LIBRARIES

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, librarians in the United States were among the many specialized groups aspiring to establish themselves as professionals. Aligning themselves with educators and attempting to establish their special expertise in the area of books and reading, librarians were necessarily sensitive to the views of the entrenched social hierarchy that held the power to grant them the status they sought.

The resulting ambiguities of purpose meant that libraries reflected changing values and social structures in the formative years of the profession to a greater degree than they influenced them, despite professional rhetoric to the contrary. The period was one of great growth for all types of libraries, but it was in public libraries that fundamental ideological struggles took place and in which the particular character and identity of American libraries was molded.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY MOVEMENT

The year 1876 saw the publication of the U.S. Bureau of Education Report Public Libraries in the United States: Their History, Condition, and Management. Prepared for the nation's centennial, the report acknowledged the impressive growth in public libraries that had occurred in the two decades since the founding of the Boston Public Library and the first gathering of library enthusiasts.

Inspired by the encouraging figures in the report and facilitated by the orchestrations of Melvil Dewey (1851–1931), library leaders met at the centennial celebrations in Philadelphia in October 1876 and gave birth to the American Library Association (ALA). This, and the founding of the American Library Journal in the same year, signaled the beginning of the modern public library movement as well as the first stirrings toward the professionalization of librarianship.

Prominent in the early organizing efforts of the profession were three men, Justin Winsor, William Frederick Poole, and Charles Ammi Cutter, and their values, chiefly those of the prevailing social elite, were reflected in the emerging sense of the library's place in American cultural life. Winsor, director of the Boston Public Library, was elected first president of the ALA (1876–1885) and emerged as a respected spokesman for the profession. Poole, who created the standard index for access to nineteenth-century periodical literature, was librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, director of the Chicago Public Library, and later head of the prestigious Newberry Library. He succeeded Winsor as ALA president (1885–1887). Cutter, who devised a numerical system for organizing a library collection that is still in use today, was assistant librarian at Harvard before becoming head of the Boston Athenaeum. He served as Poole's successor as ALA president (1887–1889) and as editor of Library Journal (1881–1893).

All of these men shared, in varying degree, a New England–based sense of propriety and convention that valued gentility as the distinguishing mark of the cultivated person. This genteel tradition and the egalitarian notion that gentility could be learned, led to the concept of the library as an institution most closely aligned with education. Emerging naturally from such institutions as the lyceum and the athenaeum, the public library was seen to have a clear mission to serve as a repository for culture and as an agent for the cultural elevation of those it served.

The motives behind this point of view have been variously debated, broadly divided between those who see the library movement as a noble effort dedicated to the betterment of the common people, and those who see it as an imposition of the will of the cultural elite toward a perpetuation of shared beliefs, designed to uphold the status quo. In any case, the members of the profession saw themselves as qualified to make the value judgments necessary to assess the cultural status of users and to mold collections best suited to the goal of elevation.

Following the 1876 report, as libraries multiplied and collections grew, the necessity of having librarians dedicated to providing personal assistance to patrons became increasingly apparent. As librarians sought to define themselves, it became clear that the provision of reference service was a distinguishing feature of the profession. Reference collections were developed and reference rooms became a standard feature of library facilities, particularly in plans for new library buildings.

THE FICTION PROBLEM

In this missionary phase, one consistently troublesome issue had to do with the place of fiction in the library collection. Widely considered to be merely a low form of entertainment, it was the view of many that fiction had no place in a serious library collection at all. Yet it was clear that patrons of the library expected to find fiction there.

Furthermore, some argued, it was clear that certain forms of literature—Hawthorne was one author who met with approval—met a higher standard and could arguably be said to contribute to the library's mission to elevate. Another theory held that frequent reading of "lower" forms of literature would cultivate an appetite for something better. A library that provided such "low" literature was thus both serving the public and fulfilling its mission at the same time.

There was consensus that a work judged to be immoral was unworthy of inclusion in a library collection. The standard of morality was considered to be so commonly held as to make such works apparent, despite the fact that disagreements arose as to just which titles were immoral. The struggle to arrive at some sort of standard by which literature, particularly fiction, could justifiably be included or excluded from library collections led to an 1881 survey by the ALA, the results of which included Horatio Alger, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and G. W. M. Reynolds among the questionable authors. The survey passed judgment on the value of particular works based on assumed standards of genteel behavior. Besides works identified as immoral, writes Patrick Williams, books that were "sensational, vulgar, sentimental, and inauthentic in their portrayals of the problems and predicaments of human beings and society" (p. 13) were also deemed objectionable.

The zeal for censorship spread, causing works such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) to be banned in 1881 by the Boston Society for the Suppression of Vice and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to be banned from a Concord, Massachusetts, library shortly after its publication in 1885. The assessment of Huck Finn neatly summed up the standards at work. The committee did not want to call it "immoral" but thought it "rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating." In his response, Twain said that the ban would only increase his sales and would cause "purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so after the usual way of the world and library committees" (Inge, pp. viii, ix).

Twain knew in 1885 what the library profession would only reluctantly admit by 1893 (when the ALA included a number of fiction and popular titles in its first book guide for libraries), that the public would read what it wanted despite the most well-intentioned attempts to guide it toward enrichment. Helped along by the advocacy of iconoclastic library thinkers such as the Denver librarian John Cotton Dana, the idea that the library could legitimately provide entertainment in the form of popular fiction as well as provide higher forms of literature gained greater acceptance. This point of view was reinforced by the fact that the forces of social change influenced by a great influx of immigrants and the growth of the working class had, by the end of the century, diminished the influence of the genteel model.

Nonetheless, remaining true to its perceived role as cultural advisor, the ALA began to publish lists of recommended books to guide libraries in developing collections that would be acceptable within what it saw as prevailing standards. New complications in evaluating literature had emerged as writers chose increasingly to write in a realistic mode, dealing with issues such as divorce, adultery, prostitution, and political matters that were thought to be unduly troublesome and provocative. Hamlin Garland's politically charged work was omitted from the ALA list in 1893, for example, and an 1896 meeting to create a supplement to the list found Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) unacceptable for inclusion on the grounds that it was "unrealistically profane."

The trend toward overt censorship became most intense in the first decades of the twentieth century. The ALA published a list of recommended titles in 1904, and the publishing and indexing concern H. W. Wilson Company published a list of its own in 1908. The lists were strikingly in accord, and the fiction omitted from them indicates the strict standards that were being imposed.

Herman Melville, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells, and the still difficult Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane had important works omitted. All of Henry James's most important works were omitted, and Ambrose Bierce was excluded altogether. Subsequent catalogs in 1911 and 1914 showed an increasing intolerance for anything socialist or critical of the American way of life. Jack London and Upton Sinclair were often considered troublesome, and everyone, it seemed, agreed that Theodore Dreiser was generally unacceptable.

London's case in particular pointed up the contradictions at the heart of the assessment practices. Owning a personal library of some fifteen thousand volumes, London confessed an insatiable appetite for reading and praised the Oakland Public Library from which he borrowed heavily, yet much of his work, unquestionably informed by his voracious reading, was considered too unsettling for library collections.

With the advent of the First World War and the ensuing patriotic fervor, censorship reached a peak. The Library War Service, created to supply reading materials to military camps in the United States and abroad, created lists of acceptable books that found their way into general use in libraries outside the military. A book could be omitted from these lists as seditious simply for being insufficiently critical of the Germans. There was some dissent, but many librarians willingly continued in their roles as guardians of public sensibilities through the war years, after which the profession began to shift toward its present role as defender of the right and freedom to read guaranteed by the First Amendment.

DEWEY AND FEMINIZATION

While the New England cultural aristocracy dominated the thinking of the profession in its formative years, other forces were at work from the beginning. The young and ambitious Melvil Dewey, best known for the system of classification that bears his name, was instrumental in organizing the 1876 meeting and became an inexorable force in the development of libraries as we know them. It was Dewey who in 1876 convinced his employers, Frederick Leypoldt and R. R. Bowker, to create the American Library Journal as a spinoff from their Publishers Weekly. Dewey ran the Journal, which still exists as the important professional publication Library Journal, for the first years of its existence and used it as a forum for his highly technical ideas regarding library practices.

Dewey also helped found the Library Bureau, a concern that provided business equipment and further reflected his emphasis on innovative methods and materials. His eccentric and uncharacteristically disorganized financial and bookkeeping practices caused him difficulties in his business ventures, and in 1883 he returned to library work as librarian in chief at Columbia College.

Dewey had long recognized the need for librarianship to have a standard body of knowledge as well as schools to train practitioners if it was to be taken seriously as a profession. He saw his position at Columbia as the chance to make this come about. He had openly recruited women for library work for some time and employed a number of women on his staff at Columbia with plans to employ them as faculty in the library school he envisioned. When the first library class at Columbia was about to be held in 1887, seventeen of its twenty members were women.

Hearing of this, the school denied him a room. Dewey countered by cleaning out an old storeroom for use as a classroom and went ahead as scheduled. The conflict with the trustees over coeducation that ensued led to the establishment of Barnard College annex for women and the expulsion of Dewey in 1888. He moved to Albany and became director of the New York State Library; his library school followed him in 1889, transferred officially from Columbia.

Dewey was, by all accounts, an eccentric, egotistical, and difficult man who sooner or later alienated most of those with whom he came in contact. His business practices were suspect, his lack of regard for things intellectual and his obsessive attention to the minutiae of library work earned him the disdain of the established library elite, and he was at various times accused of anti-Semitism as well as impropriety with some of his devoted women followers. An absolute force in the creation of standards for the profession, in the development of professional education, and in advocacy for women professionals, he was also probably the most influential figure in the history of American libraries.

Dewey's championing of women for the profession reflected the more general view of the times that women were, by nature, well suited to librarianship. For those women—chiefly unmarried—who chose to work, librarianship, along with the other predominantly feminine emerging professions such as social work, teaching, and nursing, provided a perfect outlet for the virtues of domesticity with which women were thought to be naturally blessed.

The catalog of these virtues for librarians varied, but invariably among them was the intimation of an altruism that traded on the traditional view of libraries as institutions with a mission to serve. In other words, women librarians could experience the fulfillment of a productive working life and could also be expected to work for very little money. Women continued to be attracted to librarianship in ever-increasing numbers, becoming dominant in the profession by the advent of the Progressive Era and serving to shape the development of library programs toward meeting the needs of previously neglected groups.

PROGRESSIVISM AND CARNEGIE

It is significant that in creating his symbolic portrait of the restless and modern woman of the Progressive Era struggling against small-mindedness and outmoded points of view, Sinclair Lewis chose to make Carol Kennicott, the protagonist of Main Street (1920), a librarian. Carol gives up her library position and leaves St. Paul to marry a physician and move with him to the small town of Gopher Prairie.

At a social gathering Carol talks with the town librarian, Miss Villets, who expresses her disapproval with the large city libraries that allow "tramps and all sorts of dirty persons" to use the library. Carol responds that they are "poor souls" and that the "chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." Miss Villets replies that her feeling is "that the first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the books" (p. 112).

This exchange sums up the conflicting forces at work in the profession as well as in America at large during the first decades of the twentieth century. The view of the library as a center for community programs and service to such groups as immigrants, laborers, and children was gaining momentum at the same time that settlement houses, the social work profession, and labor movements were developing. These movements challenged the traditional social hierarchy, one symbol of which was the library as a secular temple in which the finest expressions of human progress were enshrined and preserved for the use of those culturally equipped to appreciate them.

During the period from 1886 to 1917 the traditional view was reinforced, in the view of some, by the Carnegie program. Andrew Carnegie offered to build a public library for any community willing to take on the tax burden necessary to sustain the institution. Carnegie, the members of his organization, and the trustees of local libraries were of the upper class, and the library designs that met with their approval inevitably reflected their values.

The physical placement of the library in the community, the classical and monumental elements of the exterior designs, and the floor plans all reinforced a class-based hierarchy and a clear distinction between high and low culture. After the turn of the century, individual Carnegie libraries with a progressive view managed to implement open floor plans and children's rooms, and in larger cities the foreboding and grand central library was supplemented with modest branch libraries that brought services to people in the neighborhoods.

Some communities, such as Detroit, objected to the Carnegie program on the principle that it depended on tainted money. They felt it was hypocritical of Carnegie to pretend to be the benefactor of those whom he had exploited to make his millions. Carnegie, in a version of the waning cultural elevation theory, insisted that libraries were the emphasis of his philanthropy because of his belief in making resources available—particularly to the working class—that would help the motivated and industrious to realize their full potential.

While the working class appeared to maintain an admirable immunity to the concerted efforts to elevate them and to protect them from the harmful forces at large in America, the growth in public libraries facilitated by the Carnegie program nonetheless left a lasting legacy on the cultural landscape: 1,679 public libraries came into being with Carnegie funds, and the dissemination of openly available information and community service that resulted is now widely regarded as a distinguishing feature of American democracy.

HERBERT PUTNAM AND THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Library of Congress (established in 1800) underwent changes during the visionary leadership of Herbert Putnam (librarian from 1899 to 1939) that represent another important development in American libraries. (Notably, it was once again Dewey, at a critical juncture for the profession, who placed Putnam's name in nomination for the post.) Under Putnam's guidance, the Library of Congress, unique among national libraries in the world, reinforced the democratic ideal through a radical departure from established practice. Rather than exist only as the collection of record and as a resource restricted for the use of government agencies, the Library of Congress instead became a resource for all of the libraries of the land as well as a collection for the use of all Americans. The concept of shared cataloging embodied in Putnam's Library of Congress card service (in which libraries would purchase catalog cards from the Library of Congress, rather than each individually creating their own) revolutionized the way libraries worked and brought a cooperative model and a cohesiveness to the profession in America that could not otherwise have been easily accomplished.

Putnam's vision and the subsequent central role that the Library of Congress assumed was instrumental in moving the profession more firmly toward the mission that had begun to emerge, that of creating libraries that were egalitarian and oriented toward a less judgmental provision of service. Had libraries been successful in exerting the sort of considerable cultural influence initially identified as their professional duty, America would be a different place and many of the names in American literature that we readily identify and hold in high regard might be unknown to us.

See alsoBoston and Concord; Main Street; Museums; New York

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Work

Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920.

Secondary Works

Carrier, Esther Jane. Fiction in Public Libraries: 1876–1900. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1965.

Garrison Dee. Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian andAmerican Society, 1876–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Geller, Evelyn. Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries,1876–1939: A Study in Cultural Change. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Hamilton, David Mike. "The Tools of My Trade": TheAnnotated Books in Jack London's Library. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.

Harris, Michael H. "The Role of the Public Library in American Life: A Speculative Essay." University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science Occasional Papers 117 (1975).

Heim, Kathleen M. The Status of Women in Librarianship:Historical, Sociological, and Economic Issues. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1983.

Inge, M. Thomas. Huck Finn among the Critics: ACentennial Selection. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1985.

Kaplan, Louis. "The Early History of Reference Service in the United States." In Reference Services, edited by Arthur Ray Rowland. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1964.

Rosenberg, Jane Aiken. The Nation's Great Library: HerbertPutnam and the Library of Congress, 1899–1939. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Van Slyck, Abigail A. Free to All: Carnegie Libraries andAmerican Culture, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Wiegand, Wayne A. The Politics of an Emerging Profession:The American Library Association, 1876–1917. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Williams, Patrick. The American Public Library and theProblem of Purpose. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Mark Woodhouse