A President Opened a 100-Year-Old Safe on Camera, and Reporters Laughed
Sealed in 1876 and meant for the distant year of 1976, the iron Century Safe held ink stands and nameless photographs instead of secrets.
99% Invisible · 100 Objects #1: The Century SafeIn 1976, President Gerald Ford walked from the White House to Statuary Hall in the Capitol to keep a promise made 100 years earlier. Photographers crowded the hall around a heavy metal box of iron and glass that had sat sealed since 1876.
Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian, says it looked like something thieves would try to haul off a train, sturdy and built to be moved. Known as the Century Safe, it had been assembled for the country's hundredth birthday, filled with objects meant to stand for that moment, and shut with written directions for the future.
Those directions, as Lepore describes them, carried the promise that "it will be opened by the President of the United States in the crazy futuristic year of 1976." When the safe was sealed, there had been a record of what went inside. By 1976, after a century in Washington, almost no one remembered. Everyone gathered that morning shared one question: what had Americans long ago chosen to say who they were.
Ford gave a short speech and began lifting objects out one by one, pausing to make out what each was. He held up an ink stand and identified it as a Tiffany stand, noting it looked a little different from the ones in use now. He held up a photograph of an early statesman and said he did not see a name.
Lepore says she had hoped for something revealing, like a message in a bottle, a confession, or an unpublished memoir that explained the abandonment of Reconstruction. What came out instead were photographs of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, a group portrait of the Congress seated in 1876, a temperance pamphlet, an ink stand said to have belonged to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and autograph books full of people no one recognized. As each object appeared, people in the room began to laugh. Lepore calls the contents a dud.
Then the House bells rang for a vote, and Ford told the House members present that they would have to leave.
Questions people ask
What did Ford say before he opened the safe?
He spoke briefly from index cards, saying Americans should look inside themselves as they looked inside the safe. He said the country's wealth was not in material objects but in heritage, freedom, and belief in itself.
Did anyone in 1976 know what was inside before it was opened?
No. A list had been made in 1876, but it had largely been forgotten. The Smithsonian, which held the safe, also could not open it at first because the key had been lost.
Why does Lepore think the objects were so disappointing?
She says their importance did not cross what she calls the valley of time. What mattered in 1876 was the novelty of photography and the possibility of preservation itself, so deciding what to put inside was almost an afterthought.