A Revamped Roosevelt Library and Museum Franklin D. Roosevelt's lucky felt hat, at his newly renovated presidential library and museum in Hyde Park, N.Y. More Photos  HYDE PARK, N.Y. - We should expect presidential libraries to be a bit grandiose. They are, after all, self-erected monuments, not just repositories of papers and artifacts from the Oval Office. They are used to stake presidential claims, chronicling major crises, great successes and perhaps even a few small successes. As museums, these libraries echo the European royal models: they are created, in part, to celebrate their creators. So, of course, continuous homage is being paid by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum to its founder as it unveils a new permanent exhibition here on Sunday. Its director, Lynn A. Bassanese, points out that the exhibition represents the first major rethinking of President Roosevelt's life and career in decades at the library, and its showcase is a $35 million renovation, the building's first major overhaul since President Roosevelt himself dedicated the library in 1941. Roosevelt also created the model that with some variation has been followed since: a privately financed library (here once part of the sweeping family estate) donated to the government and overseen by the National Archives. What is remarkable is not that the overall effect here is celebratory but that it is so overwhelming. You emerge from this 12,000-square-foot exhibition (designed by Gallagher & Associates) in a state of justified amazement, not necessarily because new facts have been revealed, or because of new interactive video tables and screens with digital "flipbooks," but because the exhibition, whose curator is Herman R. Eberhardt, so steadily recounts the history. Between March 1933, when Roosevelt took office during the Depression, and April 1945, when he suddenly died just before the Second World War came to an end, the world was thoroughly transformed. Was there any other president whose administration spanned one of the country's greatest domestic cataclysms and one of its greatest international cataclysms? And whose actions shaped the consequences of each? At the beginning of his first term, the exhibition notes, a quarter of the country lived on farms, and the federal government played a limited role in the economy. By 1950, only about 16 percent of the population lived on farms, and the government role was on its way to what we see today. Between 1930 and 1945, the percentage of unionized workers jumped from 7 percent to nearly 34 percent; the Democratic Party had reformed its constituencies; liberalism had shifted from a focus on individuals to a focus on groups; and the United States had become a world power. We are living in the world that Roosevelt ushered in. The exhibition calls Roosevelt "an activist president who fundamentally changed American political and economic life." And that is the portrait that takes shape. The themes sounded in his presidency - the role of the state in the economy, the nature of the public safety net, the virtues and weaknesses of a free market, the dimensions of liberalism, the justifications for long-term war, the dangers in alliances - are still being sounded. In recounting this narrative, the exhibition draws on two earlier temporary exhibitions: "Action and Action Now: F. D. R."s First 100 Days," which in 2008 chronicled the astonishing roster of legislation Roosevelt shepherded through Congress in response to the Depression, helping to create the Public Works Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Recovery Administration. The other exhibition is from 2006, "Freedom From Fear: F. D. R., Commander in Chief,"; it dealt with the waging of World War II. Some of the artifacts recur, but the new exhibition's scale draws on the full range of the library's collection, which includes 17 million pages of documents, like Roosevelt's 1882 baptismal certificate and a sketch he made in 1943 of what a postwar "United Nations" might look like. The papers also include official carbon copies, telegrams, internal memos, privately scrawled notes, drafts of speeches - providing an almost frenetic sense of personal intervention and decision. While reading, you see the mark of a rusty staple here, the crumble from a hasty grip there, the yellowing of age. There is a sense of the contingency to this history as it unfolds: events depended on actions and communications, with Roosevelt usually at the center. It is startling to learn, then, that almost all of these documents are meticulous reproductions rather than originals, which couldn't be exposed to the continuous light of a permanent exhibition. Ordinarily I might have been dismayed; the aura of the original is still powerful in imagining historical actors. But the reproductions are so fine, the exhibition so vivid, and there is so much to read and think about that the documents serve as illustrations rather than ends in themselves. The most intriguing displays are actually scanned documents on video screens that present the controversies and debates during the Roosevelt years: Did the New Deal really end the Depression, or did the coming of the war? Why didn't Roosevelt support federal anti-lynching legislation? He did not want to lose Southern Democratic support. What were his attitudes toward race? What was behind the executive order that interned Japanese-Americans along the West Coast? Did Roosevelt do what was possible to help Jews fleeing Hitler's executioners? At one point Alaska was considered as a refuge. And did he give away Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta? The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is at 4079 Albany Post Road, Hyde Park, N.Y.; (845) 486-7770, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu.