JOAN MONDALE:

Joan Adams Mondale was born on August 8, 1930 in Eugene, Oregon. She was one of three daughters of Eleanor Jane (Hall) Adams and the Reverend John Maxwell Adams, a Presbyterian minister. When she was five years old the Adams family moved to Wallingford, Pennsylvania, where Joan and her sister attended the first integrated Quaker school in the state. The family later moved to Columbus, Ohio and then on to St. Paul, Minnesota, when the Reverend Adams was named Chaplain of Macalester College. Joan's last year of high school was spent at the Summit School in St. Paul and in the fall of 1948 she entered Macalester College.

During her college years she worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts cataloging prints and teaching children's art classes. During the summer of her junior year she studied contemporary church architecture in France. Joan Adams graduated from Macalester College in 1952 with a major in history and minors in art and French. After graduation, Joan worked as an Assistant Slide Librarian at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and later as an Assistant in Education at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where she primarily gave guided tours and lectures. Although both Joan Adams and Walter Mondale (class of 1950) attended Macalester College, they did not meet until 1955 when Joan's sister, Jane Canby, arranged a blind date. Fifty-three days later they became engaged and they married on December 27, 1955.

The Mondales have three children: Theodore (Ted) born on October 12, 1957; Eleanor, born on January 19, 1960; and William born on February 7, 1962. In 1960, the Mondales became a political family when Walter was appointed Minnesota's Attorney General. Joan became an active and enthusiastic participant in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and was elected chairwoman of the 7th Ward in Minneapolis, a post she held for a few years, until her husband was appointed to the United States Senate (to fill Hubert H. Humphrey's vacated seat ) in 1964. The family then moved to Washington, D.C., where the children attended school in the 1960s and 1970s. Joan actively campaigned for her husband's Senate races in 1966 and 1972, and for the Carter-Mondale ticket in 1976.

Mrs. Mondale continued to pursue her passion for art when she moved to Washington by giving tours at the National Gallery of Art and by taking pottery lessons from a master potter who has called her "my most talented student." In 1972, Joan Mondale authored "Politics in Art," a book aimed at young adults that grew out of some of the lectures she had been giving.

Joan Mondale was an active member of the Woman's National Democratic Club, serving on its board of governors and chairing its legislative program committee for two years. She served as a member of the board of the John Easton Public School PTA in the District of Columbia and on the advisory council of Reading is Fundamental, an organization which brings books and the joy of reading to young children. In 1973, Mrs. Mondale was elected to a two-year term on the board of directors of the Associated Council of the Arts, a private nonprofit organization which represents all the state arts agencies and hundreds of community arts councils and related agencies. She also conducted tours of historical and artistic points of interest for convention groups visiting the Nation's Capitol. In 1975, she helped organize a food buying cooperative in her Washington neighborhood.

Upon Walter assuming the vice-presidency in January 1977, the Mondales moved into the Admiral's House, long used by the Navy, but designated as the official vice president's residence in 1974. Mrs. Mondale turned the house into a showcase for contemporary American art, filling it with paintings, sculpture, and crafts on loan from museums. Artists from the Midwest were featured during 1977; artists from the Southwest during 1978; artists from the Northeast in 1979; and artists from the Pacific states in 1980. Works of Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ansel Adams, and Georgia O'Keefe, as well as many other artists, several of whom had not yet reached a national audience, were exhibited. Tours of the art in the vice-president's home filled a good part of Mrs. Mondale's schedule when she was home in Washington.

During the four years her husband was the vice president, however, Joan Mondale traveled throughout the country, visiting most states at least once and many states several times, promoting government support of artists, museums, theatres, operas, schools, dance companies, and other educational groups. In 1977 President Carter appointed her honorary chairperson of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. She served as the Carter Administration's "ombudsman for arts." Working with the General Services Administration's Art in Architecture program, Joan Mondale urged use of art items to decorate federal buildings and offices. She met with National Park Service officials and got them to reverse a ban on sales of arts and crafts at National Park stores. Mrs. Mondale's interest in the arts extended beyond arts and crafts to the other visual arts, and to dance, theatre, and music. In testimony before Congress she urged the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service to revise the tax code so that artists and their families would not be so negatively affected by estate taxes.

During foreign trips to South America, Europe, Africa, China, and various Pacific countries, Joan Mondale was often able to visit foreign artists and craftspeople and museums to broaden her perspective. In addition to numerous honorary awards (an honorary degree from Macalester College for example), a variety of the Triumph Tulip, was named the "Joan Mondale," by J.F. van der Berg, and was planted at the vice-president's residence in 1980.

Joan Mondale, of course, campaigned around the country for the Carter-Mondale ticket in 1980 and the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984. Although both campaigns lost out to the Republican landslides led by Ronald Reagan, the Mondales continued to live in Washington until 1987 when Walter Mondale resumed law practice in Minneapolis. After about five years back home, duty called again when Walter Mondale served as United States Ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996, during Bill Clinton's first administration. During that time, Mrs. Mondale, of course, immersed herself in Japanese art. The Mondales returned to Minnesota in 1997, where Joan Mondale has since been involved with several Twin Cities arts organizations.

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These are Joan Mondale's files from her years as the nation's second lady, 1977-1981. Many of them reflect Joan's interest in and advocacy for the arts. The bulk of the collection consists of trip and personal appearance files, which include invitations, correspondence, subject files, and speeches related to those events. There is also some documentation of her campaign activities during the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns.

The Trip, Events, and Speech files include itineraries, correspondence, background material and speeches that document Mrs. Mondale's trips throughout the United States and abroad, including campaign appearances, official visits to other countries, speaking engagements as an advocate for the arts, commencement addresses, and the like. The collection contains a good deal of brochures, pamphlets, and background material on artists, art exhibitions, museums, craft fairs, theaters, dance companies, and operas from around the country and from abroad, all dating from the middle to late 1970s. There also are several boxes of invitations to various events, which reflect the huge demands on the second lady's time. Another series documents the Carter-Mondale transition team in the arts and humanities (late 1976-early 1977), and still another documents some of the arts activities in federal agencies promoted by Joan Mondale. Although documentation of teas, receptions and dinners held at the Vice President's House, located on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., are located in the trip and events files, several other boxes deal with the history of the House and various art exhibitions held there. Some folders and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings also are included in these papers, as are some photographs, slides, audio tapes, and video cassettes. Correspondents include her executive assistant, Bess Abell, and other office staff; politicians and politicians' wives; political supporters and campaign workers; family members and friends; officials of various colleges where Mrs. Mondale gave commencement addresses; artists; and members and officials of arts organizations, including the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

A portion of this collection was originally a part of the Joan Mondale Personal Papers manuscript collection.

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These documents are organized into the following sections:

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Availability:

The collection is open for research use.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Joan Mondale Second Lady's Office Files. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Accession Information:

Accession numbers: 13,631; 14,299; 15,412; 15,513; 15,785; 15,853; 16,319

Processing Information:

Processed by: David B. Peterson and Richard W. Arpi, January-June 2004; Alex Kent, additions made May-June 2010.

Catalog ID number: 990017382110104294

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Files containing background material on the event, correspondence arranging the event, and follow-up thank-you letters for Joan Mondale's appearances between late 1976 and early 1981. A majority of these files document her appearances promoting an artist, an exhibition or a museum and include copies of her speech. Also included are some campaign speeches, commencement speeches, foreign trip files, and documentation of dinners, teas, and receptions, some of which were held at the Vice-President's Residence.

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Letters received by Joan Mondale and her staff, and carbons of responses sent, between 1977 and January 1981.

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Letters to the second lady on various subjects, as arranged by her office staff. A brief description is provided in the inventory below and on each folder. Researchers should read the file manual in Box 34 for rationale, rules, and complete description of the codes used. Usually a carbon copy of the reply is attached to the original letter. A number of uncoded personal files have been added to the VPL (second lady personal) files in Box 44. These include articles by or about the second lady and other personal files.