Harding's pajamas: Presidential history goes on the road

ST. LOUIS -- From the inkwell Abraham Lincoln used for a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to Warren Harding's silk pajamas, a traveling exhibit chronicling the presidency is on view at the Missouri History Museum.

Visitors who haven't been to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., will have a chance for some of the National Museum of American History's famed artifacts to come to them. "The American President: A Glorious Burden" runs until Jan. 8 with more than 350 objects from the museum's collection.

The exhibit is set up according to themes, like presidential campaigns, with items such as a dress printed with the word "Ike" all over it that Dwight Eisenhower supporters wore during the 1956 campaign.

Other topics include inaugurations, limits of presidential power, assassination and mourning, the presidency in popular imagination and life after the presidency. The exhibit contains everything from a gown worn by Jacqueline Kennedy at a reception for the president of Tunisia to a microphone used by Franklin D. Roosevelt during one of his fireside chat broadcasts.

The director of the Missouri Historical Society, Robert Archibald, said that the exhibit shows how the American people expect extraordinary things of their presidents, although leaders are often picked from among ordinary people.

That's why Harding's red-and-black silk pajamas, included in the exhibit, likely will hold a certain fascination for visitors. "This guy put pajamas on, and had to go to bed like everybody else," Archibald noted.

And it's amazing, too, he said, to see items like the inkwell Lincoln used to write the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring an end to slavery.

The proclamation, issued in the midst of the Civil War, applied only to areas under the control of the Confederate States of America. Slave states that had not joined the confederacy, and areas of others occupied by the Northern forces, were exempted.

After the collapse of the confederacy and Lincoln's assassination, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1865 freeing slaves.

Archibald noted how Lincoln, despite his humble beginnings, made decisions that forever changed history. "He rises way above himself. Somehow people are transformed by the office," he said.

The Missouri History Museum is located in St. Louis' Forest Park. Admission to the presidency exhibit is $8 for adults; $7 for people 65 and older, and $4 for students. Children age 6 and under are free, and the exhibit will be free on Tuesdays.

The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Tuesdays until 8 p.m.

Since 2002, the presidential exhibit has been in Chicago; Independence, Mo.; Seattle; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Pittsburgh; Austin, Texas; and St. Paul, Minn. St. Louis is its last scheduled stop, a museum official said.

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Missouri History Museum: www.mohistory.org