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The library was first proposed more than a decade ago as a partner to the Theodore Roosevelt Center at nearby Dickinson State University, but the plan stalled. Lauf, then a policy aide to Gov. Doug Burgum, instead suggested a $50 million facility in Medora. Burgum jumped on the idea and set the price at $500 million, with the goal of making it “a global institution,” Lauf said. The project cost is now $450 million, with most of the money from private donors. Roosevelt descendants kicked in $81,000 to buy U.S. Forest Service land for the 93-acre site, near the outdoor amphitheater where the popular Medora Musical is staged each summer. Libraries have been built for other presidents who came before the National Archives system, though for most of them the term “library” is a brand; they’re basically museums designed for public appeal. The best-known example is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.; the least-known is likely a dive bar in Cleveland named for Millard Fillmore. There were no presidential libraries as we know them when Roosevelt died in 1919 of a coronary embolism. By then, he had turned over his presidential papers to the Library of Congress. The other major collection of TR documents is at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1880 only a few years before he first traveled to the Badlands to shoot a bison. Roosevelt today is considered arguably the most colorful of all American presidents, with his larger-than-life personality and big-stick dynamism. He broke up monopolies, built the Panama Canal, mediated peace between Russia and Japan, spearheaded government reforms and set aside more than 200 million acres as national parklands, forests and wildlife refuges. The library will celebrate those achievements, Lauf said, but it won’t soft-pedal TR’s early racist views on Native Americans. Library CEO Edward O’Keefe has said the library aims “to humanize rather than lionize” Roosevelt, and it will also acknowledge that the Badlands once were home and hunting ground to tribes including the Mandan, Hidatsa and Oglala Sioux. Representatives of North Dakota’s five tribes were invited by library officials to bury tobacco on the site as part of a healing ceremony.
