David Graham: The Proposed Auction of Ronald Reagan's Blood Isn't Surprising

David Graham is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he writes and edits for the Politics Channel.

...But as grotesque as the auction might be, it's hardly surprising. The still-young United States -- deprived of the bones, blood, and fading locks of centuries-old saints, as well as a state church to celebrate them -- has long made a habit of fetishizing relics from our late presidents instead. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, a famous photograph of the bloodstained sheets in Washington's Peterson House where he had lain entered popular circulation, and artifacts were distributed. The bed in which he died is now in the Chicago History Museum. A stained pillow ended up in the Peterson House, and a chair went to the Henry Ford Museum. But as James Swanson wrote in Bloody Crimes, a stained coverlet in the photograph disappeared, apparently taken by souvenir hunters....