Post-205: Into the National Archives

Fate decreed that I shouldn’t have even one minute of downtime in the wild month of February 2014, which started for me in an airport (see post-204) and ended at a bus station, where I collected my friend J.S. (of Roanoke, VA)

We finished our post-CELTA celebratory events about 11:20 PM on Friday Feb. 28th (see post-200). To the subway. On to home, for the others. Not me. For me, it was on to the bus station. There, I found a recently-arrived J.S. leaning up against a post, backpack at his feet. It was 11:55 PM. As the clock ran out on the month of February, J.S. and I were maneuvering down into the subway. Back to Arlington. Sleep.

J.S. wanted to see the original U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Into the Metro again, in the morning:

Out of the Metro. We found the “Clinton Building”. There is a Clinton Building? There is. I see that it was named in 2013. “Payback”, I’d guess, for Republicans putting in a Reagan Building.

The Archives is (are?) nearby.

This was also my first time seeing the founding documents of the USA, even though I was born and raised just a few miles away. They’re right there (at the National Archives, near the U.S. Capitol).

Here is the very romanesque front of the National Archives:

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We found the room housing the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. A quiet piety dominates that giant, dimly-lit room. The feeling is equal to walking through a religious sanctuary.

It seems to me that very many Americans feel that the Declaration of Independence and so on are, at some level, “sacred”, even “divinely inspired”. In a much more primitive society, maybe we would actually worship Jefferson and Washington and so on, as gods, today. The feelings people have towards them “draw water from the same well”.
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J.S. posed a good question: If what they have on display is the “original” Declaration of Independence that was sent to the King in 1776, to legally secede from the British Empire, “how’d they get it back?” I have no answer.

J.S. went off to look at other exhibits. I spent a considerable amount of time slowly reading a replica of the Declaration of Independence. The original cursive is a bit hard. People younger than I won’t be able to read these originals at all, if it’s true that “they” don’t teach cursive anymore.

The Archives’ front side gets 99.9% of the visitors. That’s where the Constitution and all are, along with a waste-of-time exhibition called the Rubinstein Hall or some such name.

The rear side is the Research Center entrance. We went back there, too, thinking to look at microfilms of censuses. Why not?

That Research Center has a strange atmosphere: One part library, one part airport-security-area, two parts prison.

Sign in, get ID card, go through airport-style security, all amid suspicious glares. We did it all. The process took so long that we had to leave before entering the main area. Off to meet A.W.F. & P.F….

Here is a map of the location of the National Archives:

Outside, the Washington Monument is not far away (at left, below). Stone barriers, to prevent anyone driving bombs onto these federal buildings, are along the sidewalks. I don’t think they had those so much when I was young.

Later on, somewhere else, there was this completely-unrelated statue: