President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his desk, circa 1940. Getty Images
Inside FDR's wartime mission to protect American treasures
By Michael Riedel
August 27, 2016 | 10:06pm
Early in the evening of Dec. 26, 1941, a train bound for Fort Knox pulled out of Union Station in Washington, DC. Four Secret Service agents stood guard over an assortment of discreet-looking packages stashed in Car A-1. Only a handful of government officials knew what they contained.
Inside the parcels were the original Declaration of Independence, the original Constitution of the United States and the first and second drafts of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
The very spirit of America was on that train, being secreted away from an enemy determined to stamp out life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
"American Treasures" (St. Martin's Press), a book by Stephen Puleo out Tuesday, tells the stories of the US government officials who protected our nation's heritage following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
One of its heroes is Franklin D. Roosevelt, who understood "the symbolic value of those documents and who realized, particularly after Pearl Harbor, the psychic disaster it would be if they were destroyed," Puleo tells The Post.
Roosevelt's fears were warranted. There was, Puleo explains, a palpable sense that the Germans could attack Washington, DC.
"There were U-boats off the East Coast of America, sinking ships near Cape May and Cape Cod," he says. "People thought there would be bombers overhead. So the decision to remove the documents was not a frivolous or whimsical thought."
Government officials were also acutely aware of the destruction, well underway by 1941, of England's heritage: The Germans had dropped a bomb on the British Museum, obliterating more than 1,000 books collected by King George III.
'People thought there would be bombers overhead. So the decision to remove the documents was not a frivolous or whimsical thought.'
- Stephen Puleo, author of 'American Treasures'
Roosevelt put his friend Archibald MacLeish, the head of the Library of Congress, in charge of cataloging and safeguarding America's historical papers. Well before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, MacLeish and some 700 Library of Congress staffers worked overtime and without pay to catalog thousands of documents, ranking them in order of historical importance.
Some 5,000 manuscripts were removed from Washington, DC, during the war. Among them were an original Gutenberg Bible, James Madison's handwritten notes on the Constitutional Convention, the Articles of Confederation, George Washington's personal papers, the Lincoln Cathedral copy of the Magna Carta, and Walt Whitman's notebooks.
Not everything could go to Fort Knox. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau could only spare 60 cubic feet of space — "about the size of a freezer," says Puleo — at the fort, housing America's gold bullion reserves. Mac- Leish debated where to send everything else, weighing the idea of caves, tunnels and mines. "The fears were water damage and vermin," says Puleo. In the end, the papers were sent to three schools — the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, as well as Washington and Lee University and the Virginia Military Institute, both in Lexington.
All were hundreds of miles away from the coastline and invulnerable to a possible German attack from sea.
Secrecy was paramount, but an enterprising reporter in Lexington sniffed out the news of several cartons marked "Property of the Library of Congress." When Mac- Leish found out the journalist was asking questions about what was in the cartons, he exploded. Gossipy librarians from Washington and Lee University had been talking to the writer. MacLeish called and squashed the story.
The funny thing is, the Declaration of Independence was not always cared for the way it was during World War II.
The Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence are displayed at the Library of Congress circa 1940.Getty Images
During the American Revolution, the document was shuttled from city to city in a sack. It was rolled up and hidden in a farmhouse when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812. And for several years it was displayed in direct sunlight, which is why it's so faded today.
But the Declaration of Independence's value as a symbol of freedom is eternal. Roosevelt knew this, and so he permitted it to be displayed at the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial in 1943.
"He knew it would boost morale at the height of the war," says Puleo.
After World War II, almost all of the 5,000 documents that had been hidden away made their way back to Washington, DC.
Lost — and still missing — were two of Whitman's five notebooks.
Filed under books , franklin d. roosevelt , history , library of congress , secret service
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