100 Objects #1: The Century Safe

ROMAN MARS: It’s 1976. The average annual salary in the U.S. is just over $9,000. There is no internet to entertain us, but Jaws is back in theaters, and afternoon delight is burning up the charts. Nixon has resigned in disgrace. So now Ford is president. The Vietnam War has finally come to a close. And now an ambivalent country is about to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

All of Washington is trying to get hyped. There’s going to be fireworks, a huge celebration on the mall… And in the U.S. Capitol Building, in the marbled, beautiful Statuary Hall, there’s a big iron safe. 

JILL LEPORE: Picture, like, a Western where they’re robbing a train and there’s a safe on one of the cars of the railroad train and it’s this big iron monstrous thing but it’s sort of portable–that kind of a safe–like a 19th century safe. 

ROMAN MARS: This is historian Jill Lepore. 

JILL LEPORE: The safe, which is known as the Century Safe, sometimes called the Centennial Safe, was specially built on the occasion, a hundred years before, not of the Bicentennial, but of the Centennial, the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

ROMAN MARS: The Century Safe was created in 1876 to mark the country’s 100th birthday. The idea was to make a time capsule to fill the safe with objects, things hand-selected to represent the moment they came from. Those meaningful objects were hidden away inside the safe and the doors were sealed. And written on the doors were instructions to the future. 

JILL LEPORE: It is inscribed upon it, the promise that it will be opened by the president of the United States in the crazy futuristic year of 1976. 

CONGRESSIONAL OPENING ARCHIVAL: Good morning to all of you. Happy birthday to the USA. We are very pleased to have you assembled here this morning on a very historic occasion… 

JILL LEPORE: And President Ford has been coerced by his aides to carve out a few minutes in his schedule to traipse from the White House over to the Capitol Building into Statuary Hall where a fleet of photographers is assembled, awaiting this century-long wait finally coming to an end with the opening of an iron and glass door. 

ROMAN MARS: When the safe was first sealed, there was a record of what had been put inside. But by 1976, after its 100-year journey through time, most people had no idea. And so now they were gathered around with one shared question: What was in there? What objects did those Americans from the past think would really say, “This is who we are; these are the things that represent us and our values?” I mean what a daunting task. What a fraught exercise. What objects could anyone possibly pick to tell the story of the country, of our country? What fool would even attempt such a thing? 

From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so let’s go back 100 years before 1976, when the safe was first being filled, which to my understanding was at the World’s Fair of 1876. So could you talk about that World’s Fair? 

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, so the World’s Fair–we don’t really have them anymore. It’s a little bit even hard to describe, but it’s a bit like a circus plus Epcot Center plus Disney World plus the UN. 

ROMAN MARS: It had arts and science exhibits from across the globe–30,000 exhibits in more than 200 buildings. You could climb a ladder onto the right arm–the torch arm–of the future Statue of Liberty. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated what turned out to be his prototype of the telephone. Heinz Ketchup was introduced to the public. It is hard to conceive of those as contemporary inventions. But with innovation accelerating to light speed, there they were, side by side. 

JILL LEPORE: The big hit of the Centennial Exposition was Machinery Hall, where there was this giant power engine. There are also typewriters and sewing machines–just, like, a lot of gadgetry that was fun to see. 

ROMAN MARS: President Grant personally pulled the lever of that engine that brought all the other exhibits in the hall to life. The technology had advanced so far that, for most attendees, it must have seemed like magic. The fair was, in many ways, the centerpiece of the nation’s first big birthday. 

ROMAN MARS: So could you give a sense of what the general mood of 1876 is? Are people really feeling like celebrating the United States? Like, what is going on? 

JILL LEPORE: It is a big commercial hullabaloo to get people to celebrate the United States in 1876. Recall we’re only 11 years from the end of the Civil War in which three quarters of a million Americans died. We are at the turning point in which Reconstruction–the plan for a fully multiracial democracy in the United Seas for the first time–is just about to be abandoned. And there is a great spirit of reform in the United States still, especially under the banner of the women’s suffrage movement. So there’s a lot of political tumult in these years, but there is a tremendous amount that Americans who have an appetite for celebration are very keen to celebrate, and maybe surprisingly less about American freedom and liberty and democracy, and more about American economic and industrial might and geographic expansion. 

ROMAN MARS: One in five Americans came to the 1876 World’s Fair to see all of that innovation for themselves. In fact, progress had accelerated so much–life was changing so fast–that for the first time, Americans were becoming fascinated with the future. 

JILL LEPORE: You would say now, “Okay, for all of human time, haven’t humans always been interested in the future?” And I would say no. We just live in, like– “What is the future of work?” “What is the feature of automation?” “What is the future of AI?” “What is the future of democracy?” All of our political debates are about the future. It is a kind of, like, Davos to Aspen pipeline of, like, “We must talk about the future at all time!” Nobody thought about the future until the 20th century. 

But there is kind of the beginning of a notion of historical time that is novel in the 19th century. And people can picture rockets and going to the moon and… They’re not called robots until the 1920s, but there’s a lot about mechanical men. So people begin, for the first time, really thinking, “If machines keep getting better and faster and bigger and stronger, what will the future look like?”

ROMAN MARS: And it’s in this moment of celebrating the past and thinking about the future that one woman, Anna Deihm, a magazine publisher, dreams up the Century Safe. 

JILL LEPORE: She was a Civil War widow and, you know, was a canny businesswoman. And here was a stunt to get some attention for and sell subscriptions to the magazine and the newspaper. So she commissioned the building of this elaborate safe, which is kind of cool. It has engraving all over it, and then it promises on it that it’s going to be opened by the president of the United States in 1976 on July 4th, which is just cool. It would have been like looking at a rocket ship. 

ROMAN MARS: So she gets space at the World’s Fair to set this thing up. And then people interact with it. Like, how do they– What is on display? 

JILL LEPORE: Well, the thing itself, but then you could look at what was already in there. And you could pay money to have yourself put in. You could pay to sign your autograph in an autograph book–just anybody. And these chumps did that. It was a clever ruse. “Come here kid! You got a nickel?” So she made a little pretty penny. 

ROMAN MARS: So, like, if the idea of time capsules is quite new, and the idea of thinking about the past is kind of a new concept–thinking about the future is kind a new kind of concept–how does she convince people to care about this enough to get floor space on the World’s Fair? 

JILL LEPORE: I think she was a great show businesswoman. And it did speak to the moment in the sense of it was a clever idea, right? Here we are, 100 years from this Declaration of Independence. Why don’t we think about where the country will be a hundred years from now? 

ROMAN MARS: After the fair, having done everything she could to drum up excitement, Anna sealed her safe full of objects and entrusted it to Congress. 

JILL LEPORE: And it goes down, you know, into the Raiders of the Lost Ark storage facility. 

ROMAN MARS: So really over the course of this hundred years, despite the ornate bigness of the safe itself, it really does get kind of forgotten. 

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, it’s meant to be forgotten for a century. Like, what are you going to do? Check on it?

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] Yeah, I guess that’s true. 

JILL LEPORE: What’s the point of seeing what it looks like in 1929? 

ROMAN MARS: So the safe sat in the nation’s Capitol as the country changed around it. It sat there as debates about segregation grew from Reconstruction, as the Washington Monument went up, and eventually Lincoln’s, as men in uniform filled the streets on the way to World War I, then World War II… It sat, not bothering anyone, through the Great Depression and Wounded Knee and the Titanic and the creation of television and the Korean War and the March on Washington and the Stonewall Riots and men walking on the moon. Time went on and on and the country changed and changed and suddenly it was the 1970s. 

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, so a newspaper article appears, I think, in 1971. There’s a lot of newspaper coverage of the bicentennial. And there’s a story about–hey–aren’t we supposed to be opening up the centennial safe? Some clever reporter got the idea to go back and see what happened at the centennial. And then they go to the Smithsonian, and the Smithsonian’s like, “Yeah, I think we still have that, but we don’t know how to open it.”

ROMAN MARS: The New York Times runs an article, “Smithsonian Can’t Find Keys to Centennial Safe.” That’s right. In the intervening decades, they had lost the key. And then a man in Florida sees the article and realizes he has it. 

JILL LEPORE: Because Anna Deihm didn’t have any children. So what happened to the key? And somehow, for some reason, she didn’t give it to the Smithsonian. She gave it to her, like, great niece, Edith or something. And this guy in Florida was Edith’s… I don’t know. 

ROMAN MARS: I have great aunt Emma. Does that sound right? 

JILL LEPORE: Okay, Emma, Edith, Gertrude– We could just make up a name that belonged to the Edwardian era, Roman, and we would be covered. 

ROMAN MARS: It was the guy’s great aunt Emma who had gratefully passed on the key. So the safe could now be opened. 

JILL LEPORE: And so then there’s a whole rigmarole of like, “Are they going to get it out? Are they going to bring it to the Capitol?” Then they managed to find it in storage. They bring it into the Capitol in January of 1976. They have gotten the key from that guy, but maybe it’s rusted. They have to hire a locksmith to jimmy the thing. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so we have at least some of the parts here all coming together in 1976. And again I kind of was hoping you could sort of characterize the national mood at this moment as opposed to 1876. I mean, this is the bicentennial. Again, it’s a really tumultuous time. Watergate has happened–a real change in the sense of what people feel about their government. What is the temperature around the country and how is the bicentennial unfolding? 

JILL LEPORE: Yeah. So, we’re barely out of the Vietnam War. Pentagon papers, Watergate… Nixon’s resigned in ’74. Ford very controversially pardons him. And for Ford, really throwing himself into the hoopla of the bicentennial is about healing the country from those divisions and those wounds. And he comes to really believe that that is his main task as president. It was also controversial because, you know, the country’s vision of itself was not a unitary vision anymore than it was at any other point in American history. But Jesse Jackson called for a boycott of the bicentennial. Gil Scott-Heron wrote this great piece called Bicentennial Blues. There was a lot of kind of Frederick Douglass-vibe resistance to the bicentennial through a lot of protests by native nations, really effective protests. And there are also a lot of powwows, like a lot of public celebrations of native culture and native politics. So, it kind of had it all, the bicentennial. 

CONGRESSIONAL OPENING ARCHIVAL: It is with high honor and deep personal pleasure that I introduce the President of the United States… 

ROMAN MARS: And so, like, in an effort to grab onto something that we can all rally behind, let’s get to this opening ceremony where Ford is in his three-piece suit. 

GERALD FORD: Obviously, I’m deeply honored to have the opportunity to open this historic Centennial State… 

ROMAN MARS: Ford stands in front of a packed room, cameras flashing, reading his speech from index cards. 

GERALD FORD: It contains many items of interest to us today as we celebrate the completion of our second century…

JILL LEPORE: And I think it’s actually quite a special– I think it’s a nice speech, right? I don’t know, I guess if you don’t like Ford, you’re not gonna– I mean, I kind of like Ford. And he just kind of runs with the metaphor, right? 

GERALD FORD: As we look inside this safe, let us look inside ourselves… 

JILL LEPORE: But what does the safe contain? It contains our hopes and aspirations as a people. And nothing is more precious than that. 

GERALD FORD: America’s wealth is not in material objects but in our great heritage, our freedom, and our belief in ourselves… 

JILL LEPORE: “Let us look into our hearts…”

GERALD FORD: Let us look into our hearts…

JILL LEPORE: “And into our hopes…”

GERALD FORD: And into our hopes. Thank you very much… 

JILL LEPORE: “And now let’s open the doors.”

ROMAN MARS: So we’re finally at this moment where the safe is gonna be opened, and we’re going to find out what’s inside. So Ford finishes his nice little speech. And can you tell us what happens as they start pulling out some of the items? 

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, so he pulls things out one by one and sort of looks at them…

GERALD FORD: Here is a, uh… 

JILL LEPORE: And tries to, like, identify it…

GERALD FORD: That’s a Tiffany ink stand, I understand… 

JILL LEPORE: Like, “Okay, this is an ink stand.”

GERALD FORD: It looks a little different than the ones we have…

JILL LEPORE: There’s a room of photographers and reporters who are awaiting, you know, a message in a bottle, confessions of Jefferson Davis, an unpublished memoir that explains the abandonment of Reconstruction–all the things that I want to see! 

GERALD FORD: This is a photograph of an early statesman. I don’t see his name… 

JILL LEPORE: But, I mean, really, it’s a dud. 

GERALD FORD: Lindy, I have a picture of the chairperson. I don’t have any indication of her name, but looks mighty pretty… 

JILL LEPORE: It’s just nothing after nothing. And so he pulls out more things and people just start laughing. 

GERALD FORD: I guess the other picture was “Mr. M.F. Cooper, Electoral Commissioner…”

[LAUGHTER]

GERALD FORD: They always seem to get their picture in there, don’t they? 

JILL LEPORE: You have very high expectations for, like… What could you want to have seen from 1876? And nothing in there is anything that you would ever have wanted anybody to keep on any occasion. 

ROMAN MARS: In the end, the safe turned out to have a lot of photographs. Abraham Lincoln was there, Ulysses S. Grant… There was one of all the members of the 44th Congress, the one seated in 1876, and one of Anna Deihm herself. 

JILL LEPORE: And then there’s the Temperance pamphlet. There is this ink stand that supposedly was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. 

ROMAN MARS: There was a book with the names of the 80,000 people working for the government in 1876. There was a picture of Anna Deihm’s family physician–he must have been a fantastic doctor–and a book of autographs from legislators, clergymen, poets, scientists, and anyone who paid to sign it. 

JILL LEPORE: Like, “forgotten nobodies,” they might as well have been called. Everyone’s just like, “Oh. Okay. Yeah. What are we doing tomorrow?”

CONGRESSIONAL OPENING ARCHIVAL: I hate to make this announcement, but the bells have rung in the House for a vote to all the House members… 

JILL LEPORE: It’s just, like, a non-event. 

ROMAN MARS: Why do you think these objects were so disappointing? 

JILL LEPORE: Um… I think they don’t cross the valley of time with their significance intact. So what was significant to the people who put them in there was the novelty of photography, the possibility of preservation… I mean, it is kind of new to be keeping something preserved. And this would have been a very well-preserved set of materials because they’re sealed in a glass box. That would have seemed significant to them, the very fact of being able to seal it. Embalming was really new in the Civil War because your son or your brother or your father died far from home and people could pay to have the body embalmed so that it could be sent by railroad to go home. And it would still be something you could view before burial. And that form of preservation–preserving the human body long enough for a railroad journey to get home and be seen by loved ones–was a hugely significant thing, like photography, where you could still see someone who had died. The Century Safe has that sense of embalming a moment in time, but it’s more fascinated with the very act of preservation than it is with carefully thinking about what’s worth preserving. It’s almost like a monument to the possibility that we could preserve something, where what to put in there was an afterthought. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, so what would have been interesting? What could she put in there that you as a historian and you particularly as an archive nut–as the type of historian who likes old dusty things to pull out–would have liked to have seen? 

JILL LEPORE: Oh, something totally sneaky. First of all, nothing published, nothing that is not handwritten or hand drawn–something that is one of a kind that exists nowhere else that can be found nowhere else that would be a revelation upon its discovery. So… Love letters of Ulysses S. Grant. I don’t know. I don’t really care about Ulysses S. Grant. But the diary of a Chinese railroad worker who was learning English or something… I don’t know–something that we don’t have and that was not going to survive otherwise. 

ROMAN MARS: I very much take Jill’s point here. I can’t imagine how disappointing everything in the safe must have felt after 100 years of buildup. But I will say, even those objects that seem like they are absolutely worthless–when you spend a little bit of time with them–they do take you somewhere, like the Temperance pamphlet. Of course, a handwritten original item would be more profound. But this mass-printed pamphlet represents one of the biggest social movements at the time–one that would ultimately amend the Constitution, not once, but twice. This fight over alcohol that is so far in the past for us was front of mind for them. Or that photograph of the 44th Congress–it features eight Black members, more than ever before. But it was also the last time we would have so many Black representatives for almost 100 years. Were they thinking at this moment in 1876 that this progress would continue? Or could they feel the failure of Reconstruction on the horizon? Even that thoroughly unremarkable inkwell that Ford pulled from the safe. It belonged to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the celebrated poet and author of Paul Revere’s Ride. He’s the reason every American knows “the redcoats are coming.” The version of the Revolutionary War most people carry around in their heads came from his pen. But when the safe was filled, he was still deep in mourning from the death of his wife. She was at home with him when her dress caught fire. And when Longfellow tried to smother the flames, he suffered severe burns to his face. From then on, he wore a long beard to hide his scars. He was never the same. One writer said his poems about mourning effectively turned him into the nation’s grief counselor. And the only reason I know all this is because that inkwell was in the Century Safe. So I understand the disappointment of Jill Lepore and President Ford and the entire population of the United States in 1976. But I do think that in all these objects, in any American object, you can find America. 

ROMAN MARS: The reason why I want to talk to you about the Century Safe is because we’re embarking on this series called A History of the U.S. in 100 Objects. And so we’re kind of picking things out to represent the United States. And I was just wondering, like, should we even be trying to do this? Like, do you have some advice? 

JILL LEPORE: I don’t know, why not? I’m glad you’re doing it. You will have fun. I think it is important to recognize that, much like the present, the past is largely a chronicle of misery. I mean, people suffer. And the people who suffer the most leave the least evidence behind. And so any history that begins with what survives has a real challenge to arriving at any proper perspective on the human condition. I think that is the asymmetry of the historical record, right? People who were wealthiest and most literate and had the greatest resources not only made a lot of records, they managed to have their records preserved. And everyone else disappears and just vanishes. Their remains are gone. And I think it puts a special obligation, on anyone who’s trying to write history or tell a story about the past, to be attentive, to not give up in the face of the asymmetry, and to try to repair the historical record by finding other kinds of evidence, the evidence that does survive, that makes sure that we understand the lives both of the powerful and the powerless. But I wouldn’t fall into the notion that you’re assembling an exquisite and representative archive. 

ROMAN MARS: We are not making an official archive. It probably won’t be exquisite. But we are going to tell our story, the story of the United States, through objects, 100 objects to be exact. We are gonna try to look beyond the official record, outside of the things we’ve already thought to preserve and put behind museum glass. Instead, we’re gonna talk to historians and writers and storytellers and just normal people about discarded objects and small personal keepsakes and all kinds of things that are so common that we don’t think about how important they really are. We’re gonna see what stories those kinds of objects have to tell us about where we’ve been as a country–the good and the bad, the promises and the failures. 

ROMAN MARS: Thank you so much for talking with me, I really had a great time. 

JILL LEPORE: Yeah, I had a great time, too. I can’t wait to see what you guys put in your safe. 

ROMAN MARS: Whatever we put in our safe, it won’t be a time capsule for the future. This is a collection for right now, an ongoing weekly exhibit of the past to help us understand this moment. And we need you. I want you to look in your attics and think back through your family histories and tell us what objects you think tell a bigger story of America. Email us at [email protected]. It’s going to take all of us forgotten nobodies to do this right. Join us as we make history. 

There was a version of this show back in 2010 from the BBC that was focused on the world, A History of the World in 100 Objects. The stories all came from objects housed in the British Museum. And I loved it. It was a landmark show. So I’m proud to be working with BBC Studios on this new and re-imagined version, picking up the mantle and telling stories about the USA. We’ll be bringing you new episodes every Friday, right here in the 99% Invisible feed. Our next episode will air next Friday, but if you want to hear that episode and all future episodes one week early, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+.

My guest, Jill Lepore, is a historian, professor of American history at Harvard University, and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She’s also a staff writer at The New Yorker and a brand new recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. I love every single one of her books, but the Jubilee edition of her amazing book, These Truths: A History of the United States was just released. It’s so good, guys. You gotta read it. 

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.

Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorph, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our Associate Producer is Isaac Fisher.

The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell.

Mixing by Charlie Brandon-King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.

From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu.

From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our Production coordinator is Shan Pillay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.

99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. BBC studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.

If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

Thank you to the Julian P. Kanter Collection at the Carl Albert Center Archives and the Gerald Ford Presidential Library for use of the audio of the opening of the Century Safe.