commission into a General ServicesAdministration (GSA) agency created to provide the service-and-supply function of the government. Emphasizing the records management activity of the National Archives as central to the service mandate of GSA and perceiving the cultural missions of the Smithsonian Institution and the Fine Arts Commission as being outside it, Congress adopted and the president signed into law the Hoover Commission recommendation that the archives be placed within the GSA. Hearings were held to consider the impact of the...