One cathedral more or "Mere lounging places for bummers"? The cultural politics of leisure and the public library in gilded age America

Libraries and the Cultural Record

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 169-188

  McCrossen, Alexis ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949623243     PISSN: 19324855     EISSN: 19329555     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lac.2006.0027     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. W. E. Foster, "Methods of Securing the Interest of a Community," Library Journal 5 (September-October 1880): 246.
2. "Report of the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston," city document no. 37, July 1852 (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1852), 15.
3. Charles H. Eaton, "The Ideal Sunday," North American Review (September 1891): 327;
4. S. C. Hallowell, quoted in Henry Ward Beecher, Libraries and Public Reading Rooms: Should They Be Open on Sunday? (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1872), 19.
5. Dee Garrison explained nearly a quarter of a century ago that "the building of public libraries was motivated by a fear of egalitarianism and upheaval from below as much as by a desire for democratic extension of education" (Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 [New York: Free Press, 1979], xiii).
6. Carlos Martyn, The American Sunday, the Museums and Libraries, the Public Press, and the Half-Saturday Holiday (New York: Martin B. Brown, 1886), 17.
7. Concerning the relationship between work, rest, and leisure see Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2000).
8. See also Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
9. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion and the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
10. Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).
11. There is no single reference book tracing the development of mass culture in the United States, although David Nasaw's Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993) is a good elementary introduction.
12. A strong literature about professional baseball, Coney Island, and P. T. Barnum partially makes up for this. See especially James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001);
13. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973);
14. and Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
15. There is a vast literature about the development of institutions central to the consumer culture; the best place to begin is William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
16. About public libraries' acquisition policies see Dee Garrison, "Immoral Fictions in the Late Victorian Library," American Quarterly 28 (1976): 261-66;
17. Charles Johanningsmeier, "Welcome Guests or Representatives of the 'Mai-Odorous Class'?: Periodicals and Their Readers in American Public Libraries, 1876-1914," Libraries & Culture 39, no. 3 (Summer 2004) : 260-92;
18. Esther Jane Carrier, Fiction in Public Libraries, 1900-7950 (Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1985).
19. Rosemary Ruhig DuMont, Reform and Reaction: The Big City Public Library in American Life (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 72-75.
20. Elizabeth A. Stone, American Library Development, 1600-1899 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1977), 165.
21. DuMont, Reform and Reaction, 72-75.
22. Sidney H. Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture: A Social History of the American Public Library Movement in New England and the Middle States from 1850 to 1900 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947), 119;
23. Barry W. Seaver, "Rebecca Browning Rankin Uses Radio to Promote the Municipal Reference Library of the City of New York and the Civic Education of Its Citizens," Libraries & Culture 36, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 289-328.
24. For foundational works on this theme see also David W. Davies, Public Libraries as Culture and Social Centers: The Origins of the Concept (Metuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow Press, 1974);
25. Michael H. Harris, The Role of the Public Library in American Life: A Speculative Essay, Graduate School of Library Science, Occasional Paper no. 117 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975);
26. Kenneth C. Carpenter, Readers & Libraries: Toward a History of Libraries and Culture in America (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1996).
27. Ernestine Rose, The Public Library in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 217;
28. Harriet G. Long, Public Library Service to Children: Foundation and Development (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1969);
29. Jacalyn Eddy, '"We Have Become Too Tender-Hearted': The Language of Gender in the Public Library, 1880-1920," American Studies 42 (Fall 2001): 163-65.
30. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 89-123.
31. William Foster in Library Journal (1904), quoted by Carrier, Fiction in Public Libraries, 34.
32. Wayne A. Wiegand, The Politics of an Emerging Profession: The American Library Association, 1876-1912 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 10.
33. Emil Hirsch, quoted in Chicago Public Library Annual Report (1897), 44. As did corporations during this period, the public library sought a monopoly.
34. Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 213-27;
35. Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), 285.
36. Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture; Augst, "Introduction: American Libraries and American Culture," 9.
37. I am. largely indebted to David D. Hall's work on print culture for this insight. See his essays in Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996)
38. Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
39. David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
40. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
41. See David D. Hall's review "A World Turned Upside Down?" Reviews in American History 18 (March 1990): 10-14. The emergence of the distinction between "high" and "low" culture has come under attack as exaggerated; nevertheless, it is clear that venues for learned culture have typically been set apart from market forces (museums, opera houses, libraries) since the middle of the nineteenth century.
42. Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
43. Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
44. Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
45. Garrison, Apostles of Culture, xiv.
46. On "middlebrow culture" see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
47. Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 99.
48. Foster, "Methods," 246. About fiction and censorship in public libraries during the Gilded Age see Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture, 180-89;
49. Evelyn Geller, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876-1939: A Study in Cultural Change (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 29-67.
50. "Fiction in the Public Libraries," Library Journal 10 (November 1884): 193, italics in original.
51. Quotation from editorial, Library Journal 9 (December 1884): 207.
52. "Whether Periodicals Should Circulate as Books," Library Journal (March 1907): 102.
53. In 1889 a new reading room opened with increased seating capacity, superior sanitary conditions, and better lighting. Attendance doubled, and any disparaging references to vagrants and tramps did not make their way into the library's annual reports again (Chicago Public Library Seventeenth Annual Report [1889], 27).
54. Johanningsmeier, "Welcome Guests."
55. Samuel Swett Green quotes Cincinnati's public librarian, Thomas Vickers, in The Public Library Movement in the United States, 1853-1893 (Boston: Boston Book Co., 1913), 314.
56. Abigail A. Van Slyck, "The Lady and the Library Loafer: Gender and Public Sphere in Victorian America," Winterthur Portfolio 31 (Winter 1996): 236;
57. Johanningsmeier, "Welcome Guests," 267.
58. The annual reports of public libraries nationwide detail the proliferation of ladies' and children's reading rooms, and those from the South testify to the racial segregation of space within that region's public libraries. For secondary studies about these phenomena see Toby Graham Patterson, A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900-1965 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002);
59. Van Slyck, "Appendix: American Public Libraries with Ladies' Reading Rooms," in "The Lady and the Library Loafer," 242;
60. Long, Public Library Service to Children;
61. A. Robert Rogers, "Library Buildings," in Sidney L. Jackson et al., eds., A Century of Library Service: Librarianship in the U.S. and Canada (Chicago: American Library Association, 1976), 221-42.
62. Ditzion, Arsenals of Democratic Culture, 174-76.
63. Worcester Free Public Library Nineteenth Annual Report (1878), 16.
64. Budd L. Gambee and Ruth R. Gambee, "Reference Services and Technology," in Jackson et al., A Century of Library Service, 172.
65. William F. Poole, "Small Library Buildings," Library Journal 10 (December 1885): 255.
66. Public librarians still face these dilemmas. According to the courts in the 1990s, "access to the public library by any one is a limited right." According to the decision rendered in Kreimer v. Bureau of Police for the Town of Morristown et al. 958 F 2d 1242 (Third Circuit, 1992), "the public library is a limited or designated public forum where constitutional protection is afforded only to activities consistent with the nature of a library." Quoted in Katherine Malmquist, "Legal Issues Regarding Library Patrons," in Patron Behavior in Libraries: A Handbook of Positive Approaches to Negative Situations (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), 95-96.
67. The noisy patron is engagingly explored by Ari Kelman, "The Sound of the Civic: Reading Noise at the New York Public Library," American Studies 42 (Fall 2001): 25-37.
68. The "civilizing function" is discussed by Augst, "Introduction: American Libraries and American Culture," 10.
69. Franklin, "Service to the Urban Rank and File," 3.
70. The "Duncan Clothes Case" is also discussed in Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture, 123.
71. Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life.
72. Van Slyck, Free to All;
73. Curtis Miner, "The 'Deserted Parthenon': Class, Culture and the Carnegie Library of Homestead, 1898-1937," Pennsylvania History 57 (April 1990): 107-35.
74. William Poole, "Proceedings of Buffalo Conference," Library Journal 8 (August 1883): 270-71.
75. Editor's notes, Library Journal 13 (July 1888): 203.
76. About "sacralization" see Richard W. Fox, "The Discipline of Amusement," in William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (New York: Russell Sage, 1991);
77. Richard W. Fox, "The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875-1925," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 639-60;
78. Jean-Christophe Agnew, "Times Square: Secularization and Sacralization," in Taylor, Inventing Times Square.
79. Rev. Dr. Pullman of New York quoted in Library Journal 7 (March 1882): 44.
80. Wiegand, The Politics of an Emerging Profession, ix.
81. Mary Salome Cutler, "Sunday Opening of Libraries," Library Journal 14 (1889): 179.
82. See also Sidney Ditzion, "Opening the People's Library on the Lord's Day," in John David Marshall, ed., An American Library History Reader (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1961), 57-66;
83. Charles Johanningsmeier, "The Devil, Capitalism, and Frank Norris: Defining the 'Reading Field' for Sunday Newspaper Fiction, 1870-1910," American Periodicals 14 (2004): 91-112.
84. Charles Mayo Ellis, Arguments for Opening Reading Rooms of the Public Library of the City of Boston on Sunday Afternoons (Boston: A. Williams, 1867), 23.
85. Quoted in Cutler, "Sunday Opening of Libraries," 178-79.
86. Samuel S. Green, "Opening Libraries on Sunday," Library Journal 9 (May 1884): 85;
87. Mary Salome Cutler, "Sunday Opening of Libraries," prepared for U.S. Congress, House Education Report, 1892-93, 53rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1894, House Executive Document 1, 781-94.
88. Cutler, "Sunday Opening of Libraries," 178-79, quoted in McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday, 63.