Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory by Benjamin Hufbauer (review)

“Man’s desire to be remembered is colossal,” Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked when viewing the Egyptian pyramids during World War II. For centuries, these monuments of stone have reflected past civilizations and memorialized the pharaohs buried underneath. In Presidential Temples, art historian Benjamin Hufbauer argues that presidential libraries have become America’s pyramids, “an assertion of ego and power—an attempt to claim immortality and induce political veneration—just as it was for Egyptian pharaohs” (6). He examines how these spaces shape our shared public memory of former chief executives and symbolize the imperial presidency. As “presidential temples,” these libraries “construct sites that have all four of the elements of civil religion”—saints, sacred places, sacred objects, and ritual practices—and “promote the best possible place for their subjects within civil religion” while often concealing the less-flattering elements of presidencies past (7). Hufbauer contends that these libraries are profoundly important, for presidential commemoration “is not merely about the power of presidents” but also “about questions of race, gender, national identity, and even national destiny” throughout history (7). As such, these spaces provide “nodal points for the negotiation of who we are as a people and where we are going, politically and culturally” (7). Presidential Temples insightfully demonstrates how these spaces interpret our national identity and suggests methods for scholars to engage critically these places of presidential veneration and public memory.

Hufbauer opens the book with an examination of how presidential libraries came to be. In the prologue, he considers how the Lincoln Memorial, “the most important presidential monument built thus far,” foreshadowed the presidential library through its “combination of words and sculpture” (10). Hufbauer provides a masterful reading of the memorial as a rhetorical text, analyzing how the memorial’s physical structure and the inscribed texts intersect to reflect the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln championed. He then explores the monumental shift in presidential commemoration under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Chapter 1 explains that the relatively recent presidential library “functions as the most important institution for the expansion of the civil religion of the American presidency, continuing in a new form the structure of reverence initiated by the creation and use of such memorials as the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial” (40). Although “no previous president had presumed to memorialize himself,” FDR inaugurated a new tradition of presidential “self-commemoration” when he proposed building a library to preserve his papers for scholarly research and showcase his personal artifacts and memorabilia to visitors (23, 24). Roosevelt trumpeted the goal of making his papers available for future study, but he also took steps to “prevent access to many of his own sensitive papers”—a move that has become symptomatic of presidential libraries (33). In these and many other ways, Hufbauer argues that these “temples” continue to follow FDR’s blueprint, “reify[ing] an ideology that claims all presidents as exceptional human beings and leaders worthy of reverential commemoration” (40).

After this historical backdrop, Hufbauer uses four case studies to demonstrate how presidential commemoration has unfolded. In chapter 2, he provides a sustained analysis of the “rhetorical pairing” of Harry S. Truman’s Presidential Museum and Library Oval Office replica and the Thomas Hart Benton mural designed specifically for the Truman Library, Independence and the Opening of the West (43). Framing the entrance to the office replica, the mural depicts images of “Native Americans, white settlers, black workers, and covered wagons” on the Western frontier and projects “the ideology of Manifest destiny, with non-white ethnic groups . . . as subordinate to white Americans” (42). Visitors then walk beneath Benton’s mural and into the Oval Office. The 94-percent-scale replica is decorated just as it was during Truman’s eight years in office and includes his presidential desk and famous “The Buck Stops Here” sign. Hufbauer argues that this pairing makes “the settling of the West analogous to the preservation of the American way of...