In the Course of Human Events, Still Unpublished

The timeline is so long that Rebecca W. Rimel, the Pew trusts' president, said only half in jest that her goal is to have the papers completed "in our lifetime."

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Pew, a large foundation in Philadelphia, has been trying to make the founding fathers' writings accessible to the public since 1981. It has poured $7.5 million into the papers and wants to see that investment reach fruition.

Rimel and Jordan took a major step in that direction in the 1990s. They were instrumental in persuading Princeton University to allow a portion of Jefferson's papers, those from his retirement years, to be annotated by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation near Jefferson's home, Monticello, in Charlottesville. Princeton had been working on Jefferson's oeuvre by itself since the 1940s, but agreed to split off the final papers Jefferson accumulated as a way to complete the full set of documents earlier than expected.

The effort has speeded publication considerably. But, typically, the decision did not occur without a fight. John Catanzaritti, who was the editor of the papers at Princeton, took early retirement rather than see the project divided into two parts, Katz and Jordan said.

Pew is now trying a new, governmental tack to move the process forward. At least $30 million of taxpayer funds have gone into the papers projects since 1965, though federal accounting has not always been easy to follow.

This year Pew retained Michael A. Andrews, a former Democratic congressman from Texas, to organize an effort to persuade Congress to provide more oversight for the projects and to scare up more funding for them.

Rimel and Andrews assembled a heavyweight group of advocates. In addition to McCullough and Jordan, its supporters include Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein; and Deanna B. Marcum, an associate librarian of Congress, who represents Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.

Besides their concern about the pace of the projects, the activists are eager to provide the scholarship and the papers to a broader audience. A recent poll of public libraries found that very few have many if any of the volumes on their shelves.

The main reason is cost. A complete set of 26 volumes of the papers of Hamilton runs about $2,600.

"Many of us have been concerned that the scholarly editions have been very slow to be produced, and ordinary people don't have as much access to those materials as we would like them to have," Marcum said. "We've already digitized the founding fathers' papers that we hold at the Library of Congress; we would like to see more of this kind of access to such papers from the projects as well."

That's easier said than done, the papers' editors say, especially when it comes to the annotated books. "We would love to have the volumes done and would love to do them more quickly, but physical and fiscal constraints indicate that's not likely to happen," said Theodore J. Crackel, editor of the Washington papers at the University of Virginia.

"It's unrealistic unless we radically reconceptualize the product," Katz agreed.

Both men noted that efforts have already been stepped up to put the documents onto the Internet, with the University of Virginia considered a leader in that effort.

But the Pew-led lobbyists are not satisfied that enough has been accomplished, especially McCullough, who does not believe that a quicker completion would sacrifice quality. Instead, he blames the slow progress on "the little fiefdoms of each project, which have been working in their own way in their world for over two generations."

"I liken this all to the Washington Monument, which ran out of money and stood there on the Mall like a giant marble stump," he said. "Finally, they went ahead and finished it."

The papers project also needs to be completed, he said. "It is a monument that will last longer than any of the monuments we now have."