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One of our most important jobs at the Roosevelt Library is to make sure our researchers have access to the Library’s holdings. Our research room is continuously busy with a mix of authors, students, academics, genealogists and interested people searching through our documents. We are always happy to hear about their experiences in our research room and enjoy sharing their stories with others.
Rabbi A. James Rudin has been researching at the FDR Library and wrote about his experience. We hope you will enjoy his recent article in the Washington Post as much as we did. To read Rabbi Rudin’s article, please visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/back-to-the-future/2012/09/19/2df8230a-028f-11e2-9132-f2750cd65f97_story.html
Americans With Disabilities Act
President Roosevelt in his wheelchair on the porch at Top Cottage in Hyde Park, NY with Ruthie Bie and Fala. February 1941.
To commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the National Archives is featuring Presidential records related to disability history on a new web research page. Following that theme, below is a brief description of how FDR’s disability affected the design of his private retreat and of the first Presidential Library.
The FDR Library Building
The FDR Library was conceived and built under President Roosevelt’s direction during 1939-41 on 16 acres of land in Hyde Park, New York. Roosevelt decided that a dedicated facility was needed to house the vast quantity of historical papers, books, and memorabilia he had accumulated during a lifetime of public service and private collecting.
FDR considered himself to be an amateur architect, and was intimately involved in the design of the Library. He was particularly fond of the Hudson Valley Dutch Colonial style of architecture, and the Library was built in this fashion. The building provided not only museum space for visitors and a formal office for FDR but also storage areas for FDR’s vast collections.
Because a 1921 attack of polio had left Roosevelt paralyzed from the waist down, FDR primarily used personally-designed wheelchairs for daily mobility. Since he intended to personally and regularly use the vast collection of papers and manuscripts housed in the archives at the Library, he made sure the storage area aisles were built wide enough to accommodate his wheelchair. He also personally designed the document storage boxes initially used to house his papers. To enable his own lap-top style reading while in the storage areas, a special box type was created that could lie flat on the shelf, open in a clam-shell fashion, and act as a sort of paper tray. For preservation purposes, these boxes have since been replaced with newer, acid-free archival containers, but FDR’s original shelving remains in place in many parts of the Library storage areas.
An archivist at work in the FDR Library archival stacks, circa 1950s. The document boxes were designed by FDR.
Historic view of FDR Library archival stacks, featuring the original document boxes. FDR’s carefully arranged shelving remains in place in some areas of the Library today.
Top Cottage
Architectural design to accommodate FDR’s disability is also seen at Top Cottage, the Dutch Colonial style retreat FDR built for himself in 1938. FDR played a large role in the design of the building, which features a number of accommodations for FDR’s wheelchair. There are no steps to the first floor of the cottage, and a natural earthen ramp was built off the porch to provide access. Within the cottage, there are no thresholds on any of the doorways that might prohibit FDR from easily accessing any of the rooms, and all of the windows inside were built lower to the ground to give FDR clear views of the outside.
Architect’s drawing of Top Cottage exterior
Top Cottage blueprint with FDR’s handwritten notations
View of the Top Cottage drawing room interior, 1945
Find more information about about FDR and polio on our Library’s official website.
Bob Clark
Why should anyone care who works at the Roosevelt Library, you might ask? Well, it’s because we all view ourselves as just the most recent caretakers of the institution that FDR created and established. It was FDR’s dream that the Roosevelt Library would house the papers, records, and memorabilia of his life and presidency so that Americans of later generations could gain in judgment for the future. The Roosevelt Library itself is part of FDR’s legacy, and we all take our responsibilities very seriously. So I think it’s important for the people who pay our salaries—you the taxpayers—to know who we are and what we do here.
I received my undergraduate and Master’s degrees in history at Texas Tech University. As a starving, penny-less student, I began working in Tech’s special collections library, the Southwest Collection. I’ll never forget sitting at the partner desk in the basement at the Southwest Collection going through my first box of completely unorganized archival materials that had been rescued from a woman’s attic in Lubbock. I fell in love with archival work.
But then I took an interesting turn. I went to law school and practiced law for seven years. While the law fascinated me, private practice did not. So with the turn of the millennium in January 2001, I asked myself “when were you happiest?” The answer: when I was an archivist. Soon, an archivist position opened up at the Roosevelt Library, and I moved to Hyde Park. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I was named Supervisory Archivist in February 2005.
Today, I oversee the care of the Roosevelt Library’s 17 million pages of manuscript materials, including the papers of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt; printed materials, including FDR’s personal book collection of 22,000 volumes; and the audio-visual and photographic collections totaling some 150,000 items. I also manage our research operations, which hosts nearly 1,500 on-site researchers a year and responds to over 3,500 research requests that come in annually from all over the world. All this is done with one of the smallest (six people)—yet mightiest—archives staffs in the presidential libraries system.
The accomplishment of which I am most proud is that at the beginning of the renovation we managed to completely vacate the Library without ever closing our doors to research, even for one day. The experience proved that archival theories and practices work on any scale—whether organizing that box on the desk at the Southwest Collection in 1986, or moving all of the collections and research operations out of the Roosevelt Library in 2010.
I will always be grateful for the professional and personal satisfaction that the Roosevelt Library gives me. I work with some of the best and most conscientious public servants in government today. And every day, I get to come to work and be inspired by two of the greatest figures of the Twentieth Century, if not all time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Last week 27 people traveled from all over the country, and even across the Atlantic Ocean, to visit the FDR Library’s research room. They came to interact with the estimated 17 million pages of primary source materials housed here within nearly 400 separate manuscript collections related to the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II.
A view of the FDR Library research room on Tuesday, June 26, 2012.
FDR strongly believed that the records of government — those created by presidents, civil servants, and citizens alike — should be preserved, organized, and kept open for future generations. In developing this Library, he envisioned an institution both an archives and museum, to become a center for the study of the entire Roosevelt era.
In 1939 as plans for the Library were still being drawn, Roosevelt said of his voluminous papers:
I have destroyed practically nothing. As a result, we have a mine for which future historians will curse as well as praise me. It is a mine which will need to have the dross sifted from the gold.
He went on to say that neither he nor any scholar of his age could do that “sifting” task appropriately. Instead, we:
[…]must wait for that dim, distant period […] when the definitive history of this particular era will come to be written.
Today’s generations of researchers are some of the very people FDR sought to reach.
Research topics on Tuesday included education policy analysis; a study of the “Clergy Letters” detailing New Deal programs in rural communities; and Harry Hopkins’ wartime correspondence.
Vision for the Future of Democracy
71 years ago the Nation’s first Presidential Library opened its doors to researchers and museum visitors. In June of 1941 the threat of world war loomed heavily over the opening day proceedings. In his dedication address FDR said:
And this latest addition to the archives of America is dedicated at a moment when government of the people by themselves is being attacked everywhere. It is, therefore, proof—if any proof is needed—that our confidence in the future of democracy has not diminished in this Nation and will not diminish.
There are now 13 Presidential Libraries within the National Archives and Records Administration, including one for every U.S. President since FDR.
Above: Watch a newsreel reporting on the Library opening
For more information:
Sarah Malcolm
My name is Sarah and I am the Archives Specialist here at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. My story at the Library begins back in 2007 when I was a summer intern in the archives. I didn’t know much about what an archive was nor had any clue about what an archivist did, but I loved history and wanted to try something a little bit different. That summer I fell in love with archives and with the Roosevelts. I went to graduate school and received my Masters in Library and Information Science in 2009 and was hired by the Library in 2010.
You may be wondering what exactly an archives specialist does, and the answer to that is many different things. As a member of the archival staff I provide reference service in our research room and answer questions we receive through e-mail. I copy documents that researchers request and retrieve materials from our storage rooms when requested. I am also able to provide outreach through digitizing documents and our social media efforts.
One of the greatest things I find about working in archive is being able to work with history every day. Every document and photograph in our collection has its own story to tell, something that makes it unique. Telling those stories and sharing our collections with people is important to me and social media provides an outlet for doing just that.
When I was in school, I never thought I would be spending time at work blogging, or on Facebook and Twitter. However, social media is an important part of what I do here at the Library. As part of our social media team I am responsible for finding content to write about and moderating our different sites. Working on social media projects has given me a different perspective on our collections and I’ve been able to learn so many great things. Thanks to our blog I’ve learned what FDR would have done after the presidency, that he flew a blimp in 1918 and that fabric swatches for gowns can be found in Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers.
I do want to say thank you to you our readers. Thank you for continuing to follow all of our social media sites and for the feedback that you give us. Being able to help bring the treasures of the Roosevelt Library to all of you through social media is a great joy for me. I also want to say thank you to all of my colleagues who play a part in our social media efforts. Without the content you all provide, we never would have gotten as far as we have.
So thank you all and stay tuned for more stories of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
In Roosevelt History 