Southern California is a land bestrewn with megachurches, and perhaps none attracts more parishioners than the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I recently saw the hushed throngs pile into the shrine of the Great Communicator, and felt as if I were witnessing a kind of Republican Hajj. I came away convinced that our presidential library system is bad for history, bad for architecture, and bad for our conception of self-government.
Though the Reagan library is an unsurprising outlier of bad taste among the fifteen institutions crudely deemed “libraries,” they all serve as monuments to something rotten in our culture of presidential commemoration. To start, they don’t actually do a good job of conveying the basic facts of American history. In my own sojourn through the piles of Reagan memorabilia, I started keeping a list of curious omissions from the biographical narrative. There was nothing for instance about Reagan’s 1968 abortive presidential run, nor his infamous speech about “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi. You may not leave the library knowing anything about the AIDS epidemic, but you can purchase a commemorative jellybean jar from the gift shop.
Nor are the curators successful at the core of their mission — historical archival. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the records of a young John Roberts were misplaced just before his confirmation hearing. I can only assume that a few dry policy memos were difficult to locate among the seemingly endless portraits of Ronald and Nancy on horseback.
And lest it seem that the Reagan library is alone in historical malpractice, the Nixon library in Yorba Linda was until recently even worse. Its board of loyalists attempted to fire director and historian Tim Naftali when it emerged that he was planning to renovate the Watergate exhibit, thereby replacing a video that proclaimed the whole matter a Democratic plot to avenge the scheming George McGovern.
Beyond this unseemly historical airbrushing, it cannot be denied that the newest libraries are artistic wastelands. The George W. Bush library looks like nothing so much as a Green Zone bunker transposed from Baghdad to suburban Dallas. Its interior is even worse, proudly displaying its namesake’s paintings as if they were the work of Rembrandt. The Clinton library in Little Rock is an uneasy hodgepodge of architectural styles, shoving together a modernist exterior with a replica of the Trinity College Dublin library, a ghastly pastiche that will forever scream of the 1990s. One hesitates to say so, but it almost seems as if the architects were trying to purchase two museums for the price of one.
From the graceful Kennedy library, designed by I.M. Pei, we seem to have descended to a frantic race by each successive president for more floor space. Clinton outdid Reagan who outdid Johnson, until inevitably the final library arrives like some frightful vision out of Ceausescu’s Romania and shatters the earth’s crust. Rick Perlstein made the observation that since presidents are beginning to be buried on their library grounds, these putatively academic institutions have in fact become like latter day Pyramids, our Pharaoh Gerald Ford entombed at Grand Rapids instead of Giza.
Yet my deepest objection to presidential libraries is not aesthetic, but symbolic. They represent an abrogation of the idea that a former president is a citizen like any other of our country. Instead, they are portrayed as perpetual Great Men, cultural epochs unto themselves. These legacies are burnished through a great deal of money-grubbing, partially funded by the American taxpayer. As documented by Anthony Clark, the federal government spends over $100 million a year in library maintenance, a hefty sum that should only increase as new libraries of even grander scale are dedicated. The Reagan library has as its centerpiece a massive Air Force One Jet, a neat encapsulation of the fundamental problem. Presidents should not soar above us, but walk among us, a truth we seem to have forgotten underneath the razzle-dazzle. As I left Simi Valley, shaken and distraught, a strange and unsettling thought began to settle in my head.
The wrathful city of Nineveh, it is said, was finally brought to heel in a fury of smoke and ash. Assembled Medes and Chaldeans in their thousands engorged themselves on the ruins of the once-proud Assyrian civilization, displaying a special contempt for the great library of Ashurbanipal. Tablets were shattered into dust, scrolls set ablaze in a mighty plume of fire. I am a modern man of modern methods, yet I can’t help but wonder if we’d be better off following the Mesopotamians. At the very least, it would spare us from the inevitable prospect of Donald Trump presidential library. In comparison to that gilded monstrosity, one can almost imagine the Reagan shrine to be but a modest dwelling, a quiet little cottage in that city on a hill.
Jack Weller, a recent Stanford graduate, was a staff writer for Stanford Politics.