America is losing its memory. The National Archives and Records Administration is in a budget crisis. More than a resource for historians or museum of founding documents, NARA stands at the heart of American democracy. It keeps the accounts of our struggles and triumphs, allows the people to learn what their government has done and is doing, and maintains records that fill in family histories. Genealogy researchers depend on it, as do journalists filing Freedom of Information Act requests. If Congress doesn’t save it, we all will suffer.
The National Archives tells us who we are, at our best and our worst. In its holdings, biographer Jonathan Eig found a letter written by the imprisoned Al Capone, apologizing for bringing shame on his family. I discovered an assistant provost marshal’s report, recommending the banishment of Frank and Jesse James’s parents from Missouri during the Civil War; it cited the brothers’ participation in atrocities as Confederate guerrillas with the full support of their mother, “one of the worst women in this state.” Journalist and author David Maraniss uncovered a statement from his own father in the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And researchers continue to find gems in the Richard M. Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson tapes.
An encounter with a record at NARA can be profound, even when its content is well known. When poring through the contentious argument over whether Theodore Roosevelt deserved a Medal of Honor for service in the Spanish-American War, I came across the original recommendation, written on a torn scrap of paper by Leonard Wood while in the trenches outside Santiago, Cuba. It overwhelmed me. The preservation of physical documents, even in our digital age, remains an essential mission.
