SPOTLIGHT ON NARA
THE
CONGRESSIONAL
ARCHIVES
NARA Unit Preserves Histories of Legislation in House, S enate
By Rob Crotty
I n 1954, a Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquen-
cy met to discuss “the problem of horror and crime
comic books.” Over three days of hearings, numerous
experts were called to testify whether comics of the day
were contributing to increased violent crimes in teens.
Doctors testified that “most of the children that we do see
at the psychiatric services of the court are reading comic
books.” The New York State joint legislative committee
claimed “The reading of crime comics stimulates sadistic
and masochistic attitudes.” Certain magazines were cata-
loged as examples of “disturbing” and “sadistic” comics.
Someone, or something, was to blame.
This is why the Center for Legislative Archives now
holds in its records issue #1 of Mad magazine—and a
litany of other comic books. They were submitted as evi-
dence to display the corrupting characteristics inherent in
the “printed poison” of comic books.
Moments such as this remain important in our
American journey. The Senate may have never determined
the cause of juvenile delinquency, and many Americans
may not remember that comic books were ever a national
issue of immorality in today’s digital age. But the docu-
ments that capture this moment and the other half-billion
documents held at the Center for Legislative Archives are
like a national diary, cataloging moments—their emo-
tions, activities, and concerns. It’s the Center for
Legislative Archives’ job to ensure those moments in
Congress are preserved, comic books included.
46 Prologue
Following the Paper Trail
Congress’s memory lives in its paper trail. Before the
1930s, the trail led to obscure places in the Capitol—base-
ments, attics, closets filled with subcommittee hearings
and inaugural addresses.
It wasn’t until 1937 that Senate records found a proper
resting place inside the walls of the National Archives. In
1946 the House records followed suit. In this same year
Congress responded to the executive branch’s explosive
growth during World War II with the Legislative
Reorganization Act, increasing its size and, subsequently,
its paperwork.
In the 1970s Congress’s committee staff and workload
grew again, and the National Archives began to receive
much larger volumes of legislative records. Because of this
influx of records and the need for Congress to have histor-
ical and contextual references when making decisions, the
Archives started to take on a much larger role in the leg-
islative branch than ever before. Early in its history the
Center was considered to be little more than a warehouse,
says Richard McCulley, the Center’s historian. “That has
very much changed.”
By the 1980s the Center was considered critical. When
the National Archives achieved independence in 1985, it
established the Legislative Archives Division, renamed the
Center for Legislative Archives in 1988, as the NARA unit
responsible for filling legislative requirements and keeping
its records, though their legal custody remains on the Hill.
Fall 2009
 Left: Terrors of the Jungle was submitted as evidence to a 1954 Senate subcommittee that examined the effects of “sadistic” comics on juvenile delin-
quency. Right: The Pecora investigation of 1933–1934 looked into the causes of the Great Depression and helped model the New Deal.
In 1990, the Advisory Committee on the Records of
Congress was created. Alternately chaired by the Secretary of
the Senate and the Clerk of the House, the committee pro-
vided policy guidance to the Center and established a direct
link between the Capitol and the National Archives, illustrat-
ing the importance of the Center as an archives to Congress.
Over time, the congressional paper trail has moved
from parchment to paper and, more recently, into the dig-
ital realm, and with it the Center has evolved as well. It
now works with Congress to ensure the transition to a
more digital archives is a smooth one.
Whether in print or on screen, the Center remains an
essential stop for researchers and members of Congress
alike. Recently, it has focused on providing descriptions
and products on a historic commission that may provide
some context to the current struggling economy: the
Pecora Investigation of 1933–1934 that looked into the
causes of the Great Depression and informed New Deal
banking and financial regulation.
It’s also busy handling the most significant independent
committee investigation in the past decade: the 9/11
Commission. Since the commission’s closure five years ago,
The Congressional Archives
the Center has been hard at work cataloging and releasing
its records. About 35 percent of the records are currently
open, and much of it is available online. Release of the
remaining documents is dependent on National Security
interests and other standing confidentiality agreements.
These commissions represent a sliver of what the
Center holds. As Congress’s paper trail extends into the
21st century, the Center collects, and its archives just
keeps growing.
Half a Billion Papers
and Counting
Handling congressional papers is no easy task. While
presidential libraries maintain a relatively static collection,
the Center for Legislative Archives’ holdings increase every
time Congress passes a bill, discusses proposed legislation,
confirms a presidential appointee, or does anything at all.
When the House closes its congressional sessions every
two years, all the House’s related documents—paper or
otherwise—are organized, held on site for four years, and
then shipped to the National Archives Building for storage.
The Senate delivers the boxes in accessions sporadically.
Prologue 47
 “Accessions can vary from a box to 300 boxes” explains
Matt Fulghum, the Center’s assistant director, adding that
the Center receives “four or five hundred accessions in one
year.”
More than 13 million pages will arrive this year, says
Richard Hunt, the Center’s director. “From the 1980s up
to the present, our holdings of House and Senate records
have been doubling every 10 to 15 years,” a nearly incom-
prehensible amount considering the Center currently has
a half-billion documents to track, enough to circle the
globe three times, if one laid the pages end-to-end.
As if organizing and storing these documents weren’t
difficult enough, the Center’s team has 24 hours to fill
requests from committees. They made 187 of these
loans—totaling more than 1 million pages—in fiscal year
2008 alone. And that’s not all.
Apart from the records of the House and Senate, the
Center also maintains stacks at the National Archives at
College Park, Maryland, that hold the records of legisla-
tive branch agencies like the Government Accountability
Office and the Government Printing Office (GPO).
“We are a repository of last resort,” McCulley says. If a
researcher can’t find a government publication, “they
come to us because we have a copy of the records.” It’s the
GPO, after all, that prints all the government’s publica-
tions, and so it’s the Center’s job to preserve them, all
31,400 square feet.
This is part of what makes the Center such a treasure
trove for researchers. Balancing its obligations to Capitol
Hill, the Center’s 20-person staff also retrieved more than
3,500 items in its holdings for researchers in fiscal year
2008. According to McCulley, the research is as “diverse as
the holdings” themselves.
Maintaining History
That there are any records to study is something of a
miracle.
Before 1800, Congress met in eight separate places in
four separate states, each time shipping written records by
barge or horse before finally settling in Washington, D.C.
In 1814, when the British army burned the Capitol,
Senate Clerk Lewis Machen had to commandeer a wagon
to evacuate the young Senate’s records. The House was less
fortunate: many of its petitions and documents burned.
Maintaining the documents was a less dramatic ordeal
after 1814, but no less trying on the records themselves.
Documents were stored wherever clerks could find space.
Parchment decayed. Mice made meals out of hearings on
bills and amendments. Mold settled in. Heat made
Constitutional proceedings brittle.
It wasn’t until 1927 that an exhaustive effort was made
to catalog the Senate holdings. Harold Hufford, then a
young Senate file clerk, found the Senate records scattered
across 50 separate locations throughout the Capitol.
When the Archives building prepared to receive the docu-
ments 10 years later, Hufford was ready. He later became
the first director of the legislative section of the National
Archives, working to ensure easy access for the legislative
body to its own body of work.
Opium and Secret Journals
Though much of the Center’s records remain closed to
researchers—unpublished records of the House are closed
to the public for 30 years, unpublished Senate records are
closed for 20—the Center remains a significant collection
of American history.
Called “perhaps the most valuable collection of records

Lesser known moments in Congress

The Center for Legislative Archives preserves moments of congressional history, some well known, some hidden under
the remains of lengthy proceedings and thick bills. Here are a few of the lesser known facts about the legislative branch.
• On April 10, 1869, Congress passed a joint resolution making Promontory, Utah, the meeting place for the two
halves of the transcontinental railroad. Lesser known is that by the time Congress had settled on Promontory, the
two construction companies had already graded about 100 miles past each other on parallel tracks.
• President Lyndon B. Johnson fought hard against many entrenched southern congressmen for the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. One such congressman was Virginia representative Howard Smith, who tried to kill the bill by
adding “sex” to the list of items employers couldn’t use to discriminate when hiring. Instead of killing the bill, the new
wording stayed in, and the Civil Rights Act was adopted, giving rise to both racial and gender equality in the workplace.
• The House amendment ending slavery—what would become the 13th amendment—passed by only one vote.
• If it were up to the House, the Capitol might be located in Pennsylvania. In 1789 “an act to establish the seat of the
government . . . on the banks of the Susquahannah River in the state of Pennsylvania” passed in the House. In
October of 1814, the Capitol in embers following the British invasion, the House voted 72-71 that it would be
“expedient to remove the seat of government” from Washington back to Philadelphia.
• There were originally 12 amendments submitted by Congress for ratification in September of 1789, but only 10 were
adopted to become the Bill of Rights. The two amendments that failed dealt with the size of the House and with
congressional pay issues, the latter of which was ratified in 1992 to become the Constitution’s 27th amendment.

48 Prologue Fall 2009

in the entire government” by one of the original examin-
ing archivists in 1937, the collection is unique in touching
nearly every aspect of American history. “We hold the
records of the only representative branch of the federal
government,” explains Hunt.
“Congress deliberates on everything,” and all those
paper trails lead to the Center, McCulley adds.
“Everything” is not an understatement. Apart from
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech, or
George Washington’s inaugural address, there are the more
obscure documents that just as well provide a glimpse into
an American moment.
When Hunt searched through the House stacks years
ago, he found a letter from a doctor to a member of the
House. The doctor, who was observing the House in ses-
sion, noticed one of its members had a horrible cough and
had enclosed a modern-medical cold remedy for the con-
gressman: opium.
It was inside a little folded piece of paper in the enve-
lope, Hunt recalls. “I called security.”
Fulghum once found cigarettes folded inside a letter to a
congressman. It was from a soldier serving in the Far East
during World War II who thought the Army’s rationed cig-
arettes were subpar. “You try to smoke this!” the letter read.
There is even a secret journal of the House locked away
in the stacks. Hunt notes that the only secret commu-
niqué in it is an 1803 letter from Thomas Jefferson to
In this secret letter to Congress, President Thomas Jefferson requests funds totaling “two thousand five hundred dollars ‘for the purpose of
extending the external commerce of the US,’” words that funded the Lewis and Clark expedition five months before the Louisiana Purchase.
Congress requesting funding for a politically sensitive
expedition to the west: the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Together, this is what makes the Center a unique refuge
for American history: it captures moments in American
history as they played out in Congress—what concerned
the nation, what its priorities were, how Congress intend-
ed to resolve issues.
The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency,
after its hearings on comic books like the popular Terrors
of the Jungle, released its interim report. “Majority opinion
seems inclined to view that it is unlikely that the reading
of crime and horror comics would lead to delinquency in
a well-adjusted child and normally law-abiding child,” the
finding shows.
It appears that horror and crime comics were in the
clear. But as the report continued, the Senate observed
that if comics weren’t causing teen crime, they may be
guilty of something else. “There is evidence that comic
books are being utilized by the U.S.S.R.,” the report reads,
“to undermine the morale of youth in many countries by
pointing to crime and horror . . . as one of the end results
of the most successful capitalist nation in the world.”
This was in 1954, when America was gripped by fears of
communist influence in government and everyday American
life. These sentiments, written into the American diary, are
now preserved for generations in the Center’s holdings, so
America never forgets its past as it steps toward its future. P