Democracy Requires a Past
To a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.
Federalist Papers No. 63
In 1941, at the dedication of his presidential library, Franklin D. Roosevelt clearly articulated why the nation’s archives and presidential-library system are so vital to our democracy.
“To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things,” he said.
“It must believe in the past.
“It must believe in the future.
“It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”
Unfortunately, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and presidential libraries, both of which it oversees, are in serious jeopardy. The U.S. Senate has just held hearings on overturning President George W. Bush’s executive order 13233, issued in 2001, which gave presidents, former presidents, their heirs or designees, and former vice presidents broad authority to withhold or delay the release of their records. Despite the fact the House of Representatives passed legislation to revoke the order, the Senate has not yet been able to bring a similar bill to the floor. That is an outrage.
At the same time, there is also a continuing controversy over millions of White House e-mail messages that are missing or have been destroyed. Add to that the Bush administration’s request for zero funds, for the fourth year in a row, for the historical-records commission, which assists with preserving records and supporting editing projects; the need for additional staff members and capital repairs, not only at presidential libraries but throughout the National Archives; the need to digitize collections; problems in the archive’s declassification program — and we clearly have a crisis.
It is in the nature of the political process of governments that much of what we believe about contemporary decisions will be revealed by historical research to have been incorrect, or at best partially correct. And I submit that our democracy cannot remain robust without the constant historical auditing of our government’s behavior.
Just as the press is the Fourth Estate protecting our democracy, history is its Fifth Estate, equally essential. Ominously, the current administration does not appear to share Roosevelt’s view that our way of life depends on access to our history.
Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, presidential records were public property to be released to historians and the public 12 years after the end of an administration. President Bush’s executive order, however, is a frontal assault on the principle of open government that sustains our democracy.
The president and vice president are public servants, elected to office to serve our nation — not as dictators, not as they define their service, but as our laws, traditions, and institutions have defined them.
After the tenures of officials have expired, it is the public’s right to know, in a timely manner, how they fulfilled their responsibilities. Their actions are not a privileged secret that they and their families have the right to control. That is how dictatorships operate. That is how totalitarian societies function. That is a certain recipe for corruption.
At a recent hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on completion of the editing and digitizing of the Founding Fathers Papers, which receive support from the historical-records commission, the historian David McCullough said that “you can tell a lot about a society by how it spends its money. Here is our chance, and it’s long overdue, to show what we care about.”
We join him in urging Congress to reject the president’s zero-funding proposal for the commission, and to finance it at the fully authorized level — $10-million for its national grants program and an additional $2-million for staffing and related program administration. We urge Congress to follow the example of the Clinton administration when some of its e-mail messages were discovered missing: Require the White House’s Office of Administration to absorb the cost of recovery. We call on Congress to provide the resources that the National Archives needs. And We plead with the Senate to overturn President Bush’s executive order. In short, We ask Congress to be stalwart stewards of America’s past.
Martin J. Sherwin is a professor of history at George Mason University. With his co-author Kai Bird, he won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (A.A. Knopf, 2005). Lee White is executive director of the National Coalition for History.
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