Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush by Jodi Kantor (review)

Jodi Kantor has great timing. Presciently anticipating the new national attention to politics as performance, her observations about the presidential library and museum as an American president’s final act feel all the more significant when a former reality television star has been elevated to the White House. And yet, despite both the content of the book and its publication during a presidential election year, she carefully avoids overtly politicizing the material. Following established work in performance studies and museum studies, Kantor claims that “[t]o consider a museum as a performance, then, is to approach it not as an attempt to brainwash us into believing a story that isn’t ‘true,’ but as an account deliberately constructed to do particular work in a particular place, with particular consequences in mind for visitors” (5). To this end, she analyzes three “scripts” for how museums construct their performances and visitors’ experiences within them: a “historical script”—the narrative play of historical events within the museum and its materials; a “representational script”—that is, how the various museums design and display their materials; and a “cultural script”—how these museums construct the normative expectations for both the presidents on display and the visitors who attend to them.

To facilitate our understanding of these various scripts in different spaces, Kantor structures the book thematically, with particular attention to the construction of the American president as a character. Part 1 focuses on “Museum Funding, Visitor Participation, and Presidential Character,” while the second part expands on “Individualism and American Character.” Part 3 concentrates on “Disruption, Inspiration, and the American Community” and the broader cultural effects of the presidential narratives. In each of the chapters within these three parts, Kantor juxtaposes the functions of various museums in relation to one another. For example, in chapter 4, “Utopian Character: The Role of the Imaginary,” she looks at the pre-presidential galleries of the Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan libraries. Comparing both the content of these exhibits and their respective orders within the library, Kantor analyzes how each creates a different utopian performative, both for the former president en route to the White House and for the viewer. When learning about Carter’s early years, the visitor replays tropes of rural, small-town life in the formation of his moral character, but in Reagan’s, she can play opposite the fortieth president in one of his famous movie roles. As Kantor observes, Reagan’s exhibit not only demonstrates his skill as an actor, but “also performs his early career as entertainment” (101).

Her repeated use of phrases like character, campaign dramaturgy, mise en scène, and presidential performance reminds readers how easily politics often blurs distinctions between reality and its simulation. The book often returns to its central claim that “[p]erformance has always shaped the American presidency” (3). One cannot dismiss the logic in reading presidential libraries as a president’s final performance or, perhaps more accurately, as an extended curtain call. However, at a certain point in the book I wondered if too many things are performing and not enough people. So many elements of a presidential library are read as performing elements—the objects in collections, their sequence and signs, the staging, the building, even the location itself—that the actual people making decisions occasionally become obscured. Kantor argues, in a chapter titled “Character Failure,” that presidential libraries “are wont to demonstrate good character through the president’s ability to exercise unerring political judgement, neglect nothing, exhibit exemplary personal behavior, and win reelection campaigns” (120). While it may be true that the libraries and their exhibits create favorable impressions of their presidents, the libraries themselves are not wont to do anything; the libraries’ buildings and exhibits have been imagined, designed, and funded by specific people.

The book is strongest when Kantor focuses on the individuals whose choices shape...