Presidency Project makes civics easy

In honor of Presidents Day this week (Lincoln's birthday was last week, but why let that get in the way of a Monday off...), Tuesday's column briefly highlighted executive orders. This hammer in the presidential toolbox is but one; the power, limitations, and evolution of the American presidency is a multi-volume study whose story has just begun in our young nation.

With so much more to know and ponder, two professors at the University of California-Santa Barbara started the American Presidency Project in 1999. Since then their team has amassed an impressive store of 104,739 official documents chronicling the chief executives' - all of them - time in office.

In this virtual warehouse of information available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu or americanpresidency.org are speeches (including inaugural, State of the Union, to Congress and the United Nations, legislatures, and even colleges); policy statements and official press releases; public letters; party and campaign materials; executive orders and proclamations; and more.

Here you can read President Roosevelt's fireside chats. You can see what George Washington had to say when our nation was born. You can read party platforms from 1840. It's all searchable by key words, president, document category, and dates.

"It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East." (Harry Truman speaking to Congress Aug. 6, 1945)

"There's a great myth around that all politicians love to go out and make speeches and to engage in politics. It isn't true at all; I come here not because I enjoy driving around the countryside and making speeches, but because I have lived for 21 months with a closely divided Congress...And (the United States) cannot be strong and free unless the executive, and the President, and the Congress are committed to this kind of progress, and it involves your welfare and the welfare of your children, and most especially those who come after us." (J.F.K.'s remarks at McKeesport, PA. City Hall Oct. 13, 1962)

Half a century after words are spoken it is easy to forget them, at least verbatim. Like the child's game of "telephone," in which each passes a message in whispers forward to the next and the stories change from beginning to end, time and repetition have a tendency to distort. We have a dangerous inclination to believe what we read or hear without verification, and as the Internet's reliability varies as widely as the typists behind its millions of linked computers, it's wiser to go back to the source rather than rely on a decades-long chain of hearsay (and worse, opinion and unrecognized bias so popular today).

This is the value of the Presidency Project, unprecedented in its attempt to collect in one location so many direct sources on our national leader. Let's face it, few Americans catch every word a president utters, yet we all form strong opinions about him (and one day, her). Now, from the inaugural speech of the first non-Caucasian president to the heartbreaking announcement of our first major terrorist attack, thanks to this project we have no excuse not to go straight to the source. It's that easy.

Sholeh Patrick, J. D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at [email protected].