17 A Temple to Clio: The National Archives Building By Virginia C. Purdy he United States was in its sesquicen­ building in the United States. Frequent fires in tennial year when it provided for ana­ government buildings and, after 1899, pressure tio n a l archives building. At the from the American Historical Association, kept T ceremonial laying of the cornerstone in the idea of an archives buildjng alive. Many plans 1933, Secretary of the Treasury Ogden L. Mills for an archives building were drawn by succes­ saw the previous lack of concern for government sive supervisory architects of the Department of records as "unmistakable evidence of the youth the Treasury, which was responsible for gov­ of our country and of how intent we have been ernment buildings, but Congress could not be on the future rather than the past."' When, in persuaded to enact the legislation necessary to response to President Coolidge's 1926 budget build it. message to Congress, the Commission of Fine Finally, under the leadership of J. Franklin Arts proposed that a national archives be among Jameson, the campaign almost succeeded in 1913 the buildings to make up the Federal Triangle, when Congress authorized the preparation of the Commission's comment had been less tol­ plans for a national archives building to be pat­ erant: "The United States is the only civilized terned after similar buildings in Europe. Unfor­ nation which does not administer its archives tunately, the outbreak of World War 1 and United both for its own protection and also for the pres­ States participation in it aborted that project. Af­ ervation of its own history ."2 ter the war, Jameson found new allies in such A firm commitment to the construction of an patriotic organizations as the American Legion, archives building was the culmination of years which were anxious that records of wars and the of agitation by historians and others, beginning American men who fought in them be preserved with Josiah Quincy in 1810. After a disastrous in a secure and honorable setting. At last, in 1877 fire that destroyed the top floor of the Pa­ 1926, Congress appropriated $6.9 million (later tent Office Building (now the National Portrait increased to $8.5 million) for a national archives Gallery), Montgomery C. Meigs, the quarter­ building to be located somewhere in the Federal master general, recommended construction of a Triangle bounded by Fifteenth and Sixth Streets, cheap, fireproof hall of records and drew plans NW, and Constitution (then B Street) and Penn­ for one, probably the first design for an archives sylvania Avenues.3 From the beginning, it was recognized that the archives would require a rather special build­ Virginia C. Purdy is on the staff of the National Archives ing, different from others in the triangle that and Records Administration. She acknowledge~ the a!';!';i~­ tance of Will.iam Cunliffe of the Special Archives Division were designed essentially as office space for ex­ with this article. ecutive departments. The site finally chosen, be­ 1Construction and Installation, Buildings and Grounds, tween Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW, centered Office of the Director, Building Management and Services on the Eighth Street axis with the Mall, gave it Division, Records of the National Archives, Record Group a prominence over other buildings in the project. 64, National Archives (hereafter RG 64, NA). 2 "National Archives Building," Senate Document No. 332, The site was occupied by the old Center Market, "Washington: The National Capital" by H. P. Caemerer (1932), which had served the City of Washington for Senate Documents, XI : 170-72, 7lst Congress, 3d Session, sixty years, and had been used as a market since transcribed in "The Archives of the United States Govern­ 1802. Razing the market building in 1931 and ment: A Documentary History, 1774- 1934," Percy Scott Flip­ pen, comp., 22: 56. One copy of this unpublished collection of copies of documents, articles, and newspaper clippings 3 Victor Condos, Jr., /. Fra11kli11 fnmesoll a11d the Birth of the in 22 binders is in RG 64, NA. Nntio11al Archives, 1906- 1926 (1981). The National Archives building is an impressive architectural m01wment lo the nation's past. : I ........... .... .......... , J--~ - !&......:...___·~ ..____..j( ,. .. .tl ,. .· ,._____ .,_ -···- i I I j U I .. ":-.!..=:= • Tllis 1879 plan for a /mil of records was pr~red by M.C. Mei8S, tl1e desig11er of tile Pensio11 Buildi11g. " • ·• , r 'l'J 1J.- 11, :- , , AI , ... \ . d·. • ; ~--.r· . ,...--~·--. ,LL- o ~ ~...J. S-F\ ECCJF\ 0 5 · . • . ~ - __. • ).' .. : j ~ , ~,.... , , ~ . ,t\1 •. r .. ... .. ... '" ~ · • ' · ~r,., , , .:::!!: ~- . .. rr • j J . ___...' ' ......" ·· "~····· .. IIOU$lll!. DOt "" Jl 2. ~• • ,. 0011'. - WfMIIf•-.... - This 1883 design for a fireproof lm/1 of records was 011e rcsponst• to n11 1877 fire i11 tlu! Interior Department building. Tire original design for the National Archil•t'S build in~ included a l•isi/1/e roof, but tlris feature was elimiuated at tire request of the Commission of Fine Arts. The Panorama Buildin8 (/eft}, a round structure witlr interitlr murnls of tire IJtlttles of Bull Run, was considered as a JIOssi[l/e lm/1 of records. ;;-Guardian ofH eritage banishing the stalls, trucks, and wagons that air-conditioned stacks were the only safe envi­ had graced the south side of Pennsylvania Av­ ronment for the storage of paper records. The enue for so long was not only a step in the cre­ Bureau of Public Health commented that, while ation of facili ties for the archives, but was also employees would suffer no health hazards from symbolic of the metamorphosis of the area into artificial light and conditioned air, complaints a monumental sector in the nation's capital." might be expected from older employees if the But who knew what an archives building difference in temperature between outside and should be like? Not until 1934, when construc­ inside air ever exceeded fifteen degrees. tion was well under way, did Congress enact Committee members cannily went straight to the National Archives Act creating the National the heart of some of the problems that profes­ Archives Establishment headed by the Archivist sional archivists have dealt with ever since. They of the United States. As a result, there was no sought ways to estimate how much of the paper professional archivist involved in the planning accumulated by the U.S. government would be of the building. President Hoover appointed the worth saving, how much could be destroyed as Advisory Committee for the National Archives "useless papers," and how to manage papers in June 1930 to draw up specifications to guide that required limited retention before being de­ an architect. Louis A. Simon, superintendent of stroyed. Archivists today call those functions the Architectural Division in the Office of the ''appraisal" and "scheduling" of records. In es­ Supervising Architect in the Department of the timating the space and facilities required for per­ Treasury, was chair. Historians were repre­ sonnel, some members assumed that agency sented by Tyler Dennett, historical advisor to the records transferred to the National Archives State Department, and J. Franklin Jameson, then would be accompanied by agency personnel fa­ chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library miliar with the files to service them. (This was of Congress. Brig. Gen. James F. McKinley, E. K. Burlew, and James L. Baity represented the War Department, the Department of the Interior, and the General Accounting Office, respectively. Throughout two Washington summers in the pre-airconditioning era and into the spring of 1932 the advisory committee worked inten­ sively. Simon had been studying requirements for archives buildings since the 1913 act was passed. A designer, he told the 1916 meeting of the American Historical Association's Confer­ ence of Archivists, has "a sense of responsibility to posterity .... A successful plan calls for a directness of treatment entirely free from strained efforts for monumental effects ... Simplicity of conception wi ll make for content!ment] in the archivist and comfort to the user." As he pointed out in a preliminary statement to the committee, they had been asked to plan a building to house an unknown quantity of existing records with room for undeterminable future expansion within a grid of city streets that precluded external ad­ ditions. Therefore, he proposed to allot space according to function in a dense plan, much of which closely parallelled the fi nal blueprint. The committee pondered the fact that such a plan would create spaces that would require artificial light and "conditioned air," since natural light and outside air could only be supplied to the areas with windows on the outside rim of the building. They were relieved when the Bureau of Standards informed them that windowless, 4 Records relating to the operations of the Center Market, 1921- 30, Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Mnrsl!y soil nnd n11 r111der~rowui slrenm forced tlu• COIISimclioll cn·w Record Group 83, National Archives. n lxnvltu i11s11re n stnllle b11ildin.~ . A TEMPLE TO CLI O 21 in fact true of some ea rly accessions .) They foresaw the need for space for the repair, re­ productio n, a nd description of documents and fo r researchers to use the records. They dis­ cussed w he ther parking s pace fo r cars s ho uld be provided. A subcommittee chaired by Den­ ne tt made a survey of existing fed era l records in Was hing to n and reported tha t a building of ten millio n cubic feet would suffice fo r perma nent a rchives fo r sixty-five years. (The actual s tack a rea of the building tha t was cons tructed is a bo ut 1.4 millio n cubic feet.)5 Meanwhile, a rchitect jo hn Russell Po pe was appointed to the board of a rchitectural consult­ a nts fo r the Tria ngle project a nd g iven respon­ sibility for the design of the Natio nal Arch ives Building.