When Richard Freeland, an emeritus distinguished professor of history at Northeastern University, was doing research in the late 1960s for a book on President Harry Truman, he frequently made use of the former president’s library.
Low-slung, modest in design and scale, and tucked away on a hill overlooking the Kansas City skyline in Independence, Missouri, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum is a repository for everything that could be recorded and preserved during Truman’s presidency. That included presidential papers, correspondence, memoranda, policy drafts and meeting notes, photographs and audio recordings, even the odd glimpse into private feuds and other personal dramas, such as with a Washington Post writer who was critical of Truman’s daughter’s musical performances.
For Freeland, who was looking to document how the Truman administration’s early Cold War policies contributed to McCarthyism, the library was an indispensable resource.
“So far as I could tell, I had access to anything I wanted,” Freeland told Northeastern Global News.
That was more than 60 years ago. But, more than a dozen presidents later, as the Obama Presidential Center prepares to open on June 19 and with Donald Trump proposing a site in downtown Miami for his future library, experts say the concept of these institutions as primarily archival repositories has radically shifted. Such places are now widely seen as vehicles for legacy-branding, commemoration and even architectural grandeur, the experts say.
It raises the question of what purpose a presidential library is supposed to serve.
“I think we’re starting to see a trend toward more pretentious structures and self-glorification,” Freeland said. “The question becomes: what will that mean for historical memory?”
The modern library system
Truman’s was the first library built under the auspices of the 1955 Presidential Libraries Act, which established the private funding and public maintenance structure for the museum-style archives. Prior to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who believed that presidential records ought to be part of the national heritage, such documents were not systematically preserved and were often burned, discarded or otherwise lost to history, experts say.
Instead, the 1955 act envisioned a set of institutions that functioned primarily as archives and research libraries rather than monuments to their namesakes. The act also encouraged other leaders to preserve their papers and “historical materials” for public use once they were out of office.
“It was just basically understood that they were property of the president,” said Ted Miller, a teaching professor of history at Northeastern University, who said that the concept of a presidential library is still “fairly new in the American experience.”
But in the digital age, the debate over whether a president’s records are private or public takes on a new dimension when the records themselves are scattered across platforms and other private channels, blurring the line between personal correspondence and government business, experts say.
That could complicate how future libraries classify and preserve scholarly material.
“Historians are going to have a much more difficult time understanding the past because it’s digital — it’s not analog,” Miller said. “You won’t have mimeographed white papers or early drafts of important speeches. Today, what do we have? We’re really just talking about email.”
The digital shift
When so much public decision-making today leaves a digital trail rather than a paper one, not only are presidential libraries as archival institutions less central for purposes of research than they once were, but they’ve tilted somewhat unsurprisingly away from scholarship toward legacy-building, branding and even revisionism, historians say.
“The presidential libraries have served a useful purpose with respect to paper records and artifacts,” said Martin Blatt, who taught in and directed the public history program at Northeastern.
But, he noted, the duality at the heart of these modern institutions — that they are brought into being through private money, usually a foundation, with vested interests, and maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) through public dollars — may be unsustainable in the digital era. The growing emphasis on digital curation and immersive exhibits gives presidents and their financial allies new opportunities to frame their legacies and present favorable narratives of their administrations.
“They’ve always been a celebration of the particular individual president,” Blatt said of such libraries, “a commitment to serving as a shrine, a worshipful place where whatever deficiencies or critiques could be made of a president are whitewashed and eliminated.”
The Nixon Library was something of a case study in the tension between legacy-management and public education. Prior to its takeover by the NARA, the library was condemned for downplaying the ex-president’s wrongdoing in the Watergate scandal in its exhibit, which portrayed him as the target of politically motivated investigations.
When federal archivists assumed control nearly 30 years later in 2007, they dismantled the exhibit and debuted a new one in 2011 that more rigorously addresses “abuses of governmental power, secret Presidential taping and the role of the three branches of government and the media in this constitutional crisis,” according to federal archivists.
The episode presaged a battle over who gets to control the historical record of a presidency. In the aftermath of Watergate, lawmakers moved to prevent Nixon from retaining control of his White House tapes and papers, passing the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974.
“That’s when the fight begins,” Miller said. “Are presidential records public or private property? Nixon was insistent that he wanted to keep his tapes, and didn’t want to have his papers released.”
The Obama Center, Trump’s efforts
As former President Barack Obama’s President Center — a library, museum and community space — prepares for its grand opening on Juneteenth, many of those same questions are being raised, but in more modern contexts.
The Chicago center has been described as the first “fully digital presidential library” and departs from the traditional model. The National Archives will instead keep Obama’s presidential records in digital form and store physical artifacts — anything from briefing materials and works of art, to books or White House furnishings — in existing archival facilities, while the center itself will be run by the Obama Foundation as a private museum dedicated to his life and legacy, as well as a civic space.
The shift represents a departure for historians, some of whom believe that the National Archives’ involvement in public-facing exhibits provides a necessary balance between presidential legacy-building and independent historical interpretation.
“If there are no paper records and no books, then calling it a library might seem misplaced,” said Blatt, who added that he does not think presidential libraries “contribute in a positive way to American culture.”
The Obama Presidential Center wasn’t without its share of friction. Built on the South Side of Chicago’s Jackson Park, it encountered significant resistance from locals and activists in Chicago over the prospect that the onslaught of visitors to the area and need for amenities to accommodate them would drive up rents and push out the predominantly Black and brown resident population.
Trump’s suggested library, slated for a site on the campus of Miami Dade College, is being proposed as a towering Miami skyscraper that would be emblazoned with Trump’s name and packed with similarly branded displays, a replica of the Oval Office and other monuments to his political legacy, according to early concepts published about the project.
It has also generated controversy. Residents have sued, alleging the allocation of the parcel, which was conveyed to the president’s foundation by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a violation of the Emoluments Clause. The provision prohibits federal officeholders from accepting certain gifts, payments or benefits from governments without congressional approval, and the plaintiffs argue that no such approval was obtained for the land transfer.
Still, the White House has stood by the project.
“The Trump Presidential Library will be one of the most magnificent buildings in the world and a living testament to the indelible impact President Trump has made on America and its people,” a White House spokesperson, Davis Ingle said in a statement, the Washington Post reported.
The popularity of the prospective Trump library remains to be seen; but some experts believe that whatever the outcome, the concept of immortalizing the legacy of a U.S. head of state in the form of a private repository will last.
“I do think they will persist, so long as the president is still the single most powerful individual in the world,” Blatt said.