Libraries

Sources

The Lyceum Movement. Although the nation’s public libraries first opened their doors during the 1850s, their origins go back at least two decades earlier, to the Lyceum Movement founded by Connecticut educator Josiah Holbrook. Inspired in part by the democratic impulse of the American Revolution, lyceums were intended as a “federation of adult educational organizations” whose members would “hold weekly … meetings, for reading, conversation, illustrating the sciences, or other exercises designed for mutual benefit.” By 1835 there were over three thousand lyceums spread through out the country and gradually began to accumulate book collections and build up archives filled with documents of local historical interest. In many areas the lyceums functioned as informal schools, compensating for the “failure of traditional institutions to respond to popular educational needs.” Women, in particular, became avid participants in the affairs of local lyceums, and the institution played an important role in breaking down educational barriers against them. Factory girls from Lowell, Massachusetts, were said to have “saved their pennies” to attend lyceum courses, but for the most part it was the middle classes that made up the audiences for lyceum lectures and courses. Public lectures typically featured discussions on literature or science, but toward midcentury the lyceums became an important venue for representatives of the various reform currents: woman’s rights advocates, abolitionists, and education reformers were frequent visitors to the lyceum podium.

The Free Public Library. Early attempts at establishing public libraries often consisted of no more than a call by individuals to open the lyceum collections to the general public. Expressing an egalitarian optimism typical of American intellectuals before midcentury, Francis Wayland urged members of the Providence Athenaeum in 1838 to make available to the average citizen of Providence, Rhode Island, “all the reading which shall be necessary to prepare him for any situation for which his cultural endowments have rendered him capable.” In the view of reformers, libraries would serve as the “arsenals of a democratic culture” by developing an intelligent and informed citizenry. Significantly, they viewed the public library campaign as an important extension of the common-schools movement. Boston’s tireless advocate George Ticknor considered the public library “the crowning glory of the public schools system,” recommending the issue of “special library tickets for school children in order to create the reading habit early in life.” By 1850 this impulse had moved considerably beyond the call to open private collections. In Boston, Ticknor and former governor Edward Everett, both allies of Horace Mann, had managed to win public funding for a city library, and their achievement was reinforced by similar successes elsewhere. New Hampshire legislators voted in 1849 to permit public funding for libraries “open to the free use of every inhabitant of the town or city… for the general diffusion of intelligence among all classes of the community,” making it the first state in the Union to do so. The state of Massachusetts followed with similar legislation in 1851, to be joined by Maine (1854), Rhode Island (1867), and Connecticut (1869). By the mid 1870s most major towns in New England had established public libraries, and their popularity was noted by U.S. commissioner of education William T. Harris, who recognized the library as “one of the most efficient auxiliaries of the public schools.” Melvil Dewey, for whom the Dewey decimal system would later be named, founded the American Library Association in 1876.

Struggle. Outside of New England, the success of the public library campaign was more modest. The largest collections in the United States remained in private hands. The John Jacob Astor Library in New York City, with 100,000 volumes the largest collection in the United States at the time, opened its doors in 1854 but only to a limited, private readership; within twenty years it had added another 135,000 volumes to its collection. Harvard University, with 72,000 books, was closed to the public as well. The Library of Congress at Washington, by comparison, contained a modest 50,000 volumes during

this period, and the largest of the public libraries, at Philadelphia, just 60,000. In this situation, social welfare agencies very often attempted to fill the void. In New York, for example, after efforts to establish a free public library there failed in 1858, the YWCA established its own library and attempted to make its collection available to working women. One of its librarians described the atmosphere “by the librarians desk in the evening, when the women and girls from the shops and factories are free…. And…the jostling crowd presses in, embarrassed and awkward, half awed by the very beauty and refinement of the place, and abashed at the sight of so many books.” Though it would not be until 1895 that New York would establish a free public library of its own (based, in part, on the Astor collection), by 1877 the notion that Americans from every background should have ready access to quality reading materials, a corollary of the common-schools ideal, had become fixed in the popular mind as one of the distinguishing features of life in America.

Sources

Sidney H. Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture: A Social History of the American Public Library Movement in New England and the Middle States from 1850 to 1900 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947);

David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).