By Michael Satchell The Nov. 6, 1940, letter
to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from a
14-year-old admirer in Oriente Province, Cuba, is
written with a neat, cursive script. In slightly
fractured English, the author makes a simple
request. "If you like, give me a ten dollars
bill green american . . . because never I have not
seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would
like to have one of them. . . . Thank you very much.
Good by. Your friend. Fidel Castro."
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A
routine communication from an ordinary student who
by happenstance went on to become Cuba's
dictator for life. There are uncounted missives like
this in the National Archives--petitions, appeals,
confessions, opinions, complaints--written by
private citizens. They include, says curator Stacey
Bredhoff, demands for federal action, bold
assertions of rights, organized efforts to effect
change--and requests as mundane as a Cuban teenager
seeking a souvenir 10 spot.
The right to be
heard. The letters represent two centuries of
dialogue between the government and the people. The
colloquy reflects historical events and personal
experiences from the profound to the whimsical: a
lynching witness names the killers, a slave wants
her freedom, a cuckolded husband petitions Congress
for a divorce, school kids scold a president. Says
Bredhoff: "Beneath this great diversity of
time, tone, and content is a common faith in the
right of the people to speak out and be heard."
Consider this Jan. 27, 1790, epistle to the
U.S. Senate, written in the third person, as many
petitions are. It is from Katherine Goddard, one of
the first government employees to lose her job when
a new administration takes over. She is fired after
14 years as Baltimore's postmaster when George
Washington is sworn in as the nation's first
president and the federal government inaugurated.
"The whole of her labour and industry was
nefariously unrewarded," she complains in
seeking to retain her position. "To deprive her
of this office, to which she has a more meritorious
and just claim than any other person, is a
circumstance pregnant with that species of
aggravation which a sense of ingratitude inspires
& which is much easier felt than
described." She also grumbles that she has to
advance her own money to cover postage when
government funds are late arriving. Congress refuses
to intervene.
David Beck, a Washington, D.C.,
resident, is a "sea faring man" whose Oct.
21, 1811, petition to Congress reads like a
soap-opera script. Every time he goes away, his
wife, Ellen, abandons him and moves in with a
different man, he explains. Fed up, he asks for a
law "absolving your said petitioner from his
said marriage." Congress declines, saying it is
"incompetent to dissolve the sacred bonds of
marriage."
On Aug. 25, 1864, a Maryland
slave named Annie Davis pens a simple, eloquent plea
to President Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation
Proclamation has been signed the previous year, but
it does not apply to slaves in Union states like
Maryland. "It is my desire to be free, to go to
see my people on the eastern shore," she
states. "My mistress won't let me. You
will please let me know if we are free and what I
can do."
