More than 35 documents, including letters from political figures such as Winston Churchill and invitations to White House dinners, were added to the James O. Eastland Collection in October.
The new documents were donated by Eastland’s four children, Anne Howdeshell, Woods Eastland, Sue McRoberts and Nell Adams, and were received by Modern Political Archives, a unit of the Department of Archives and Special Collections.
Howdeshell and her son found the papers while going through boxes of financial information.
“Our son, Jamey, was helping me go through what we thought were old bank records. I’ll never forget his saying, ‘Mom, I think there’s something here you ought to see.’” she said. “We decided to donate them to the university because we felt that those letters added to a well-rounded perception of who Dad was.”
Woods Eastland said that donating the documents to the library made the most sense.
“They would just be in a drawer, not looked at, and be something for our children to deal with whenever they had to go through our effects. Having them all in one place, where they could be viewed by anyone interested made sense to us,” he said.
Sen. Eastland was a Democrat who represented Mississippi in Washington, D.C., in 1941 by appointment and then from 1943-1978. The collection, which already consists of 1,800 linear feet of records—hundreds of boxes—now contains these newly uncovered personal letters from various political VIPS, including Lady Bird Johnson, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy.
Eastland supported a bill to increase Secret Service protection for President John F. Kennedy’s family following his assassination in 1963. “I know that you and my husband often held different opinions about things,” Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Eastland, “but he respected you so much, and I think you were always wonderful to him—and now to me and to his children.”
Another addition to the Eastland Collection is a scrapbook documenting his trip to Europe after World War II. Seeing the destruction and devastation of a postwar Europe affected Eastland, causing him to encourage passage of the Marshall Plan to rebuild the European economy.
“I think that the fact that his staff compiled the scrapbook and gave it to him as a memento of the trip made it doubly special. His staff was very loyal to him,” Howdeshell said.
The new pieces of Eastland memorabilia, while small in number, hold great significance to the archives.
“We are very grateful that the family decided to donate this latest batch of correspondence, photographs and scrapbook to the university. Each item contributes to the overall historic record of Sen. Eastland’s career,” said Leigh McWhite, political papers archivist and assistant professor.
Much of the collection has been digitized already, and it will join the online archives in 2012. For more information about the collection, contact Leigh McWhite at the Modern Political Archives, 662-915-1850.