History: just taking up space

     For all the South's obsession with its history, its Republican state Uniparties don't care much for the cost of preserving it. SC Governor Nikki Haley and her predecessor Mark "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" Sanford annually tried/try to zero out funding for museums and archival programs (South Carolina's archive, which contains documents back to 1671, has dropped from 125 employees in the 1980s to 28, and has no funds for consesrvation of records at all). Mrs Governor Haley regularly denounces such things as foreign to her otherwise utterly undefinable notion of "the core functions of government."

     Last Thursday The New York Times ran a depressing story on how the Georgia Archives will have its staff cut to three persons in November, one of whom is the maintenance man. Documents coming in from state agencies will pile up unsorted and unfiled.Georgia will now share honors with no other state in the distinction of having a state Archive that's not  open to the public. If you want to see anything, you will have to make an appointment.

Not open for business.

     A week after announcing the cuts, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal issued the traditional annual Georgia Archives Month proclamation (which, curiously, is not posted on his official proclamations list).

     A local economic development official put his reaction succinctly:

“Can you believe that [expletive]?” said Morrow Business and Tourism Association President Mike Twomey.

     The Clayton News Daily reports:

 The closing of public access to the Georgia Archives likely will have a ripple effect. Clayton State University created a master’s degree program in archival studies because of its Morrow campus’ proximity to the Georgia Archives and the National Archives at Atlanta. Clayton County economic development officials want to attract genealogy-related businesses to the dormant Gateway Village development, located across Ga. 54 from the archives.

     Governor Deal is turning his back on the state's history as a leader in the public archives field:

The Georgia Archives was established on August 20, 1918, after a prolonged effort on the part of the Archive's first director, Lucian Lamar Knight. The Archives occupied a balcony in the State Capitol Building for twelve years until 1930, when furniture magnate Amos Giles Rhodes left his home, “Rhodes Hall,” to the Archives.

On October 11, 1965 the Archives dedicated its first home built specifically to house archival collections. The 14-story marble building—known to many as “the White Ice Cube”—was hailed as the most modern archival facility in the country. The new home led to the expansion of services, including the addition of records management and microfilming services for state agencies and local governments.

In 1998 engineers determined that the White Ice Cube was sinking due to ground water and nearby interstate construction. Even as the building sank, the archives faced massive expenses to repair the aging HVAC systems. The cost to repair and refurbish the state archives (estimated by some to be as much as $40,000,000) made new construction an attractive alternative. In April 2001, the Georgia General Assembly endorsed a public-private partnership to construct a new archival facility near Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia, and adjacent to the Southeast Regional Branch of the National Archives (completed in 2004). Groundbreaking took place on October 30 of that year and the Archives opened its new building on May 6, 2003. Since that time the facility has been awarded design awards by the American Institute of Architects at the state, regional, and national levels.

     ^{Apparently not even a public-private partnership, so beloved of Southern Uniparties as the alternative to government activity of every sort, is enough to save Georgia's history from the axe.}