Happy Earth Day! How can the National Archives be a greener place? How about using goats?
Last year, 900 goats grazed on the grounds of the Reagan Presidential Library.
An annual brush clearing is an important part of fire abatement because the Library is located in a fire-prone area. The Library took on 400 goats in 2011 to clear 13 acres of brush around the property. In 2012, 900 goats covered 40 acres.
A portable fence was used to move the goats around and keep them safe. A shepherd also lived on the property for the entire month to watch over the goats so that they were safe from coyotes or bobcats.
Read the full story on the Prologue blog.
Chef assistants decorate President Nixon’s 1971 birthday cake at the Western White House Kitchen. La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente, California. January 9, 1971.
-from the Nixon Library, Photo ID WHPO 5442-02
Source: archives.gov
Folsom Prison Pearl Harbor Petition
The attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 brought an immediate unity of purpose to the nation. Thousands of letters flooded into the White House after the attack, and especially after President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his War Message to Congress (the “date which will live in infamy” speech) on December 8th.
Citizens of all political persuasions and from all parts of the country pledged their support, volunteered their service, and offered to enlist in the military. One of the most interesting examples among the President’s papers is a petition that FDR received signed by prisoners at Folsom State Penitentiary in California.
This is the first page of the bound petition that contains 39 pages and 1,746 signatures.
-from the FDR Library
Source: fdrlibrary.wordpress.com
Chinatown, 1976 Election
First Lady Betty Ford Campaigning for President Gerald Ford at a Chinese American Rally in Chinatown, Los Angeles, California. 10/20/1976
-from the Ford Library
Source: research.archives.gov
Today in history, The Japanese-American Internment Compensation Bill is Signed by President Ronald Reagan.
In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which was used almost exclusively to intern Americans of Japanese descent. By 1943, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans had been forced from their homes and moved to camps.
Forty-six years later, on August 10, 1988, President Reagan signed the Japanese-American Internment Compensation Bill. The bill acknowledged the injustice of the internment, apologized for it, and provided a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was interned.
Pictured above: First-grade children of Japanese ancestry during flag pledge ceremony at a public school in San Francisco prior to internment. 4/20/42
Below: President Reagan signs the Reparations Bill for Japanese-Americans in the Old Executive Office Building. 8/10/88
Source: archives.gov
I met this guy tonight who says he is going to marry me,”
-Pat Ryan to her friends, 1938
Today is the wedding anniversary of Richard and Pat Nixon.
The couple met in 1938, at an audition for a community theater production of “The Dark Tower” in Whittier, California. Pat was a high school teacher who also worked as a Hollywood extra, and Dick was a recent graduate from Duke University, just starting out as a lawyer. Two years later, he proposed to Pat in an Oldsmobile pulled up close to the edge of an ocean cliff at sunset.
The Nixons were married on June 21, 1940 in Riverside, California. They are pictured here at the beach in San Clemente, 1/13/71.
This year, we are celebrating the Centennials of two U.S. First Ladies, Pat Nixon and Lady Bird Johnson. More about the First Ladies Centennial here.
Source: research.archives.gov
On this day in 1966, California Republicans nominated former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan for governor. He won the election in November, and served two terms from 1967-1975.
In 1975, Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the 1976 Presidential election. He lost the race for the nomination, but his campaign laid the groundwork for the 1980 election.
Pictured here, Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan at the Governor’s Inaugural Ball in Sacramento , California. January 1971.
Thanks to PeterFeld for the correction to the original post.
Source: reagan.utexas.edu
Because Lou Henry Hoover was awesome-
Before she became First Lady, Lou Henry Hoover was a tomboy, outdoors woman, bareback horse rider, Girl Scout leader, world traveler, and one of the first women geologists at Stanford. Have we mentioned she spoke Latin and Chinese?
Here’s Lou on a camping trip to California’s Mount Gleason in 1891. She is seated on a burro outside the Acton store-post office-photographers studio.
Source: ecommcode2.com
The marvel of the Hoover Dam: Build a huge dam— the largest ever built— across the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border to harness the power and riches of the mighty river. Tomorrow will be the 76th anniversary of the dedication of the Hoover Dam. As the Great Depression deepened in the early 1930s, a monumental civil engineering project known as the Boulder Canyon Project captured the nation’s attention and stirred its imagination. President Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, approved funding for construction of the dam in 1930. The multipurpose structure would store irrigation water, provide flood control, and generate power to fuel the fast-paced growth of southern California. In designing and building the dam, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation engineers were tasked with some of the most difficult engineering challenges ever faced. When the last bucket of concrete was placed in the dam on May 29, 1935, the staggering 660-foot thick base almost equaled its height of 726 feet. Coming amid widespread poverty and unemployment, the massive project not only provided jobs to thousands of unemployed men but offered some of the most complex engineering challenges ever tackled. Perhaps as important, it asserted America’s ability to overcome extreme adversity with technical ingenuity, physical prowess, and unwavering resolve. Hoover Dam, through the generation of electricity and the orderly dispersal of its waters, fueled the incredible growth of southern California— its large cities, its industrial base, its massive agricultural industry— and created Lake Mead, the world’s largest man-made reservoir. Here are pictures taken in the 1970s for the EPA’s Project DOCUMERICA that are part of our holdings at the National Archives. On September 30, 1935, FDR dedicated the completion of the Hoover Dam.
Over the course of 17 days in 1975, two assassination attempts were made on President Gerald Ford’s life. The first attempt was by a member of Charles Manson’s cult. The second happened outside of the Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, California on September 22, 1975. The gun woman was Sara Jane Moore, her shot missed.
These photos were taken in the moments immediately after the gun was fired. They show President Ford wincing upon hearing the gunshot, an image of the hotel taken at almost the same moment the gun when off, and Secret Service Agents 3 seconds later.
