Herbert Brownell's Papers

Sometimes I think about whether I should write another biography. One candidate would be Herbert Brownell. On the plus side, he was one of the more important Attorneys General during his service from 1953-1957. On the minus side, he was the co-inventor of the Bluebook. (That's a joke. Sort of.)

But here's where things get complicated. Brownell gave most of his papers to the Eisenhower Library. The covering memo on that gift explains that almost all of the papers related to civil rights were accidentally thrown away before the Eisenhower Library received them. The story was that Brownell gave the civil rights papers to someone to write a book. When she died, the family didn't know that the papers were important and  just tossed them. A book about Brownell without his civil rights papers doesn't sound too appealing, which may explain why nobody has written his biography.

This is a more common problem than you might think. Some of John Bingham's correspondence was also thrown away by the family of a private collector after the collector died. They didn't know that what he had was significant. The lesson here is that some library or archive should also serve as the custodian.