Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Do Libraries Still Matter?, page 3

Should libraries carry what people wanted or what librarians felt they ought to want? Librarians and library trustees recognized early on that, as publicly supported institutions, it would not do to sweep aside public taste and offer only the kind of learned treatises and uplifting philosophy that most readers would never borrow. In the words of F.B. Perkins, a Boston librarian: “Trash... must to a considerable extent be supplied by the public library.”

So the novels stayed, jacketed by a rationale that was neatly expressed by the Boston Public Library’s audit committee in 1878: “Banish them from the library, as some advise, and you banish their readers also. Keep them in the library, and you keep their readers also; who with constantly improving taste, will finally select books of unquestionable excellence and profit.”

Not all libraries succumbed; some limited their fictional holdings, and at least one, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, offered no fiction as late as 1892. In the pages of library publications and at professional conferences, the battle raged until finally, around the turn of the 20th century, it was clear that (in Williams’ words), “the public’s preference for books of little or no educational value was an enduring one.”

The seeming preference of patrons for diversion over self-education drove some librarians to despair. In 1889, for example, James M. Hubbard, a former official of the Boston Public Library, contended in the North American Review that while libraries were established “to promote the education and elevation of the people,” it just hadn’t happened. “Libraries are in no true sense of the words educators of the people. They are the haunt, in every place, of a few scholars and persons of leisure, but their chief work is to furnish amusement for the young.” Molz and Dain observe that public libraries have never really resolved this dilemma, and to the extent that circulation figures are a primary metric for success, there is always pressure to further accommodate public tastes.

Andrew Carnegie certainly never imagined he was merely sparing middle-class readers the price of a new bodice-ripper, though he considered reading and learning deeply pleasurable. His idea was to pay for libraries in order to help people help themselves. Accordingly, he would only fund libraries in places where the community was willing to provide a site and commit to tax itself 10 percent of the value of his donation annually for operations. Beginning in 1886, Carnegie (and later, Carnegie Corporation*) spent $56 million to create 1,681 public libraries in nearly as many U.S. communities, plus 828 more elsewhere in the world.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that Carnegie’s library philanthropy took place in a time not so unlike our own. America at the turn of the 20th century was a land of rapid technological change, particularly in communications. Airplanes, automobiles and movies were being invented, but in business, bigness was already the order of the day. Immigration was rapidly changing the face of the nation, and these polyglot newcomers, who had to be assimilated somehow, were coming from nations other than those which had supplied the people already here. Americans were moving to the West, as they still are, and income inequality was great, with the excesses of the rich much commented upon. People worked long hours, on the job or at home, and education was considered the ladder of economic (which was to say social) mobility.

Infused with an idealistic—if not messianic— “library spirit,” librarians too subscribed to the notion of uplift by education. So did Carnegie, whose efforts transformed the American library landscape. In 1896, Williams reports, there were 971 public libraries in America with 1,000 or more volumes. In 1903, there were 2,283. Carnegie was responsible for much of the increase.

But the changes were qualitative as well as quantitative. Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Carnegie’s library philanthropy was the requirement that communities provide public funds for library services, a requirement that planted the idea that library services were a natural function of government to be provided at public expense—a notion beyond question today. Indeed, Carnegie’s library giving helped communities embrace the idea that every place ought to have a library. Over time, public funding would have a growing influence over library purpose, since it was no longer a question of pleasing a single benefactor, a small group of trustees or a staff of paid professionals.

Now there was the electorate to consider. Even building a Carnegie library required a referendum, and in many communities it was the occasion for women to cast ballots in a public election for the first time in their lives (the 19th Amendment granting women’s suffrage wasn’t ratified until 1920). This was just one of the ways libraries empowered women, who were at the forefront of campaigning and fundraising for Carnegie libraries and gained valuable political and organizational experience by doing so. Local women’s clubs played an especially prominent role in bringing Carnegie libraries to hundreds of small towns.

The Carnegie library program probably also hastened the feminization of library work, which was already under way. Abigail Van Slyck reports that as early as 1878, two-thirds of library workers were women, and by 1910 it was very nearly four out of five. According to Van Slyck, Carnegie’s library philanthropy “augmented the conditions that supported the entry of women” into library work by dramatically increasing the number of libraries—and therefore the demand for librarians. At the same time, the efforts of James Bertram, Carnegie’s private secretary and library-giving overseer, to simplify library design and keep down costs had the effect of lowering municipal library operating budgets (which were set as a percentage of Carnegie’s capital grant). Women library workers in those days were paid a lot less than men, and so they got hired.

What’s interesting here is how society was democratizing libraries even as libraries were supposed to be democratizing society. Around this time, for example, the idea of the library as a storehouse of treasures was fading away, replaced by what we would now call open stacks, which in turn reflected falling book prices made possible by advances in technology and economic growth. Now patrons could browse and obtain books for themselves—and bypass the embarrassment that might arise from asking for a volume on a sensitive topic.

At the same time, libraries started providing information on demand. Reference departments were created in the 1890s, around the same time libraries began to ease their traditionally restrictive policies toward children. From the modern perspective it’s startling to read that a survey of 126 libraries in 1893 found 70 percent requiring visitors to be 12 years or older, but around the turn of the century more and more libraries began letting kids in, and many set aside children’s rooms for their use. Admitting children in turn increased public support for libraries and further democratized their practices and holdings.

But these changes were consistent with the climate of missionary zeal that infused librarianship in the early 20th century, a time when librarians started suggesting their institutions might go far beyond books, offering lectures, classes, exhibitions, scientific specimens, photos and music rolls—much as libraries do today. Early Carnegie libraries, in fact, often had meeting rooms or other facilities. “In many towns, Carnegie libraries were the only large public buildings,” writes Jones, adding that “they became hubs of social activities like concerts, lectures, and meetings and did double duty as museums and community storehouses.”

But libraries have always been hothouses for the flowering of more exotic ideas, as well, and the newest was that of the library as a center of adult education, a concept promoted by Alvin Johnson in a 1938 study (funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York) called The Public Library—a People’s University. Perhaps the timing was bad; the period following World War II saw a vast expansion of the higher education system, and the rise of community colleges offered a host of non-exclusive postsecondary learning opportunities. “Libraries never got very far with adult education,” Williams reports somewhat wearily, “despite something like three decades trying. Many reasons were cited, but perhaps the most convincing was also the most distressing: people weren’t interested. Only a fraction of people used the library at all, and only a fraction of a fraction used it for enlightenment.”

In 1947 Carnegie Corporation funded a larger—and ultimately, more influential—study of libraries and this by now longstanding problem of purpose. Known as the Public Library Inquiry and published in seven volumes by Columbia University Press (along with various ancillary reports issued by other means), the study was directed by political scientist Robert D. Leigh and written by several scholars including Columbia University Library School Dean at the time, Bernard Berelson.

* In the past 25 years, the Corporation has not had a program of support for domestic libraries, except for a few grants for specific purposes. The Corporation's recent library-related efforts focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

Next page: The Public Library Inquiry found that only one-in-ten adults and three-in-ten children used libraries, and of course much of this use was recreational, as it had always been.

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