Completing it required one final gift. On Thursday, that gift arrived: $26 million from Kenneth C. Griffin, founder and CEO of the $69 billion hedge fund Citadel. The library’s west wing will bear his name.
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It was not the largest check Griffin has ever written. Not even close. But it is certainly revealing.
The collector of American founding myths
To understand what Griffin is doing in Medora, it helps to start in Philadelphia—or, more precisely, at a Sotheby’s auction in November 2021, where Griffin paid $43.2 million for a first printing of the United States Constitution, outbidding an internet collective of 17,000 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who had crowdfunded under the name ConstitutionDAO. The price set an all-time record for a book, manuscript, or historical document sold at auction.
Then, this past spring, Griffin quietly did something stranger: He bought the only other surviving first printing of the Constitution still in private hands—the so-called Van Sinderen copy—for an undisclosed sum. He now owns both of them. Of the roughly 500 copies printed for delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, 13 are known to survive. Eleven are held by institutions like the Library of Congress and the National Archives. The other two belong to one man.
Griffin has loaned both copies to museums for public display—one to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and a donation of $15 million to the Constitution Center, the largest single gift in that organization’s history. The other was loaned to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, where it anchors an exhibition called The Promise of Liberty: Words That Shaped a Nation.
A portfolio of patriotism
Griffin’s philanthropic record is vast. He has given an estimated $2 billion to charitable causes—and notably diverse: Harvard, the University of Chicago, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the Art Institute of Chicago. But running through a significant slice of his giving is a specific, recurring subject: America itself, as an idea.
He has funded the restoration of the Lincoln Memorial. He made the largest donation in Navy SEAL Foundation history and the largest private gift ever to the Call of Duty Endowment, a veterans’ employment fund. He gave $30 million to the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation. Through Griffin Catalyst, his civic engagement initiative, he brought a sweeping dramatic presentation of American WWII history to audiences in New York and Miami.
And now: a presidential library for Theodore Roosevelt, in the Badlands, opening on the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Each gift is defensible, even admirable, in isolation. Taken together, they form something that looks less like philanthropy and more like curation—a deliberate, decades-long effort to paint a particular vision of American history: constitutional, militarily honorable, frontier-spirited, and defined by meritocratic striving rather than inherited privilege.
“In our nation’s 250-year history, few Americans have embodied the spirit of leadership as fully as Theodore Roosevelt,” Griffin said in Thursday’s announcement. “His vision, courage, and commitment to public service left an enduring mark on our nation.”
TR was the original trust-buster—a capitalist who believed in vigorous markets and equally vigorous civic responsibility, who thought great men had an obligation to public life, and who built his identity in the very Badlands where Griffin has now written his name on a building.
The tension at the core
What complicates the portrait—and makes it a more interesting story—is that Griffin has been one of the Republican Party’s most reliable megadonors and fiercest critics of its current direction. He spent more than $100 million on conservative candidates in the 2024 election cycle, but declined to back now-President Donald Trump.
The break became more public and pointed in May 2025, when Griffin appeared at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference and described Trump’s tariff regime as having “regretfully—already unleashed an era of crony capitalism.” He called it “terrifying to watch” and described businesses lobbying the White House for tariff exemptions as “nauseating“—the spectacle of a government choosing winners and losers as the antithesis of the American story he has spent hundreds of millions constructing.
By May 2026, he was back to writing GOP checks—$5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund for House Republicans—but his critique of the administration’s economic direction has remained consistent.
Perhaps the choice of Teddy Roosevelt is intentionally symbolic—a lion of the Republican Party whose heterodox positions and social liberalism paint a different vision of what the party, and country, could be. Clearly, Griffin doesn’t mind that idea of the Republican Party—and that idea of America.
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