Until the 1970s, former presidents could do almost whatever they wanted with their presidential papers. This has often been a problem. Some documents “were deliberately destroyed, while others were the victims of accidental destruction,” concludes a 1978 Congressional study. “Others were scattered to the four winds.”
As the nation’s first president, Washington set a precedent. He planned to build a building at Mount Vernon to store his papers, but did not. On the last day of his life in late 1799, according to Mount Vernon historians, Washington said to his secretary Tobias Lear: “I found myself leaving, my breath cannot go on for long… to organize and write down all my late military letters and papers – to organize my accounts and pay off my books.
Washington bequeathed his papers to his nephew, Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington. The judge lent many documents to Chief Justice John Marshall, who was writing a biography of the first president. The nephew later lamented in a letter to James Madison that Marshall had kept some of the papers where they were “badly mutilated by rats and otherwise damaged by damp.”
Meanwhile, after her husband’s death, Martha Washington burned most of the letters they exchanged. “Only a few are known to remain, including two, both tender and fearful, that George Washington wrote shortly before he left for the war,” The Washington Post reported in 2015.
John Adams, the second president, and his son, President John Quincy Adams, kept detailed records, which the heirs later donated to the State of Massachusetts. But after that, the fate of presidential papers turned out to be unpredictable.
When Virginia President John Tyler left office in 1845, most of his papers were moved to a bank in Richmond. After the outbreak of the Civil War, Tyler died in 1862 on his way to the Confederate Congress. His papers in Richmond were destroyed in April 1865 when rebel forces set fire to the city to keep it out of Union hands. The rest of Tyler’s papers “were left behind at Tyler’s home, Sherwood Forest, which was occupied and looted several times by Union and Confederate forces,” according to the Congressional study.
Much of the late President Zachary Taylor’s papers were destroyed when Union troops occupied his son’s home in Louisiana in 1862. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, his son Robert Todd Lincoln “destroyed many of his father’s papers – those he considered worthless – before placing the rest in the Library of Congress,” the report said. The Lincoln Papers were not published until 1947.
President Ulysses S. Grant had difficulty keeping track of his papers. “The only place I ever found in my life to put paper down to find it again was either in the side pocket of my coat, or in the hands of an employee more careful than me,” he wrote. As a result, Grant simply lost many of his presidential papers.
President Chester A. Arthur hated the idea of journalists interfering in his affairs. The day before his death in November 1886, “he instructed his son to destroy” his presidential papers, Congressional scholars wrote. “Three large trash cans were used to burn most of the presidential papers.”
President Grover Cleveland didn’t care too much about keeping records for two consecutive terms. According to him, he considered any papers addressed to him his private property, “and if I saw fit to destroy them, no one could complain.” Cleveland lost many of his papers after leaving office in 1897 and gave away some other papers to autograph seekers.
After President Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, his wife Florence “destroyed many papers that would have dishonored Harding’s memory,” according to a Congressional report.
It did not help. Nan Britton, Harding’s former secretary, stated in a candid book that he fathered her child. DNA confirmed his paternity in 2015.
President Calvin Coolidge kept meticulous records, followed by one of his aides, Edward T. Clark. Clarke later wrote that Coolidge wanted all the papers in his so-called personal files to be destroyed.
“Nothing would have been preserved if I hadn’t removed something on my own responsibility,” Clarke said.
Some presidents have gone to great lengths to keep their papers. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft organized presidential collections that were passed on to heirs and then transferred to the Library of Congress. Taft’s papers numbered over 700,000 documents.
Finally, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set a precedent by donating his records to the National Archives and Records Administration. He also created a presidential library. Roosevelt modeled his library on the first presidential library, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums, which opened in Fremont, Ohio in 1916, with papers held in trust after Hayes left office in 1881.
Roosevelt opened his library in Hyde Park, New York on June 30, 1941. “As president, I’m hosting this newest home that holds people’s records,” he said. On the first day, 161 people paid 25 cents each (about $5 today) to visit the library, according to the Associated Press.
The government began classifying classified documents as classified shortly before World War II. All presidents from Roosevelt turned their papers over to the government until Richard M. Nixon attempted to retain control of some of the Watergate material after he resigned in 1974.
Nixon ultimately relinquished 42 million pages of documents after Congress passed legislation culminating in the Presidential Records Act of 1978 that made the documents of presidents and vice presidents the property of the state.
Trump became the first former chief executive since Nixon to attempt to maintain personal ownership of presidential documents.
During a debate in the House of Representatives on the 1978 bill, first-term Rep. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.) proposed that retention requirements also “should apply to congressmen.” Rep. Allen Ertel (D-Pennsylvania) responded, “I can tell you, Mr. Quayle, that you have to remember one thing. … I can’t imagine a historian interested in the papers of a freshman congressman.”
Quayle, of course, later became vice president under President George W. Bush.