They’re getting rid of “red tape’ in Washington — through the gift shop
The “tape” the agency is selling off isn’t adhesive tape; it’s a soft, flat and narrow woven cotton that’s snipped from a spool. Red tape eventually was abandoned for white or undyed tape because of its tendency to bleed, but in its heyday, the government used vast amounts of the red stuff. For instance, in 1864, the War Department headquarters purchased 154 miles of red tape, according to the Archives.
At the Archives, one common place to find it is knotted around stacks of tri-folded military records, Kratz says, which is how red tape ended up in the gift shop. A volunteer in the 1990s, Robert E. Denney, was unbundling Civil War service records to be microfilmed when he saw an opportunity with a curio that had outlasted its usefulness. In 1997, the store began selling clippings for $5, and its red-tape business is bigger than ever.
They span a spectrum of reds and conditions and lengths; some are knotted, some are stained. There was a learning curve to working with the tape; it requires ironing, for instance, and at first it would discolor or burn when he soldered the jewelry. “But I just love working with something that’s an old piece of history that somebody else has touched and utilized,” he says. “It was just kind of cool to think about the past that it had.
William J. Hansard bought a few red-tape charms online last year. A digital collections specialist at the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson, N.D., who has a doctorate in history, Hansard knew all about red tape. He’s delighted that it has been turned into a keepsake. “This thing that once was the bane of our existence,” for archivists, for citizens, “ … now we look upon fondly as an amusing charm — as ‘charming,’ quite literally.
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