Apr 22, 2007 - 04:10:31 CDT
Here's a big dream for North Dakota.What do Abilene, Kan., Independence, Mo., Grand Rapids, Mich., and West Branch, Iowa, have in common? They are relatively small and out-of-the-way places that serve as the home to the presidential libraries of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Gerald R. Ford, and Herbert W. Hoover.
What if western North Dakota became the home of a National Theodore Roosevelt Center that also served as a kind of virtual Roosevelt Presidential Library?
If Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay on Long Island in New York is Theodore Roosevelt's first home and family headquarters, his second home can be no other than the Badlands of North Dakota. While serving as president, Roosevelt told Sen. Albert Fall, of New Mexico, that if he could only keep one life experience in his memory and all other memories would have to evaporate forever, he would "take the memory of my life on the ranch with its experiences close to nature and among the men who lived nearest her." Roosevelt really meant it when he said in 1910 that he would never have become president of the United States were it not for the time he spent as a cowboy and rancher in western North Dakota.
Where should a National Roosevelt Center be built: Manhattan, where he was born on Oct. 27, 1858? Boston, where he attended college (1876-80), Long Island, where he built his sprawling manly family home? Washington, D.C., where he lived off and on for 15 years?
What do all these places have in common? Congested, exceedingly expensive, surrounded by countless other monuments, centers, libraries and historical sites, presidents, and - above all - they are not the American West, the factor without which the life of Theodore Roosevelt makes no sense.
The National Roosevelt Center belongs in the Badlands of North Dakota, where the frail, uncertain, class-conscious New York dude, 25 years old, was born again as a man of the American West, America's foremost advocate for the strenuous life, the champion of the common man and woman, and the greatest conservationist of all American presidents.
Where do you think Roosevelt would want his presidential library to be built?
We all know the answer to this question.
Where would America's first cowboy president wish for his memory to be conserved and celebrated? Of all the places a Roosevelt center might be built, which would guarantee that Roosevelt would be remembered forever precisely as he defined himself. In Dickinson on July 4, 1886, Roosevelt said, "I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner; I am proud, indeed, to be considered one of yourselves."
Nowadays a former president's papers go his private presidential library, where they are curated by the National Archives of the United States. But presidential libraries are a relatively recent phenomenon, and presidents before Hoover (1929-1933) languish in a kind of commemorative and archival limbo. There have been some efforts recently to create modified presidential centers for Thomas Jefferson near Monticello, Woodrow Wilson at Staunton, Va, and (more spectacularly) the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum at Springfield, Ill.
If any former president deserves a serious library and research center, it is Roosevelt, who was the writingest president in American history (155,000 letters, more than 35 books, 465 reels of microfilm at the Library of Congress alone). Roosevelt was one of the most intellectually gifted presidents in American history, and arguably the best prepared for the burdens of high office. His presidency was one of the handful of pivotal ones in American history. He essentially invented the modern imperial presidency, and led the people of the United States, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. In other words, while there may not be that much to study in the presidencies of Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes or Millard Fillmore, Roosevelt represents a motherlode of historical possibility.
Until very recently, the idea of a Roosevelt presidential library was simply a logical impossibility, since the vast majority of his papers are deposited at the Library of Congress and the Houghton Library at Harvard, and those institutions would not be willing to hand them over to a new institution. But now, thanks to the digital and information revolution, it will be possible to obtain high-resolution, searchable, digital copies of almost everything associated with Roosevelt and provide that digital treasury to schoolchildren, college students, scholars, tourists and curious citizens. Think of it: in many ways a digital Roosevelt library will be better than the old low-tech ones. Everyone will have a higher-quality experience with the Roosevelt papers in Dakota (or remotely, via computer) than they could ever have at Harvard or the Library of Congress, because Roosevelt will be the sole mission of the North Dakota center, whereas at those other institutions Roosevelt is just one of literally thousands of research subjects.
Recent presidential libraries have tended toward a distasteful opulence and egocentrism. President Clinton did not so much build himself a library as a mausoleum. His presidential library cost an obscene $165 million, the largest private-sector construction project in the history of Little Rock, Ark. Not to be out-idolized, President Bush announced not long ago that he intends to raise approximately $500 million for his library in Texas. That's a heap of money for a presidency - to put it very politely - that is not likely to achieve Rushmore stature in the nation's collective historical memory.
Gigantism and grandeur are not what North Dakota's Roosevelt admirers have in mind. Imagine an impressive, but much more modest, National Theodore Roosevelt Center in western North Dakota, consisting of a museum, interpretive center, auditorium, media studio and "virtual" presidential library. The cost would be somewhere between $10 million and $20 million.
As with most presidential libraries, one of the attractions would be a recreation of a key Roosevelt edifice. Full-scale replicas of the Oval Office have been built at the Carter, Clinton and Reagan libraries, for example. Tourists love them. Roosevelt was president before the creation of the Oval Office (first version 1909), but he did play a key role in moving the main presidential offices from the White House proper to the West Wing. It would be possible to recreate his presidential office at the National Roosevelt Center in western North Dakota, or - even better - to recreate the 60-foot-by-30-foot Elkhorn Ranch house that he had built for himself on the west bank of the Little Missouri River in 1884. (The recreation would not be located at the Elkhorn Ranch site, which the National Park Service manages for solemnity and the pristine natural setting, not in homage to the Roosevelt buildings, which have long since disappeared).
President Lee Vickers of Dickinson State University has already begun the process of determining whether a National Roosevelt Center is feasible. He has met several times with North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan (encouraging and cautiously optimistic), and the Librarian of Congress James Billington (extremely encouraging), and members of the DSU staff have met with foundations and government funding agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities. If the seed money can be found (approximately $500,000), all of the Roosevelt papers at the Library of Congress can be digitized and made available to the world. From that sensible beginning, the rest would follow over the course of five to 10 years.
A National Roosevelt Center would bring thousands of tourists to western North Dakota. It would immediately become one of the premier cultural institutions of the northern Great Plains. It would be an economic engine for the least populated and least prosperous region of North Dakota. It would confer national, even international, prestige on North Dakota. It would take Medora and Theodore Roosevelt National Park to the next level.
And by godfrey how it would it please TR.
We need to do this. It's the kind of thing a state with a huge budget surplus and an uncertain future ought to invest in. And if we don't do it, and soon, one of those more predictable places will do it, and Roosevelt will be lost forever to the East Coast, which was not his soul's true home.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State Univesity. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
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