On February 20, 1933, a bitterly cold winter day, President Hoover had laid the cornerstone of the new archives. In his speech, Hoover paid homage to Pope’s design, calling the building a “temple of our history.” More significantly, he indicated that this temple would also be a treasure house, informing the assembled dignitaries that “there will be aggregated here the most sacred documents of our history, the originals of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution of the United States.”
There was just one problem with Hoover’s announcement. Washington’s other Herbert, then-Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam, refused to surrender the engrossed Declaration. As had happened when the Patent Office and the State Department had briefly tussled over control of the Declaration back in the 1870s, the question of custody was a thorny one. As another Librarian of Congress later noted, “A threat had been proclaimed. The period of uncertainty had begun.” Putnam considered the transfer from the State Department to the Library to be the final one, referring to Congress’s 1922 appropriation for a “permanent repository.”
It would take another act of Congress, Putnam believed, for him to give it up. Facing such an obstacle, neither Hoover nor his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pushed the issue. Putnam’s successor, Archibald MacLeish, was more sympathetic to a transfer, but had been forced by World War II to focus on protecting the Declaration. Now in peacetime and with a new set of actors, the time had come to bury the hatchet and settle the issue between once and for all.
A stout, avuncular Texan with a ribald sense of humor, Luther Evans took over the Library of Congress from MacLeish in 1945, when he was only forty-three years old. A committed New Dealer, he had directed the Historical Records Survey of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, making him more of an archivist than librarian. Within a few years of succeeding MacLeish, he had come to believe that a new era required a new approach to the Declaration.
A political scientist with a PhD from Stanford University on the topic of international diplomacy, Evans told Grover over lunch that he was concerned about the security of the founding documents in view of the “international situation,” a guarded reference to the danger of atomic warfare. From an archival standpoint, Evans also worried about the long-term effects of keeping the Declaration housed against an exterior wall, where temperature fluctuations were more extreme. Evans considered it unseemly that the great Rotunda of the National Archives remained empty more than a decade after its completion. In short, he was ready to give up the Declaration. But he knew he would need political cover to hand over the scroll.