22 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
Building. “This temple of our history
will appropriately be one of the most
beautiful buildings in America, an ex-
pression of the American soul,” he said.
A granite, marble, and limestone mon-
ument with two forty-foot bronze doors
behind seventy-two Corinthian columns,
it was built at the height of the Depres-
sion, a massive public-works project. In
1941, with Hitler in power in Germany
and Mussolini in Italy, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt spoke at its dedication:
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
living in the future, a Nation must believe in
three things. 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 judge-
ments in creating their own future.
Americans used to believe in those three
things. Do they still?
A
rchives are ancient, but national
archives, the official repositories of
the records of a nation-state, date to the
French Revolution: France established
its Archives Nationales in 1790. Britain
established what became a pillar of its
National Archives in 1838. Newly inde-
pendent nations have established na-
tional archives as part of the project of
declaring independence: Argentina es-
tablished what would become its na-
tional archive in 1821, Mexico in 1823,
Brazil in 1838.
National archives uphold a particu-
lar vision of a nation and of its power,
and, during transitions of power in na-
tions that are not democratic, archives
are not infrequently attacked. Most at-
tacks involve the destruction of the ev-
idence of atrocity. Brazil abolished slav-
ery in 1888. Two years later, after a
military coup, a minister of the new re-
public ordered the destruction of every
document in any archive in the country
which related to its history of slavery.
Richard Ovenden’s new book, “Burn-
ing the Books: A History of the Delib-
erate Destruction of Knowledge,” is a
litany of this sort of tragedy. “The pres-
ervation of information continues to be
a key tool in the defense of open soci-
eties,” Ovenden, who runs the Bodleian
Libraries, at Oxford, writes. UNESCO’s
report “Lost Memory” is an inventory
of inventories: a list of libraries and ar-
chives that were destroyed in the twen-
tieth century, including the widespread
devastations of the First and Second
World Wars, the burning of some of the
collections in the National Library in
Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, and
the destruction of the National and Uni-
versity Library in Sarajevo, by the Bos-
nian Serb Army, in 1992. Libraries house
books: copies. Archives store documents:
originals. Archives cannot be replaced.
As UNESCO’s report puts it, “The loss of
archives is as serious as the loss of mem-
ory in a human being.”
All is not always lost. Officials of the
British Empire set fire to entire archives
as they left the colonies. In 1961, in
Uganda, the objectives of what came to
be known as Operation Legacy included
the elimination of all documents that
might “embarrass” Her Majesty’s gov-
ernment. Decades later, some three hun-
dred boxes from Kenya and nearly nine
thousand files from more than thirty
other former British colonies, including
Malta, Malaya, and the Bahamas, were
discovered in a top-secret government
fortress north of London. In 1992, guards
from the former Soviet republic of Geor-
gia burned to the ground the Central
Archive of Abkhazia. But many of its
documents had been microfilmed or pho-
tocopied, and these records were stored
in other buildings. In 2005, Guatemalan
officials conducting a safety inspection
of a munitions depot came across the
long-hidden records of the brutal force
that was the National Police—an esti-
mated eighty million pages, described by
my Harvard colleague Kirsten Weld as
“papers spilling forth from rusted file
cabinets, heaped on dirt floors, in trash
bags and grain sacks, shoved into every
conceivable nook and cranny, moldy and
rotting.” People have spent more than a
decade preserving and organizing them.
Governments that commit atrocities
against their own citizens regularly de-
stroy their own archives. After the end
of apartheid, South Africa’s new govern-
ment organized a Truth and Reconcili-
ation Commission because, as its report
stated, “the former government deliber-
ately and systematically destroyed a huge
body of state records and documenta-
tion in an attempt to remove incrimi-
nating evidence and thereby sanitise the
history of oppressive rule.” Unfortunately,
the records of the commission have faredlittle better: the archive was restricted
and shipped to the National Archives in
Pretoria, where it remains to this day,
largely uncatalogued and unprocessed;
for ordinary South Africans, it’s almost
entirely unusable. In the aftermath of
the Trump Administration, the most elu-
sive records won’t be those in the White
House. If they exist, they’ll be far away,
in and around detention centers, and will
involve the least powerful: the families
separated at the border, whose suffering
federal officials inflicted, and proved so
brutally indifferent to that they have lost
track of what children belong to which
parents, and how to find them.I
n 1950, Truman signed the Federal
Records Act, which required federal
agencies to preserve their records. It did
not require Presidents to save their pa-
pers, which remained, as ever, their per-
sonal property. In 1955, Congress passed
the Presidential Libraries Act, encour-
aging Presidents to deposit their papers
in privately erected institutions—some-
thing that every President has done
since F.D.R., who was also the first Pres-
ident to install a tape recorder in the
White House, a method of record-keep-
ing that was used by every President
down to Richard M. Nixon.
The Presidential libraries are overseen
by the National Archives and Records
Administration. They were intended to
be research centers, and include muse-
ums; and they serve, too, as monuments.
The Barack Obama Presidential Library
is the first Presidential library whose
collections will be entirely digital—they
will be available to anyone, anywhere,
anytime. But the Presidential library,
which started with F.D.R., may well
end with Obama.
Donald Trump, if he decides that he
wants a Presidential library, is far more
likely to build a Presidential museum,
or even a theme park, and would most
likely build it in Florida. “I have a lot
of locations, actually,” Trump said on
NBC last year. Last month, an anony-
mous group from New York published
its own plans for a Trump library at
djtrumplibrary.com. Its exhibits include
a Criminal Records Room and a Covid
Memorial, just off the Alt-Right Au-
ditorium. But, long before Trump gets
around to designing an actual Trump
Library, he is likely to run afoul of a