I was surprised last week to learn that plans for the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago have run into local opposition.
The proposed library/museum/think-tank design, a sprawling campus in Jackson Park featuring a giant monolith and mammoth parking garage, has been criticized by South Side activists for intruding on the park space and overwhelming the neighborhood. The center is a joint project of the Obama Foundation and the nearby University of Chicago, where Obama once taught. Now, more than a hundred faculty members there have signed a petition complaining that the complex “will soon become an object-lesson in the mistakes of the past,” and that among other things, the parking garage is “socially regressive” since it “privileges cars and those who can afford them.”
The proposed Library for President Barack Obama
On the one hand, I was surprised by this because Barack Obama is a local hero in Chicago, and if any president enjoys sacred status in the academy, it is he. No fewer than four institutions of higher learning had bid for the privilege of hosting the Obama center. By contrast, in the 1970s, when poor Richard Nixon sought a home for his archives, the faculty at his alma mater (Duke Law School) made it clear that the Nixon papers were not welcome there.
On the other hand, I should not have been surprised. Along with the imperial presidency itself, the growth and grandeur of presidential libraries/museums over the decades has been relentless, and not without controversy. Even the archival shrine to the martyred John F. Kennedy ran into NIMBY complaints in Cambridge, Mass., and had to be exiled from its planned location on the Harvard campus to a distant peninsula on Boston Harbor. One-term presidents now generate more papers and objects than a century of their historic predecessors, and in size and volume, many of the structures themselves resemble the Egyptian pyramids.
Presidential libraries, by the way, are a modern invention. Until the middle of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure, papers (both official and unofficial) tended to accompany their presidents into retirement—and in some cases oblivion—or, if the president thought of it, to make their way to the Library of Congress. Theodore Roosevelt, class of 1880, left his papers to Harvard.
In 1939-40, TR’s distant cousin FDR designed and built a comparatively modest, two-story library-archives on the grounds of his family’s estate in the Hudson Valley, all of which was deeded to the federal government upon his death. The National Park Service operates the Roosevelt house and grounds, and since passage of the 1955 Presidential Libraries Act, the National Archives has administered the library and all its successors. (In the 1950s Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt’s only living predecessor, commissioned a similarly low-key establishment at his birthplace in rural Iowa.)
From the standpoint of history, of course, this is as it should be. Official government documents should never have been regarded as private property; library staffs and resources are a blessing to scholars and students; the exhibits, and occasional homes and birthplaces, are magnets to visitors. In a nation routinely accused of ignoring its past, presidential libraries have much to teach us, good and bad.
They are significant for other reasons as well. We’re a secular society, and in the absence of saints’ relics and places of religious pilgrimage, the presidential libraries, with their personal artifacts, historic documents, and approved mythology, combine good citizenship with cultural needs. They are also uniquely American. With the possible exceptions of Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, there are no comparable reposi-tories for the private papers and furnishings of the British prime ministers. For that matter, you can stare in wonder at JFK’s rocking chair or FDR’s cluttered desktop, but in Moscow, the main remnant of Lenin on public display is his corpse.
The libraries are also redolent of their namesakes and times. The design of Roosevelt’s library has a kind of genteel amateurism about it; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s complex is a testament to heroism and humility. Nixon’s library was bogged down for years in legal controversy over the status of his White House tapes and so was initially built and administered with private funds. Jimmy Carter, involuntarily retired from the White House at 56, began a new tradition by combining his presidential library with a separate institution (the Carter Center) intended to prolong his public career.
And as Obama is discovering, design and architecture are part of the legacy. The Eisenhower and Truman libraries have an austere neoclassical appearance. Two of the three presidents of the high Brutalist era (Kennedy, Johnson) are enshrined in forbidding bunkers, looming ominously over bare terrain; the Nixon library, by contrast, is considerably more accessible. Recent structures, including the Ford, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush I and II libraries have sought, with varying degrees of success, to integrate themselves into the landscape.
By contrast, the planned Obama Presidential Center is a Brutalist throwback: a 20-acre concrete theme park (and athletic center!) in a low-rise neighborhood, anchored by a tall, misshapen, high-rise cube-tower containing exhibition and meeting spaces. Obama’s papers have all been digitized for online access; the original documents will remain in a federal warehouse.
In that sense, Obama’s center (as currently constituted) is the culmination of dubious trends in the concept: a monument not to history or scholarship, but to Barack Obama, destined to swamp its surroundings. Perhaps that’s what the faculty petition meant by “an object-lesson in mistakes of the past.” Community organizers have their work cut out for them.
