“…we advertised the exhibition not as a show for historians (even though we owed very much to the historians) but as a citizens’ exhibition. Actually it was not an art exhibition, but more like a colored walk-through tabloid. We tried to make this purpose clear.”

“We used the captions to deal with problems and circumstances; that’s why there were so many words. Had we been dealing with accomplishments, we could have done it in very few words. However, it is true that we set out originally to be quite critical and hard about the main characters, but as we went on, we were so impressed by how much someone like James Madison was able to pull off time and again that we came out pretty much all admiration.”

“Franklin was trying everything—it was part of his lifelong experimenting—but in these writings he tried something that wasn’t very good. It seemed rather pointless to dwell on it when there was so much new we hadn’t seen before, and so much we wanted to tell—for example, about Madison and Washington. Quite frankly, we swung over to what they managed to accomplished, not in an attempt to cover anything up but to show the importance of some of their ideas.”

Charles Eames, from an interview by Owen Gingerich.