The Public Library in the Political Process 9780231896757

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The Library Reference LI BR A R I A N S H I P A N D

LIBRARY

Series RHSOURCHS

The Library Reference Lee Ash General

Editor

Series

T H E PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS

By OLIVER GARCEAU and others

GREGG PRESS Boston

1972

This is a c o m p l e t e p h o t o g r a p h i c reprint of a work first published in New York by t h e Columbia University Press in 1949 First Gregg Press edition published 1 9 7 2 . Copyright © 1 9 4 9 by t h e Columbia University Press R e p r i n t e d with permission. Printed on p e r m a n e n t / d u r a b l e acid-free paper in T h e United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Garceau, Oliver, 1911T h e public library in t h e political process. Bibliography: p. [ 2 4 1 1 - 2 4 3 . 1. Public libraries-United States. 2. Libraries and s t a t e - U n i t e d States. I. Social Science Research Council. Public Library Inquiry. II. Title. Z 7 3 1 . G 3 7 1972 027.4'73 72-7432 ISBN 0 - 8 3 9 8 - 0 6 6 8 - x

The Public Library in the Political Process

A REPORT OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY INQUIRY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

A

REPORT

OF

THE

PUBLIC

LIBRARY

INQUIRY

The Public Library in the Political Process By Oliver Garceau WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF C. DEWITT HARDY WHO WROTE CHAPTER I AND CO-OPERATED IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS REPORT ROBERT D. LEIGH, LILLIAN ORDEN, AND WATSON O'D. PIERCE ALSO ASSISTED IN THE FIELD STUDIES

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

NEW

YORK

THE RESEARCH U P O N W H I C H THIS STUDY IS BASED W A S MADE POSSIBLE BY GRANTED BY THE CARNEGIE CORPORATION OF N E W

FUNDS

YORK T O THE SOCIAL SCIENCE

RESEARCH COUNCIL FOR THE PUBLIC LIBRARY I N Q U I R Y . THE CARNEGIE CORPORATION IS NOT, HOWEVER, THE AUTHOR, O W N E R , PUBLISHER, OR PROPRIETOR OF THIS PUBLICATION, AND IS NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD AS APPROVING BY VIRTUE OF ITS GRANT OF THE STATEMENTS MADE OR VIEWS EXPRESSED THEREIN.

COPYRIGHT ©

First printing Second Third

1949, C O L U M B I A

PRESS, N E W

YORK

1949

printing printing

UNIVERSITY

1950 /yj6

PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, CANADA, INDIA, AND P A K I S T A N BY GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON, TORONTO, B O M B A Y , AND KARACHI M A N U F A C T U R E D I N THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ANY

T H E PUBLIC INQUIRY

LIBRARY

proposed to the Social Science Research Council, in 1946, that the Council "conduct a thorough and comprehensive study of the American free public library." The proposal further defined the nature of the study as "an appraisal in sociological, cultural and human terms . . . of the extent to which the libraries are achieving their objectives" and of the library's "potential and actual contribution to American society." The Council approved the project and submitted to the Carnegie Corporation a proposal for a two-and-a-quarteryear study, to terminate in a general, final report in June, 1949. The inquiry was designed to use, insofar as possible in the study of the public library, such techniques and experience as social scientists have accumulated for the analysis of other social institutions. The Carnegie Corporation appropriated a total of $200,000 for support of the study. The Council selected a director to be responsible for the conduct of the Inquiry and for the preparation of a final, general report, and to serve as editor of such reports on special aspects of the study as he recommends for separate publication. A committee was appointed for the Inquiry to serve in an advisory, deliberative, and consultative capacity, under the chairmanship of the director. The Committee has reviewed and criticized the general report and the other Inquiry reports recommended for publication. The interpretations, judgments, and conclusions contained in them, however, are made solely on the authors' responsibility. T H E A M E R I C A N L I B R A R Y ASSOCIATION

C O M M I T T E E

F O R

T H E

I N Q U I R Y

ROBERT D .

M A R Y U . ROTHROCX

LEIGH

Library Consultant, Tennessee Valley Authority

Chairman and Director RALPH A .

BEAU

Director, The New York Public Library

RICHARD H .

SKRYOCK

Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

J . FREDERIC D E W H U R S T

Economist, Twentieth Century Fund DONALD M A R Q U I S

Chairman, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan

S T A F F

O F

L I B R A R Y

T H E

MALCOLM M .

WILLEY

Vice President, University of Minnesota

P U B L I C

I N Q U I R Y

Finance: CHARLES M. ARMSTRONG, Associate Statistician, New York State Department of Education. Use: BERNARD BERELSON, Dean, Graduate Library School, University of Chicago; assisted by Lester Asheim. SURVEY RESEARCH C E N T E X ,

and Charles Metzner.

University of Michigan, Rensis Likert, Director,

Personnel: A L I C E I. B R Y A N , Assistant Professor of Library Service, Columbia University; assisted by Lucy M. Crissey and Phyllis Osteen.

Government:

OLIVER G A R C E A U ,

political science faculty, Bennington Col-

lege.

C. DEWTTT HARDY, formerly instructor in history and government, University of Maine.

formerly with the

LILLIAN ORDEN,

Bureau of the Budget.

U.S.

Foreign and International Developments: Committee on Foreign Relations. Mass Media:

JOSEPH

T.

KLAPPER,

RICHARD H . HEINDEL,

U.S. Senate

Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Music Materials: OTTO LUENING, Professor of Music, Columbia University; assisted by H. R. Shawhan, and Eloise Moore. Government Publications: J A M E S L. M C C A M Y , Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin; assisted by Julia B. McCamy. Book Publishing: Library Processes: & Company.

W I L L I A M MILLER,

WATSON O ' D . PIERCE,

Special Projects: H E L E N Freedom of the Press. Films:

GLORIA WALDRON,

Administrative

writer and historian.

R.

ROBERTS,

formerly Vice President, Nejelski

formerly with the Commission on

Twentieth Century Fund; assisted by Cecile Starr.

Assistant: Lois

A.

MURKLAND.

F O R E W O R D

T H E AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY has been much studied as an operating agency, through detailed and useful analyses of the manner in which it functions. The Public Library Inquiry has itself added to this store of technical information by undertaking fundamental surveys in the areas of library personnel, use, finance, and processes. This material will be helpful to librarians and members of their staffs and to governing boards as they appraise day-to-day activities and seek to provide as efficiently as possible the services that are called for. All of this is important, yet if the study were to stop there, it would not achieve the full purposes that motivated the Inquiry at the outset. For it is as a social institution, functioning in a social context, that the public library has its paramount significance, and it is chiefly in this context that it needs to be analyzed. In this respect Dr. Garceau's report makes its distinct contribution. One notices first of all that the stiff engaged in the analyses out of which the report grows included political scientists, with specialized interests touching public administration, budgeting procedures, administrative management, mass communication, social psychology, and the political life of interest groups, a social and economic historian, and a management consultant. When trained research workers whose approaches embody such diverse primary interests turn as a team to the analysis of the government of public libraries, interesting and significant results will certainly follow. Dr. Garceau's report is not a statistical summary, nor was it intended to be, even though numerical data have been effectively utilized. The reader will especially observe, however, that the statistical materials are employed largely as starting

X

FOREWORD

points for critical examination of processes and organizational factors, which are then further elaborated and refined through a case-method approach. This has both strength and weakness. It is not always possible to establish with quantitative exactness some of the conclusions that are ultimately reached. On the other hand, the careful and controlled observations of experts do lead to valid insights and interpretations that ring true, but which statistics alone would never reveal. It is this combination of methods, applied by research workers with multi-phased interests, that gives to Dr. Garceau's volume an intrinsic interest that carries far beyond librarians or those immediately concerned with management and operation of American public libraries. Social scientists generally, especially those who focus on the study of social institutions, will find much to justify their careful reading of this book. There is a temptation to point in this foreword to many of the striking generalizations to which the Garceau study leads. Some of the conclusions are unexpected, although so thoroughly substantiated that the reader will not be disposed to question them. Thus, for example, the undeniable gap between the "library faith" of professional librarians as expressed in many forms over many years and the actualities as evidenced by the character and the coverage of library service might at first reading appear to constitute a discouraging and disturbing weakness. Yet, as Dr. Garceau makes clear, this apparent vulnerability can, in fact, be turned into an element of strength. The government of libraries should be adapted to furthering what they can do best, rather than to a library "myth" that is divorced from the realm of reality. With some of the conclusions there will, perhaps, be disagreement, but this in itself has value. In the last analysis, it is through discussion of well-stated problems pertaining to the public library that understandings will emerge that facilitate more effective government. At every step in his report, Dr.

xi

FOREWORD

Garceau is concerned with the factors that do bear upon the more effective government of libraries. Dr. Garceau's study starts with a consideration of historical backgrounds that are essential in comprehending the framework of library government as it is found today. The early emphasis upon social factors is noteworthy, for the author's discussion of the governing authorities of public libraries, and of the political potential of the public library in the community, acquires its full meaning only if the reader is conditioned to the fact that the library functions in a cultural setting and can be adequately understood and appraised only in relation to it. In the final portion of the book, dealing with professional library associations and with the unit of government best adapted to provide adequate library services, the emphasis shifts somewhat, although a predominant interest in social dynamics is still evident. The problems here presented merit the thoughtful attention of all who are interested in the public library. At the same time, the discussion of them is a contribution to the general study of the political process in the United States.

Neiv York June, 1949

ROBERT D . LEIGH

CONTENTS A NOTE

ON

I. T H E

FOUNDATIONS

XVII

METHOD OF

LIBRARY

GOVERN-

3

MENT The Seventeenth-Century Religious and Humanistic Learning (4); The Eighteenth-Century Social Setting (7); The Eighteenth-Century Book of Nature (10); The Social Library (14); The Beginnings of the Public Library (22); Early Library Government (3:); The Social Circumstances of Later Library Development (33); The Character of Later Library Development (37); The Rise of the Professional Librarian (43); Summary (jo) 2. T H E G O V E R N I N G A U T H O R I T Y OF T H E P U B L I C LIBRARY

53

The Concept of the Library Boards (53); Institutional Characteristics of Library Boards (55); The Selection of Board Members (62); The Work of Library Boards (70); Working Relations between Librarians and Boards (79); Alternative Types of Library Government (91); Summary and Interpretation (95) 3. T H E L I B R A R Y ' S P O L I T I C A L

POTENTIAL

III

Inventory of Group Affiliations (111); The Strategy of Group Relationships (135); The Library Faith in Practical Politics (141); Summary and Interpretation (149) 4. P R O F E S S I O N A L

ASSOCIATION

152

The Structure of the American Library Association (155) ; ALA as National-Interest Group (177); Reconstructing and Reorienting A L A (187) 5. T H E

UNIT

OF

GOVERNMENT

FOR

LIBRARY

SERVICE Balance Sheet of Localism (202); County and Multi-County Libraries (207); The States as Promoters of Library Extension

201

XIV

C O N T E N T S (114); The State Agency Field Office as Unit of Service (121); The Role of the Federal Government (232); Concluding Summary (238)

APPENDIX

I:

APPENDIX

II:

SAMPLE REPORT INDEX

A NOTE THE USED

ON

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PUBLIC

LIBRARY

IN P R E P A R A T I O N

241

INQUIRY OF

THIS 244 247

CHARTS

I. S N A P S H O T TION

OF

OF T H E

CIATION, II. T H E

THE

PROTEAN

AMERICAN

ORGANIZA-

LIBRARY

ASSO-

1947

DIVISION

162 OF

AMERICAN

LIBRARY

PROPOSED

REDRAFT

PUBLIC

LIBRARIES,

ASSOCIATION; OF

1947

CONSTITUTION

AND B Y - L A W S III.

MASSACHUSETTS LIBRARY

164 ASSOCIATION

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

T H E STUDY OF PUBLIC LIBRARY GOVERNMENT is o n e o f a

dozen projects comprising the Public Library Inquiry. T h e Inquiry as a whole was designed as an adventure in interdisciplinary methods of research, and as part of the larger enterprise our study has drawn upon the data gathered in the other projects. T h e methods of this special project on the government, administration, and politics of the public library have been eclectic. T h e first element of diversity was established in the staff itself. Field work was divided among five people. Three were by training political scientists, all with experience in public administration, though at very different levels and types of activity, and their primary interests within the field ranged from budgeting and administrative management to mass communication and the political process within and between organized social groups. T h e fourth was a social and economic historian, and the fifth, an industrial management consultant with training in psychology. In order to maximize the working effectiveness of the sampling aproach and in order to bring to bear the experience and judgment of each represented discipline upon as wide a range of library phenomena as possible, the field work was allocated, with one unavoidable exception, so as to give to each staff member a range of big and small communities, state, county, and municipal institutions, and library problems in at least two widely separated regions of the country. This report on the government and politics of the public library is based primarily upon the eighty-four field reports and upon the collective judgment of the five staff members. A framework of analysis and of reporting field study was prepared, drawing on six techniques of social research. First

XV111

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

was the institutional approach, resting on a study of the formal structure of the public library, its institutional setting, and the hierarchical relations within the library. Constitutions, statutes, ordinances, and judicial decisions impinging upon the library were examined, and the dilemmas of institutional rigidities isolated for comparative study. An important factor for public libraries, as for so many other of our institutions, is our federal form of government, with its concomitant regional inequalities of economic resources, education, and facilities for communication. On the other hand, public libraries are inextricably enmeshed in the jungle of local government jurisdictions and the resulting confusion of tax resources. This is the classic field of political science, and the library profession has already made extensive surveys of it, particularly in the work of Joeckel and Foutts (Carleton Bruns Joeckel, The Government of the American Public Library, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1935, and James C. Foutts, editor, American Library Laws, 2d edition, Chicago, ALA, 1943). It was not, therefore, made the central theme of the research. A second research method analyzed the political process in terms of the interest groups. In each case study, the configuration of interest groups directly or indirectly concerned with the public library was examined, and an effort was made to note as well the groups in the community which remained untouched by public library service or the governmental and financial problems of the library. In the overall parallelogram of political forces in the community, the groups untouched may be quite as important as the library's friends and enemies. The internal structure and organization of librarians as a professional interest group have been presented in the report as a separate analysis, but the original data were collected less from library associations than from interviews with practicing librarians in the eighty-four field visits. The field workers examined the experience of librarians and their resources in

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

xix

pressure politics at the community level, the state and national library associations in the legislative and administrative process, and the techniques of intergroup affiliations at all political levels. In their search for security from "politics" librarians have sought to balance social and political groups in their communities. It was, therefore, especially appropriate, as a third method, to make a separate analysis of the social status of the participants in library government and politics, though no elaborate statistical research could be undertaken in so many communities. It was possible to examine such obvious factors as occupation, education, religious affiliation, political activity, club and recreational outlets, civic enterprise, residential address, and evidences of income, and to form some judgment through formal interviews and a certain amount of streetcorner gossip as to the reputation and standing of librarians, library boards, and leading sponsors of the public library. While a precise scale of status cannot be constructed upon such limited and heterogeneous data, and in fact a single scale has no real validity in the multiple hierarchies of the diverse social and political scene in America, nevertheless it has been possible to establish a generally valid impression of the public library's place in the social status system. Quite as important in a political study as the static picture of social status is the historical perspective of the library as an institution and a political activity within a rapidly evolving society. T o the library, as to other political and administrative activities, the rate of change has been of the greatest significance. The research therefore included as a fourth method a general survey of the history of the public library and a specific attention to the origins and changing character of each library unit in the sample. The pertinent historical evidence included institutions, interest group configuration, the social status of participants, and the emerging pattern of ideas about public

XX

A

NOTE

ON

M E T H O D

library service. The economic and demographic history of the local community was particularly helpful in throwing light on the institutional problems of library government. The library unit, the professional association, and the strategy of group politics are products, as well as molders, of the ideas about the public library. Equally significant to library politics are the ideas about education, society, and American democracy. In addition to the broad strands of intellectual history, a fifth important method of the research has been the compilation and analysis of the official doctrines of librarianship developed by the professional association. The skill with which a group integrates its own ideology into the prevailing political values of the community is a primary determinant of its success, and particularly is this true of a profession administering a public service. So the constandy renewed interpretations of the meaning of library service have been closely surveyed. It has been equally important, through the case studies, to examine the limits of the thinking now being done by individual librarians, by library boards, by school authorities, and by the public officials ultimately responsible for library appointments and library finance. As with every organized activity, there are many levels of thought and discourse, and the myth pattern of the formal group is not always the thinking of the rank and file, however much association headquarters may lead and mold the thinking of the group as a whole. Finally, in order to pin down the process of library government and politics, it was found helpful to record patterns of interaction between the component individuals in library situations. Librarians, board members, and public officials have been asked how often and in what ways they communicated with each other during a specific recent period. While this has in no sense been a precise or refined tool, establishing statistically the nature of interpersonal relations or the patterns of

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

xxi

effective leadership, it has roughly shown what library business is and who performs it. By reducing the data to reasonably concrete terms, it has been possible to elicit information by no means clear in the minds of those interviewed. At the least, it yielded better data than their subjective, over-all judgments about their own respective roles and more relevant data than would have resulted from the relationships of a formal organization chart. These six methods of analysis, focusing on structure of the institution, on interest group configuration, on social status, on historical development, on social myths, and on patterns of individual interaction, were used in the study of nine major topics of library government and politics, central alike to large and small public libraries and library service at every level of government. Six of these nine topics concerned the operation of the individual library unit: the history and present status of and frictions immanent in the institutional structure of the library; the governing authority of the library; the librarian as chief executive; the library's relations, organized and informal, with the group life of the community; the library's relations with the schools; and, in order to clarify all these relationships, a separate investigation of three key processes in library government—the budget, personnel administration, and book selection—including the tensions arising over borderline books and the problem of censorship. Three further topics involved the relationships of the individual library unit with librarianship in a wider focus: participation in and attitudes toward the professional organizations, working relations with the state library agency, and relations with other units of library service. T h e tools themselves, therefore, were not the framework of investigation or the frame of reference in preparing case reports of the field visits. In an overlapping and inexplicit way they guided the preparation of questions and approaches to the nine

xxii

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

topics of relationship around which the case reports were framed. Quite as important as the interdisciplinary character of the research was the case study method. Case reports were prepared on the Inquiry sample made up of sixty libraries, with additions for this project. These sixty libraries do not provide a statistically accurate cross-section of the 7,408 public libraries in the United States; but, having been selected to exemplify variety of population, geographical location, and types of service, they do provide a comprehensive picture of public library experience. Although every study in the Inquiry adapted the sample to fit its needs, these sixty libraries constituted the common starting point for all Inquiry projects employing the sampling method. They were selected in two groups. One group was made up of forty-seven libraries, located in forty-three population areas selected by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. These areas constituted a population cross-section of the country as a whole for the purpose of a national opinion poll. The first group of libraries in these areas consisted of thirty-nine city, town, and village libraries, four of which served the adjoining county also; four county libraries serving counties containing independent city libraries; and four county libraries giving the only library service. The second group of libraries consisted of eleven city, town, and village libraries and two county libraries, selected because their services, as rated by three library experts, were of unusually high quality or new to the library field.1 For the particular purposes of this individual project still further additions were made. The resulting sample for our study, then, includes fifty libraries of incorporated 'For a more thorough discussion of the sample libraries and population areas studied see the general report of the Inquiry by Robert D. Leigh, The Public Library in the United States, N e w York, Columbia University Press, 1949, Appendix A . T h e list of libraries for the present study appears at the end of this volume.

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

xxiii

municipalities, ranging in size from 2,500 population to the largest metropolitan areas, ten county library systems of almost equally diverse size and function, and the extension agencies of twenty-two states. Since the individual library unit studies noted relations with state agencies, and the state studies were not limited to states in which local studies were made, data has been gathered by field research on aspects of public library government and politics and particularly on the library extension agencies in thirty-seven states. The sample so constructed is large enough to reveal the range of public library service offered the people of the country. The sample is too small to justify detailed statistical analysis of institutional, political, and administrative relationships. Interdependent and multiple variables cannot be factored out. Nor is the sample scientifically selected for the precise purpose of making it statistically representative of the phenomena of library politics and administration. It is an explicitly scientific sample only in its original and limited form and intent of conducting an opinion poll. For the purposes of this study, the enlarged sample presents no more than what may be assumed to be a reasonably representative picture of the range of phenomena. If the sample was too small for definitive statistical work, it was too large to allow time for a complete understanding of the process of government and political life in each individual library and community. Only three members of the research staff devoted full time to this project, and each of them had specific areas of inquiry in addition to the field visits. Within a one year program field work had to be restricted to visits of from two to ten days for each case study. Within that time there were rule-of-thumb tools that could give a feel for the community, for its cultural life, its political traditions, and its status system. But no single relationship of the many enumerated could be exhaustively examined. The number of cases

xxiv

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

and the rime available imposed many of the research decisions. As a result, the staff remained conscious of their continued ignorance, but aware of some of the flavor of the individual situations. T o this degree, the scale of the case method selected may well have escaped the deceptive thoroughness of either extreme, a thin, but all-inclusive, and statistically gratifying accumulation of data on the one hand, and a thorough acquaintance with too few situations on the other. The size of the sample dictated a considerable dependence upon the professional librarians for interviews. Some chief librarians were themselves interviewed as much as ten to fifteen hours. Added to this were interviews with three or four board members, occasionally a meeting with the full board, in larger library systems with a selection of department heads and branch librarians. In all libraries some contact was made with the appointing or fiscal officers of the unit of government and with public school authorities. Wherever possible, one or two active friends of the library or active users of the library were formally interviewed, and in a number of cases it was possible to include an organized labor official and a newspaper editor. In a visit of two to ten days there remained little time for establishing independent contacts, and in very large part it was the chief librarian who selected our informants. In some cases the librarians, recognizing this situation, attempted to make their selections in such a way as to give us a well-rounded picture and in every way sought to give us a free hand in obtaining a full view of the local situation. In a few cases the librarians were skeptical of the Public Library Inquiry and reluctant to plan the use of our time. Some librarians were watchful of us, careful to control our time and to influence our impressions by keeping us busy with "the right people." Despite these limitations it was possible, in the few days allotted, to note in many cases the half-told story, the fuzzy memory, often the utter confusion about the most basic facts

A NOTE

ON

METHOD

XXV

of library business, past and present. Testimony varied widely as seen from different perspectives in the same community. There were instances of deliberate concealment of information from the Inquiry and even from the responsible authorities of the community. It is a significant fact about public library government that as outsiders the field workers, even in two or three days, could bring these confusions into some degree of focus, often to the considerable surprise of local officials who had never themselves bothered to look at their library. The discovery, in one case, of casually concealed or poorly reported endowment income was much less dramatic than cases in which the librarian and all the board members together had no clear conception of the library laws or the sources of current library income. There was more than one such library. The interviews were long enough and numerous enough to establish the limitations of the data received and to this degree were superior to research techniques relying upon correspondence and questionnaires. Only in a personal interview can the fog of ignorance, the unconscious bias, or the calculated generalities of deception be sensed and appropriate action be taken to develop further the revealing points. On the other hand, there were cases in which the librarian, the staff, and the board were both informed and candid, and the research could outline and correlate with other case studies information that was fully known to the local participants. In so doing the Inquiry has sought to organize the collective wisdom of the library profession. The interviews were loosely controlled within the framework of major topics, but were never limited by any presuppositions as to the interesting or important aspects of a given library. A free flow of ideas, and not uncommonly a reasonably free outburst of emotion, were the central objective. The material was gathered in confidence and has been reported here in such a way as not to violate that confidence.

xxvi

A NOTE

ON

METHOD

The field staff members were not librarians and pretended to no special knowledge or experience which would permit them to pass judgment on the work of the librarians or of the governing authority in any individual situation. It required especial care to avoid answering direct requests for judgments, particularly where common sense seemed to provide a ready enough answer to local dilemmas. Common sense is not always directly applicable to a political or administrative problem, and it was vital for us to remain in the role of neutral seekers of information if we were to be honest with the profession and if we were to obtain the information needed. The success of the interviews varied widely, not only with the time available, the attitude of the librarian, and the quality of the board, but also with the degree to which the Public Library Inquiry's concerns had any relevance to the life and thought of the individual library. There were cases in which communication was difficult and the important questions had to be approached cautiously and indirectly. A few librarians and a number of board members found it hard to think in the terms of the Inquiry. Again the personal interview was the appropriate tool to gauge this barrier. It remained universally true that whatever the difficulties encountered every case provided significant data, and almost invariably the most valuable and informing data came as a surprise, unexpected by us and very commonly unrecognized by our informants. As outsiders to the profession we could not help learning something from every contact; but the real reward came particularly from such unexpected and unconscious contributions. However carefully the sample is put together and the tools of research selected and applied, the value of each case study remains unforseen. A wide flexibility was, therefore, indispensable in the handling of each interview and of each case. The multiple-discipline, case-study method developed in this Inquiry has given a picture of the structure, the political

A

NOTE

ON

METHOD

XXVÜ

process, the ideas, and the issues of public library government. It has gone beyond that and given a usably accurate gauge of the range of experience in public library government and politics at the present time. While internal correlations cannot be established in the data gathered, this is the normal experience of political science. A substantial area of uniformities has appeared and can be documented more satisfactorily than could a comparable study of national political institutions and processes. The evaluations and recommendations resulting from the study have their verification in the diversity and inclusiveness of the sample, in the meeting of minds among the research staff, and in the range of research methods. In a very real sense, also, this is a report on governmental and power relationships by the library profession itself. W e have not made discoveries about library government. Rather, we have sought to verify and crystallize the understanding of political relationships and thus to give greater coherence and direction to developing public library policies.

The Public Library in the Political Process

I THE

FOUNDATIONS

LIBRARY

OF

GOVERNMENT

in America has had a short history; three generations nearly cover its span of life. T h e ideas behind the library movement, however, are much older, and perhaps more than recent events these older roots have been controlling influences upon the development of library government. In consequence this study, although primarily an analysis of public libraries today, begins by carrying the present back some three hundred years into the past. T h e free public library has long been claimed by the United States as one of its great contributions to modern civilization, an institution unique in its American democratic character. This claim is only as true as the general claim for American uniqueness is true. T h e American public library is a variant of an old institution. Libraries have appeared in every civilization in which scholarship and learning have been valued. "Scholarship" here is meant to describe that type of intellectual activity that works out the implications of a received body of information. Such an activity necessarily implies a more complete and accurate preservation of previous speculation and experience than oral tradition can hope to give. T h u s one finds a collection of written records growing within every institution of learning, religious observance, or governmental activity from Babylonian times down to the present. T H E PUBLIC LIBRARY

Access to these writings has been widened or narrowed according to circumstances, and especially according to the prevailing belief in a broad or restricted community of schol-

4

L I B R A R Y

G O V E R N M E N T

ars. In Roman times libraries were open to the public, a reflection of the Roman conception of broad citizenship and scholarship; in medieval times books were chained to their cases, a reflection not only of their preciousness but also of the monopoly of learning by a small community of clerics. During the periods of the Renaissance and the Reformation the revival of learning extended the community of scholars, and print multiplied the holdings of books. As a result, the later library came to serve a steadily increasing body of readers with an expanding body of information. The United States introduced, at the end of this development, the radical concept that every man is a scholar and opened the storehouse of learning to all who cared to enter. THE

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY

RELIGIOUS

AND

HUMANISTIC

The circumstances behind the early English colonies in N e w England fostered this belief. Although the Puritans were not democratic in either their politics or their theology, they were the product of a revolt of the private conscience against official doctrine, and this had made Protestantism base its theology on individual learning, especially in the Bible, whereby the private conscience could discover the true presence of God. Predestinarian as many Puritans were, they were nevertheless convinced that they could best discover and follow their destiny by a close application to the word of God as written in the Bible. This placed reading and learning from books, or the Book, at the center of their culture. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in 1647 the General Court of Massachusetts passed an act designed to educate all children in the fundamentals of reading and writing in order that learning might not be buried in the graves of the fathers in the church and the commonwealth, and that the old deluder, Satan, might not keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures or becloud their sense "by false glosses of saintLEARNING

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seeming deceivers." This education was to be the responsibility of the family. If the family failed, the town was to provide it. Whether the education act succeeded or failed to do what it proposed is still a moot question. What is important is that it clearly shows how early in its history N e w England adopted two fundamental tenets of American education: that "the good education of children is a singular behoof and benefit to any Commonwealth" and that this education should be given to all in large enough measure so that everyone could "attain at least so much as to be able to read the Scriptures and other good and profitable printed books in the English tongue . . . and in some competent measure to understand the main grounds and principles of Christian religion necessary to salvation," 1 to have a knowledge of the capital laws, and to be trained in some vocation. This educational system and its belief in individual learning were not democratic in the sense of assuming all men equal and free to rise by their own intellectual effort. Education and reading were to fit the citizen for his proper role in a theocratic state. After the seventeenth century the church declined in power; but the state remained as a source of public education, and the belief in book-learning as the basis of good citizenship lived on. These beliefs began in a society in which there was a fairly rigid class system and were to continue regardless of changing class lines. T o this religious emphasis upon reading as the beginning of knowledge must be added the humanist's worship of literature as the guide of all humane conduct. This was a pattern of learning that was deeper than Puritanism and that created a common concept of an educated man in the minds of colonists both North and South, the ideal of the well-read man, the 'New Haven compulsory education act, 1655. Quoted in Newton Edwards and Herman G. Rjchey, The School m the American Social Order, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947, p. j8.

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informed citizen. Ever since there has existed in America the almost unmentioned basic belief that reading is good, a belief upon which the American library system has developed down to the present time. T o serve religious education and humanist education N e w England towns, such as Boston, Oxford, Concord, and N e w Haven, collected some books and made them publicly available.' H o w many and how available it is now difficult to tell, but they were libraries and the beginnings of better things. These public libraries, if they may be called that, were the result of private gifts; they were extremely limited in size, that in Lancaster, Massachusetts, consisting of one book, but that one purporting to contain the Complete Body of Divinity, and they did not circulate their holdings. But they do indicate that the early communities, which, it should always be recalled, existed in a wilderness, considered the care of books a legitimate public service. For somewhat the same reasons parochial libraries were established in Maryland about a generation later. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the tradition of the learned clergy, the pastor ministered not only to the souls but also to the minds of men. A large part of what today we would call adult education was to be obtained in the weekly sermon and subsequent discussions. T h e Anglican church in England took a real interest in educating for this responsibility the rural clergy of the mother country and those it licensed for the colonies. T h e Reverend Thomas Bray interested himself in establishing parish libraries in England for the use of the rural clergy w h o were too poor to buy books, as he himself had been as a curate; and when he was chosen in 1696 b y the Bishop of London to go to Maryland, he organized such libraries for the use of the clergy in the colonies. T h e Society for the Propaga•Jesse Shera, The Foundations of the Public Library, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. 29.

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tion of the Gospel was organized by him and proceeded to supply books to a system of parochial libraries. Collections were sent from England and kept in the parish churches in Maryland and later in other colonies. In all, the society sent out thirty-four thousand volumes to the colonies over a period of a hundred years. The titles were largely on religion and philosophy and were mostly used by the clergy. Eleven layman's lending libraries and one provincial library, however, expanded the twenty-nine parochial libraries into something like a province-wide library system, a characteristic that was further developed by laws against misuse passed by the provincial assembly.' The Bray libraries, in the long run, failed of real success because they were too small and scattered, lacked financial support, and were not adequately protected by administrative responsibility.

As the eighteenth century opened, the character of the British colonies in America was subtly changing. The attempt to transport European culture some three thousand miles across the Atlantic without a sea-change had been in some ways remarkably successful. Both North and South looked to England for their social and cultural ideas; they were provincial in outlook, considering themselves a part of English civilization unfortunately cut off from the source of their ideas by a broad ocean. This cultural provincialism hung on into the nineteenth and in some ways even.into the twentieth century. Our earliest literature was English literature; our formal art, architecture, and styles were English or adapted from the English; our educational curriculum and intellectual speculation were largely borrowed from the same source. Perhaps it would be better to THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOCIAL SETTING

"Joseph T . Wheeler, "Thomas Bray and the Maryland Parochial Libraries," Maryland Historical Magazine, X X X I V 7 (Sept., 1939), 246.

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say that America was, culturally speaking, part of Europe and did not borrow from so much as it enjoyed European civilization. The fact remains, however, that the colonies were changing and taking on characteristics that were to create a new nation in the world. The conditions which produced these new characteristics were at first largely the result of geography. North America presented to the European a dazzling opportunity to expand into a land of great natural wealth, comparatively uninhabited. The hope of the Puritan forefathers to perpetuate a British commonwealth was soon undermined and finally destroyed by the New Englander's penchant for wandering, by the fact that poor soil drove him out to sea or the frontier and into manufacturing and commerce, with the close companionship of material opportunities nudging him into the adventures of Mammon. By the turn of the century the theocratic state was in retreat, and a new commercial society was advancing. In the South the exhaustion of the soil and the lure of the frontier were to break up the hoped-for landed and hereditary aristocracy. In spite of its name the original New England town was a rural institution, but during the eighteenth century it began to develop the characteristics of city life and interests. Mercury, the god of commerce, brought with him the mercurial temperament, and society became fluid, with the small farmers, the artisans, and the merchants sharing the power. As the old society, with its shapeliness, began to break up, the pieces were picked up and fitted into new institutions groping for a style. The interests of the new leadership were the application of new knowledge to the problems of a commercial world and the polishing of manners for a new society, even to the point of teaching music, painting, dancing, millinery, hairdressing, and French to the girls and fencing to the boys. Boston, like Philadelphia, was becoming London writ small.

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This is an exaggerated picture of the change, because it emphasizes what happened in cities. Country life in N e w England remained very much the same, an unremitting and unrewarding contest with a niggardly soil. And it should be remembered that most of America was rural, making its living by heavy physical labor under frontier conditions. Forests covered the face of the land; the clearing of them and the extension of transportation was to be the great labor of many generations of Americans. This was almost universally true of the South and the West. Only on the Atlantic fringe, and there only in certain favorable locations, did an urban society develop. The most important of these regions for the study of the public library was N e w England. In 1790 Rhode Island had a population 19 percent urban, in 1830, 31 percent urban, and in 1850, 56 percent. For the same dates percentages of urban population in Massachusetts were 14, 31, and 51. Without this urban growth an institution such as the library could not develop. In this century there were no technical facilities to serve a scattered population with books, even if there had been a demand for them. T h e N e w England urban center of this period differed from its modern descendant in one significant feature: it was homogeneous. This enabled the town to develop institutions with a feeling of largeness about them, no matter how small a part of the population supported them—a part seemed representative of the whole. Down to the present time this feeling of community comprehension has characterized the public library, an institution arising out of this environment. In the Middle Atlantic colonies there developed a cosmopolitan society that was more nearly the picture of the later nation than the N e w England town. The Germans in Pennsylvania, the Dutch in N e w York, the Quakers in N e w Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the Scotch-Irish on the frontier, to-

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gether with many immigrants from New England who early began that region's remarkable expansion, made up a population that had little in comihon except the desire to be let aione. As a result the diverse cultural pattern created in these middle colonies institutions that served, not the community as a whole, but groups, churches, or neighborhoods. Here was the playground of private enterprise and informal co-operation. The wealth in the ports of New York and Philadelphia came from commerce, and this, as in New England, led to an alert openmindedness and an eagerness for catholic knowledge that was an excellent school to eighteenth-century learning and the institutions it fostered. THE

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The

com-

merce of this country joined it closely to the remarkably uniform pattern of belief then spreading over the Western world, a faith, as the late Carl Becker put it, in a new heavenly city obeying the law of nature and of nature's God.* This law was discovered by the great scientific geniuses of the seventeenth century and was codified in Newton's Principia; this God had as his disciples the philosophers of the following century. As a result of scientific investigation from Galileo to Newton and the contemporary development of mathematical theory, the world of nature became nothing but a dance of material particles and God merely the choreographer. This figure of speech seems more accurate for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought than the usual one of God, the master mechanic, setting up a mechanistic universe, in which "nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."5 The full •Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1931, passim. •A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1929, p. 80.

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implications of the mechanistic theory of the universe were not recognized in the first two centuries of its domination. It was left to the nineteenth century to develop them in all their inhuman despotism and to the twentieth century to circumscribe their power. It is well to remember that Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, made the statement: "There are sentences in the writings of the poets more serious than in those of the philosophers. . . . There are in us, as in a flint, seeds of knowledge. Philosophers adduce them through the reason; poets strike them out from the imagination, and these are the brighter." It was Voltaire, the anti-poet of Blake and Baudelaire, who first called attention to the careless "poetic" richness of Descartes' style; and it was also Voltaire who first commented on the fact that the last thing from Descartes' pen was a ballet written for the Queen of Sweden. 6 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the God of nature was accepted as a benevolent despot, and his laws were good. The psychology of Locke eliminated innate traits of character from the psyche, which now became the offspring of its environment. The doctrines of the Christian religion were directly attacked as superstition; man could now obey the dictates of God without the intervention of an interpreter, simply by the exercise of his reason. The book of nature was open for all to read in a language that all could understand, and its message was that all men were created free and equal and therefore should be governed only by their own consent. Government was established by contract between men and could be changed by men when necessary and proper. If man is the result of his environment, the good man is created by the good environment, and the millennium was simply waiting for man Taken from Leon Roth's exegesis upon The Discourse on Method, quoted by Wallace Stevens, "The Figure of Youth As Virile Poet," Sevianee Review, LII (Autumn, 1944), 520-21.

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to progress in his understanding of nature until his laws coincide with natural law. That all this has no basis in empirical science is irrelevant. Pethaps because it could not be proven, it was all the more strongly held. The philosopher and the statesman of these centuries lived in a world in which man was still the molder of his destiny, and their philosophy was a religion of humanity, called scientific and natural and framed to support a new world upon its precepts. This concept of man and his society was begun by the English, especially John Locke, whose ideas influenced Jefferson in his writing of the Declaration of Independence, and was elaborated and popularized by the French, such as Montesquieu, who is so important to our Constitutional theory, Voltaire, and Rousseau, who is a revolutionary figure in spite of himself both in the political world with his Contrat social and the educational world with his Emile. The universality of this French influence is most remarkable. Such figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin seem to have in part followed the English tradition through French translation; and the English revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1793 became linked together in a common millennialism. This belief deserves a good deal of analysis and emphasis, for from it stem the basic tenets of American democratic thought: a fundamental law grants individuals certain inalienable rights; man is naturally a free individual, essentially equal to his fellows; society, freed from former misunderstandings, is progressing to a better future; consequently this country has a mission to exemplify and to preach the virtues of its new democracy.7 From it come the social beliefs behind public library support: that every person should have an equal chance to fulfill his abilities; that every man can and will do so if given Tlilph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, New York, The Ronald Press Company, 1940, passim.

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the chance; that the individual shall be free to develop as his inclinations and capacities guide him; and that society will progress as the enlightenment of its citizens advances. In the eighteenth century this enlightenment was to be gained from the reason, as it apprehended the truths recently discovered and advanced to new truths soon to be discovered. In due course education became the hope of mankind. This climate of opinion was secular, in distinct contrast to that of the seventeenth century, and brought with it a much wider range of reading interests and a larger audience for new books. It was middle class in its characteristics, especially in its emphasis upon self-improvement, a salient feature of middleclass psychology. Reading in America left the high moral ground of revealed truth and bustled into the society and business of this world. It is a fact, which librarians have long felt uncomfortable about, that their institution came into being when novel reading began to grow and has lived much of its public life in the companionship of this demi-monde of literature. In the last two centuries the novel has become the folk art of the literate masses; what music, dancing, and story-telling were to other peoples. The novel was begotten out of the cheapness of printing by a fascination with human society, an ill-bred offspring of an unsanctified union from any ecclesiastical point of view. It has never fully recovered from this taint of cheapness and fleshliness, cast upon it by those who conceived of it as a vessel of original sin. Interest in the world also led readers into the respectable realms of science! history, and travel. The eighteenth-century enthusiasm for the new history is of great importance, because it led directly to the collection of many books, the sine qua non of historical scholarship. The public of this time studied the past of mankind to discover the meaning of its experience, the law of its nature. The philosophers, such as Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, and Voltaire, produced a large, widely read succes-

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sion of historical writings and as historians are wont to do, found what they had expected to find, that the history of mankind was a sorry tale of man's reason being clouded by superstition and his natural goodness corrupted by evil institutions. Gibbon, the greatest of them, commemorated the death of ancient civilization and described for "the instruction of future ages" the "triumph of barbarism and religion." Knowledge of the world had now replaced knowledge of the Bible in the curriculum of self-development. This meant a wider reading than could often be found in a private library. The figure of Benjamin Franklin is almost too pat an example of the eighteenth-century thinker as father of what is now called the social library. W e should not exaggerate his influence, but in his own person he summed up and illustrated the origins of the library of his time. In his philosophical outlook and his intellectual activities he represented, more brilliantly, perhaps, but with substantial accuracy, the middle-class interests of his day and our day. He was an artisan and a trader, with a mind consumed by curiosity and an eye for the uses of his findings, informed by a shrewd practical judgment of men and society. He came out of New England to the commercial bustle and prosperity of Philadelphia, where he could more nearly breathe the air of the great world than anywhere else in America. As he describes in his Autobiography his active mind picked up what reading it could from childhood on. He first read the polemic divinity in his father's small collection of books, a sorry diet he was later to believe, Mather's "Essays to Do Good," some Defoe, and Plutarch's Lives. Having exhausted his home library, as soon as he became acquainted with booksellers' apprentices, he smuggled books, with their help, out of the shops for a quick, clandestine reading. All this led to a reputation for learning, and he was given the privilege by Matthew Adams, an ingenious trades-

THE SOCIAL LIBRARY

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man, of borrowing books from the latter's "pretty collection." At this time he bought a copy of the Spectator Papers, one volume only, which he read dog-eared and used for a pattern of style. He mastered Cocker's arithmetic, a subject that had baffled him in school, and got what geometry he could from Seller's and Shermy's books on navigation. After this he moved on, far on it would seem, to Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and Messrs. du Port Royal on the Art of Thinking. In these ways, at this time, a determined seeker of knowledge could find it. When he had settled in Philadelphia, after having been to England, Franklin organized a club of young intellectuals known as the Junto, being artisans and other "citizens in the middle and lower walks of life." Since they were individually poor, they agreed to make themselves collectively rich in books by pooling their holdings. This did not work out in practice, so Franklin, with others, established in 1731 the Library Company of Philadelphia. This was the first society library in America, an institution that soon spread through the settled areas of the colonies. In his old age Franklin claimed paternity for all the subsequent libraries that were so like his own in appearance, but it seems more historically accurate to say that other libraries grew up in a like environment among similar persons with the same appetite for reading. The social library was familiar to the English by 1725, and a social invention of this sort could cross the ocean easily during this period. In 1739, for instance, we find Isaac Watts sending rules as well as books to the Philogrammatican Library of Lebanon, Connecticut." We find in 1733 a group of men in Durham, Connecticut, organizing a library to enrich their "minds with useful and profitable knowledge by reading," having been "unable to do so for the want of suitable and proper books." As Newport gained a re•Shera, The Foundations of the Public Library, p. 33.

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markable prosperity from its trade and as its intellectual life was quickened by the presence of Bishop Berkeley, the English philosopher, a Library and Philosophical Society was founded. This was the 1730 formula from which came the Redwood Library of 1747, the result of a gift of £500 by Abraham Redwood for a collection of useful books, a gift of lands by Henry Collins, and enough popular interest to establish a company to administer and a building to house the collection. The Redwood Library is still active in Newport, carrying on its activities, though not a public library, in the original, mid-eighteenth-century building. This new source of information so suited the public appetite that it spread rapidly through the populous parts of the country. From 1731 to 1780 some fifty-one social libraries were organized in N e w England, and from 1790 to 1815 five hundred and thirty-two were added. All in all, by 1850 1,064 libraries had been established at one time or another in N e w England alone. In the service they gave, these institutions followed modern library practice; they bought the books their members wanted, allowed them to be circulated for a month or so, and instituted fines for violation of the rules. In their later development they even branched out into special libraries for mercantile clerks, mechanics, children, ladies, lyceum audiences, farmers, factory workers, lawyers, and music lovers. This was a library system of a sort, and it is probable that almost every serious reader could get access to what books there were in his community. Where the social library differed most radically from the modern public library was in its institutional form. It was in essentials a voluntary association of persons contributing to a general fund for the purchase of books. The books were owned in common, and every member had the right to use them. Owing to its voluntary, spontaneous origin the social

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library did not always have a formal, legal organization; but the associations soon found that they needed legal powers to protect them from their own members, who had to be disciplined by enforceable rules, and to give some continuity to the institution. As the number of libraries grew, they took two principal legal forms: the proprietary library, in many ways like a common-law partnership, and the subscription or association library, a common-law corporation obtaining its powers from the corporation law of the period. In the former type of library the proprietors invested their money in shares which set up the fund from which buildings, salaries, and books were to be financed, the proprietors alone having library privileges. This restricted the membership too much, and the most popular form of social library became the subscription or corporation type, which accepted as members all those who paid a set fee, either annually or quarterly. Many libraries developed a combined form with proprietary stockholders supplemented by fee subscribers. These associations applied for incorporation by the various provincial governments. At first they were the subject of special bills, but after 1796 the states, as they now were, followed the example of New York in setting up general permissive legislation. The New York act was long and precise in its regulations, giving the trustees of any library corporation strong powers, but limiting their right to hold property beyond the value of $500, exclusive of books and payments.® The acts that followed tended to be more brief and general, until in 1839 the Rhode Island provision was just a brief clause in a larger act codifying the legislation for the school system. From the beginning the legislators had in mind the value of these libraries as educational institutions. In granting a charter to the Redwood Library, the Rhode Island legislature did so •/¿>W, p. 61.

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to encourage the propagation of knowledge, virtue, and useful learning. 10 Thus the social library now had the power to hold property, receive gifts, sue and be sued, elect officers, and set up a form of corporation government which could arrange for perpetual succession. It was given these rights because the governments of the states believed it performed a valuable public service. In this period the corporation was the most popular means of getting services that the people wanted. In England it had been widely adopted, and its efficiency had been proven. America followed suit and set up corporations to provide education, water supply, piers, bridges, roads, canals, fire protection, and even some religious functions. These were all of a public character that ultimately caused many of them to be taken over by the state, but only after they had failed to give the kind of service the public demanded. The subscription library, throughout its rise and decline, clearly fits within this pattern. It took a century, from 1750 to 1850, to wear out the early enthusiasm for this type of library, and for more than half a century after that it continued to appear swaddled in the high hopes of women's clubs, literary circles, and educational reformers. But it could not live up to its promise, which has not been better stated than in the charter of the social library of Castine, Maine, organized in the second decade of the nineteenth century. It is greatly to be lamented that excellent abilities are not infrequently doomed to obscurity by reason of poverty; the rich purchase almost everything but books; and that reading has become so unfashionable an amusement in what we are pleased to call this enlightened age and country. T o remedy these evils; to excite a fondness for books; to afford the most rational and profitable amusement; to prevent idleness "Ibid., p. 60.

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and immorality; and to promote the diffusion of useful knowledge, piety, and virtue at an expense which small pecuniary abilities can afford, we are induced to associate . . . " This repays quotation at length because it states so clearly the widespread cultural functions the libraries were meant to fulfill. This hope had been undiminished from the time the Rhode Island legislature had incorporated the Redwood Library, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to encourage the propagation of knowledge, virtue, and useful learning. It was to be the emotional and intellectual conviction behind the free public library movement, and it is one measure of its success today. The social library was bound to fail in such a high calling. It had of necessity to be exclusive, for it could serve only those who could pay. The fees were not great, from one to four dollars a year in most cases and rarely over ten dollars, but subsequent evidence has clearly shown that fees, no matter how small, do prevent a wide use of the library. Its use was also limited by class-conscious patronage, oddly witnessed to by the fact that fees in libraries called athenaeums were uniformly higher than in others. The basic difficulty, however, was that not enough people wanted to read books. In 1840 Horace Mann made a survey of the library situation in Massachusetts and found the membership of all libraries to be 25,705, about one-seventh of the population. This does not compare too unfavorably with the modern situation, where about onefourth of the population holds cards, including a large library population of children, whose reading needs have been effectively met only in recent times. The limited reading public was served by too many institutions; the unit of service, using modern terms, was too small. Only one social library during this early period had more than one hundred members, and about half of them had between "Quoted in part in ibid., p. 238, and in full in the original unpublished thesis, p. 113.

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twenty-five and fifty. These libraries were always in a delicate economic condition. They could not break the vicious circle in which fees limited their size and their puny size weakened their financial health. The circle could be broken by philanthropic gifts; but these were not often made, and when given, they were not generous enough, in the years from 1750 to 1850. The first benefaction to the New York Society Library, for instance, came from Elizabeth Demilt, in 1850, after the library was nearly a century old. Even the Boston Athenaeum was in continual financial straits during its first half century, as Josiah Quincy, its treasurer, records, and this in spite of fairly generous bequests by the Perkinses and John Bromfield. No other social library had its advantages. The average institution, which held fewer than three hundred volumes and had a membership of only twenty-five to fifty persons, withered away during the depressions or led a languishing life as soon as the initial enthusiasm waned or the founding father moved away. There was nothing but the original zest for reading to keep social libraries alive. They were organized by a group for that purpose alone; they were managed by their membership in an informal way, the book selection, administration, and budgeting, in fact all the activities now called professional, being carried on by the membership or by an elected board representing them. The librarian was merely a hired clerk to act as custodian of the books. He and his fellow clerks had no interest in keeping their library system going, and if they had had, they could have done nothing. The whole future of the social library rested in the hands of the library boards, and they felt little sense of responsibility for an institution that performed so small a service so poorly. It was not until such establishments as the Boston Athenaeum, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society took on the dignity of age, tradition, and size that management felt the

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importance of its function and the librarian became a person of some significance. Although boards had scarcely covered themselves with glory by their administration of the social library, the public library borrowed the form for its government. As it became obvious that the social library was too little patronized, too insecure in its financial footing, and too limited in its resources, variants were attempted. T h e Mechanics' Institutes, brought here from England, supplemented their vocational curriculum with reading from a mechanic's library. Merchants' clerks hoped to get the versatile knowledge they needed from mercantile libraries. These soon became indistinguishable from the general social library and suffered the same illnesses. Factory owners attempted to use the mill as the center of their new towns in a genuine attempt to mitigate the horrors of the factory system, as they had been felt in England, and to retain the virtues of the N e w England town in the very institution that was breaking it up. Factory vocational libraries were part of this attempt. Needless to say, they failed. T h e factory as a device for efficiency in production had none of the communal strength to carry such a load and tended in its routine to sap the emotional sources for vocational reading. T h e urge to get ahead in the world is a prominent factor in all library building, but that urge was not present in enough persons or in enough strength to make the vocational library a success; just as the desire for general reading was not widely or deeply enough felt to make the general social library a success. A n addition to these discouraging conditions was the competition of the circulating library, which was another contemporary importation from England. This institution made no pretense of being a public service, but supplied much of the popular passion for novels and cut away a significant fraction of the small library population. T h e circulating librarian's lot, however, was not easy, and in general his business was short-

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lived. He had always to appeal to his patrons to abide by his rules and return the books; he relied upon a public taste that was uncertain; the obsolescence of his stock was rapid; and he was made uncomfortable by being constantly reminded that he was pandering to low literary tastes. The clergy, together with the intellectual leadership of the age, agreed with Sheridan's Sir Anthony Absolute that "a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year," and "they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last." 12 Thomas Jeiferson was only a little less eloquent in a letter to Nathanial Burwell, where he discussed the education of girls and opposed the reading of novels because they result in "a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust toward all the real business of life." 1 " Although the proprietors of circulating libraries were thus forced to apologize for their work, they would not have foregone profits because of a bad conscience. What limited their maleficent influence was the fact that they made little or no money. They contributed little to American library development beyond discrediting private enterprise even more than the social libraries' failure had done. So W e find b y 1850 the sources for reading quite unsatisfactory to those most interested in a full flow of knowledge over the fertile but parched soil of the public mind. From the point of view of these critics this soil was producing a harvest of weeds, sprouting in the social libraries in spite of careful tending, cultivated by the circulating libraries, and overrunning the vocational libraries. They became advocates of a free public library. What new evidence was vouchsafed them that public irriga-

T H E BEGINNINGS OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The Rivals, ACT I, scene 2. "Quoted in Roy J. Honeywell, The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1931, p. 23.

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don would bring forth better fruit than private? There was none. T h e y were direct inheritors of the eighteenth-century belief in the perfectibility of man; that belief had not been shaken by the failure of private enterprise; the right device had simply not yet been invented, and if private corporations did not give man the reading he needed, the public corporation might be the answer. Basically, then, the free public library was a continuation of the old library movement. The terminology is significant evidence in point, for the social library was called a public library, and was so considered because it was open to all those willing to pay a fee for its privileges. It is so listed in Jewett's report on the public libraries of 1850. What led to a change in the base of financial support was the feeling that the fees and regulations of the earlier libraries made the term "public" inexact. There were, however, some new motives appearing in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that helped design the new institution. It is well to bear always in mind that the library, in its public character at least, is an educational institution. Education, during the period we have been reviewing, went through much the same experimental evolution. Inasmuch as the library corresponds most nearly to the secondary school and college, it is significant that as the semi-public corporation library became popular the semi-public academy was the basis of secondary schooling. By 1820 this was seen to be inadequate, and in 1821 Boston opened the English Classical School in order to give boys "intending to become merchants and mechanics, better means of instruction than were provided at any of the public schools." 14 This did not mean a vocational school, but a school for the general public who did not intend to go to college. It is the beginning of the public high school as we now know it, and Boston was so soon followed by other cities that the high "Quoted in Edwards and Richey, The School in the American Social Order, P- 399-

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school would seem to be the result of a need simultaneously recognized by many people in the large cities. In the census of 1860 some three hundred high schools were reported. At the same time'that the secondary school was taking on this public character, higher education was groping toward the same solution. B y the Civil W a r there were seventeen state universities and some three or four private colleges with hazy state connections.18 This growth had been the result of a country-wide sentiment that higher learning should be open to the public, not on a free basis, it is true, but on the basis of moderate tuitions and unprejudiced entrance requirements. The work of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, the great educational leaders of the rime, thus developed the pattern of the American school system, but it is not to be supposed that such a pattern was followed throughout the country. The idea of compulsory elementary schooling, followed by free voluntary secondary schooling with a tuitionsupported higher education at the top is there, but it was not widely put into practice before 1850. This educational example was not wasted upon those interested in libraries. The names of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard appear frequently in reports about libraries. Both of them pushed the first free public library system in this country —that of the school-district libraries. This was first developed in the state of N e w York, where the legislature, in 1835, passed a law for tax-supported libraries in the school districts of the state. It was permissive legislation and simply limited the tax which might be imposed to twenty dollars the first year and ten dollars every succeeding year. In this form it failed, but when, in 1838, N e w York distributed the "deposit fund" from the Federal Government through the school districts, provided they would match the state gift, the system began to grow in size. Within six years they reached their peak, and "¡bid., p. 404.

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then they declined until they were made purely school libraries, in 1892. These libraries were established to provide free reading to all the public. Although the name implies a library for schools, they were adult collections for adult readers and were not necessarily housed in school buildings. The example of N e w York was followed by nine states before 1850 and ten more before 1876, most significantly in Massachusetts under Horace Mann's leadership, in Rhode Island with Henry Barnard to push them, and in Michigan where the income from penal fines in the state was used to promote them. Although adopted with enthusiasm at the beginning, the school-district libraries soon became moribund and have almost disappeared, with the notable exception of Michigan. T h e reasons for their decline are fairly clear; they were artificially created by state planners, following no local pattern of cultural loyalties; they served too small an area—in N e w York only 267 persons to the district; they were inadequately housed, poorly supervised by school trustees, and badly managed by elected librarians. This was not a library system with a future, but it did indicate the general interest in government support for adult reading. A similar abortive effort can be found in the attempt by Indiana to set up county libraries by its first constitution of 1816, when it was still a frontier state. Conditions were too unfavorable in the wilderness; the Indiana county library system of today had a much later origin. For the establishment of a lasting free public library pattern we must return to the settled Northeast, where the old wealth of commerce was multiplying itself in new industries founded since the War of 1812 and a literary renaissance was in full bloom. The flowering of N e w England, to use Van W y c k Brooks' term, gave the N e w Englander a renewed sense of grace. He had accepted eighteenth-centurv philosophy to the point of adopting Unitarianism, but its arid intellectuality

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proved barren. T h e warm, Romantic mist of transcendentalism moved across the land to give the rational man of the previous century the fecund power of mystical emotion. T h e sense of mission revived; now every man, as Emerson put it, was a shower of thunderbolts. During the 1850's the Eastern seaboard region saw an extraordinary fulfillment in the masterpieces of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and W h i t man. These were peaks rising from a high plateau of enthusiasm for the life of the mind and for literature, with scholars chained to their study chairs in the midst of private libraries filling up with books from abroad. T h e region seemed to discover the great world of international humanism at the same time that their clipper ships were bringing the products of that world to their doors. Their enthusiasm spread into science, where Nathaniel Bowditch, of Salem, Benjamin Silliman, of Yale, and Colonel George Gibbs, of Newport, were doing significant work in the fields of mathematics and navigation, chemistry, and geology or natural history. German scholarship had been discovered by George Ticknor and Edward Everett and was being introduced, with a delayed response, at Harvard. A new interest in history produced the magnificent literary narratives of Parkman, Prescott, and Motley, and hundreds of minor investigations into local backgrounds which led to the founding of state historical societies. Immediately upon entering the company of European scholars the Americans felt the poverty of their resources. Gibbon's history became a celebrated case, when Fisher Ames made the statement that there were not in all the libraries of America the materials to write such a work as Gibbon's and the indefatigable John Quincy Adams began at his own expense to collect the titles to verify Gibbon's quotations. This was the atmosphere of N e w England scholarship, in the center of which was Boston, where the free public library

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came of age. It had its beginnings, however, in the local loyalties of the N e w England town. Hoping to provide opportunity for reading, which he had longed for and been denied by circumstances when he was a boy, Caleb Bingham, in 1803, sent a collection of 150 titles to his native town of Salisbury, Connecticut. This was to be a library open to juveniles of the town, if the town would accept the quixotic gift. It did so with enthusiasm, and in 1810 it drew upon the town treasurer for one hundred dollars so that the trustees of the Bingham Library for Youth might make additional purchases. It is the first example of a free public library. In Peterborough, N e w Hampshire, a state fund, distributed to towns for free schools or "other purposes of education," was devoted in 1833 to the establishment of a town library. This money came from a literary fund accumulated after 1821 in the hope of establishing a state college, and after Dartmouth had successfully fought the state's attempt to make it such a school. T h e fund in most of the N e w Hampshire towns was used for the school system, but Peterborough interpreted the education clause broadly enough to include a library. This institution was maintained b y an annual appropriation of one hundred dollars down to 1849. T h e man most influential in translating "education" to mean "library" was the Reverend Abiel Abbot, D.D., w h o had established in 1828 a Juvenile Library, social in form, in order to give children "rich entertainment, keep them from idleness and vicious companions, and improve their minds and manners," 1 " who also promoted the Peterborough Library Company (Social) in 1833, the Ministerial Library in 1836, the Peterborough Lyceum, the Peterborough Academy, and the Tree Society. He was also active on the school committee. A better example of the civic-minded man would be hard to find. These early town libraries were usually established because "Quoted in Shera, The Foundations of the Public Library, p. 167.

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of gifts b y native sons to express their gratitude for the early environment that had helped make them successful men, but some philanthropists, such as A b b o t L a w r e n c e , William W o o d , K i r k Boot, and W i l l i a m M c C l u r e gave libraries to towns w h i c h they had never seen. T h e y thought of libraries, in the religious sense, as g o o d works. Such philanthropy came very close to being an indispensable preliminary to most t o w n libraries; for, as the directors of the Athenaeum in Portland said in 1855: ". . . w i t h reference to a free public library, no example is k n o w n to us, of any such institution, in this country, established b y any municipal corporation or otherwise, w h i c h has not had its origin in some large private benefaction, made for the purpose b y one or more individuals . . ." 1T O n e of the attractions the library had for early philanthropists was that gifts could often be of modest dimensions and still render good service. T h e giver of any considerable amounts of money often required the t o w n s to match the offer before the money became available. T h e role of philanthropy has always been a factor in the public library movement. But these small N e w England libraries, typical as they are of community library beginnings d o w n to the present day, had none of the great influence that the founding of the Boston Library was to exert. In that city the motives behind the library movement w e r e more numerous and more dramatic. A n international figure, the French ventriloquist Nicolas Marie Alexandre Vattemare, k n o w n on the stage as " M o n sieur Alexandre," started the w h o l e movement off b y making a speech in Boston in 1841 to promote his project of international exchanges of information. H e had previously been successful as a publicist, and his arguments had encouraged the Federal G o v e r n m e n t to set up an international exchange on behalf of the L i b r a r y of Congress. His idea of a Federal union of intelligence was exciting; the Boston public welcomed it as •7bid., p. l o i .

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a method of attaining international good will. This necessarily meant the establishment of a Boston library as the trading post for intellectual commerce. The solid men of Boston backed the idea of a library, but not with enough vigor to get it beyond talk until 1847. Then it was the leadership of Mayor Quincy, together with his conditional offer of five thousand dollars for books, that got the city council to petition the state government for permission to tax in support of a library. The next year the state government gave Boston that permission. From 1848 to 1852 the wheels of city government moved slowly, but by the latter year the library had taken form with the first trustees' report, written by George Ticknor. In it Ticknor wrote a description of what the library was to do. It has been rightly judged that—under political, social, and religious institutions like ours,—it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely. That this can be done,—that is, that such libraries can be collected, and that they will be used to a much wider extent than libraries have ever been used before, and with more important results, there can be no doubt; and if it can be done anywhere, it can be done here in Boston; for no population of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, lying so compactly together as to be able, with tolerable convenience, to resort to one library, was ever before so well fitted to become a reading, selfcultivating population, as the population of our city is at this moment.18 He went on to say that the trustees considered that their first regard should be for the wants of those who could in no other "Horace G. Wadlin, The Public Library of the City of Boston, a History, Boston, Boston Public Library, 1911, p. 32.

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way supply the reading for further education; that for their convenience no restrictions should be placed upon the use of the library, except as the nature of the safety of the books required; that certain persons, who seemed responsible characters, such as city officials, should have free privileges, and all others should have the privilege of borrowing upon deposit of the cost of the volume. This report set the policy of the library from then on. It had been adopted only after much discussion. Edward Everett, a leader in the library movement along with Ticknor, had in his mind a large reference library, where the resources of scholarship would be available to all. He was taken aback by Ticknor's promotion, not only of the circulation of books, but also of the inclusion of novels and other popular literature. Ticknor believed that reading tastes would develop from bad to good, and that the public must first be brought into the library if it was to be in any way enlightened. Yet he was also interested, with Everett, in establishing a working collection for scholars. When he offered his fine collection of Spanish and Portuguese books to the library, after mentioning that he hoped a portion of his gifts would be widely used, he went on to say, Others of the books, I have the pleasure to offer you, may be infrequently asked for, but when they are wanted, they will be found, I think, important, since copies of many of them cannot elsewhere among us be obtained, except after a troublesome search, if at all. I have wanted them much myself, and, because there was no public library in which I could obtain them, I have bought them—often very reluctantly. I shall be happy if I am permitted to relieve others from the necessity.1' From this collection was written Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, a monument of American scholarship. Through Ticknor we join hands with the eighteenth century. For ten years he had been a correspondent of Jefferson. "Ibid., pp. 127-28.

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He translated the passionate humanism of the eighteenth century into nineteenth-century terms. H o w like in spirit to his statement is Jefferson's letter to John W y c h e , in 1809, on the subject of libraries: The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. And certainly they would never consent to be so used were they not deceived. T o avoid this they should be instructed to a certain degree. I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under such regulations as would secure their safe return in due time. These should be such as would give them a general view of other history, and particular view of that of their own country, a tolerable knowledge of geography, the elements of Nature, Philosophy, of Agriculture, and Mechanics.20 Yet Ticknor is of the new age, and the public library is to be the haunt of the urban scholar, not of the rural philosopher. In both Ticknor and Everett there was a conscious emulation of the European wealth in books as they had known it. And there was in the Bostonians a city pride that Ticknor does not exaggerate in his report, as well as a fear of dangerous rivalry from N e w York, which had just received the Astor gift of half a million dollars for a library. EARLY LIBRARY GOVERNMENT

T h e m i x t u r e of motives be-

hind the founding of a library provides the complex background of its government. The Bostonians as a community did not demand a library. It was given to them by a f e w interested leaders, who were at the same time prominent in the Athenaeum, Boston's largest social library. Yet that public was important in the movement, for though they scarcely knew what "Honeywell, The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson, p. 24.

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a public library was and certainly not what it could be, they approved it as progress toward the education of the common man. This was his era, when he had obtained the vote and with it freed himself of such threats to his liberty as imprisonment for debt. He had become class-conscious and powerful. The appearance of the laboring man at the polling booth worked two ways, directly for government aids to the underprivileged, in education, for example, and indirectly by frightening the upper classes into bettering those who might now govern. The Jacksonian Democrat, although similar in many other ways to the followers of Jefferson, had little of their fear of government activity. The significant feature of the free public library was the fact that it was supported by appropriations from public funds or by direct tax-support, in either case an acceptance of communal action where private enterprise had been the accepted rule. If the wider base for our government was to be anything but shifting sand, it must be secured by education. This became the accepted belief of all classes. Such a vital function could no longer be entrusted to voluntary associations. The remarkable effort to provide elementary schooling for all was witness to this fact, a movement that swept both the North and the South. If education was now to be taken out of private hands, it must nevertheless be secured from the vagaries of political partisanship. The corporate form, with an unpaid board of trustees, responsible to political authority, but not immediately responsive to its whims, seemed the most appropriate, as well as the most convenient, device for attaining this end. The board form of government is also a natural development from the need for some agency to guard endowments. These are an important force in early public library development, as has already been said and can be documented comprehensively with such illustrations as the Boston Library,

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where Quincy's offer began stacking up books before the city had provided a building and the large gift of Joshua Bates for a reading room, together with subsequent gifts of books, really put the institution on its feet. T h e motives behind this philanthropy were often generous. Josiah Q u i n c y wrote in his journal for October 18, 1847, I have determined to endeavour to found a city library, and Museum, and for that purpose to give Five Thousand Dollars on condition that the City double the donation. I have been very prosperous and feel as though it were my duty to improve this opportunity of starting an institution which may, if it "takes" with my fellow citizens, be of great and lasting benefit and Honor to the Public. T o such men the stewardship of wealth was a real duty and privilege, and the library board, made up of men of like mind, was set up to carry on the good work. In one sense the present study is an attempt to see how successfully this purpose has been fulfilled. T H E SOCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF L A T E R L I B R A R Y D E V E L O P M E N T

A s the nineteenth century progressed, philanthropy continued to play an important, though lessening, role. A s the Civil W a r and its aftermath changed the character of American economy and social stability seemed constantly in danger, the motives behind the founding of libraries became more and more unrealistic. For instance, it was a commonly held belief of the conservative owners of wealth that education would lead the public to support the status quo and be a safe insurance policy. Some educational leaders and many library supporters appealed to this sentiment with apparently no suspicion that the library might be an "evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge." Many philanthropists were given to general moral uplift and were easily convinced that the library was a competitor of the tavern and the brothel. T h e development of

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the juvenile library was especially supported as a safeguard against delinquency. The growing prohibition movement gave its support to library legislation, and the churches not only supported it but also organized Sunday School libraries of their own which held in 1870 some 8,346,153 volumes of edifying reading. Y M C A libraries were later established, with a broader book selection, but with much the same purpose. This motive of moral uplift continued throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, not only encouraging philanthropy but also guiding library policy. This somewhat Pecksniffian attitude toward him did not impress the common man. As time went by, he even began to look with suspicion upon philanthropy as conscience money. He tended to agree with William Cobbett, an English T o r y radical who had spoken his language, when he said, I will allow nothing to be good, with regard to the labouring classes unless it make an addition to their victuals, drink, or clothing. As to their minds, that is much too sublime a matter for me to think about. I know that they are in rags and have not a belly full; and I know the way to make them honest, to make them live well, and I also know that none of these things will ever be accomplished by Methodist sermons and by those stupid, at once stupid and indignant things, and roguish things called Religious Tracts. 21 The library has never been a vital issue with labor; it has never seemed their institution. When unions have thought of worker education, and this has not been often, they have organized their own classes with their own book collections to a large degree. When libraries were established, workers became patrons, but as individuals only, and with none of the emotional satisfaction that philanthropists, such as Carnegie, hoped they would get from institutions that were in an indirect way built with their own hands. Even by 1850 class lines had been "Frank Keller Walter, "A Poor but Respectable Relation—the Sunday School Library," Library Quarterly, XII (1941), 733.

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too sharply drawn and the belief in the exploitation of labor too deeply held for the American library to become the secular counterpart of the medieval church, as many civic leaders hoped it would. The narrow foundations of the early libraries were not materially broadened by the constructive work that women's organizations—social clubs, literary circles, church groups, civic leagues, and so forth—put into the establishment of later libraries. Many a community, from the largest to the smallest, in all parts of the country and especially in the Middle and Far West, owes its library to the growing influence of women. With their emancipation, legally, economically, and politically, women came to play an increasingly important, almost a predominant, part in the educational and cultural life of America. Their preponderance in the reading public has for several generations been taken for granted. Certainly their influence upon later library development has been significant. Yet their contribution did not bring much political strength. Although they made up one-half the population, their activities, politically speaking, tended to be peripheral, not central to American community life. Through them the libraries moved closer to a large part of their reading public, but not to the vital interests of the community at large, which unfortunately did not include reading. So the public library began, with claims to a great democratic service but with a small select leadership, close ties with philanthropy, and few persons vitally interested. Although librarians have spoken of their institution as if it were as important as street lighting, sanitation, police and fire protection, public parks, and hospitals, the American people have not so considered it. The people, taken as a whole, have felt that it was a good thing to have around and have taken pride in it when possible, but they have not considered the library a sine qua non of their way of life.

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T h e library has been trying to break out of this circumscribed environment ever since, but without much success. Only in states where there were some people of wealth and leadership, possessing a sense of civic responsibility and living amidst a concentrated population, could the example of Boston be followed. In the period before the Civil W a r this meant the Northeastern section of the country. After the war it meant the North and the West. Down to the present time reading has been largely an urban activity, so that there have rarely seemed enough readers of good books to justify public libraries outside of cities and towns. These circumstances have never been present in the South. Its occupation has been farming, its population scattered, and its wealth diffused. Although its staple-crop farming brought large profits to a few large plantation owners, they were not many and were isolated. T h e y did, however, set the pattern of Southern life to a remarkable degree, considering their small number. T h e y were the leaders upon whom any library movement would have to depend, but their ideal was the country gentleman, descended from medieval chivalry out of Sir Walter Scott. T h e y attempted to be a leisured and enlightened aristocracy living upon the labor, first of indentured servants, then of negro slaves. T h e y had an expanding political and social power, which attempted to create all new Southern society in its own image. But this plantation life was not that of the great majority of the people, who were small farmers, living hard and simple lives on the frontier or what recently was the frontier. As Jeffersonian Democracy spread, the English landed aristocracy pattern could not hold; primogeniture, entail, and an established church were outlawed, and what was to be fixed became fluid. T h e planter class was thrown open to talent. T h e economy of the South, concentrated as it was upon staple crops, especially cotton, was also fluid and spread rapidly, but

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also thinly, as far as cotton could be raised. A uniform, homogeneous way of life expanded from the Atlantic Ocean to Texas—rural, conservative, and uninquisitive. The economic adventurers, as they rose to the top, could follow, but not set its pattern. The South never had time to work out the problems of a rural civilization. Its tradition of the gentleman who could quote his Greek and Latin, whether honored in the breach or in the observance, produced many fine private libraries, but it produced few public libraries of any sort. It is worth noting, however, that where conditions were favorable, in Charleston, for example, a society library was established as early as 1748. As the old conception of the Cavalier South and the Puritan North fades in the light of recent historical investigation, regional differences, especially institutional differences, are seen to be caused largely by economic and social factors. The basis of local government in the South is the county, not the town. Its population is scattered, and any district school system has always suffered because not enough students can be gathered together before an adequately paid teacher over a long enough period of time. A condition that was difficult at best for education was made disastrous by the devastation of the Civil War. The same conditions handicapped the library development of the South. It could not follow the pattern set by Northeastern urbanized wealth. As it recovered from the prostration of the war, it pioneered in rural service based upon the county as the unit of library government. In many ways, and especially in many of its problems, the county library of the South is the counterpart of the village library in the North. With the foundation of the Boston library the free, public, tax-supported library with circulation privileges, which is the modern definition of the term "public library," came into being. It

THE CHARACTER OF LATER L I B R A R Y DEVELOPMENT

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was to be the pattern of library development from 1850 on. The Bureau of Education reported on library growth from 1850 to 1875 in its great report of 1876. The statistics, which are not reliable, but indicative, show that the social library was not dead by any means, but that it was losing ground to the public library. Some 595 social and society libraries were founded in that period, as compared with 257 public libraries, but the books held by the former were only 1,020,292 volumes, as compared with 1,571,382 in the latter. The growth of the public library was limited almost completely to the North, and there was most vigorously developed in N e w England, Massachusetts leading by far, with 144. This concentration can be accounted for in large part by the fact that in 1850 the total taxable personal estate in N e w York and Pennsylvania was one hundred million dollars less than that of Massachusetts,22 and by the fact that Massachusetts had a concentrated urban population that inherited the habit of communal cultural activity. As the N e w England conditions, together with New England traditions, spread across the North, the public library sprouted behind them. In N e w England the first state legislation on municipal public libraries was enacted. In 1849 the New Hampshire legislature passed a general law that in broad and simple terms permitted towns to tax for the support of libraries. The Massachusetts legislature followed suit in 1851, but with more specific terms, among which was a one dollar tax limit for each ratable poll in the first year and twenty-five cents in each succeeding year. Maine, in 1854, Vermont, in 1865, Rhode Island, in 1867, and Connecticut, in 1867—all enacted permissive legislation following in general the Massachusetts, not the New Hampshire statute. This set the pattern of state legislation for the rest of the country. Underneath a multitude of local vari"Sidney Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture, Chicago, American Library Association, 1947, p. 70.

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arions the uniform situation in the country as a whole has been that states have permitted local enthusiasm to take action where interested, but states themselves have not taken enough initiative to make the libraries a compulsory part of the state educational program. This dependence upon local action is another circumstance making the public library an urban institution rooted in urban conditions. The thought behind state action seems to have been that public libraries are an educational luxury, valuable if they can be afforded, funds for which, therefore, should be a matter of community option. As state educational systems broadened their activities and as the public high school became common, the states took a greater interest in providing means for their citizens to continue their education throughout life. T h e y established library commissions to encourage the establishment of libraries. In 1875 Rhode Island gave the state board of education the right to grant sums up to five hundred dollars to existing libraries, the amount depending upon the size of the respective book collections. In 1890 Massachusetts and in 1891 N e w Hampshire set up commissions that could make grants of one hundred dollars worth of books to any town library meeting the appropriations required by state law. These state appropriations took the place of private philanthropy in the older pattern, and many social libraries with this inducement became public libraries. Within the next decade many other states followed these examples, and by 1900 state governments were playing a real part in library development. T h e y did so for very much the same reasons that town governments did, but they placed more emphasis on civic, vocational, and adult education through libraries. They were not so interested in conservation of the resources of scholarship as in disseminating information as widely as possible.

4©

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N o w that books were being produced in large quantities by American publishers with power presses, linotype machines, and other technological improvements to work with, the book was no longer as precious and irreplaceable as it had been on the frontier, and its value, from the public point of view, was not in its rarity, but in the number of readers it had. These new library commissions, unlike the old state libraries which had been organized first as reference libraries for the legislature, emphasized the extension of library service. They promoted the founding of small libraries, to which they gave some financial aid, and they sent boxes of books, called "traveling libraries," to outlying crossroads hamlets. The small community library and the traveling box of books provided too inadequate a stock and too little supervision to give rural areas the equivalent of urban service. So the proponents of extended library coverage turned to the county as the basis of library support. Local loyalties, habits, and institutions in the South clustered around the county, and the county library movement began there in the natural course of events, for in this section it could tap the same sources of local pride and enthusiasm found in the villages and the towns of the North. Along with consolidated schools, it was hoped that the county library would solve the difficulties of a scattered and inadequate population. Maryland began the movement, and her example was followed by rural states throughout the country, especially in the South and the West. The hope, however, that this would provide adequate minimum service to rural areas proved illusory in most states, for the population of the average county still proved too small and too poor to support such service. It was California, with its large counties, both in area and in population, and with its growing wealth that had the outstanding success with the county unit. The California system owes much of its success, not only to its natural advantages

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but also to the leadership of a brilliant politician, James L. Gillis. After beginning his career as a lobbyist of the Southern Pacific Railroad, he became state librarian in 1900. During his seventeen years in office he changed the California State Library from a place where back-room political bargains were made to the center of the most advanced county library system of the country. Both from his study of other state extension activities and from his own experience, he early came to the conclusion that the orthodox promotion of small libraries and small traveling book collections was unsatisfactory. He therefore promoted county library service, first through contracts with large city libraries, and then by independent county libraries, organized under a law which he obtained from the legislature in 1 9 1 1 . Gillis promoted his county system through the state library association, of which he was president from 1906 to 1915, and by his astute choice of enthusiastic and capable assistants. He recruited and trained these county librarians at a library school he founded and operated at the state library, which later moved to Berkeley to become the University of California Library School. From 1911 to 1916 thirty-seven of California's fiftyeight counties were persuaded to establish libraries. And by the later date county libraries with 2,441 branches were serving half a million people with three-fourths of a million books. B y then the traveling libraries had been discontinued. The county libraries were encouraged to use a union catalogue, which Gillis brought into being, and the resources of the state library, which he greatly expanded and newly housed. The momentum of his leadership continued after his death, in 1917, and it has made California the prototype and the recruiting ground for the county library movement throughout the nation. The brilliance of such notable libraries as those of Kern, Fresno, and Los Angeles counties, however, blinded many persons to the fact that the poorer and less populous

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counties never attained the book resources and services of their wealthy neighbors. The inescapable facts, nevertheless, drove library extension into a further search for a larger unit. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties the multi-county area and the region were promoted. But they were artificial creations from a political point of view and could rely* less than could the county upon the kind of local loyalties which had traditionally been the basis for library development. A t the same time that state governments were making rural service their particular interest, the growth of city libraries was greatly advanced by the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie. In returning his fortune to the people he wished to spread the benefits of cultural wealth to all the deserving, and he could find no instrument so ready to his hand as the public library. As he stated it, " M y reasons for selecting public libraries being my belief, as Carlyle has recorded it, that the true university of these days is a collection of books, and that thus such libraries are entitled to a first place as instruments for the elevation of the masses of the people." 23 So he financed the building of libraries in those communities that would guarantee 10 percent of the building cost for annual upkeep. He began with the gift of a library to his native town of Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1881; followed it with another to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, his American home by adoption, added fourteen more by 1898; and then proceeded to go into library philanthropy on a wholesale basis. The public library system of this country was expanding under its own power before his generosity took effect. The statistics of Poole, which are more reliable than others because he restricted "public library'' to "a municipal institution, estab"Quoted in William S. Learned, The American Public Library and the Diffusion of Knowledge, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924, p. 70.

LIBRARY

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43

lished and regulated by state law, supported by local taxation, and administered for the benefit of all the residents of the municipality which supports it," showed that in 1876 there were 188 public libraries and that in 1887 the twenty states having public library laws contained 649." But the incentive of Carnegie gifts was enough to accelerate this movement to a stampede. His greatest amount of giving was done in the years between 1900 and 1905, but he continued to make grants for buildings until 1917. By that time he had built 1,679 library buildings at a cost of over 41,000,000 dollars. In 1915 the Carnegie Corporation sent Alvin Johnson, a prominent social scientist, out to take stock of the situation. As might have been expected, he found that since approximately two-thirds of the library buildings had been erected in small towns, which were frequently not so much interested in getting a library as something for nothing, they were too often civic monuments rather than working libraries. The architecture, called Carnegie Renaissance and Carnegie Classic, was so patent a misuse of funds that the Carnegie people had already, in 1911, issued a pamphlet saying that the designs for prospective libraries should obtain the utmost amount of library efficiency consistent with good taste in building. But it soon became apparent that buildings alone were not the answer. Library government and management too often were neglected, and the small library, living up to its appearance, became a mausoleum with a ghostly caretaker. So the Corporation, following the recommendation of Johnson, terminated its building program after 1917 and concentrated upon providing librarians with the training and tools of a profession. The discovery that a library is about as good as the trained skills and manage-

THE RISE OF THE PROFESSIONAL LIBRARIAN

" W . S. Green, The Public Library Movement m the United States, 1893, Boston, Boston Book Company, 1913, pp. IJI, 153.

i8f}-

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ment of its staff had been announced by the librarians nearly half a century before. They had come a long way from the clerical position they had held in the old social libraries and continued to hold in the new public libraries until the size and character of their institutions made it obvious that more than a clerk was necessary. The librarian had taken on stature and become a recognized figure in the cultural world, his offices of increasing importance in the literary world. This is reflected in the first two library conferences. The first in 1853 was made up largely of persons interested in libraries, but not employed by them. Out of eighty-odd men who signed the register, thirty-one were professed librarians, mostly from colleges and scholarly institutions; but authors, professors, and clergy totaled more. The conference, nevertheless, passed resolutions in favor of public libraries and promoted the organization of a library association by the appointment of a committee to draw up plans. This committee failed to function because of changes in its personnel and the intervention of the Civil War. The librarians next met in Philadelphia during the centennial exposition of 1876. There the librarians took command of the meetings, feeling now fully qualified to speak for themselves. As they put it, the time had come when a librarian could call his occupation a profession, with a membership possessing "positive, aggressive characters, standing in the front rank of the educators of their communities, side by side with the preachers and the teachers."25 They formed in that year a professional association and subscribed to a professional magazine, the Library Journal, which was to be a forum for their discussions and a record of their convention proceedings. The American Library Association was founded for many reasons: to give librarians prestige and esprit de corps, to develop the techniques of library organization, to promote the public library, and to provide "Quoted in Sidney Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture, p. 168.

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45

some point where a centrifugal system could center itself. It was organized loosely, principally to provide the machinery of national conventions, and all its bibliographical and organizational work was voluntary. A s it grew in size and multiplied its functions, its government became more tightly organized, with a permanent headquarters and a paid secretary. But its purposes remained the same, the promotion, expansion, and perfection of library service, "the best reading to the largest number at the least cost." Supplementing the American Library Association, which, though large, did not include more than one out of t w o people engaged in library work, state and regional associations were established. T h e state associations began with N e w Y o r k in 1890, and other states followed suit down through the years. T h e regional associations began with the Pacific Northwest Library Association in 1909, followed b y the Southeastern and the Southwestern Library Associations in 1922, and subsequently the N e w England Library Association. In addition there were local clubs of librarians in towns, districts, and counties. So the 50 percent membership of the American Library Association did not necessarily imply for public librarians an underorganized profession. T h e state associations played a significant part in promoting library extension work in their states. T h e y , more than the A L A in many sections of the country, had what political strength the American library movement could muster; they were the organizations to which the librarians of small towns gave their loyalty and from which they gained most of their professional attitudes. T h e profession emphasized in all its associations the need for training in the skills and knowledge necessary to make available the resources of learning lying dormant in books. It developed catalogue and classification systems, subdued the problem of book storage and location, studied the costs of bookbinding and obsolescence, devised schemes for more efficient charging,

LIBRARY

GOVERNMENT

and suggested plans for library buildings. There grew up a body of specialized knowledge that required a specialized training. Schools were organized, the first in 1887 being under the headship of Melvil Dewey, then librarian of Columbia University, and schools multiplied as the emphasis on professionalism grew. In due course the positions of importance in the library world were taken over by their trained graduates. The curriculum of these schools, following the interests of library leadership in the second half of the nineteenth century, emphasized the mechanics of the library. The great library mechanic of this age was Melvil Dewey, with his decimal system of book classification, his interest in library equipment, and his training of skilled technicians. But he was only the most articulate of a whole group of librarians who attacked, and at least subdued, the problem of making the country's printed knowledge available to readers. Their task was not made easier by the way in which book resources accumulated in this country. Providing books to those who could not get them seemed to the public a legitimate activity on the part of government, a justifiable use of the taxpayer's dollar because it appeared to serve a large number of people. But the collection of great scholarly, research libraries, where a book might not be used once in a hundred years, was more difficult to justify, and public libraries did not often attempt it. Both Chicago and N e w York owed their great research libraries to private donors, and this was the usual pattern. Dependence upon philanthropy tended to exaggerate the normal difficulties of finding a rare book in so large a country, since it might turn up in any of a number of small, restricted collections donated by a rapt bibliophile to an unknown library. This difficulty tended to lessen as research holdings began to concentrate in a few large institutions, such as the Boston and N e w York libraries and the Library of Congress, and especially in great university libraries such as

L I B R A R Y G O V E R N M E N T

47

Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. The problem, however, of devising a system whereby the book wealth of this country might be made current was, and is still, a major one. Library leaders are now taking steps, through such devices as national and regional bibliographical centers and union catalogues, to get control of our book resources, scattered not only by the natural circumstances of our geography but also by the artificial conditions of a laissez faire origin. Beyond these technical problems, which might be called pure library functions, the purpose of the library as a public institution became mixed. In a society which mass production and rapid transportation were magically transforming from day to day, where class lines were shifting, and where fife was becoming so mobile as to bewilder old habits and standards, the problems of librarianship took on a new complexion. The library pioneers, such men as John Shaw Billings, Melvil Dewey, William Howard Brett, and John Cotton Dana, created a tradition of democratic service that in general characterized the modern public library as distinct from its forebears. Eagerness to serve people was not the outstanding feature of the older librarian, who was often a miser of books, thinking them safe only in the library where they belonged. By the turn of the century the librarian began to think of his institution as the people's university, less the product of a stable society and more a stabilizing influence in a shifting society. From being a custodian or a technician the librarian became a teacher and a guide. If this concept was to be realized, many of the old regulations had to go. Rooms were opened for children, the stacks were opened to adults, and browsing was encouraged by departmentalization. The building was kept open in the evening and on Sundays. The question of book selection was answered by considering the reading interests of the population. Newspapers and magazines were stocked because they were in

48

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popular demand, and novels were duplicated as much as calls for them justified and the budget allowed. Branch libraries were built in locations carefully planned to serve conveniently the most people. If branches were impractical, deposit stations were established in factories, stores, settlement houses, or other local meeting places. If deposit stations were too inaccessible, people could get their reading from traveling libraries. Book collections were introduced into hospitals and prisons. At its height the hope of extended service was that the public could not escape reading. In two spheres the modern library had outstanding success. The new librarian took up the task of educating the immigrants. He did so by making available to them books in their native languages and in simple English, which mitigated their homesickness and introduced them to America. This service, carried on with great ingenuity and devotion in such libraries as those in Seattle and Cleveland, endeared the institutions to a large body of readers who were barred from normal library use. It proved to be a real extension of democratic service and, together with a monitorial environment and an alert educational system, helped materially to bring about the remarkable assimilation of foreign peoples into our civilization. This task will to a large extent be finished within the present generation. The other outstanding success in which the new services could take pride was the development of reading for children. This was much more than the simple opening of a room for them. Librarians were trained to supervise their reading, to advise parents, to tell stories, and to create a stimulating environment for the child's imaginative life. The public looked to children's librarians to criticize and recommend books for children. Schoolmen were slow to recognize the value of libraries for their pupils, even after the outstanding success of the public library in this field had made the children's room

L I B R A R Y G O V E R N M E N T

49

one of the busiest, as well as one of the pleasantest places in the library. T o the children's librarians, perhaps, more than to any other group is due the modern revolution in the literature for children. These successes were part of a whole policy designed to tie the library, as a public institution, into the community. T o promote this purpose librarians related it to group activities of all sorts, oftentimes only remotely connected with reading in its traditional sense. B y developing special library services they tied their work to the practical, as well as to the cultural, life of their communities. T h e influence and the political support of the library began to have a broader base, and the librarians, now taking up the burden of publicity and promotion, based their campaigns upon this new condition. T h e y relied, of course, as previous leaders had done, upon an aroused public opinion and the usual small group of influential persons who promote civic welfare. W i t h missionary zeal they planned campaigns and discussed strategy. T h e y brought the trustees into their associations; they promoted library clubs; they organized publicity committees. T h e y attempted to sell their service. This commercial expression is not inaccurate; for such slogans as " W h o reads—succeeds," "Knowledge wins on pay day," " G e t wise quick," and "Keep up with your boy," which were to encourage people to use booklists, are not many steps removed from the advertiser's slogan "She's lovely; she's engaged." W h a t was of deeper significance was the librarians' new feeling that they were part of the great crusade against ignorance and prejudice. It is obvious from a simple catalogue of its activities that the new library had left the old trustee far behind. In the many services that demanded specialized knowledge, in the internal administration of an institution employing in some cases more than half a thousand persons, even in the matter of shaping a policy to fit the many objectives of modern library activity,

5o

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the trustees could not take as personal a part as they had previously taken. Most libraries still were governed by a board of trustees, generally selected by the mayor, or elected by the council, but the relations between the board and the librarian were changing. From 1876 to 1930 the problem of that relationship was continually discussed, and nearly all possible adjustments were suggested to obtain the right balance. As the years progressed and libraries and their problems became larger and more complex, the librarian gained in power. In 1876, with the emphasis on small libraries, the trustee was described as a volunteer worker in the library, a person free of politics who out of sheer love of books would enjoy making the library a success. By 1900 the librarians were already defining the best boards as the ones which interfered least with the librarian, while the trustees were still questioning whether the librarian should be at all board meetings. In 1913 the A L A Committee on the Library and the Community agreed that the board should have control of its own working force and should initiate its own policies, but that the librarian should be regarded both as its executive officer and its expert adviser, to whom the choice of methods and management of details would naturally be left, who would normally be present at all meetings, and who might serve as secretary. By 1927 the A L A , in its brochure The Trustee and His Library, limited the trustees to the determination of policy, the securing and supervision of funds, the selection of the librarian, and a critical supervision of the results of the library's activities. Leadership in library government had by that time and in such circumstances come into the hands of the librarian. Out of this past has come what we may call the library faith. It is a fundamental belief, so generally accepted as to be often left unsaid, in the virtue of the printed word, the reading of which is good in itself, and upon the preservaSUMMARY

LIBRARY

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51

tion of which many basic values in our civilization rest. When culture is in question, the knowledge of books, the amount of reading, and the possession of a library—all become measures of value, not only of the individual but also of the community. From its beginning the library has been closely connected with the American conception of democratic progress. It has offered opportunity, largely without discrimination except for the color barrier in the South, for everyone to increase his knowledge and therefore his position in the world. It has been considered a part of our technological resources, allowing the talented to perfect their skills and contribute to their own and the community's advancement. The library, among other purposes, was created as a source of knowledge for an informed citizenry, upon whose collective judgment the success or failure of responsible democracy rests. The government of the library has evolved out of this faith to fulfill these purposes, conditioned by its environment and past experience. The library has traditionally functioned in isolation, as a local institution created by local loyalty to fill a local need. Although its function has been broadly educational, it has normally remained independent of the schools, which end their service with childhood, and of government welfare and vocational agencies, which are more specialized. The board form of government, inherited in part from the library's previous corporate structure, was designed to separate it from partisan politics and devote it to its disinterested cultural purposes. Under these circumstances the library has remained relatively aloof from active and effective power groups in the community. As the function of the library broadened from the storage of knowledge to the sowing of information, as the librarians developed a sense of a professional civil service, and as the institution seemed about to become derelict in the new social currents, this isolationism tended to break down. A library

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movement, organized and led by the professional associations, undertook a positive search for support at local, state, and national levels of government. And a library system, which would do for the nation what a great library system does for a city, became the goal.

2 THE

GOVERNING

THE

PUBLIC

AUTHORITY

OF

LIBRARY

L O O K E D AT IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, the transition has now been made from library government in the hands of amateur boards to positive leadership by professionally trained librarians. Yet the change has not been easy, and our case studies have emphasized that the pattern is by no means uniform and the points of friction by no means fully resolved. Indeed, it is only in the most general way that such a transition can be said to have been completed. Many small institutions are governed today almost precisely as they were forty or fifty years ago, without benefit of professionally trained chief executives. T h e case studies have revealed something of a continuum of situations. At one extreme is the older picture of the librarian as chief clerk carrying out the detailed instructions of the board or minority of the board. At the other is the aggressive administrative type, a leader of the community as well as of the library and undisputed in the making of professional decisions. Even in the latter cases, the research brought to light tensions and disputed areas of authority which made it appropriate to reassess the accepted thinking of the profession about forms and relationships of library government.

In both the thinking and the practice of public library government there has been, and is today, substantial consensus in favor of the board form. Out of fifty-seven libraries, the sample surveyed on this point, there are only four libraries operating directly as government

T H E CONCEPT OF T H E LIBRARY BOARD

54

GOVERNING

AUTHORITY

departments, two in which the school board serves also as the library board, and fifty-one with library boards. These ratios are not far from the over-all totals in the country. Not only because of this numerical preponderance, but also because of the overwhelming preference of practicing librarians for the board form, it is appropriate in discussing library government today to begin with a detailed examination of the library board. The library profession has developed an orthodox and generally-agreed-upon body of thought about the library board. The most frequently repeated statement in the literature of the profession and recorded in our field research is that the board is an indispensable buffer against "politics." Some librarians have said they would feel "naked and defenseless" if they had to go alone to city hall or before the county commissioners. Others say the board can make a plea for sufficient library income without the appearance of self-seeking, that without the board the librarian would be in the role of a political claimant, with neither the political skills nor potential to make a good case. So the board is seen as not solely a buffer against but also an instrument of politics. A further refinement of this concern over "politics" is the view that the library board represents the community, perhaps the best in the community; certainly by implication it is felt to represent a broader and finer element in the community than the politicians and a more powerful element than the librarians. The library board is rated by its librarian as a good board if it has people of prestige, of substantial economic, social, and perhaps inherently political status in the community. It is further believed that a board with staggered statutory terms provides a continuity of policy, of interest, and of special knowledge which would be inevitably denied the library were it exposed directly to the winds of political

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55

fortune, that is, operated directly under short-term, elected political officers. In addition to this negative approach, the librarians also state that their boards have a valuable function to perform as lay critics of professional administrators. Not only do the boards sponsor the library before the government, they serve as a sounding board for the librarian. They help the librarian to think aloud. They bring to bear a range of experience and attitudes which of necessity is denied to any specialized professional group. They whet the mind of the librarian, while leaving full administrative freedom to the professional so long as they have confidence in him. Finally, the lay board will customarily bring to the library specific expertise, which can be of direct value. In large libraries this may be thought of in terms of investment, legal, and architectural counsel, while in small libraries the board members may be someone who can and will order the coal and get a leaky roof repaired for a lady librarian who is carrying heavy responsibilities virtually singlehanded. Such, in brief, is the analysis which leads the profession to a stanch defense of the board form of library government and by which board government may best be measured. INSTITUTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LIBRARY BOARDS

The

library boards examined display a wide and often ingenious variety, both in formal organization and in practice. The number of members varies from three to twenty-five, with an average of a little, more than seven members. The stated term of office varies from two years to life, the median being five years. There is great variation in the actual tenure of incumbent board members. Nineteen of 370 board members have served twenty-five years or more, some more than thirtyfive years, and three of them, forty-three, forty-six, and fifty years, respectively. Ten libraries have board members whose

56

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tenure covers the entire life of the institution, though five of these libraries are less than ten years old. Median tenure on library boards ranges from less than a year to twenty-three years. In thirty-three out of fifty-one library boards the median tenure of incumbent members is ten years or less; in eighteen it is five years or less. With one exception, extremely long individual terms in office are not associated with high median tenure. Indeed, the fifty-year and forty-six-year men are on boards with median tenures of nine years. A board with median tenure of four years includes a twenty-seven-year man. Any over-all statistical summary is therefore largely misleading. Many boards with short tenure are in libraries having a firm tradition of very long service, where an older generation has recently given way to the new. Nor is there any marked relation between the stated term of office and the tenure. T w o libraries in the sample have life terms, and the median tenure in one is twenty-three years, but in the other nine years. The fourteen library boards with stated terms of three years or less have an average median tenure of nine years; nine libraries with stated terms of seven years or more have an average median tenure of eleven years. Finally, the method of appointment is notably irrelevant to the tenure of board members. T w o metropolitan libraries with fully selfperpetuating boards have median tenures of only six and nine years. Three partly self-perpetuating boards in small cities have median tenures of four, seventeen, and twenty-three years. It can be concluded that formal provisions have had a very minor impact upon the years of actual service of library trustees. In thirty-five out of fifty-one library boards the members are appointed by the political officers of the unit of government. In twenty-five cases this is the mayor, usually subject to confirmation by the council, by the senior county commissioner, or by the city manager. In the remaining ten cases ap-

GOVERNING

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57

pointment is by the legislative body, such as the village board, the commissioners of a taxing district within a city, the city or county commission. Five of these ten cases are county libraries with boards appointed by the county commissioners. T h e board appointed by the political unit of government is the predominant pattern institutionally, both in this sample and in the country as a whole. It is by no means, however, the sole technique of library government. The institutional experiment of linking the library to the public school system is represented in the sample by five libraries whose boards are appointed by the school board and two in which the school board itself serves as the library board. There are two libraries which, though public institutions, are still governed by boards selected by private groups. There is one library with a wholly self-perpetuating board. Six boards are of a "mixed" character, some with separate appointing authority in the county and the city, some sharing the authority between a court and a legislative body, one by virtue of an early bequest sharing appointment among the mayor, designated churches, the bar, and the chamber of commerce. T w o libraries with "mixed" boards combine appointment by the political authority with appointment by a surviving association or by the board itself. There are two elective boards. In one case nomination is shared by the local committees of the two major parties; in the other, nomination is by a caucus of civic groups and organizations. In no case is board membership the subject of a partisan contest before the electorate. Of the fiftyseven libraries, only four operate directly as departments of government, without a board. While the sample so constructed cannot be said to include all the devices conceivable or quite all the types now in operation in the country, it is believed to represent the range of institutional experiments, and closely approximates the over-all distribution of types. In addition to the appointive or elective board members,

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A U T H O R I T Y

there are, in a number of cases, a minority of ex officio board members, some by legal provision, some by custom so firmly established that the board and the appointing authority are at a loss to tell whether it is or is not a binding statutory requirement. Aside from the interesting indication that the legally responsible governing authority of the public library does not know the controlling law, and almost as often could not readily find out, the difference between law and custom makes little difference to the role of ex officio members. In ten cases these include the mayor; in fourteen cases they include a representative of the school system, usually the superintendent of schools, but sometimes the chairman of the school board. In four cases there are fiscal officers of the unit of government on the board. Six libraries out of fifty-seven have advisory committees. T w o of these are products of a recent reconciliation of an association library or informal public library with the general library law of the state, and seem likely to die out after the first few years under the official smaller library board. One is a sponsoring group to facilitate the operation of a negro branch. Another is formally designed to bring a degree of citizen representation to bear on book selection in a library without a board. Only two are conceived as general representation of community interests on a wider base than can be achieved in a governing board. Despite the diversity of institutional structure, the library boards have a substantial degree of uniformity in the social, economic, and political status and affiliations of the members, and what diversity there is cannot for the most part be directly correlated with the method of appointment. A number of inclusive statistical studies have been made of the boards of the larger city libraries which point to the preponderance of older members, of men, of lawyers, and of businessmen of various major classifications. These findings are readily borne out by the sample of fifty libraries about whose boards sufficient in-

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59

formation was secured for this type of analysis. The broad categories of age, sex, and vocation are more revealing if to them can be added a more living picture of the role of these people as individuals in their communities. And a study of boards in their communities, rather than of statistical conglomerates of individual board members, is more pertinent to a study of library government and politics. Our research has noted, therefore, information and opinion as to the social status of the board members, their income, inherited status, education, residence in the community, their church affiliations and activity, their political ties and influence, their principal activities in associational life. In a sample of fifty communities with library boards it has been possible to interview personally many board members, sometimes all members of each library board, in their offices, their homes, in the library, or at luncheon. First-hand impressions were checked against the opinion of the librarian, the appointing authority, often newspaper editors, school officials, labor union officers, clerks, taxi cab drivers, and soda jerks. The concept of class status and social and political influence had necessarily to be left subjective. No single study was complete or scientifically precise. A thorough study of fifty separate communities could not be carried through in the time available; yet rule-of-thumb sensitivity to business, professional, political, and cultural factors in the life of the community were gauged with at least a rough approximation for comparative purposes. It is interesting and not without significance that no boards were found to have a wholly homogeneous membership, certainly none toward either end of a social scale. Where the board has a preponderance of eminent people, there is a prevalent tendency to describe the group as altogether made up of the very top people in society. There may be a few boards in the sample consisting of uniformly upper-middle-class people, but even these are the rare exceptions. Recognizing, then,

6o

GOVERNING

AUTHORITY

that any classification of boards deals with the dominant character of groups often having considerable variation within themselves, it is possible to say that all of the fifty boards analyzed are under the control of people from the middle class and up. Eight of the fifty are pretty solidly middle-class groups, people of minor professional standing, small businessmen, young and politically energetic lawyers who hold minor public office. In the smaller communities, particularly small industrial suburban cities, it is peculiarly difficult to assign a scale of status, because a scale valid for the local community is in such a great degree distorted by a nearby metropolitan city with an elite of so much greater prestige, wealth, sophistication, and power. It may well be that in terms of the local community alone three of these eight boards should be classified as upper-middle class. Eleven of the fifty boards are led and controlled, though not in any case exclusively constituted, by people of the upper income group, members of the families dominant in the business world, or old families of recognized status as the leaders of the community. There is no correlation between these eleven and the size of community, the term of office, tenure in office, or the quality, imagination, or per capita income of the library. There is, however, a correlation with the method of appointment. Five of those boards are either wholly or partially self-perpetuating, based upon the heritage of an association library. In two of these five the heritage brought with it a significant capital endowment, and a third remains dependent entirely upon private support. In these five cases only may the institutional framework be assumed to have been a significant factor in determining the character of the library board in practice. The remaining thirty-one library boards fall into a social category which can be properly, though anomalously, de-

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61

A U T H O R I T Y 1

scribed as upper-middle to lower-upper class. Though, again, there is some range within each board, these people are predominantly self-respecting, prosperous, effective, and successful, well above the median income. The boards often include one lawyer of top standing in the community, the richest man in a small town, or a senior businessman with wide influence, or a clergyman of great prominence. Yet the board will remain surprisingly true to type in its upper-middle-class character. Five boards in this group have a labor union official, but in almost every case these are men who think in solidly middleclass values; in four cases they remain in a minority of one, and in one case there are two out of eleven. The control of these thirty-one boards is in the hands of prosperous, for the most part self-made, lawyers and businessmen, their wives, and widows. These are senior partners of small law firms without affiliation with the largest corporate interests in the community, heads of middle-size business enterprises, department heads of large corporations, vice presidents of the junior local banks, clergymen, the widows of college professors, morticians, retired school principals, insurance agents, politically sophisticated physicians, and associate editors of newspapers. The two power groups of the American political scene most conspicuously omitted are labor and agriculture. In fifty library boards with 370 members there are only ten people who by vocation can be classified as labor, and they sit on only seven library boards. In only one case are there as many as three labor people in a board of nine. In a total of ten county library boards, and four small-town libraries with rural orientation, there are only two farmers. Thirteen library boards out of fifty regularly represent church groups in the community. Eleven as a matter of un"For a helpful analysis of the concept of class see W . Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community, N e w Haven, Yale University Press, 1941, chap, v-vii, and their Status Systein of a Modern ComTnunity, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1942, Part 1.

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A U T H O R I T Y

broken custom include a member of the Catholic faith; six include a member of the Jewish faith; one includes representatives as such of the various Protestant churches. The representation of racial or national groups is not so common. Only two library boards in the sample include negroes. A total of eight libraries represent explicitly one or more minority national blocs, two recognizing a claim on the part of as many as four such minorities. There are many more boards which include members of various religious or national groups without having developed a formal conception of representation, and certain of these are undoubtedly in the process of institutionalizing in this fashion some of the unreconciled strains in the community. Eight of the fifty boards include members whose appointments were overtly political. In some cases this is no more than a custom of bipartisan balance. In some, it is a regular practice for the political machine or the current mayor to pay minor and not onerous political debts in this fashion. In a few, the board has been openly packed to achieve a particular political objective, and in one, a political appointment was made out of spite. The important and well-substantiated fact is, none the less, that, with only one exception, the library boards in our sample are today essentially free of political domination. In addition to these facts about the members of library boards in fifty sample libraries, it is also appropriate to ask what people say and do about selecting board members. T o a certain extent, those who are chosen to sit on a board are determined by the attractiveness of the job, and in this respect libraries vary widely. In a few communities, not more than a half-dozen in the sample, the position carries very considerable prestige and is eagerly sought after by people of the upper income group who occupy key positions in business or the professions or who have stand-

T H E SELECTION OF BOARD M E M B E R S

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ing in the world of letters. At the other extreme are a few small cities and towns, and a few metropolitan areas as well, where it is generally difficult to find appropriate people to serve on the library board. In the metropolitan cities the problem is usually expressed as one of finding the "right type" still living within the boundaries of the old core city. In the smaller communities it is occasionally frankly recognized that the "best people" will not take the job. In a number of communities where there is no difficulty in filling a strong library board, it has, nevertheless, been reported that the library board is far from the best appointive board in town. The hospital board is frequently cited as a considerably more notable group. The Community Fund almost invariably includes the executive heads of big business, whereas the library will usually consider a chief of one of the departments of such a business as a symbol of library influence in high places. N o t unrelated to the occasional difficulty in filling library board vacancies is the much more common casualness with which public officials make their selections. As has been noted, public library boards are almost entirely free from political, in the sense of partisan, domination, and the routine operations of library business—personnel appointments, book selection, purchase of books and supplies—are correspondingly free from such considerations. Repeatedly our informants have attributed the freedom of the library from "dirty politics" to the fact that the total library budget offered small rewards to a corrupt political machine. But library immunity involves more than this. A sense of the fitness of things plays a part here. T o some extent the library is shielded by a respect, in some an awe, for books and learning. Some politicians have explained their nonpartisan approach to libraries as due to a fondness for children and an unwillingness to exploit an institution which is serving children. Undoubtedly the integrity, one might in some cases say the political innocence, of the librarian has deterred a free-

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booting official. The library board is not, therefore, a particularly significant appointment from the point of view of the mayor or the county commission. The job goes to the first reasonably suitable person that comes to mind. A very large number of appointments in the sample were made on this basis. What, then, is a reasonably suitable person? The almost universal description is "civic-minded." T o some extent it connotes the civic butterfly, a person of high metabolic rate and extraverted personality, a joiner, not possessed of consuming ambition or aggressiveness but happy in constant activity. Library boards have a great many members with truly astonishing lists of civic activity—clubs, charities, special causes, active church affiliations, the Red Cross, the Boy or Girl Scouts, the P T A , the Rotary, the Kiwanis, the Lions, the Association of University Women, the League of Women Voters, the Garden Club, the Community Fund, the innumerable special organizations of a particular city. Because in each locality there are only a few people with enough vitality to run their businesses or raise their families and have a large surplus of energy for civic activity, there is a pronounced snowball effect. These people become known to each other, and if they are not known to political officers directly, then indirectly their names are readily brought to mind. Membership on the library board is a thoroughly respectable, not overly taxing affiliation to add to the many others. Such people are the backbone of many, many library boards, perhaps of their communities as well. In almost as many cases, suitability also involves the idea of freedom from the routine tasks of an employee. In cities and towns alike, people are thought to be not really eligible unless they are self-employed, a senior professional person, a corporation executive, or a housewife with the income and the energy to be away from home freely. The point is somewhat

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irrelevant, as many boards meet in the evening; all could conveniently do so. It is also ironic, since board members tend to be unusual people, with extremely diverse commitments, who in many cases give very little time and thought to library business. It may be that what is really meant is that board members must be people who "know how to get things done." In virtually every case studied, either the librarian, the board president, the mayor, or the city councilman has paid his respects to the businessmen and the lawyers as people who "know how to get things done." One cannot quarrel with this description, nor can one challenge this tenet of a business civilization. In perhaps half of the libraries a "suitable person" is also described as, if possible, one who shows an interest in the library or who uses it regularly. The "if possible" is important in this definition, for in no case has library use or interest in the library been a prerequisite for appointment to the board; it is secondary. But it has been the reason for choosing many a library board member, more especially in communities where it is difficult to find a suitable person to serve. Some extremely useful board members are former librarians who have married and are eligible because of social status, civic mindedness, and interest in the library. A handful of valuable businessmen members and one of our two dirt farmers received appointment because of interest in and use of the library. Many mayors who would like to make their appointments on this basis have in practice had to stretch "library interest" pretty far to cover their appointees. It is an attribute that is easy to talk about to visitors. There are, however, libraries in which the rule has been followed with real meaning and where the majority of board members are knowledgeable in library business. As noted, there are in the sample thirteen libraries whose boards explicitly represent religious groups, and eight representing racial and national minorities. There are also six where

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geographic distribution has become a rule, and there is one whose ordinance requires such distribution, but whose social traditions and narrow class prejudices prevent any effort to comply. Certain concepts of representation are therefore implicit in the requirements of eligibility far beyond the more formal criteria indicated. A "balanced board" was in the minds of a great many mayors interviewed. This usually means a businessman, a lawyer, a contractor or architect, a representative of the school system, if none is included ex officio, a clubwoman, a housewife with children of school age. In some communities the social organizations originally sponsoring the public library retain, sometimes over a span of forty years, a claim on representation. If there are endowment funds, the board almost always includes a man qualified in investments. Representation as a criterion of selection means talents directly useful to the library, perhaps specific talents for a particular contingency; it means a way for the political appointing authority to relieve religious and national tensions; and it means a place for recognized groups of the "civic-minded." It does not mean representation of the wide spectrum of interests, talents, and perspectives which make up a community, be it a metropolitan city or a small town. A corollary of this special interpretation of representation is the oft-repeated criterion of maintaining board harmony. T h e board is described as a small, working group whose effectiveness would be impaired by the interjection of a socially incompatible appointee. Some appointing authorities have at times disregarded this criterion of selection, and the other incumbents report their irritation with ill-concealed venom. Perhaps one third of the libraries visited reported at least one board member who was "not quite a suitable person." But for the most part eligibility includes personal qualities that will be acceptable in the chummy meetings of the board, and this requirement is firmly enforced. This factor, imponderable, but

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powerful and frequently paramount in the minds of board members and appointing authorities, contributes greatly to a narrow conception of a "representative" board. These are the considerations reported as uppermost in the minds of those who determine the selection of library boards. The stakes are not very high; the search is not pressed very hard. Occasionally we met newly appointed members who expressed amazement at having been selected. The library was the last thing in their minds. In some cases this was quite literally true; they had had reason to hope for a more significant post. As in so much of human society, accidents of acquaintance, or more precisely the cumulative effect of wide acquaintance, determine a large proportion of appointments to library boards. While the range and diversity of experience is very great in many aspects of library government, the degree of uniformity has been most striking in respect to the characteristics of and the considerations for eligibility to board membership. The five field workers, each visiting libraries in at least two widely separated geographic regions, covering communities large and small, rich and poor, have reported the same picture. The data of research in this field are somewhat subjective. In studying social status, personality types, and motivations and criteria of selection the political scientist is still disposed to rely upon the perceptions of sensitive outside observers if adequately verified by number of cases, diversity of coverage, and variation in the perspective of observers. The consensus among the mayors and city councilmen interviewed and among the library trustees and librarians themselves when dealing with the local situations has given strong confirmation to the subjective impressions of the field research. For the purposes of political science analysis, therefore, this composite picture of library trustees may be employed as verified data. The methods of research and standards of judgment chosen

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for the political science aspects of the Public Library Inquiry are validated by the close parallel of the results with several previous surveys of the characteristics of library board members. An impressionistic condemnation of the group is reflected in the comment of William E. Marcus, outstanding library trustee for many years in Montclair, N e w Jersey: "Apparently more public libraries are handicapped by unqualified trustees than by ineffective librarians." 2 A more particular observation is that because library boards are from the managerial class and library users from the employee class® there is an element of paternalism in the boards that is not altogether wholesome for library service. The narrow social stratum that predominates on library boards is noted with concern in a survey of eleven communities and twelve libraries in the South. Though the selected libraries had been established or extended specifically for the purpose of reaching rural areas, none-theless the research noted a "high representation from the professional, business and managerial groups, and the absence of members engaged in skilled trades and manual labor." Even on county-wide boards urban members predominated.4 Turning to an industrial state of N e w England, we find the recent state survey of public libraries strongly recommending a policy of making boards "representative of a diversity of the major occupation groups of the community, including higher representation than is now typical of younger men and women and employees of the skilled trades and related groups in the important manufacturing interests of the state." 5 Joeckel and •Emily Millier Danton, ed. The Library of Tomorrow, Chicago, A L A , 1939, p. 120. "Arnold Miles and Lowell Martin, Public Administration and the Library, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1941, chap. vii. 'Louis Round Wilson and Edward A. Wight, County Library Service in the South, A Survey of the Rosenwald County Library Demonstration, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1935, pp. 50, 51. •Edward A. Wight, and Leon Lidell, Connecticut Library Survey, New Haven, Conn., Connecticut State Dept. of Education, 1948, p. 12.

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Carnovsky's intensive study of the Chicago board from 1900 to 1938 emphasizes the continuity of unrepresentativeness in library boards. Based on the eighty-two members during that period, a typical board would have two lawyers, two from other professions, one banker, one manufacturer, three merchants, but no working men. In the whole period "only a very small number of the trustees could be classified as 'employees.' " "At relatively few periods in the history of the Library have serious efforts been made to make appointments of unusual merit."" It is a familiar conclusion to which they came, that "more frequent representation of working-class groups and of the young people who constitute such an overwhelming proportion of the library's clientele seems plainly indicated."7 A more complete enumeration of board members, though limited to a representative sample in cities of more than 30,000 population, is to be found in Joeckel's analysis of 667 board members as of the early 1930's.8 He was able to classify only nineteen of the total as "employees," and twenty as "mechanics and foreman," or roughly 5 percent, and he concluded that "the lesser man in general, and the labor group in particular, have had little consideration in the appointment of library trustees." On the basis of professional experience rather than statistical study, Clarence E. Sherman concludes that the criteria for selecting trustees may be listed as follows: political activity, especially in elective boards, wealth and the ability to present gifts, a name with prestige value, love of books which "may become a useful aid or a petty pest," engineering or architectural ability to help with the building, knowledge of "Carleton Bruns Joeckel and Leon Camovsky, A Metropolitan Library in Action; a Survey of the Chicago Public Library, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1940, pp. 71, 72. 'Ibid., p. 418. •Carleton Bruns Joeckel, The Government of the American Public Library, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1935, chap. viii.

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banking to help with investments, religious affiliations to offset secular influence.® The research of the Public Library Inquiry has extended the range of evidence to include smaller communities than are considered in most of the existing studies. It has sought to refine the analysis of social status somewhat more closely than has been done in the over-all classifications hitherto made. It has assessed the tone and perspective of each board as a working social group rather than counting individuals in an over-all total. The findings have fully supported the previous research and made possible the further statement that even though there are individual appointments from sources other than the narrow social group controlling public libraries, these appointments are in fact scattered among many libraries. The pattern is therefore even more uniform than could safely have been concluded from previous studies. T h e work of the library boards so constituted varies from almost complete neglect of the job to the devoted board president to whom the library is the principal creative work in life. Certain jobs fall definitely within the direct control of the board. In our sample, in every case where there was a substantial endowment, individual board members or a committee were in charge of or responsible for investment policy. Where the endowment was insignificant, the board was responsible, but at times negligent. In three or four cases the board or its members were concealing endowment income from the public view, not for personal gain, but as part of the strategy of maintaining public appropriations. In other cases the board was accepting a rate of return so low as to be either the product of mismanagement

T H E WORK OF LIBRARY BOARDS

"Clarence E. Sherman, "The Role of the Board in Library Administration," in Carleton Joeckel, ed., Current Issues in Library Administration, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1939, pp. 46-6J.

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or of misleading accounting. In other cases investment management was prudent, and in a few cases, brilliantly successful. The board commonly handles the insurance of the library directly. The board almost invariably takes an active part in the business decisions of real estate and buildings and particularly in the potentially political decision of locating branches. It was found that in small libraries board members often carry directly almost all the maintenance and operation of the library plant. In large libraries as well, their interest remains focused on this phase of the work, because, as they frankly admit, it is the phase of library business in which they feel they have something tangible to offer. In the internal operations of the library the variation is wider. The very small library without a trained librarian sometimes has one or two board members who take an active part in book selection, not the major part they would have in repairing the heating system, but they offer a helping hand and a watchful eye. In all except the very small library, the librarian, trained or untrained, has not only the initiative, but virtually full positive control over books. Where religious or socioeconomic tension is strong in the community and reflected on the board, the librarian may retain a vestigial dependence on the board in the form of a list of accessions submitted to a board committee for perfunctory approval. In matters of personnel management the role of library boards is more difficult to describe. The businessmen on the board tend to be regarded as experts on labor; this is one of the things "they know how to get done." Employment policies tend to be matters for active board consideration, and in both small and large libraries boards have recently intervened to liberalize salaries, vacations, hours of work, beyond the recommendations of the chief librarian. Despite these incidents, boards remain for the most part ignorant of employment policies of their libraries, though they continue to pass in monthly

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meetings upon a vast amount of routine hiring and firing. In many small libraries, again, it remains customary for one or two board members to interview candidates for the staff and exercise some degree of positive control. And in the larger libraries there are examples of boards which have lost touch with the situation until surprised by a real flare-up against an unsuccessful chief librarian. F e w library boards in cities of over 50,000 inhabitants have in fact developed techniques for keeping themselves informed of personnel relations, despite the clearance of routine personnel decisions through the board; and very f e w boards interviewed have seriously and honestly faced up to the basic dilemma of library administration, the low salary scales which have been its tradition. Many boards interviewed professed surprise at the idea, and few had under way any coherent planning to effect substantial increase in library income. In two cases board members have intervened in the personnel policies of the library by placing members of their immediate families on the staff. In both cases the results were ruinous to morale, destructive of good administrative policies, and in every sense a negation of the very purposes of a board of trustees. Though this is evidently not a common error, the impact is so disastrous for the library as to warrant specific mention as an aspect of library board activity. Beyond the internal affairs of the library, the board commonly carries on at least a routine activity in connection with the annual budget. Ordinarily an individual board member with financial experience assumes a permanent part in this process, which requires relatively little but routine allocation of very limited resources among the indispensable needs to keep the institution open. A basic decision, whether to spend on books or on salaries, tends to originate with the librarian. Whether to build physical plant and what to build would command close and sustained attention of the board. The board

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chairman, and perhaps one or two other members, but usually just the chairman, will typically accompany the librarian to routine appropriations hearings. It is in a referendum for tax increases, for a bond issue, for statutory changes, that a few boards have shown the greatest initiative. An able librarian who understands the community and the political process can make good use of a few really prominent and sincerely interested board members; in a few cases in the sample the dynamic leadership and statesmanship of individual board members have determined the successful outcome of crucial battles for the future of the library. Taking the sample as a whole, however, there have been only a few library boards in which the members as a group were either able or willing to contribute to such campaigns. Most library boards attempt to exert a controlling influence upon the appointments to the board. Librarians are most sanguine about their success, freely describing the board as a selfperpetuating body and thus free from "politics." Board members are much less self-confident; mayors, city councilmen, and county commissioners are least impressed. The picture changes rapidly in a single community. A new mayor may have close personal ties with the library board chairman, have great confidence in him, and quite openly make the board a virtually self-perpetuating body. Yet only three or four years earlier the library may have had no influence whatever over the selections. And the reverse may and does happen to the deep chagrin of the library board. At most only a half dozen appointing authorities in the sample have explicitly granted the power of nomination to the board. Perhaps one half have customarily requested that the board make suggestions. Virtually all are willing to entertain suggestions volunteered by the board. T o a great extent the willingness to entertain and adopt board suggestions is a reflection of the political officers' attitude toward the job and is in no sense a

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matter of principle. T h e y do not want to dominate the library, have no interest in interfering y i t h it, can most easily leave it alone by letting the board run itself. Where political authorities do take a more positive line and when library chairmen are not politically influential, it is almost a matter of custom for the board, usually in the person of the chairman, to make every effort to have board members regularly reappointed. A number of board chairmen have indicated that, while they could dictate nothing, they felt an obligation to be on friendly terms with the political authority so that indirectly the kind of appointment, if not the names, could be indicated. Here enters the theme of the board as a homogeneous group that must not be spoiled by interjecting "the wrong type." Such board chairmen make a great point of praising to the mayor the outstanding qualities of incumbents whose terms are currently expiring. Board chairmen in the sample have given a good deal of time and thought to this work. In a very large majority of the sample, the boards, on close questioning, revealed an underlying sense of insecurity in the matter of board appointments, and this is true of big and little libraries, good ones and bad ones, library boards with long tenure and those with short tenure, boards that are consulted by the appointing authority and those that are not. Surprisingly enough, it is sometimes board members with little interest in libraries and no idea how they happened themselves to land on the library board who are most eager to establish board independence and isolation. T o some degree they are educated in this by the librarians, some of whom regard new board members as an extra burden, since they must be indoctrinated in the routines, the operations, and the policies of the library, but many of whom are fearful of "politics" and, indeed, of any new relationships in the government of the library. It is safe to say that the board minutes examined, the board meetings attended, and the board members interviewed have

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not revealed the habit of discussing or the disposition to discuss actively the broad purposes of the public library. In most libraries there are a few cases in which the board has checked or vetoed a policy proposed by the librarian, usually in terms of the rate of growth or increased expenditure that can prudently be contemplated. Though it is not common, a few boards have frankly thought of themselves as guardians of the taxpayer, and so, of course, they are. On the constructive side, few boards are thinking on their own, and few board meetings are concerned with policy beyond the immediate problems of routine continuance or survival. In carrying on their work, most of the library boards in our sample meet monthly; two metropolitan boards meet fortnightly; eight small city and town boards meet quarterly or bi-monthly, and they include some of the best and some of the weakest in the sample. Most boards are organized into standing committees, though some of the best boards are not. In the majority of cases the committees appeared to be serving no vital function. In many, the committees have virtually atrophied. In some there is a personnel committee, including one trustee who is active and skillful in relations with the staff and serves as an extremely valuable channel of communication, by-passing the librarian, but not impairing the authority of the chain of command. Still more numerous are finance or budget committees that really work out problems with the librarian more effectively than can be done in a full board meeting. Commonly the buildings and grounds committee, the insurance committee, and the legal committee are merely fictions for the work of the committee chairman. One small library gives interesting recognition to this fact by appointing each of seven board members to one man committees. Book committees are commonly not meaningful. Committees play their most vital role when old age has robbed the board chairman of effectiveness, which oc-

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curred in only a few of the sample cases. An administrative or executive committee can, as a corporate body, thrash out problems, inform itself adequately, and under the leadership of a strong committee chairman hand on the results to the board chairman for the perfunctory action of the full board. Only one library in the sample requires annual rotation in board offices. T h e position of vice-president and president of the board come soon in this library to any newly appointed board member, and until a trustee has served as president, working in effect as an executive committee of two with the librarian for a full year, he is not considered a properly educated member of the group. T h e library adopted this device after a long period of domination by a strong willed and exceedingly active board chairman. This practice has not been widely copied in the country as a whole. T e n out of fifty library boards examined retained as chairmen men and women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, who were sometimes unable to attend board meetings for years at a time. But more important are those who can and do continue active in library affairs, but have lost zest for a new idea, have lost touch with the political life of the community, are determined to hang onto the library to the last, and talk of what they once did for the institution, not what they hope to do. This is the search for continuity run riot. In some libraries the old timer runs the show in great detail. In some, a good deal of effort goes into circumventing the old timer. In at least two libraries the elderly chairmen have clung so pertinaciously to political and social precepts of thirty or fifty years earlier as to leave the library isolated from the community and in bad odor at city hall. While there are some who stay too long on the library board, and particularly in the chair, there are correspondingly some who are much too busy about the library. These are the small minority, but there are a few, who, chairmen or not, visit the library twice or thrice a week, even daily, who watch

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and suggest and concern themselves with details, who have very firm ideas about interior decorating and about the staff and about books. They are a minority, but they are described by their librarians as consummate nuisances; they inevitably carry an inordinate weight with the other members of the board, often people of good common sense, but who must needs give way before the opinions of the overly informed. Such board members can often be identified by their declaration that the library has been their principal hobby in life. Such devotion to the library does not always, however, disqualify a trustee as a valuable advisor, for there are other instances in which board members whose regular visits and knowledge of the institution have been real assets to the librarian. At the other extreme there is a substantial majority of board members who turn up only at the stated meetings of the board, never cross the threshold for any other purpose, and never have done so; who know nothing about books, reading, libraries, or education, and say so. These are unevenly distributed. A few libraries have no such members. Many libraries can point to only one or two board members who take the job seriously and do more than attend meetings with a tired mind. One prime qualification for board membership is a willingness to attend meetings and so to constitute a quorum. At the present time virtually every library in the sample reports regular attendance at meetings. The principal cause for failure to reappoint has quite generally been irregular attendance. This fact may reveal the underlying conception of library board work and is a doubtful scale by which to weigh the merits of a trustee. In most boards there are two or three who know how to get things done and also are willing, when necessary, to see that things do get done. Many effective board chairmen are people of this type, not creators of policy, but people of conscientious attention to detail, who have made their careers

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out of this reliability. They are not active enthusiasts, nor are they social butterflies, but very solid wheel horses. The motives that lead individuals to serve on a library board are implicit in much that has already been said about their characteristics and their work. A few get the job at the tag end of a patronage list and are disappointed, faithful, and usually silent members. A few want the job very much because they believe deeply in the public library and are anxious to help. Then there are those who take the job as one of innumerable outlets of the right sort for their personal emotional need to be active. T h e y blend in with the truly "civic minded," who devote themselves to reputable and worthy causes as a primary way to make their lives meaningful. Further, they blend in with those who seek in civic good works a compensation for essentially selfish lives in a society which has drifted away from organized religion. Not sharply distinguishable in practice from these last three motives are the small business and professional people who seek status in the community for business reasons. The library board is safe, reputable, gives modest status, and demands very little thought and energy and no money expenditure from its members. This latter factor was strikingly illuminated in one case by the extreme irritation shown by two rising newcomers of the business world who were confronted after their appointment by a pitched battle between city and county libraries, involving some cherished sentiments among the old families of the town. The board members spoke of the affray with profound disgust and seemed to feel cheated of their comfortable birthright. While nepotism has been mentioned in two cases, we have not found any libraries in the sample where board members were using their position for personal or family gain. Indeed, in most cases the board leans over backwards to avoid any library business for personal profit. Nor have we found any board members who sought any direct sources of power through their library posi-

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don. Though it has been mentioned in one or two cases as a stepping stone to other public office, the record is strongly against such an interpretation. The stakes are in fact not so high. WORKING RELATIONS BETWEEN LIBRARIANS AND BOARDS

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most important work of a library board involves its relations with the chief librarian, and this relationship is the subject of a great deal of discussion in the profession. The proper relations have been defined many times, and the definition is well known to librarians and library boards alike. The board has jurisdiction over policies. The librarian has full administrative control within the library and makes all professional decisions. If the board disagrees with or distrusts the librarian's professional administration, it should replace the librarian, not seek itself to make professional decisions. As a general guide-line, the definition is perfectly sound, and the American Library Association has done a most effective job of communicating the idea to the library world. In a vocation which established itself as a profession, with specialized education, only a generation ago and which is still fighting the initial battle for standards, such a definition has been of universal importance. But it has not, of course, settled the problem or really clarified the issue. Nor could any definition hope to do so. It is only in the most abstract sense that the public library in America can be considered as a specific institution. As in the case of other social institutions, the range of phenomena is infinite between the New York Public Library or the libraries of Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, on the one hand, and the small-town reading room, open ten hours a week, on the other; and there is a continuum of types between the extremes. The formal definition of board-librarian relations must be an almost correspondingly flexible concept. Some uniformities in practice can be noted. Virtually all

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librarians now sit with the board at all meetings, and most of them serve as board secretary, either in title or in fact. Virtually all librarians prepare or are free to prepare the agenda of board meetings. In one case in our sample the librarian has been made a member of the board; in the larger and in some of the smaller libraries the librarian has in effect the status of a board member, usually the principal member, in the eyes of the board. Y e t even when the librarian is regarded as co-equal with board members, if not, indeed, a senior member of the group, there is a feeling of tension about the relationship, at least on the part of the librarian. This was nicely revealed in the research b y t w o facts, the anxiety of a great many librarians to be present at interviews with board members and the remarkably diverse testimony gathered from the librarian and from the board members about this relationship after the stereotyped formula had been passed and specific situations were being analyzed. Beyond these uniformities, what is the range of experience in this relationship? A t one extreme there is the quite distinct type of dependent librarian w h o thinks only when and as told to by the board. There are only t w o or three such cases in the sample, and they are being outgrown. T h e situation is usually the result of an untrained librarian, with only nominal salary, combined with an unusually long-term board chairman or several board members w h o have always run the library and see no reason to change any of the limited services or arrangements, even the library income, of thirty or fifty years ago. It harks back to an early concept of the librarian as chief clerk or custodian of a small collection of books given b y goodhearted citizens and kept in a quiet reading room. Even in fairly substantial institutions, with $10,000 to $20,000 incomes, one occasionally finds an emotionally dependent librarian who has profound respect for her board and no initiative whatever. This relationship is often rooted in the social system of the town. In a f e w

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libraries the librarian lives not only in awe but also in fear of the board, particularly in the matter of book selection, and is constantly on guard against the "pink" book that may be criticized by some reader and lead to calamity. While the drive for standards and certification has had unquestioned merits, it has left the small and the poor libraries in a highly anomalous position. Without money enough to attract a trained librarian, the board must, for any predictable future, make do with what they have, and often they have been able to find women of good sense and friendly disposition and imagination who have run as good a library on the given income as any "professional" could hope to achieve. In one case an untrained woman was carrying out long overdue reforms, after the departure of a professional, and was rapidly increasing both the quality and the circulation of the library by the simple use of common sense and quite without benefit of professional guidance even in the literature of the profession. Yet she, and many like her, are subjected to a heavy burden by their amateur status and find it necessary to play a most passive role with the board. In such cases the boards were sometimes very much on the defensive about their nonprofessional librarians, and apologetic in the face of considerable pressure from the state library agency, stimulated, perhaps, by the accident of having been chosen in the sample used by the Public Library Inquiry. In the middle-size cities there are some very passive and very cautious librarians, though none so dependent as those in the small communities. Low salaries, the traditions of an older generation, and the social system in which the board is embedded are the principal factors in perpetuating the passive and dependent librarian. The research has lent little color to the "mystique" that librarianship per se either demands or produces a bookish, withdrawn personality type, ill-suited to administrative duties and therefore committed by nature to

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dependence upon a worldly board of laymen. Upon first-hand observation librarians do not turn out to be that kind of people. The dependent librarian is neither necessarily nor usually the bookish librarian. At the other extreme are the strong librarians who boast that no board has ever overruled them, and they do not intend that the board ever shall. Some quite Machiavellian devices are the stock in trade of a strong librarian. The most obvious device is to keep the board overwhelmingly busy with minutiae so they will not interfere with important business. One board which started criticizing radical books was immediately presented with the job of passing judgment on hundreds of books a week. The punishment was well suited to the crime, and effected a thorough cure even in a city with considerable socio-economic tension. But less appropriate is the sustained diet of minutiae fed to boards in big and little, good and bad libraries. Some boards are lulled by it, have no awareness of what is happening to them, and vow to be good sports. If this is the important business of the library, they will sit through endless statistical reports and pass perfunctorily on the pennies spent for stationery and the part-time clerical help on temporary appointment. They will tolerate statutory impositions on their time requiring two, three, and sometimes four, board signatures on routine vouchers. In part the situation is the result of haphazard development, the library having emerged slowly into big business and librarians having gradually grown from custodians into executives of large public enterprises. N o one seems to have taken the trouble to look at the new situation objectively and insist upon statutory changes which would free the board of altogether inappropriate detail. Boards have been too little impressed with their own function and too much at a loss to know what they would do if the routine were eliminated. A few board members, and only a few, perhaps a dozen in the sample, have expressed acute distaste for the whole business of board "busy work." They have

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seldom taken the necessary action to cure a situation they would not tolerate a minute in their own business. But beyond this survival of an outmoded tradition there is the deliberate use of detail by librarians to keep the boards from thinking or asking questions. They are not afraid of the board, but they find this the easiest way to carry on without interruption. Such librarians have not adequately gauged the price they are thus paying for immunity from board "interference." W e found that some librarians were employing the further technique of feeding the board new ideas very slowly and in well-chosen terms. This is good sense in any administrative relationship and is a recognition of the very real problem of communication between lay board and professional executive. W e have the feeling, however, that some very competent librarians are overly cautious. A discussion with board members almost invariably brought out that they have not been asked to think ahead for themselves, have, in fact, never consciously done so. In leaving the leadership to the librarian, they have not checked up to see that board meetings are constructively oriented, that the revealing questions are being asked. This failure is the board's, it is also the librarian's. It is more convenient to have a passive board in matters of library planning and policy. The routines of the past contribute to this result. There is a profound reluctance to interfere with a harmonious relationship that has been built up over years of hard work and that is ephemeral enough, subject as it is to the sword of Damocles of uncontrollable appointments from city hall or the county court. The Public Library Inquiry occasionally had an opportunity to sit with boards and librarians and to pose leading questions about the future growth and meaning of public libraries. In one or two such meetings the librarian took noticeable pains to interrupt the first steps in thinking by the board, and gave his own answers with an air of some finality. In other cases, the librarian let the board

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flounder unhappily when asked to think aloud for itself. In either case, the board had been fed new ideas too slowly. It was a rare board that could chart out in discussion the shape of the library's possible future. It is a safe generalization that boards are not often used by librarians for the shaping of new basic policy. In a minority of cases there are one or two board members who are doing their own thinking and talking things out with the librarian outside of board meetings. In one case at least both the board and the librarian welcomed a chance to talk about policy and were searching for a device that would open up board meetings to such discussions. In a few cases the librarian was pushing ahead with new ideas at a rapid pace and was finding that the board could not comfortably keep up. An imaginative board member can here be of great value in mediating between the librarian and the rest of the board. These examples suggest that it is not altogether for lack of good will that librarians have often manipulated their boards rather than worked with and through them on major policy. This conclusion is reinforced by the failure of several boards to act soon enough on a major policy for which they only can be responsible, the removal of librarians. Like board members, chief librarians may become too old for effective administration and leadership, and adequate provision for retirement is exceedingly rare in American public libraries. Or a mistake may well be made in recruiting the librarian, and the staff and public may suffer in consequence. There are examples of both in the past record of libraries in the sample, when the board delayed unduly long in taking action. Partly as a result of their very passive attitude, partly as a result of the profession's insistence that the board keep to "policy" and not interfere with library administration, many boards are ill equipped to spot serious maladjustments in the office of librarian. Perhaps a majority of librarians are very strict about keeping the lines of

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contact from staff to board running through their own office. Few boards are equipped with the training or the tools to consider the quality of administration being given in their libraries. A few boards use effectively a personnel committee that keeps some direct contact with the staff. Even where it is closely dominated by the librarian, this level of board contact may give the danger signal. T h e traditional tools of control familiar to the businessman are not particularly effective in dealing with a nonprofit and free public enterprise. Some boards use an audit, some have the auditor institutionally in their own office, separate from the librarian. But in most cases the auditor is in fact a member of the librarian's staff and unfit psychologically or professionally to undertake more than a bookkeeping function. Where the board has set up a financial office separate from the librarian it has in two or three cases resulted in a Janus-headed monstrosity that was the very negation of sound administration. Neither boards nor librarians have devised as yet specific tools of control for the administrative management of public libraries. Occasionally a board has too hastily and without proper cause removed the librarian. In one case, a newly packed board virtually forced the resignation of the librarian of many years standing on a minor personnel issue, supporting the act by evidence of general discontent among the staff. T h e incident was some years ago and cannot be fully judged i t this distance, but the action was taken less than a year after the appointment of a new board with a socio-economic alignment very different from that of its predecessor. T h e librarian was integrated into the older social pattern. T h e realignment of board personnel cannot be criticized, though the method used depended upon a rather fine point. But the removal of the librarian, if it was in fact because of the new tone of the board, raises some interesting questions. Is the librarian to be regarded in these rare situations as a responsible first minister of a representative

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body? If so, library boards might devise more seemly procedures than impeachment, which threatens the professional reputation of the librarian. Another case involved the strong desire of a mayor to use the librarianship for political patronage. The board refusing, a city ordinance reconstituted the library with a new board, which complied. There were several instances in the sample of mayors who had been frustrated in this same endeavor. Libraries firmly supported by the general library laws of the state have withstood such attacks. In one case the mayor-elect was too lazy to read the statute, promised the job on the basis of two board appointments he would make upon taking office, only to find that new board members had been installed a little ahead of him. In another case the mayor wanted the librarian's scalp over a personal issue and put in a board chairman who made life miserable for the whole institution over a period of years, but without collecting the scalp. So boards may act without appropriate reason as well as fail to act soon enough. But on balance the evidence shows that library boards are a barrier to rather than a channel for hasty action. Library boards have an uneven record in recruiting new chief librarians, probably the most significant step in their operations. The practice is emerging in a few larger libraries of allowing the librarians to become a self-perpetuating executive hierarchy. If the librarian is famous and successful, there is much logic in the method, but some danger. The library is not subject to the same disciplines from without as is the business corporation, and a slow deterioration cannot be so readily brought to light. Nor is the searching criticism of publicity as effective as in the operating departments of the National Government. While the elder statesman hangs on indefinitely, the heir apparent may age considerably during the long wait and have little time left to revivify the institution. In small libraries the same phenomenon may at times be observed, though with

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much less design. The board, finding itself unable to recruit readily in the open market at the going salary, turns the job over to an elderly wheel horse who knows the library perfectly and can carry on the routines without a pause. Boards that have the energy to recruit from outside and the money to pay competitive salaries will often fall back on the state library agency for suggestions, and if the library is of sufficient caliber, will turn directly to the executive secretary of the American Library Association. T o many boards, big and little, the cares and worries of this crucial step are greatly lightened by the watchword of professionalism. It may serve as well as a more thorough search. Conversely, board-librarian relations sometimes involve the librarian in the selection of new board members. Roughly a quarter of the sample report that the librarian is given a chance to nominate or is consulted by the board or by the appointing authority. Virtually all librarians, it may be assumed from our inquiry, would like to have a share in the business, but much less than one quarter seem to have played any real part in it. The librarian's opinion is asked largely as a matter of courtesy in most cases, out of recognition for his status as a participant in board meetings. Most librarians are content to say that they are well satisfied, since, if their nominee has not been appointed, a person of the right type has been chosen and the board saved from a terrible fate. There are exceptions in which the librarian writes the ticket as much as anyone can from within the library. These are librarians of outstanding political sophistication, and they are found in our sample in city, county, and town libraries. At all three levels such librarians are uncommon. Where the practice exists, it is not resented by the board, and the appointing authority is quite unconcerned. From their point of view, the librarian seems to be the person with the best answer. In dealing jointly with government officials, librarian and

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board can ideally complement each other. W e talked with librarians who lunched with the city manager weekly at Rotary or dealt with city affairs at a top level through informal luncheon groups, select clubs, and common membership on other administrative boards. W e found women librarians who combined the graces of a southern lady with the shrewd touch of an experienced politician and the prestige of a learned profession. It is an interesting blend for invading city hall. W e also found board members who could invade a budget hearing with a prestige undoubtedly effective after the clamoring of competing department officials. W e met board members who could settle library business weekly with the city commissioner on the street corner. And there were several boards which had to go over the librarian's head and settle matters of the budget after the librarian had lost the confidence of the government officials. The fundamental fact we found about board and librarian dealings with government is the profound ignorance of library business in city hall or the county court. It is very small potatoes in most cases. A small number of boards are in fact virtually autonomous financially, with the direct authority to modify the library's own tax within generous limits. Here the library is enjoying a degree of self-determination which presumably presupposes a board. Libraries which must depend upon annual political decisions for income must put librarian and board to work on the problem. T h e success of some is on the record a good deal less than they allege. A number of boards and librarians reported that they have always received what they asked for, yet we found in the minutes or at city hall that their estimates were cut, often by 20 or 30 percent. But even when city hall rather than the library remembers what happened, the library is dealing with a political hierarchy which accords library business scant attention. The multiple contacts of the librarian and his board can help overcome this.

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Furthermore, although there were some women in the sample who were astute in city or county government far beyond most of the men librarians, it remains true that the majority of women we met retained a deep distrust of politics, a feeling of acute helplessness in dealing with mayors and commissioners, women who regarded the spittoons in the political corridors as symbolic barriers to a wholly male world into which they must not trespass. In these libraries the board is indispensable, and the librarian to this degree dependent. However skillful and aggressive the librarian, man or woman, and however uninterested or passive the board, the fact of a board has a profound impact, imponderable though it be, upon the conduct of library affairs. The most independent librarian and the most Machiavellian must constantly keep one eye on the board, keep them busy, keep them happy, and carry them along in some fashion. T h e type of relation existing between board and librarian cannot be correlated with the size of library, its quality or wealth, the sex or professional education of the librarian, or the tenure of the board, its method of appointment, or its politics. Even if the sample were such as to allow factoring out of these multiple variables, there is no really objective measure or scale for relationships of this type. But the independent variable, and the record is one of marked variation, seems to be the personal capacity and effectiveness of the librarian. Previous commentaries have noted deviation of practice from the simple, logical model presented in the American Library Association's official doctrine about trustees.10 The respective contributions of librarian and board to major policy and to administrative detail are not susceptible of quantitative calculation. One major policy in a decade may be more important than all the rest of the grist in the administrative mill, "This doctrine is best outlined in Anna Gertrude Hall, The Library Chicago, A L A , 1937, passim.

Trustee,

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and subjective evaluations statistically accumulated are no better than the insight of those replying. Close inquiry into the attitudes of the diverse participants and into the written record of selected cases has emphasized the very contradictory impressions of board and librarian about their own relationships and the degree to which both are likely to think and speak in terms of the profession's official stereotype without critical examination of their own experience. Disenchantment with the library board in practice has characterized many of the recent studies made by the profession itself. Our experience lends some color to the view that lay boards are "indifferent and apathetic . . . possessing authority and responsibility but lacking ability and interest, and advance is blocked at every turn." 1 1 It is easier to agree with the more temperate view expressed b y a recent president of the American Library Association w h o wrote of the w o r k of library boards, "It seems self-evident that major problems are neglected or, if discussed, are considered sketchily and without that careful and unhurried analysis which is so essential." 12 A f t e r a series of case studies one is sympathetic to the nonlogical outburst of an experienced trustee, " F r a n k l y , the trustees will probably never do much, but there is much they can do and much they should do if they are to continue to clutter up the library with their membership on the board." 1 3 A careful weighing of the evidence gathered from careful "Arnold Miles and Lowell Martin, Public Administration and the Library, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1941, p. 225. This is a summary of adverse criticism. All of Chapter 7 should be read for a more balanced judgment. "E. W. McDiarmid and John McDiarmid, The Administration of the American Public Library, Chicago, ALA and University of Illinois Press, 1943, p. 43; see also E. W. McDiarmid, "The Library Board and Library Administration," in ALA Bulletin, X X X V I , No. 3 (March, 1942), 192 ft. "Ora L. Wildermuth, chairman of the Board of Trustees, Gary Indiana Public Library, and member of the executive committee of the Trustees Section, ALA, "The Trustee and Public Relations," A L A Bulletin, X X X V , No. 1 (January, 1941), p. 31.

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interviewing of librarians, board members, and staff in the limited number of concrete situations presented by the Public Library Inquiry sample qualifies these generalizations. There are libraries with boards of able, sincere citizens, but their contribution to the library has been small indeed. There are relatively weak boards who have none the less contributed much to keeping a marginal library unit afloat. And there are boards whose vigorous and courageous members have successfully withstood political inroads upon the library and have pushed forward to improve the statutory base of libraries throughout the state. It remains none the less true that boards have neglected to drive through such statutory revisions as would be necessary to relieve themselves of an unrealistic and unwholesome burden of administrative detail. It is equally true that boards are not using their limited time and energies constructively in the matter of long-range and basic library policies. It is in this respect that the record of our research finds them furthest from the formal picture elaborated by professional doctrine. ALTERNATIVE TYPES OF LIBRARY GOVERNMENT On balance, then, there are library boards which live up to the formula of the profession. They bring prestige, political influence, political activity, and protection from short-run partisan politics. O r they mediate between the political and administrative ineptness of librarians and the realities of public life. They may take over slices of library administration that the librarian cannot handle. They provide a lay perspective, a sounding board, a forum of discussion where the librarian can think out new policies. They interpret to the librarian the limits of tolerance of the community, either in the matter of expenditures, of new types of service, or of heterodox ideologies, and they leave the librarian autonomy and self-respect as chief executive officer. There are library boards beset with desiccation, inertia, and

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senility. There are boards which bring to the library the narrow social perspective of a small minority, which impair the neutrality of the library and pervert its function as an educational institution. There are boards whose political affiliations are a great handicap to the library in dealing with officials and with the community. There are meddlesome boards which leave the librarian in hysterical frustration, unable to think creatively, bedeviled with the need for caution. On the balance sheet of our sample it should be noted that while librarians are often enough disgusted with their boards and still more often unable to attribute any constructive role to the board, nevertheless there are only a very small minority who are prepared to abandon it as an institution. The library board plainly has a tremendously strong hold on the thinking of librarians, and this is true of big and little, good and bad libraries. The strong librarians tend to be found in libraries with strong boards of able citizens who are willing to devote themselves to the library's needs. It is these librarians who are most clear-cut in their desire to retain the board. Yet the record shows that few librarians are using board meetings for policy matters and that few boards are facing up squarely to the financial strangulation which has recently characterized library government. What are the alternatives? A modification of the library board appointed by the executive or legislative body is the board appointed b y the school board. In their quality and methods of doing business boards of this type have been indistinguishable from the more conventional model. W e found some outstandingly good libraries so governed, and some extremely mediocre ones. In one case a legal tangle forced a library to revert from special charter to a school district library and then to a county district library within a f e w years, during which time the board remained virtually unaltered. The case betokens the continuity achieved through a board, but illus-

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trates in a symbolic way the conclusion that library boards are pretty much rui generis and look about the same however appointed. Nor does appointment by the school board lead to a still further removal from "politics." As an elective body, often with many axes to grind, school boards have at times loaded the library boards under them with politically useful appointees. Ironically, school-board control does not necessarily lead to any integration of school and public library service. In one case neither school board nor superintendent of schools knew the facts about the service to schools being rendered by the public library. The type can therefore be conveniently grouped, without distinction, with other appointive library boards. A further extension of the same idea is for the school board to serve directly as the library board. There are relatively few examples of this, and only two have been visited by the Public Library Inquiry. There is, however, a consensus in the profession, particularly among those who have served in such libraries, that the school board is for the most part uninterested in the library. In some cases the school board is so bound by tax limitations that income is not enough for a full school term. One can hardly quarrel with short rations for the library in these circumstances. The school superintendent, as a type and by training, tends to be an aggressive, politically alert person. His business is complex and central to the board's purposes, he has in the Parent Teachers Association a seasoned citizen group, and he necessarily monopolizes the board meetings, even though in most cases superintendent and librarian are coequal officers under the board. Librarians tend to be wary of school-board control not only because they get the short end of appropriations and of board time and attention but also because the elective school board in cities is normally a much more consciously political body than are the library boards with which the profession is used to dealing. They are frankly alarmed at the political pace that is often set.

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Institutionally the arrangement has potential economies for the library of very real importance, but there is a price to be paid. Public library branches in school buildings have been tried many times, and the librarians we interviewed agreed that they are unsuitable for adult use. There is endless friction over hours of opening and a fine ideological battle over whether schools are too far removed from the shopping centers for maximum adult convenience. T o suburbia on wheels, this obstacle may be imaginary, in fact the somewhat isolated library offers better parking facilities. The difficulty over hours and vacations is the kind of pragmatic argument that cannot be really final. School buildings, like churches, have been successfully put to a wonderful variety of community uses. The debate over money is not really final either, as some libraries under school boards have their own tax income. Much of the difficulty undoubtedly stems from the actual practice in school branches. It is not necessary to have the rooms so overwhelmingly oriented to juvenile use, and it is even quite conceivable that there might be two rooms. It is very striking to note that school-board libraries have not in practice worked out a close integration of policy with school library service, and in fact buy books and plan services quite in isolation. It does not appear that either profession requires close institutional liaison with the other or wants it. As with libraries under independent boards, whatever co-ordination there is, springs up locally between teachers or school principals and the branch librarians or public librarians concerned with juvenile service. As a type, then, the school-board library seems to offer some potential economies, but to impose at present so many psychological hurdles for the library profession that it cannot be considered a serious alternative to the library board. The conclusion is extremely tentative, however; the instances are so few and the local situation so controlling upon all public institutions that the type has perhaps

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not had a fair representation. With its present reputation, it may well never get a fair trial, as librarians of outstanding competence tend to avoid it. Finally, there is the public library operating directly as a department of local government. This, the general literature reveals, is the bugaboo of American public librarians, the fate worse than library boards in whose name the tribulations of other forms are accepted with resignation. W e can only record that of the few visited by the Public Library Inquiry most were excellent libraries, entirely free of "politics," conducting imaginative and intelligent services, with more than average incomes, and with thoroughly professional librarians who spent far less time worrying about "politics" than many under library boards. W e also found very bad libraries of this type, thoroughly political in the worst sense of the word, without real possibility of growth or development, and in fact about to be by-passed by some parallel service under a different unit of government. Statistically nothing can be proved by such a sample. This is characteristic of political science which deals in so few and such diverse phenomena that the nice accuracy of statistical generalization is obviously impossible. It has the virtue of warning against spurious correlations. What can be said is that in the institution per se there is nothing to prevent sound library administration. One can say that the bad cases would almost certainly have been sadly underfed and neglected organizations whatever their institutional structure. It is quite impossible to conclude what library service would now be in Cleveland, Denver, New York, or Boston if there had not been library boards controlling the institutions for three generations. There are cogent arguments in public administration against the multiplication of autonomous boards presiding over small slices of public busiSUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION

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ness. And there are arguments from the internal experience of libraries, as described above. Perhaps the long-run development of public libraries should point toward libraries as operating departments. T h e r e is evidently nothing inherently incompatible with good library service in this unelaborated structure. N o sudden break with the established form, however, is conceivable. Librarians have not yet by any means become universally trained as technical experts or as a learned profession, and where they have been so trained, their standing as experts is not always fully recognized. Further, librarians even in large municipal systems are sometimes woefully lacking in administrative training and capacity. In the smaller libraries the situation would be even more perilous were the incumbent librarians turned loose all at once to administer their libraries as government departments. Institutionally there would be minor cramps in allocating the present autonomous taxing power of some boards. An appointive librarian would be an unlikely successor to such taxing power, and the same consideration arises in connection with the administration of the very large endowments enjoyed by a few libraries. Presuming, then, that library boards will remain the characteristic type for the next ten years, 14 and a few very able board members and still fewer able boards may be said to justify further experiment with the board on its own merits, what forms and practices offer the most promise? One or two lessons emerge so unmistakably from the research as to warrant the sanction of law to enforce more rational practices. T h e indefinite reappointment of board members leads to dry rot so frequently that it should be forbidden. T h e present opportunity for reappointment also leads to a profound inertia on the part of the appointing authority, which, while it un"In drawing its conclusions from current data the Public Library Inquiry attempts to keep them within the possibilities of change and improvement during the next ten years. This time frame, therefore, should be kept in mind as a presupposition behind all the suggestions offered.

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doubtedly contributes to political "purity," also contributes in all too many cases to a thorough ignorance of and lack of interest in the library at the very point where library income must normally be obtained. T o avoid these pitfalls, library laws might limit board members to one five- or six-year term and require the lapse of at least one year before eligibility for reappointment. By this arrangement peculiarly valuable members could be returned to the board while their interest was still alive; the less valuable could be replaced without reflection upon them or upon the board. Conceivably the administration of such a law could become so lax as to leave incumbents indefinitely in office in anticipation of reappointment. Such situations appeared in the sample, where terms of office became marvelously confused because of general neglect. It may well be necessary to go further, therefore, and provide four- or five-year terms, with only one reappointment and a definite prohibition against further extension of tenure. On the whole, most board members will have made their best contribution within ten years. Though a flexible custom would be the most sensible way to achieve this important objective, such a custom has developed from within the board in only one or two cases in the sample and has not been imposed from without in enough cases to warrant much hope in good intentions. It is so much easier to reappoint, and the board and the librarian are so much happier with accustomed faces than with new ones that any general reform will have to come through legislation. There are a few state laws which now specifically forbid board members to employ members of their families in the library. The point is so obvious, and the venal temptations so slight, that one would think it hardly worthy of legislation. Yet the sample has shown the outcome of the most innocent nepotism to be so outrageously harmful to the library as to warrant legislation.

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The size of library boards should depend upon their work. If they are to be casual sponsors of the institution, there can be no objection to twenty members or more. If they are to conform to the tradition of working boards, they must be limited to something like five to nine members, probably seven. The larger board cannot really be much more representative and invites the carrying of ineffective members. As a working board, they may have to meet more often than quarterly, but there seems to be no possible justification for the fortnightly meetings of a few boards, for not only does the librarian constantly have to think up detail for the board, so that the detail becomes a habit and the board loses perspective, but also the board keeps the librarian so busy that more than half his time and energy is consumed in caring for the board. Somewhere between these limits lies the appropriate schedule. Most librarians and boards are quite content with their monthly meetings, but most of them are misusing the meetings. Those who argue for the stated monthly meeting as indispensable have often overlooked the special meetings. One board member reported that the monthly meetings had been of paramount importance in the previous year of crises, yet the minutes of this board showed twenty-three meetings in the year, all of them extremely worth while. It had been 2 year of very real crises. Every two months is probably as often as library business really warrants routine meetings. The statutory impositions on board time in the matter of signatures and pay rolls and staff appointments should be changed to suit the realities of professional administration. There is every evidence that such changes requested by a special activity about its own business can easily be effected both at state and local legislative levels. It is of paramount importance, not only for the sensible timing of board meetings, but also for the constructive use of meetings, that statutes be thus revised. In its internal organization the library board should be set up

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as simply as possible. N o recognizable purpose seems to be served by the numerous standing committees that by tradition characterize most library boards. Most committees are largely perfunctory, if not wholly defunct, and there is always the danger of thinking that a problem is receiving attention because there is a standing committee with a title to fit it. When a committee is needed, such a standing committee may be staffed with the wrong individuals. In a board of only seven, individual talents can be used for appropriate jobs as they come along. T h e pressure of real board business is not such that full discussion is unobtainable in full board meeting. If it is, special committees seem the sounder technique. T h e really important function performed by standing committees in our sample was the by-passing of senile chairmen and the placing of authority in the hands of a competent member. This is not the solution best suited to the problem. T h e enforced limitation of board tenure, which we have suggested, should serve to prevent superannuation and might well be supplemented by at least an equivalent rotation in board offices, particularly in the chairmanship. Wider experimentation with annual rotation in board offices is warranted by our findings. A year as chairman for each in turn undoubtedly gives a feeling of participation, breaks the habit of passive inertia, and educates each member in a rounded view of library problems. It may serve, also, to give pause to appointing authorities who now tend to regard lightly the appointment of new members because the business of the board is presumed to be safely in the hands of one or two long-term board members. While annual rotation is clearly inapplicable to many types of governing board, it would appear to be compatible with the fairly light duties and lack of specialized experience or technical knowledge expected of a library board. In the one case examined, the device worked well, though it undoubtedly imposed some extra burden on the librarian. W e hesitate, how-

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ever, to urge the general adoption of annual rotation. Most libraries cannot now command the services on their boards of a group of people qualified to share the chairmanship in such rapid succession. T h e appointment of library boards may best follow the orthodox pattern of responsibility to the chief executive officer of the unit of government or, in the absence of a single official, to the elected body of commissioners. There appears to be no advantage in layering the library board under a school board. T h e notion of direct election is not seriously attractive. T h e library does not have the wide citizen interest of the school system, nor the policical interest associated with heavy expenditures. The separate election of officers for small departments of government has everything to be said against it from the point of view of the electoral process and the overburdened voter. T h e activity of little political potential thrown directly into the political arena is more than likely to suffer profound neglect on the part of voter and politician. Significantly, the two elective boards in the sample were safely removed from the citizen's jurisdiction by a rigid process of nomination. T h e only dilemma in the appointment of board members by the chief executive officer arises in city-manager cities. Is the library board an administrative department under the manager, or is it an autonomous, policy-making body? T h e question is especially pertinent in the case of boards that have their own taxing power and are consequently quite independent from year to year of the city's appropriations. T h e usual answer has been, despite logical objections, to call the library an operating department under the manager, and the boards we have seen have not suffered from this solution. Legislation granting the power of appointing boards should certainly remain as it is in almost every case, entirely free of any stipulations as to board member characteristics. With a

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small board, the problem of what individual qualities are needed and what forces in the community require representation is essentially a political, though not a partisan, one and must be left to unfettered and flexible judgment. The distinction between "political" and "partisan" has confused a good deal of library thinking. Conditioned by its growth during the peak period of corruption in American local politics, the library still hesitates to make its peace with the inherently political character of a public institution. It is, however, as fundamental to sound library development that mayors, county commissioners, and city managers alike make sound political judgments in selecting library trustees as that they make nonpartisan appointments. In discussing the types which should, in fact, be appointed we enter upon a field where generalization is peculiarly dangerous. As just observed, it is too political a problem for statutory generalization. But certain generalizations are worth considering. The boards now controlling public libraries are excessively limited in social status, occupations, age, and interests. This has been observed over and over again in the literature of the subject. A younger and "more representative" board has been the conclusion of many discussions within the profession. Our research has, however, indicated that practicing librarians do not want "more representative" boards, that they are almost without exception convinced that they are safer and happier with the present type. It is not impossible that librarians are led to this attitude by their own social difficulties. They have established themselves fairly recently as a professional group and are not yet generally recognized by the public as a learned profession. Their position is similar to that of school teachers, the head librarian being the equivalent, perhaps, of the school principal. Although professional, this status does not command wide deference. Through the boards, librarians have been able to associate

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with the great, or surely the near great, of the community. And insisting upon their professional prerogatives within the shop, they have held some status with the great or near great. On a much more mundane level, through their boards they have been given rather more easy access to some social groups than might otherwise have been readily available. In many cases the librarians are convinced that the narrow stratum represented on the board actually runs the town, and in many cases, of course, it does. The point is important, because on the whole librarians have been influential in determining, if not the names, at least the types appointed to their boards. Most of those we interviewed were very busy at it, doing their very best to indoctrinate at least the incumbent board so that it would breed true. N o real change in board-member characteristics is likely until practicing librarians become convinced that they are themselves wrong-headed about what the library needs. N o r are we too sanguine about convincing them by another survey or inquiry. They are hardened to such shocks, and a surprising number of them have dismissed such efforts as "ivory tower stuff." They may well learn from experience, as in fact they are now learning from frozen budgets, low salaries, and outworn physical equipment. Perhaps one half the sample libraries have not quite succeeded in standing still over the past eighteen years. Few other public enterprises have fared so shabbily. Our research has raised the question whether the library boards should not include some very diverse members of the community. With the rapid extension of high school and college education in the present generation, the active users of the library may well represent a wider social spectrum than current polls of reading habits indicate. T h e balance of political power, in the sense of the shifting or independent vote, probably lies today in the lower middle-class white collar and skilled labor groups. Even if they are not active library users,

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their political potential is a matter of more than passing interest to the public library, permanently dependent as it is on the taxes of these people and on their political attitudes. Fully as important as increasing the social range is the factor of age. A leavening of young people would be altogether wholesome in library affairs, especially as it is young people who use the library. Several library boards and librarians have heartily endorsed or volunteered this idea, only to add that a man in his early fifties was pretty well proven and should be eligible. Equally important is the factor of time. T h e civic butterflies that flutter happily in and quickly out of board meetings are simply too busy with other concerns. T h e y are interested and sincere and full of good will. T h e y cannot possibly have fresh ideas about all the activities with which they are affiliated. Heretical as it may seem, one wonders whether people with ability, but without celebrity, may not make good members of an unpaid board. This stricture does not apply universally. There are very important persons who know the practical limits of their energies and the span of their attention and who keep within those limits, wide as they may be. It is the members, particularly, who join merely to be active who should be culled out and replaced by less prominent people. T h e standard argument against obscurity is that the board cannot live in harmony unless its members are all of a certain type. This is self-deception. These same men in running their own business are not limiting their business relations or their employees to people who belong to the right clubs. T h e notion that the library is a club is beguiling, but the public shows little disposition to finance the club. V e r y few business enterprises have survived in America on such exclusiveness; some have foundered in the attempt. There is no excuse for trying to make a public enterprise do so. It should be noted that reform in this respect is needed not only in the large and older cities but just as much, if not more, in the small cities and towns.

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Public libraries in America are historically completing the transition to professionally trained librarians, with all that the change implies in altered relationships between board and librarian. They have scarcely commenced the transition to a public service institution actively sponsored by a broad range of power groups in the community. Yet politically the latter transition is by far the more important. The first step is to emphasize in board membership that the library is no longer a benefaction furnished by a public-spirited minority of the well born, the well financed, or even the well educated. More specifically, library boards can well use the talents of men and women representing a wider range of occupations. The overbalance of lawyers and a scattering of businessmen leaves few and sometimes none on the board who have any familiarity with books or have read anything but mysteries, best sellers, and the intellectual pulps of current-events commentaries, and few enough of these. There is room, in small and middle-size libraries especially, for men and women competent in some of the walks of life in which books have a professional standing. The question is often asked whether libraries are not staffed with overly bookish people. The remarkable thing is that boards and librarians are often unfamiliar with the knowledge of books that goes with their professional use. Library boards could include some members over a period of years who have an understanding of the use of books in education, if the library is to be an institution for the education of the community. This does not mean the rare book collector, who does turn up on some of the older and richer boards. At the present time an occasional high school history teacher is about the best one can expect to find. The absence of teachers of higher education is most striking, yet our sample includes a large proportion of college towns in the south central and southwestern states, and there are reputable colleges and universities in virtually all the north-

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eastern and far western communities studied. The librarians in institutions of less than $ 100,000 annual income could use the stimulation of scholars who know the bibliography of their own field and have some appreciation of the process, in any field, of building a usable collection for educational purposes. The social science and history collections surveyed in our research show that during the past fifteen years, perhaps unprecedentedly fruitful years in these fields, these smaller libraries have largely spent their book money on what turned out to be ephemeral materials. A few professors, more high school teachers, engineers, technicians, labor organizers, farm bureau officers, and public administrators are suggested alternatives to the present concentration of lawyers and businessmen. The notion that only the self-employed and the idle can be members of the "club" is not valid. Libraries cannot survive on such a premise. In addition, the most radical conclusion of all, there should be, either regularly or periodically, a practicing politician on every library board. In roughly one-fifth of the libraries investigated the mayor was ex officio on the board, and in a few cases this was more than a perfunctory membership. In no case was any harm done. Where the librarian had an opportunity to know the politician and to work with him on common problems the relief from the fear of politics was pronounced, though in one case the cure was only temporary, for the mayor, who had had a generation's tenure, was soundly defeated at the polls, and the librarian was then faced with "politics" on the board in the shape of a new and unknown mayor. These various specific suggestions support the conclusion that small working boards must not become committed to a rigid pattern of representing specific groups, economic, vocational, racial, religious, fraternal, or geographic. Binding limitations of this type only further reduce the chances of finding able and interested individuals. Furthermore, these suggestions

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should not be read in any sense to exclude the types now serving on library boards. Lawyers, bankers, manufacturers, and club women are indispensable to any community enterprise; they are not, however, all that the enterprise needs. In addition to the governing board, there are largely untapped possibilities in the advisory committee or visiting committee. The "friends of the library" groups, particularly the neighborhood friends, have much of the character of a visiting and sponsoring committee. Perhaps both institutions are needed. T o o often, the friends groups are ad hoc committees for specific political campaigns, with only a shadowy existence limited to signatures on petitions and dues for propaganda. The advisory, or visiting, cjmmittee, given status as part of the machinery of the library, necessarily mobilizes fewer people than does a "friends" group, but functions far more intensively. Whatever the device, and the formal, institutionalized advisory committee seems the soundest, there is a striking need to broaden the base of active citizen participation in library policy. A wider range of talents can be tapped in this way, a fuller representation of citizen needs for library service, a greater diversity of social and geographic groups in the community. Such a committee might well include representatives of active library users. By rotating the members among many subcommittees, each concerned with a function or branch, the committee can be given a broad perspective of library work rather than a sense of vested interest in a single phase. At the very least, such a committee gives an opportunity to widen the sense of participation and to groom diverse and relatively obscure people for appointment to the library board. For this alone it would be important. If librarians have been only instrumental in determining the character of library board members, they have been far more decisive in directing the work of the board. For a generation librarians have repeated that boards must deal only with

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"policy" and must not interfere with administration. The formula has very little definiteness, as a minute's discussion quickly reveals. It delimits nothing. It betokens, rather, the state of mind of librarians who have been struggling to establish themselves as responsible executive officers in their own shops and are to a large extent still looking back upon this period of growth, now completed in the larger libraries. But as we have seen, in practice librarians are inclined to load the board with detail and carry on policy pretty much by themselves, leading the board from step to step. The board sets the pace, which is its proper function, but does not share in the long-range thinking which should accompany the setting of the pace. Meanwhile, librarians have been reiterating what the board should not do. The time has come for librarians to begin leading the boards to do what they should do. This they may safely do. The boards are convinced that librarians are professionals and are glad to follow their lead. As chief executives, librarians must now assume the leadership of their boards and be judged by their capacity to derive benefit for the library from the work of the board. While no statement can be generally inclusive, it is clear that the board should give close attention to the annual budget —not just one board member, but the whole board. The budget should be discussed, not merely in terms of what was spent last year, but in terms of what the amounts really signify in programs and policies. The board is also responsible for seeing the budget through the legislative process at the city hall or the county court. If the library has a fixed income based on a rigid tax, requiring no defense before government officials, then it is doubly the board's responsibility to scrutinize the budget carefully to see that it accomplishes for the library what needs to be accomplished. Closely associated with this primary routine responsibility is the board's larger job to see that the library is adequately

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financed. Boards and librarians have been inclined to avoid the search for endowments on the grounds that private funds would tend to drv up public appropriations. T h e record shows that the reverse is more probably true, that a library of which the people have real cause to be proud is the easier to finance from the public purse. A few boards are beginning to think along these lines. T h e board has a peculiarly important policy decision to face constantlv in libraries whose income is fixed by a popularly voted tax rate. T h e dangers of inertia and a slow decline of real income are hard to guard against where the library seems so safe without effort. T h i s is " p o l i c y " in the most important sense. T h e board is continuously responsible for selecting a c o m petent librarian, continuously in the sense of having the information and the courage to fire a bad librarian as well as to hire a good one. T h e r e are no guide lines here which can be reduced to writing. T h e board must be alert to possibilities of change and is certainly responsible for making adequate retirement arrangements if they are needed. T h e r e are some librarians that do not grow old. But boards must replace those that do. Library boards have some responsibility to participate in library associations. As has often been pointed out, there are far more trustees than there are chief librarians, and the business of library associations concerns them. Librarians may be able to do more to make conventions and committees interesting for trustees, though at best it will be only a small minority of trustees who will ever take an active part. It is important that these few outsiders join in the professional associations. But if boards must largely remain outside professional activities, thev are nevertheless of vital significance in the state politics of the profession. L i b r a r y associations have only occasionally made good use of the local trustees in their state legislative battles, and close examination usually reveals that it is one or

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two big-city librarians who have mobilized their own boards, rather than a state-wide movement. Yet state legislation, as will be suggested below, is very probably the key to sound library growth in the years to come; and state politics is therefore "policy" for the local library boards. Finally, boards are responsible for the review and the clearance of "new policy." Again there is no specific definition in libraries or in any other type of administration. What is policy depends upon the time, the place, and the circumstance. T h e only safe statement is that policy is involved when there is a problem of direction and purpose. Policy may be formed in deciding individual minor situations; to this extent minutiae are very often policy, but not all minutiae, not all individual situations. T h e quality of the library board's performance almost inevitably depends upon the librarian's understanding of the administrative process. It is not enough to have board members who know how to get things done, who understand administration, who represent the community and can powerfully sponsor the library with the community. Traditionally, boards include men and women of unusual sophistication in the work of boards and in the methods of administration. It is not the boards who need a clearer understanding of "policy"; it is the librarians. T h e thought of the profession is still in the process of growing up—stressing its competence, its independence against boards, and the need to keep boards from meddling. In reality it is mature; its position is secure; and such attitudes are obsolete. Librarians now need to be trained in the techniques of administrative management if the library boards are to serve the institutions to the fullest. This problem cannot be solved in isolation. Men and women of administrative talent must be recruited to the profession. This becomes a problem of the unit size and income base of library service, as well as an objective of professional recruitment and training.

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The limited political success of public libraries may in part be traced back to the phenomena of poor administrators and timid political leaders in the library business, to slight political interest, to repeated frustration as a professional pressure group, to inadequate units of service and sources of income. It has been the effort of our research to see these as parts of a pattern of political interrelationships. The governing authority of the unit of library service is only one link in the chain of circumstances which constitute the political life of the institution.

3 THE

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As A TAX SUPPORTED INSTITUTION the public library depends in the long run upon how much the voters will take from their pockets to pay for its services. In the past this has not been much. As has been said, the library record is one of an undercapitalized plant manned by an underpaid staff. This is not the result of public hostility; no library in our survey has to meet active opposition to what it is doing. No one opposes the library; almost everyone approves it. But with almost equal unanimity no one wants to pay much for it. What the librarians are working against is apathy within, as well as without the library. In a good many places they have attempted to break this down by tying their services to the going interests of their communities. INVENTORY OF GROUP AFFILIATIONS The library board has been thought of as a link between library and power groups in the community. As the previous chapter has explained, the typical library board is made up of elderly, lower-upper to upper-middle class persons, who speak for a limited range of a community's interests, and rarely from experience, for its reading needs. To avoid this, and following a legislative theory of board functions, some boards are broadened to represent racial, religious, economic groups, geographical areas, or voluntary associations. This has served to placate some restive minorities and appease the pride of some civic groups, but it has not served well as a means of mobilizing public opinion.

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T h e board does not really function as a legislature; its members do not think in terms of organizing the vote; and they do not speak for segments of the population whose library interests are essentially distinguishable. In order to represent adequately the political power groups of even a small community, the board would have to be too large and unwieldy to perform its administrative functions. As it is now used in practice, the "representative board" sometimes copies the pattern of city politics rather than the realities of library politics. In several cities in the survey the city council representation was reflected in the membership of the library board, with the result that the librarian had to cope with representatives of nationality groups who as individuals were ignorant of and little interested in library services. W h a t is more to the point, such representatives would not and could not mobilize political support to help put the library on a sound financial footing. Their appointment had political significance in the calculus of the mayor's office, but not in the political equation of the public library. T h e outright attempts to recognize political realities in board membership cannot be considered successful. Board political influence follows another strategy, and when mobilized it can be impressive. Such mobilization, we found in our survey, is usually precipitated by a crisis when the library's welfare seems particularly endangered by official action, a new framework of government, or a ruinous cut in an appropriation, or it may be brought about by a library bond issue. Upon these specific occasions, with a real threat hanging over their heads or a definite objective in view, library boards in our sample have made speeches, button-holed their friends, swung their groups, clubs, and fraternities into action, demanded official hearings, pounded the pavements and pushed doorbells in order to round up the necessary political strength. But such crises are extraordinary, demanding extraordinary exertion,

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when the political status of the library becomes so obvious as to command action. In the year-to-year pressure for funds, however, the typical library board in the sample does not carry much political power. Perhaps that is all the librarians can ask of a voluntary group of citizens who have a limited amount of time and energy. It is the librarian, therefore, who is the political strategist in nearly all cases, and the board simply strengthens his hand. Board strength is partially measured in terms of the librarian's prestige and that of the people he knows. In places where society is conservative and inbred the librarian coming from the outside will find it difficult to break into the inner circles. A few library boards in our sample, made up of leading citizens or members of old families, have been of real service in introducing the librarians to the groups where political policy is made. W e found that in old, stable, homogeneous societies library boards, with some justification, tend to favor homegrown librarians; for it is a great advantage to be a native, if not of the town, county, or state, at least of the section. This is particularly true of the South, where the necessity of recruiting trained personnel from the North presents a real problem in library and community relationship. In any community, however, the board can facilitate the librarian's access to power groups. In a few of our cases, in which the retiring librarian has had an outstanding personality, the position of his successor is at first secure. H e faces, however, the problem of continuing the narrative in his own style, a task that can sometimes be as difficult as beginning anew. If there is no great tradition to continue, the librarian, like many a minister and educator, has often felt obliged to become a joiner. About forty libraries in the sample are administered by executives whose membership in study groups, service clubs, civic associations, and fraternal orders cover the wide and ingeniously varied range of organi-

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zations in a nation of joiners. For the rest, only one or two librarians expressed a distaste for all organized groups, and quite a tew more considered themselves too busy for outside activities. For men librarians in the sample by far the more important, as well as numerous, contacts with the business and professional community are made through the service clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce, and Lions, with Rotary predominating, and other miscellaneous luncheon groups, such as Exchange Clubs, Advertising Clubs, Merchants Clubs, and so forth. Here the librarian meets and becomes friendly with people he never would otherwise see. One librarian, as president of Rotary, was a first-name acquaintance of seven out of his nine city councilmen, w h o were fellow Rotarians. This familiarity, not only encouraged but required by many such luncheon clubs, is considered by those librarians w h o practice it to be of real political benefit. From the experience of our survey, the influence of the service clubs in cities under 200,000 population would seem to be greater than has generally been recognized. T h e librarians have found them of great value in reaching that group of influential men who do not use the library, but are important in community opinion and political action. And many librarians w h o are not members of these clubs are guest speakers as often as they can elicit invitations. As the world has a habit of being run by males, the woman librarian is handicapped in opportunities to penetrate the councils of political power. But too many able women with wide community influence appear in our sample for that handicap to be considered seriously crippling. T h e women librarians in the sample most often belong to the Women's Club or the Business and Professional Women's Club in order to obtain the same entrance into the women's world that the men have through the service clubs. T h e American Association of University W o m e n and the League of Women Voters were al-

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most universally considered strategically important affiliations. We found that women librarians are likely to be prominent in the Parent Teachers Association, which tends in many places to be a mothers' club. Women have, in general, an advantage in their direct contacts with the large library population of women and children. Many public libraries in our survey still think of themselves to some degree in the nineteenth-century formula of social welfare institutions. Their librarians, men and women, take seriously their relationship to moral and civic reform, and their club affiliations follow suit. Many of them take an active interest in YMCA or YWCA work and in other organizations of similar outlook. Community Councils of Social Service Agencies and Adult Education Councils, where they exist, are the natural preserve for librarians seeking community relationships. Where such correlating agencies do not function, the alert librarian, by his many memberships and his interest in all civic activities, may become the central liaison and his library the clearing house for civic activities. It is likely, from our information, that he will participate in the Community Chest drives, Red Cross work, Boy or Girl Scout activities, guidance clinics, the Urban League, inter-racial forums, and associations such as those organized to fight tuberculosis, infantile paralysis, and cancer. Many librarians in the sample belong to clubs encouraging gardening, poetry, art, music, or the theater, but these are usually joined for personal, as well as political, motives. A few join historical associations, mostly local in character, and fewer still join scientific societies. Aside from adult education affiliations, their ties with educational associations and teacher groups are few. We found that librarians have failed, by and large, to make the teachers of America feel that the library is an integral part of the community's educational system. Relatively few librarians in our survey have felt that their own active participation, or even

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membership, in teachers' groups and associations is part of the library's enlarged program. T h e extended list of activities categorized as worth while and library-connected has left librarians little time for an active social life. Few in our survey belong to the elite clubs or the country-club set. This is of little political importance, but the fact that librarians tend to occupy the social position of a local civil servant, not that of a college president or even of the leading members of a college faculty, is important. Most librarians in the sample cannot command that kind of prestige. Their profession has not in fact become a learned one. W e found that librarians have rarely joined forces with institutions of higher learning, made friends with college or university faculties, or taken advantage of the special skills and experience of faculties in such an important function as that of building a book collection. Graduate education in library schools has not yet broken down the barriers between public libraries and collegiate scholarship. Indeed, graduate education for librarians has so far reached only a few. Educationally speaking, with certain notable exceptions, the teaching level of the library curriculum and the promotional leadership of the librarian in our survey is similar to that of a broad vocational school. Librarians defend this level on the grounds that it reaches the masses and is politically profitable, but the political argument, as a long-range policy, is open to question, and the emphasis on easy reading for the masses begs the question of the library's purpose. T h e answer, that the public must be given what it wants, has been too readily accepted by librarians for them to command the public respect accorded to learning. In the equation of politics the policy chosen may well be a source of weakness, not of strength. Although this is one factor among many, the few libraries in our sample that have established alliance with higher learning seem to have profited by it politically as well as intellectually.

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Like other institutions which carry on a permanent function presumably "above the battle," the library has traditionally been neutral in partisan politics. Librarians have in general scrupulously maintained that neutrality. T h e sample discovered only one overt exception, a librarian serving as a Republican county committeewoman, an activity which was part of a most unusual pattern of services and relationships conducted with outstanding imagination and vitality. There is, however, a growing political awareness on the part of state libraries that has led them to make use of the party system. One of the most active state libraries and state associations has felt justified in supporting the party that is most favorable to its program, following the developing strategy of organized labor and certain other pressure groups. W e did not find this frank use of partisan means to obtain an impartial end employed to any extent in local politics, where party lines have been less meaningful and group organizations of greater significance. T h e pattern of numerous community contacts that is growing among chief librarians is heavily stressed by the branch and county librarians we interviewed. Here the emphasis has shifted from a staff that knows books to one that knows people. Within large libraries this tends to mean persons who can speak well to group meetings; in rural work, persons who are neighborly. T h e objective is to humanize the booklist, a reading stimulant of uncertain effect. All but the smallest libraries in our sample maintain some personal relationships with traditionally library-minded groups, the Parent Teacher Association, the women's clubs, the American Association of University Women, and study forums, and try to supplement their printed matter with commentary. Individual reader guidance may be of the very greatest educational importance, but from our survey such personal, somewhat tutorial, relations

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cannot now reach a sufficient body of people to be of immediate political importance. In library literature there is much emphasis upon neighborhood groups as the basis of branch community work. This looks well on paper, but in practice it is somewhat frustrated by the shifting of population. New York City, where the average length of residence in> some neighborhoods was for many years as short as eighteen months, may serve as an exaggerated example of the situation in many of the larger cities. In one city in our sample a branch that was particularly active while the population around it was Jewish had to be closed and moved away for economy's sake when within a few years its books were left standing on the shelves by another ethnic group. In circumstances such as these the branch librarian can with difficulty find group affiliations that are stable enough to build into the library service. Not only the reading habits but also the communal clubs, lodges, and churches have changed so that a new problem has been spelled out, only to become illegible as the neighborhood again changed its dialect. The sociological currents have been carefully charted by analysts, both commercial and academic, and the findings have been incorporated in city plans. As a group librarians in the sample pay close attention to these studies; a few of them are serving directly on the planning commissions. But the library's poverty, the cumbrous machinery of public appropriations, and the traditions clustered around it as an institution make it inevitable that library building should lag behind the moving centers and shifting character of city populations. This puts a premium on elasticity of architecture and staff organization and of the policy followed for group services. Some libraries have attempted to develop their own groups, known as the Friends of the Library. This does not appear to be a significant permanent development. Only five of the sample libraries had a "Friends" group organized or being de-

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veloped, and they were of varying effectiveness and purpose. One highly developed group has a distinguished board of trustees of its own and has been organized into central and branch divisions. It has launched film forums, panel discussions, literary teas for regional authors, recreational programs for children, and training classes for volunteer story-tellers. This is a group possessing a reputation for intellect and energy, actively interested in the library as a cultural institution. In one large city the Friends of the Library is incorporated; its membership is made up of the wealthy bibliophiles of the city organized for the express purpose of building up with gifts the research collections of the library. In the same city, however, a Friends organization of a branch was originally set up voluntarily by a local group to take proper advantage of their new building. With such wide variations in activities and purposes, few generalizations can be reasonably accurate, but the main difficulty in any Friends group will uniformly be to maintain a core of interest magnetic enough to hold it together. In general, therefore, the Friends of the Library tend to act effectively when an immediate issue is pressing, and then to atrophy or dissipate their energy in many directions. The most satisfactory method of building up library strength through effective community service appears from our survey to be with groups already in existence. Almost all libraries in the survey, as we have said, have some relationships with women's clubs and leisure-time study groups, usually made up of women members. These groups are likely to come to the library, even if it makes no effort to come to them, so the most secluded librarians find themselves suggesting reading matter, if not drawing up book lists and annotating them. In some libraries in the survey, active guidance is given to program building; one library even conducted a Program Planners' Institute. Many, especially in the large cities, have close relations with the multitudinous organizations connected

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with American family life, with parents' groups, especially those of preschool children, and with veterans' wives associations.1 In general, libraries in the sample wait for adult groups to come to them for assistance, but many active librarians we interviewed find this passive role unsatisfactory and organize their own adult education agencies, usually together with other institutions such as museums, film forums, foreign policy associations, and recreational organizations. T h e existence of a meeting hall in the library building greatly facilitates such activity. In some cities in our survey the library has taken the lead in such delicate questions as race relations and American isolationism, endangering the library's reputation for political neutrality but taking seriously its mission as an educator. The most recent library-centered program to be tried is the Great Books Program, prompted by educational leaders at the University of Chicago, headed by Chancellor Hutchins. It is currently the most active and proliferating attempt to use the library directly as a center of serious adult education. As a technique of library participation and leadership through concentration on serious literature this program is somewhat of a new departure. As with all such programs, its span of life in its present form may prove to be limited. Voluntary leisure-time formulas have on the record been beset by an incurable faddism, particularly when set in so rigid a mold. Libraries in the sample which are large enough to be departmentalized, have department heads who are often in close liaison with both lay and professional groups in their fields, that is, fine arts departments with music and sketching groups, literature with reading and writing groups. Our survey shows, however, that departments of philosophy and religion are not as successful in this as might be assumed. Many of our sample 'For the use of films in such group activities see Gloria Waldron, Information Film, New York, Columbia University Press, 1949.

The

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libraries serve church groups directly, and indirectly all take such a ubiquitous influence into consideration, but the church as an institution seems remote from the library world. This is especially true in large cities, but surprisingly evident also in small towns, where lay activities during the week run to church suppers and sewing bees. T h e r e are a few ministers on the library boards, and a few are reported to be heavy library borrowers and significant intellectual leaders. But strong church-library relationships, in the rare instances where they exist after the initial founding of the library, are usually library-inspired. At times the connection is unhappily the result of disagreement over books. In the past the immigrant laborer of this country was often served with books in his native language, and his gratitude to the library was a real political asset. This service still exists in our sample, but it is dwindling in importance as the foreignborn shrink in proportion and in absolute numbers and as they become absorbed in the acculturation process. W e have found no successor to this device for stimulating the workingman's interest in the library. Book lists and book collections are occasionally put into factories and department stores, but usually they have not proved popular. O f our sample not more than a half dozen libraries have made serious efforts to make the members of labor unions library users, and those that have are not encouraged by the results. W o r k e r education, as such, in this country is not highly organized, and information upon union activities and policy, which is the reading matter most encouraged, comes from union headquarters. T h e average laborer does not read much, and when he does, does not get his books from the library. W e found that his leaders do make use of the library for information on parliamentary procedure and how to run a labor meeting and as individuals for general reading, but this is not what is meant by "service to labor." T h e middle-class character of the library may tend to repel

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the laborer; his ignorance, his grammar, even his clothes may be psychological barriers from his point of view. Probably in a very large majority of cases the librarians are uneasily aware of these barriers and anxious to overcome them. But the public library still looks and feels a little like a rich man's collection opened to the public. Despite their best intentions, there were librarians in the sample who retained a custodial attitude toward their books and preferred to have them go into homes where they would be respected and cared for. This attitude found overt expression in a half dozen cases, scattered across the country, where librarians and trustees strongly justified high fees for nonresident borrowers on the grounds that poor people in the outlying regions gave the books such dreadfully hard use. In a majority of our sample, librarians have not themselves seriously considered direct service to labor unions, though actively searching for direct links to organized groups. One large city library has allowed experiments with service to factories and unions to become confused institutionally and ideologically with the unionization of its own staff; and library board and chief librarian maintain a hands-off coolness to the project. In several communities leaders of organized labor have frankly expressed appreciation for the good work being attempted by the librarian or certain members of the library staff, but are profoundly skeptical of the library boards. T h e conservative character of most library boards make librarians reluctant to open to labor groups the library assembly rooms so hospitably offered to women's clubs. Most librarians interviewed were unwilling to contemplate such a development. Some city libraries in the sample are developing bookmobile service to reach those who do not enter their buildings, but their light novels seem unlikely to replace the newsstand in labor's affections. This picture may change as labor becomes a more responsible power in the community, and as its leadership

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develops a more elaborate educational program. But at the present time in only a few cities do labor representatives defend library appropriations at the budget hearings. In part, the apparent failure to build library collections specifically directed to labor's needs results from the fact that what is useful to businessmen is also useful to labor. They are both in the same economic system, using the same tools. The public libraries in our sample are developing their business departments with the informational needs of our industrial and commercial economy directly in view. Their special collections contain business directories, commercial atlases, statistical analyses, current information services, corporation reports, and government documents containing data valuable to the business world. They maintain a clipping service to make information available. They develop their own subject catalogues and train their own staff to know what is asked for and where to get it. In other words these are large information centers, gathering in one place and processing the written material for the whole city's economic interests. The departments of science and technology are organized for a similar purpose. They are usually tied to the predominant industrial interests, although there are places where the department has given valuable reference aid to trade union research into matters such as general wage and price levels and standards of living. If the city is a great maker of glass, the collection of books on glass technology will be large; if the automobile industry is large, automotive engineering will be a key to library purchasing policy. This emphasis on a technical field is a direct service to that part of the city's economy which usually possesses great power. It runs the risk of narrowing the public utility of the library. The librarians point out, however, that business and technical services are so developed as to be of greater benefit to small businesses without the means to gather the information at their own expense than to

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large concerns that have special libraries of their own. The difficulty libraries face is in making small businessmen aware of the information they can get from the collection. There can be no doubt, from the testimony of department heads wherever consulted, that the presence of special libraries, privately owned and operated, increases the use of business and technological departments of public libraries. This follows from the greater familiarity with bibliographical resources and their benefits. It emphasizes the need for publicity. It also points up the advantages a department enjoys over the special isolated library, for the former can draw upon the wealth of the whole collection. As the wide extent of knowledge necessary to modern business practice becomes more and more evident, this advantage becomes more pronounced. It has also become clear from our research, however, that if the library were to be used with the utmost efficiency by the business and industrial community, its resources in both books and skilled staff would be quickly overtaxed. Realizing this, one library in the sample is voluntarily given a fee by a large neighboring industry that uses it heavily. Such an informal relationship is being formalized by another library. It is organizing for industry a bibliographical research service that will be supported by a yearly fee paid by the large, regular users, based upon a fraction of each company's over-all research spending, and by piece-rate charges for small, occasional users. T h e materials of the bibliographical research will be the property of the public library, but the research reports written up by the library's staff may be kept secret at the request of the purchaser. In this w a y it is hoped that the technical information necessary to industries can be made available at no increase in tax expense. It poses the question, however, of how much a public institution should organize its services for specialized private use. When another large public library submitted a similar plan to its business community, the

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Chamber of Commerce felt that the best solution lay in larger public appropriations and successfully helped bring the library's expanded budget through the year's tax hearings. Whatever method is used, the support given to libraries by satisfied business customers is a new political factor of importance, and librarians are nourishing it with much care. In our sample the organized services to business and industry have in general been more effectively worked out than services to local government. Municipal reference libraries have been established in many large cities, located in or near city hall and adapted to official use, but they have rarely done the job of publicity and staff training that has been done in the field of library service to business. City government represents only a small number of people, it is true, but it is these very people who determine the public library's budget. The city departments are substantially competitors for limited public revenue, and the city council is the arena for reconciling these fiscal demands. Yet several municipal reference libraries visited were dusty and dead; one was in fact justified to us mainly as a useful listening post for city hall gossip. Small city and town public libraries have for the most part not yet explored the possibility of direct service to government. In sharp and revealing contrast is one state where the governor, who as a mayor had been well served by a municipal reference library, vigorously supported the establishment of the state library extension service, urged on, be it noted, by his former municipal reference librarian, now in the role of state library association lobbyist. $uch a pat sequence of events is surely not always to be relied upon, but there is evidence in our sample to suggest that where the officers of government use the library it gains in political power. One part of the government that seems most universally unaware of the library aids available for its job is the city council. An alert city government will take advantage of the business and technology depart-

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ments, but an alert librarian eases the politician's way to the library. In rural library service the relationships are different. The need for technical information is met in large part by the county agents of the Department of Agriculture. What the farmer wants is up-to-the-minute market analyses and scientific information of immediate practical use; this the federal and state agricultural agencies are set up to give him. The farmer, in consequence, does not stand in need of the library for business purposes, but for broader informational reading, should he wish it, he is often greatly handicapped. The county agent's offices are lined with filing cabinets, not bookshelves. The natural division of information between the agricultural agency and the rural library should make the connection a close one, but such is not usually the case. County librarians in our survey, with few exceptions, have failed to establish close liaison with the agricultural and social service agencies around them. The most frequent co-operative effort found was between the county library and the Home Demonstration Agency, which merely continues the modest success the rural library service has had in reaching farm women, and has not made possible a substantial relation between library and farm in terms of vocational need. One state library is emphasizing rural sociological surveys, sponsored by many agencies, not wholly because of the new information disclosed, but also because such a common project discovers to these rural service workers the existence of each other. Serving a scattered population as the rural library does, it faces this basic problem, that there are few groups to work with and that individual or family service is expensive. The most useful agency for county library service has been the rural school system. From their beginning and in their present activities the county libraries in our sample have a close and continuous relationship with the schools. It would

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be safe to say that by and large throughout the country supplementary reading for rural elementary school children comes from the public library. This is changing, as state aid for library books is encouraging schools to stock supplementary reading at no increase in local costs. T h e urban elementary school picture is not very different, in spite of the greater urban emphasis on school libraries; for their development, with the whole weight of educational theory behind them, has none the less been slow. It is clear that the school library movement owes much to public library encouragement. Public libraries pioneered in children's service and have expanded it into school service. But the evidence of our survey seems unmistakable that as the educational administrators expand and elaborate their school library system, they will tend to take it into their o w n organization, divorcing it from the public library for administrative reasons, if for no other. There is only one instance in our sample in which the public library has developed an extensive school library system in close co-operation with the school authorities. Elsewhere, as the usual situation, we find the public library filling in haphazardly with classroom collections where high school and junior high school libraries leave off. T h e co-operation between schools and libraries varies from place to place, and in our sample there is no correlation with the institutional framework. There is no evidence to show that school district libraries, school board libraries, or libraries with ex officio school board members co-ordinate school and public library policies better than do independent systems. It is a safe generalization that closest relationships are established at the local level, informally and spontaneously, between branch and children's librarians of the public library and school librarians and teachers. Administrative common sense at local levels often brings about co-operation without even the knowledge of the senior administrative officers or boards concerned. In

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few cases is there a feeling shared by librarians and educators that they are working in a common cause. In some cases the schoolmen are happy to have the public library take over what library service the schools offer; in more cases the librarians are glad to give the schoolmen the administrative headaches and expense of their own libraries. Yet in only ten out of fifty libraries is no school service whatsoever given by the public library. T h e ties between the public library and the schools appear in most cases to be tenuous and uncertain. Schools and libraries would seem to have much in common, but on the political scene the two institutions tend to go their own way and, directly or indirectly, compete for the tax dollar. In this competition the library is at a disadvantage, for it is clearly the junior partner in the local educational firm. T h e library board and the Friends of the Library are not equal in political power to the elective school board and the Parent Teacher Associations. Overshadowed as they are in any common program, librarians tend to seek their own little place in the sun apart from formal education, and the educators are often unaware of the institution in their shadow. T h e presence of school members on library boards, as has been said, does not seem to establish a working arrangement. In some libraries volunteer groups are fitted successfully into the work of the library. In one, the Junior League sponsors radio programs and listening groups for story records and also puts on a weekly puppet show; the Council of Jewish Women provides volunteer story-tellers for children's hours and administers a service to shut-ins. Another library uses the Junior League for its service to hospitals, the library choosing the books, the Junior League buying and distributing them. Expensive service to needy cases seems to offer the greatest inducement for both financial and other voluntary aid. In one library the service to shut-ins is endowed; in another it has been financed in part by the Lions Club. Such voluntary

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participation not only saves the library money but also ties an influential philanthropic group into the library in a service relationship. T h e affiliation of active participation is the most durable means of encouraging voluntary leisure-time groups. T h i s relationship m a y extend far beyond the local library f r a m e w o r k into the state and national picture, f o r such organizations as the Lions Club, the Federation of W o m e n ' s Clubs, and the R e d Cross are large and p o w e r f u l politically. T h e American L i b r a r y Association was able to get lobbyists from the General Federation of W o m e n ' s Clubs, the National Grange, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the National Farmers' Union, and the Associated W o m e n of the American Farm Bureau Federation to testify in 1947 for its Federal demonstration bill. W h a t little force, besides lobbying routine, they put behind their action was the result of local library group affiliation. T h i s minor ripple in the Washington stream of p o w e r may become quite a current in state politics, where women's clubs and farm organizations add voting strength to the library lobby. T h e research findings raise the question w h e t h e r the technique of volunteer participation in library service could not be explored more w i d e l y . T h e example of hospitals is highly suggestive. It is difficult, and therefore rare, for local public libraries to make contact w i t h Federal agencies in such a w a y as to provide a national service. During the w a r libraries turned to organizing reading materials f o r war information agencies, defense plants, and the armed services. T h e y did not repeat their W o r l d W a r I performance of providing libraries to the armed services; this was carried out directly b y Federal agencies. But they did co-operate in every w a y they could devise with all activities that could be related to their resources and services. Public libraries explored with great energy and enthusiasm the American Library Association's idea of becoming the cen-

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tral agency of morale and internal ideological defense, as well as the more direct service toward refurbishing skills, become rusty during the Great Depression. The library's impact on the community was deflected by the tremendous pace set by the industrial and military facts of modern total warfare. Perhaps the most successful integration of public library with war effort was achieved where the library building and staff became involved in the direct administration of civilian defense. Never put to the test of war at home, even this left the library pretty much on the periphery of the wartime lives of the community, and the liaison between public library and Federal Government remained tenuous. Since the war, libraries have placed great emphasis on vocational and educational guidance for the returning veteran, co-operating where possible with the Veterans' Administration. In all these activities, however, their affiliations with government departments really doing the job are sketchy and informal. In our survey this is especially evident in their aloofness from the field agencies of the Federal Government. All these activities—group relationships, service to clubs, business and industrial departments, school affiliation, and liaisons with government agencies—would seem to add up to a widespread community influence resulting in considerable political power. But actually normal library influence amounts to little more than a surface chop running against the ground swell of public apathy. The opposition the library must face is not an active, directed campaign against it, but the general public unwillingness to tax itself for a service of which it makes limited use. Such organized opposition as there is, finds expression in taxpayers' associations, usually dominated by the large property owners, such as real estate interests; in an indirect way they can hold the fate of the library in their hands. They are not hostile to the library as such, but to taxes, and more especially to taxes, and directly to expenditures, that are not backed by a vigorous, organized vocal group.

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Libraries usually depend upon the property tax. They must attempt to gain by diplomacy what they have not the political power to gain by attack. Here library board affiliation with large property holders has sometimes softened the opposition. In one city library, where the state votes the property tax, the state legislature tends to vote any increase the city taxpayers' association is willing to impose on its members. The chairman of the library board, an influential businessman, had a prominent role in getting his friends to accept a tax rate increase this year. In some communities the Chamber of Commerce is approached as a taxpayers' association and placated as much as possible prior to tax hearings. In several cases we have found that the public library could successfully parry the thrusts of real estate lobbies by choosing a library trustee of high economic standing who was a large taxpayer of the community yet a warm supporter of library service. In one small town in a rural county the local manager of a very large absentee-owned corporation was able to play this role to perfection; for as observed by the librarian, it was not he, but the corporation, that paid the taxes, and he and his family enjoyed the books. But to match this case there are many in which the carefully chosen businessmen trustees have in practice thought in terms of taxes rather than in terms of public services rendered. In one respect, and only one respect, public indifference is an advantage to the library: when people ignore what is on the bookshelves, they are not acutely concerned over book selection. Yet, historically there is inevitably tension and censorship of a kind established in every society that has put much faith in reading; witness the Puritans in this country. The business department of one library, hoping to be of service, approached the Small Business Men's Association with a description of its usefulness. After much prodding, the association sent an envoy to the library to reconnoitre. He came back

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to report that he had uncovered a Communist outpost, bristling with radical, New Deal books, a threat to the American way of life. It was a small blast, and the library came through it unscathed, but it left the business librarian rather shaken about the value of stirring up the attention of his potential clientele, and he was completely confused about where to turn next. It is odd examples such as this, found occasionally in the sample, that indicate a deep-grained distrust of reading accompanying the apparent approval of it. This must be taken into account, as well as the open censorship attempted by church and patriotic groups. Most librarians do, in fact, exercise constant vigilance in book selection. The censorship of library holdings does not often become a public issue, largely because it is an intramural activity. As a member himself of the white collar middle class that uses his library, the librarian has a green thumb for cultivating those books that will be popular and an equal knack for weeding out what will be considered dangerous. Most libraries effect a compromise between the extremes of removing entirely from the library books subject to criticism and on the other hand boldly displaying books which they believe are unjustly challenged. They do this by removing the questionable book from the open shelves, sometimes from the card catalogue, but retaining it on a private shelf in the librarian's office, to be handed out to the hardy customer who inquires for it, provided he is beyond the tender years of adolescence. Many librarians in our sample are ruthless in their own censorship, often unconsciously so, because they feel certain that they act as the library public would have them act. Book selection becomes inevitably a question of political judgment; it is not just a technical problem. In this most librarians, in following their own predispositions, are better politicians than they may realize. One of the first research methods attempted in this study of

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the matrix of political forces within which the public library must operate was directed precisely at the issues of censorship. It was thought that, at the very least, book selection and censorship policies would give valuable leads to the interest groups in the community who were actively concerned, negatively and positively, with public library service. It soon became apparent, however, that while librarians were in general extremely insistent upon the stereotypes of democratic freedom of expression and diversity of opinion, they were inclined to count with close attention the political costs of asserting these democratic rights in their own institutions. There were very few cases of public criticism of library holdings and still fewer in which organized groups had gone on record with regard to books. It also became apparent that the reason lay in the caution of the librarian rather than in the tolerance of the community. It is further important to note that librarians have reconciled democratic ideals with political practice by a general practice of minimizing to themselves the extent to which the issue arises and also by stressing that they are interpreting, as they properly must, the mandate of policy established by the library board. At least three librarians interviewed had so far suppressed the issue in their own conscious thinking that they could, with every evidence of honesty, assert that there was absolutely no censorship of any kind in their libraries, only for us to find that in fact the staff were following careful guide lines in book selection and, more important, had large bookcases full of books under lock and key that had been subject to public criticism. At the other extreme were those so constantly aware of the pressure of organized groups that they lived under very great emotional strain. One librarian had transferred the idea of limiting the overfrank book on sex to the much less relevant field of social reform, and would circulate "radical" books only to those who appeared substantially uninterested

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in radical change or who could be counted on to oppose "dangerous thoughts." A very few librarians interviewed regarded the issue with serious dread not untinged with hysteria, and in these cases there were circumstances that related their attitudes to particular situations on the board of trustees rather than to overt pressures from the community. The research was unsuccessful, therefore, in its original objective of illuminating the group politics of library government by means of censorship issues. Politically significant uniformities did develop, however. The three great issues everywhere were sex, religion, and politico-economic change, the order of priority varying with the community, but moving up or down in intensity more or less together. Only the very largest libraries seriously attempted to resist all pressure and to select books on their merits alone. All libraries have inevitably political decisions to make in controlling the circulation of books subject to criticism. The psychological convenience of never facing squarely the conflict of abstract ideals and local reality has left under lock and key books whose sting has passed, of which the most commonly noted were All Quiet on the Western Front and Grapes of Wrath. The degree to which forgetfulness was encouraged to heal the irritations of past "mistakes" was strikingly revealed by the inability of librarians and staffs to recall what books were under lock and key, the inability to recall who in the community had ever objected to these books, and the genuine surprise with which librarians discovered what books had been sequestered. Undoubtedly many libraries need periodically to purge the purged and restore the shocking to the shelves of modern classics. The politics of book selection is, therefore, a real enough part of library politics. But it is essentially a negative part, and confused by a good deal of rationalist idealism in conflict with practice. Yet there have been cases of courageous positive

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action. In the South our sample noted libraries prominently displaying a very full selection of social studies on race relations, books highly critical in their premises toward the prevailing social relations of Southern communities. There have been libraries that deliberately undertook through promotional devices to counteract prejudice and violent outbreaks of group conflict in their local communities. Evidence is not available to measure the political results in the long run of such library experiments with constructive education. It may be supposed that on the whole colleges and universities have strengthened their position, despite many temporary setbacks, through a firm policy of resisting the more narrow types of censorship. The libraries have on the whole stood out strongly for intellectual freedom as a principle, but in the group politics of their localities they have played safe with the safe groups. Although the library has no natural enemies, it suffers concurrently from the fact that it has no natural political allies. In a political system where governmental action follows the main stream of pressure from producer groups, as it does in the United States, the library, serving a minority of individual consumers, floats along helplessly. In this it is not different from many institutions representing consumers. Consumer groups as a usual thing benefit only incidentally and individually as rival producer groups struggle for political power. They are not organized economically, impelled emotionally, or united politically in such a way as to .form a group that can join battle with the producers. Consumers must play balance-of-power politics, making temporary alliances with whatever forces are most favorable to their interests. Because producer groups are the great political rivals in our political system, the new alliance developing between libraries and big business research carries much significance. Here the library may have found an ally

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Women's

INDEX Joeckel, Carleton Brans (Cont.) Service, 241; A National Plan for Public Library Service, 242 Joeckel, Carleton Bruns, and Leon Camovsky, A Metropolitan Library in Action, 69, 242 Joeckel, Carleton Bruns, ed., Current Issues in Library Administration, 242; Library Extension, Problems and Solutions, 242 Johnson, Alvin, 43 Junior League, 128 Ketcham, Ronald M , Integration of Public Library Services m the Los Angeles Area, 242 Kiwanis clubs, 114 Labor, lack of interest in libraries, 34 Labor unions, 121 if. Lawrence, Abbot, 28 League of Women Voters, 114 Learned, William S., The American Public Library and the Diffusion of Knowledge, 143, 243 Lebanon, Connecticut, Philogrammatican Library, 15 Librarians, 203; social status of, xvii, 116; professional, rise of, 43; gain in power, jo; relationship with trustees, 79; nonprofessional vs. professional, 81; passivity, 81 f.; ruses for avoiding interference of trustees, 83; trustees' failure to remove, 84; removal by trustees, 8$; methods of recruiting by trustees, 86 f.; status of, 101; influence on trustees, 102; influence upon trustees, 106 f.; understanding of the administrative process requisite, 109; as joiners, 113 f.; as political strategists, 113; as club members, 114 f.; civic activities of, 115; social life, 116; partisan politics avoided by, 117; department heads and their community activities, 120; attitudes toward censorship, 133 f.; role of, 144; disillusionment of,

148; certification, 192, 216, 220, 231; salaries, 206; as administrators, 206 f , 231; attitude toward the Government, 238; desirable characteristics, 239 Librarians, dependent, see Librarians, passivity Librarians, women: distrust of politics, 89; discriminated against by A L A headquarters staff, 171 Libraries, branch, see Branch libraries Libraries, circulating, see Circulating libraries Libraries, county, see County libraries Libraries, parochial, see Parochial libraries Libraries, proprietary, see Proprietary libraries Libraries, research, see Research libraries Libraries, school, see School libraries Libraries, school-district, see Schooldistrict libraries Libraries, social, see Social libraries Libraries, society, see Society libraries Libraries, subscription, see Subscription libraries Libraries, traveling, see Traveling libraries Library appointments, use as political patronage, 86 Library associations, 45 Library boards, see Trustees, boards of Library clubs, 49 Library commissions, see State library commissions Library conferences, 44 Library demonstration bill, 237 Library extension (state), 214 if. Library Extension, Problems and Solutions (Joeckel, ed.), 242 Library faith, 50 f., 148 Library government: foundations of, 3 if.; alternative types, 91 S.

INDEX Library in the Community, The (Carnovsky and Martin, eds.), 241 Library Journal, 44 Library of Congress, see U.S., Library of Congress Library of Tomorrow, The (Danton, ed.), 243 Library schools, 46 Library Service (Joeckel), 242 Library Service m a Suburban Area (Wight and Carnovsky), 242 Library Trends (Wilson, ed.), 242 Library Trustee, The (Hall), 243 Library's Public, The (Berelson), '37

Liken, Rensis, The Public Library and the People, 137 Lions clubs, 114, 128, 129 Lobby, Federal, see Federal lobby Localism, 202 f. Locke, John, 11, 12 Lord, Milton E., 189 McClure, William, 28 MacLeish, Archibald, 182; quoted, 141 f. Mann, Horace, 19, 24, 25 Marcus, William E., quoted, 68 Marcus, William E., jt. auth., Portrait of a Library, 243 Martin, Lowell, jt. auth., The Library in the Community, 242; Public Administration and the Library, 242 Maryland: parochial libraries, 6; site of first county library, 40 Massachusetts: libraries in 1840, 19; school district libraries, 25; Library field offices, 223 Mechanics institutes, 21 Members, board, see Trustees Merchants clubs, 114 Metropolitan areas, needs of, 229 Metropolitan Library in Action, A (Joeckel and Carnovsky), 69, 242 Middle Atlantic colonies, cosmopolitan society in, 9 f. Milam, Carl, 168, 170

251 Miles, Arnold, and Lowell Martin, Public Administration and the Library, 242 Ministerial Library (Peterborough), V Missouri, State Library, 225 Moral uplift, a motive in library development, 34 Multi-county units, see Regional libraries Municipal reference libraries, 125 Munthe, Wilhelm, American Librarianship from a European Angle, 241 National Association of State Libraries, refusal to affiliate with ALA, 161 National Congress of Parents and Teachers, 129 National Fanners' Union, 129 National Grange, 129 National Plan for Public Library Service (Joeckel), 242 National research network, 235 Neighborhood groups, 118 New England: compulsory education in the seventeenth century, 6; early libraries in, 6; changing characteristics of, 8; homogeneity, 9; urban growth, 9-, libraries in, 17901815, 16; early public libraries in. New Mexico, Library Commission, field offices, 226 Newport, RJ., Library and Philosophical Society, 15 f. Newton, Isaac, Principia, 10 New York (state): law for tax-supported libraries in the school districts, 24 f.; school district libraries, 25; County Boards for Library Development (proposed), 225; regional service centers, 204 f.; Reional Demonstration Office, 225; .egional Library Development Boards (proposed), 225; regional union catalogue, 225

f

INDEX New York Society Library, 20 Novels, see Fiction Parent Teachers Association, 93, 115, "7

Parochial libraries, in Maryland, 6 "Partisan" vs. "political," 101 Partisan politics, avoided by librarians, 117 Personal interviews, see Interviews Peterborough, New Hampshire, Ministerial Library, 27 Peterborough, New Hampshire, Tree Society, 27 Peterborough Academy, 27 Peterborough Library Company, 27 Peterborough Lyceum, 27 Philanthropy: in the public library movement, 28, 33 f.; effect on libraries, 46 Philogrammatican Library of Lebanon, Connecticut, 15 Political patronage, library appointments used as, 86 Political potentials, see Public libraries, political potentials Political power groups, 111 ff. Political process, its analysis for this report, xvi "Political" vs. "partisan," 101 Politico-economic change, 134 Politics: boards of trustees buffers against, 54; and the public library, 88; see also Practical politics Politics, partisan, see Partisan politics Portrait of a Library (Quigley and Marcus), 243 Power groups, see Political power groups Practical politics, library faith in, Pressure politics, 199 f.; its analysis for this report, xvii Professional associations, see Associations, professional Program Planners' Institute, 119 Promotion, 49 Promotional grants, 214 Property tax, 131

Proprietary libraries, 17 Public Administration and the Library (Miles and Maftin), 242 Publicity, 49 Public libraries: beginnings of, 22 ff.; auditing of, 8j; as departments of local government, 95; business departments, 123 f.; departments of science and technology, 123; bibliographical research service, 124-, administration of, 204 Public Libraries of iSso, Report on (Jewett), 23 Public libraries: general survey of the history of, 3 ff.; growth of, 38 ff; freedom from partisan politics, 63; politics, 88; political potentials, 1 1 1 ; group affiliations, 111 ff.; department heads, 120; service to schools, 127 f.; co-operation with the Federal Government, 129 f.; war effort, 129; relation to business research, 135 f.; clientele, 137; requisite for democracy and education, 143; confused objectives and lowered standards of, 145; special issues, 145; as information centers, 146; political potentials, 149 ff.; importance of current issues in, 150; service to public administrators, IJO; efficiency needed in, i j i ; war effort, 183; units of, 201 ff.; localism, 202 f.; size, 205 f. Public libraries, Federal aid to, see Federal aid to Public libraries Public Library Inquiry, field work, xv Public Library Inquiry sample, composition of, xx ft.; list of libraries, 244 ff. Puritans, 4 Quigley, Margery C., and William E. Marcus, Portrait of a Library, 2

43

Quincy, Josiah, 20; quoted, 33 Race relations, social studies played in the South, 135

dis-

INDEX Reader guidance, politically unimportant, 117 f. Reading: in seventeenth-century New England, 4 if.; distrust of, 132 Red Cross, see American Red Cross Redwood, Abraham, 16 Redwood Library, Newport, R.I n 16, >7

Regional associations, 174 Regional libraries, 211 S. Regional offices, ree State libraries, regional offices Religion, a censorship issue, 134 Religious learning, in the seventeenth century, 4 Research, methods used for this report, xv Research libraries, 46 f. Rockefeller Foundation, endowment funds to A L A , 153 Rotary clubs, 114 Rothrock, Mary U., 188 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 12 Rural schools, as county library service agencies, 126 f. Rural sociological surveys, 126 Salisbury, Connecticut, library, 27 Sample, The, see Public Library Inquiry sample Savage, Ernest A , The Librarian and His Committee, 243 School boards, 57; trustees appointed by, 92 ; control of libraries, 93 f., 100 School district libraries, 24; in Massachusetts, 2j; New York (state), School libraries, 25; relation to public libraries, i27f. Schools, library, see Library schools Schools, rural, see Rural schools Science and technology, departments of, 123 Service clubs, 113 Sex, a censorship issue, 134 Shera, Jesse H., Foundations of the Public Library, 241 Sherman, Clarence E., 69

253 Silliman, Benjamin, 26 Slogans, 49 Social libraries, 16 ff. Social status system, library's place in, xvii Society for die Propagation of the Gospel, 6f. Society libraries, 14 ff. Sociological surveys, rural, 126 South, The, social conditions in, 36 f. Spanish Literature, History of (Ticlmor), 30 Spaulding, Forrest, 179 Spencer, Gwladys, The Chicago Public Library, 241 State agencies, see State libraries State aid, see Grants-in-aid (state) State appropriations, for libraries, 39 State certification of librarians, see Certification (state) State libraries, 2i4ff.; placement service, 216; demonstration projects, 217; field work, 219, 221 ff.; regional offices, 226 ff.; personnel, 231, 236; field offices, 239; lists of those in the Public Library Inquiry sample, 245 f. State library associations, 169 ff., 195 State library commissions, 39 States, as library promoters, 214 ff.; relation of local libraries to, 218 ff. State universities, 24 Statistical measures, 1-36 f. Study forums, 117 Study groups, 113, 119 Subscription libraries, 17 Summer institutes, 215 Sunday school libraries, 34 Taxpayers' associations, 130 f. Tax-supported libraries, New York (state) law for, 24 f. Teachers, recommended as trustees, 105 Technology, departments of, 123 Ticknor, George, 26, 29 f.; History of Spanish Literature, 30 Traveling libraries, 40, 214 f. Tree Society (Peterborough), 27

2

INDEX

54

Trustee and His Library, The ( A L A ) , yo Trustees, j8 ff.; selection of, 62 f.; suitable characteristics, 64 f.; harmony among, 66i.\ attendance at meetings, 77; relationship with librarians, 79; responsibility for librarians, 84; selection by librarians, 87; A L A ' s doctrine about, 89; terms of office, 97; tenure, 99 f.; characteristics of, 100 ff.; methods of appointment, 100 ff.; motives, 78 Trustees, Boards of, 49, 50, 53 ff., 96 if.; social status, rvii; origin, 32; as critics, $$; institutional characteristics of, 55 ff.; elective, 57; work of, 70 ff.; standing committees, 75 f.; chairmen, 77?.; personnel committees, 85; Public Library Inquiry's conclusions about, 90; weaknesses of, 90 f.; appointment by school boards, 92, 100; frequency of meetings, 98 f.; size, 98; committees, 99; desirability of diversity in, 102 ff.; functions, 106 ff. Union catalogues, 224, 234 U.S. Government: "deposit fund" 24; aid to public libraries, 234 United States, Department of Agriculture: county agents, 126; Home Demonstration Agency, 126 United States, Library Demonstration bill, 186 United States, Library of Congress, 182, 232 ff. United States, National Resources Planning Board, 180 United States, N Y A, 181, 232 United States, Office of Education, 191; Service to Libraries Section,

178, 182; Library Service Division, »37 United States, President's Advisory Committee on Education, 179 United States, P W A , 232 United States, Tennessee Valley Authority, 232 United States, W P A , 181, 232 Urban league, 115 Utley, George Burwell, 168 Vattemare, Nicolas Marie Alexandre, 28 Vermont: library field offices, 223; state-wide union catalogue, 224 Visiting committees, see Advisory committees Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, II Volunteer groups, 128 Watts, Isaac, 15 Wight, Edwin A , and Leon Carnovsky, Library Service in a Suburban Area, 242 Wilson, Louis Round: Geography of Reading, 233, 242 Wilson, Louis Round, ed., Library Trends, 242 Wisconsin, State Library, 225 Women, influence on libraries, 3J Women librarians, see Librarians, women Women's clubs, 114, 117, 119 Wood, William, 28 World W a r I, libraries for armed services, 129 Young Men's Christian Association, "5

THE FOLLOWING VOLUMES IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY INQUIRY SERIES ARE PUBLISHED BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

PRESS.

Leigh, Robert D , The Public Library in the United States. Tne general report of the Inquiry, by its director. Berelson, Bernard, The Library's Public. Bryan, Alice I., The Public Librarian. Garceau, Oliver, The Public Library in the Political Process. McCamy, James L., Government Publications for the Citizen. Miller, William, The Book Industry. Waldron, Gloria, The Information Film.

THE FOLLOWING MIMEOGRAPHED REPORTS TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE INQUIRY M A Y BE PURCHASED FROM THE AGENCIES INDICATED.

Armstrong, Charles M , "Money for Libraries; a report on library finance." New York (230 Park Avenue), Social Science Research Council. Klapper, Joseph T., "Effects of Mass Media." N e w York (15 Amsterdam Avenue), Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. Luening, Otto, "Music Materials and the Public Library; an analysis of the role of the public library in the field of music." New York (230 Park Avenue), Social Science Research Council. Pierce, Watson O'D., "Work Measurement in Public Libraries." New York (230 Park Avenue), Social Science Research Council. "Public Library and the People, The; a national survey done for the Public Library Inquiry." Ann Arbor, Michigan, Survey Research Center, the University of Michigan.