Artifacts explore American presidency

CHICAGO, Feb. 17 (UPI) -- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's poker chips are across the room from the CBS microphone he used for his famous "fireside chat" radio addresses in 1935 during the Depression.

Warren G. Harding's red silk pajamas are in a glass case across from the yellow silk Oleg Cassini gown with overlay of crepe chiffon first lady Jacqueline Kennedy wore at a 1961 reception for the president of Tunisia.

In another room sits Abraham Lincoln's deathbed -- from the Peterson House, a boarding house that stood across the street from Washington's Ford's Theatre in 1865. "The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden," an exhibit of more than 300 artifacts mostly from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, opened Saturday at the Chicago Historical Society, a traveling version of a permanent show in the nation's capital.

Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, historian Michael Beschloss and playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith will participate in public programs on the presidency during the exhibit's opening run. Actor Michael Krebs, who portrayed Lincoln in a C-SPAN production, gives an uncanny presentation of Lincoln's Speech at the Republican State Convention in Springfield, Ill., June 16, 1858, remembered for the phrase "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Lincoln's deathbed, bloodstained pillow and sheets belong to the permanent collection of the Chicago Historical Society and will not travel with the other artifacts. The rarely displayed Lincoln memorabilia are shown side-by-side with two 50-cent pieces that were placed over the slain president's eyelids. The artifacts bring the U.S. Civil War to life.

Like beds typical of the mid-1800s, the boarding house bed was too short for a man of Lincoln's 6-foot-5 stature.

"This wasn't Lincoln's bed. This is the bed they brought Lincoln to after he was assassinated," said Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historical society's president and presidential scholar. "It was in a boarding house. It's a standard boarding house bed."

Bunch said in some ways the 42 U.S. presidents had replaced religious figures in America as sources of relics.

"So in a way it tells you just how important the presidency has become," he said. "That it can replace the sort of religious symbolism.

"Lincoln, Kennedy -- really the presidents that were assassinated -- take this on. While we don't think of James Garfield, there was an amazing outcry when Garfield was assassinated and the same kind of relics."

Bunch said the museum was in the process of testing DNA on the artifacts, starting with the bloodstained black velvet cape worn by Mary Todd Lincoln the night of the assassination.

Other objects owned by the Historical Society include an 1863 petition asking Lincoln to allow the Times newspaper, an anti-Lincoln publication, to reopen after it had been shutdown by Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Lincoln permitted the paper to resume publishing.

The intimate show includes the brass inkwell Lincoln used to write the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, which by coincidence is being displayed this month at The Peggy Notebart Nature Museum-Chicago Academy of Sciences a few blocks north.

Other artifacts include George Washington's Revolutionary War dispatch case and field telescope, the suvreyor's compass he used at Mount Vernon and a Washington life mask. Also on display are a coral and silver musket given to Thomas Jefferson by the Tunisian ambassador after the Tripoli War in 1805, Theodore Roosevelt's cavalry spurs and the pen Woodrow Wilson used to sign the declaration of war against Germany in April 1917.

In more recent history, there's the gavel used in a joint session of Congress during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial and the European-inspired tunics and headgear Richard Nixon approved for White House guards in 1970 that gave his administration the nickname, "The Imperial Presidency." The Germanic black peaked caps were discarded almost immediately but the cream white uniform jackets, with gold braid and gold "W.H." insiginia, were kept for a few years to provide White House pomp and circumstance. The uniform was dropped in the mid-1970s.

Interactive displays allow visitors to deliver historic inaugural speeches before a backdrop of the U.S. Capitol or push a button to view videos on the history of presidents that died in office and the private lives of ex-presidents.

A 208-page companion book, "The American Presidency" published by the Smithsonian Institution Press has more than 300 color photographs and 50 duotones. More information is available on the Web site, si.edu/sites.

"The permanent exhibit is in Washington at the National Museum of American History," said chief curator Harry Rubinstein. "There are literally hundreds of pieces."

Rubinstein said it's a delicate process to choose what items go into a traveling show.

"Well, we decided in part by the collection and the story we wanted to tell. That's the simple answer. Probably every place the show goes we'll augment their collection. Obviously the articles had to be in a condition that allowed them to travel. We really wanted to put significant objects in this show. We really didn't hold back. There's a lot of costumes in the show.

"Objects only talk to you up to a point, but what it does is make a connection to the past," Rubinstein said. "You look at the microphone Roosevelt used for the 'fireside chats' and there it is. And it just brings back his voice. I can look at that object and I can hear his voice."

The exhibit will be in Chicago through Sept. 2 before heading to the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Mo., and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif.