Part 31 (1/2)
Within certain limits, particularly the powder-cans and lead pencils of the staff, we want the clubs to think that they do own the place. The surest proof that the St. Louis plan works, is to have the scions of our democracy feel that they are getting their money's worth from the inst.i.tution that their taxes support.
A group of young socialists was formed too late in the season to secure a regular meeting night. They finally decided that they would have to be satisfied with meeting, for the winter, at K----'s--a delicatessen store a few blocks away. K----'s has an advertis.e.m.e.nt every week in the Jewish Record, inviting men to come and read the papers there and make use of the free meeting-room. Like all Jewish delicatessens, this shop contains everything that any patron is willing to buy, and in addition, elaborates the coffee-house idea into any shape that circ.u.mstances may suggest. When the young men said individually on later occasions that they were not contented at the delicatessen, they always added, ”It's because we feel so at home at the library; because we've always gotten books out there.” The next winter their application was handed in several months in advance.
In a neighborhood where conditions are the exact ant.i.thesis of Crunden's, the same feeling exists. Miss Pretlow was talking one evening to a young man who belonged to a group giving a dancing party at Cabanne Library. She said that she could not but remark how well-dressed and well bred and altogether prosperous the dancers were. They very evidently could have met in any one of a number of large homes or could have paid for one of the best halls in the city; so she said to the young man, ”How is it you do not rent Blank's Hall, but use the Library instead? I know it can't be the difference in cost that influences you.”
The young man answered in very evident astonishment: ”Why, we like this place; we all grew up in this Library.”
When adolescents of both s.e.xes meet together, their meetings are purely for a good time. Their behavior is extremely immature from the social side; either very wooden or very uncontrolled. This is the period when the librarian must insist upon strict chaperonage, and it is also the period when resentment of discipline, or even of suggestion, runs high.
They would no more follow the advice of the Librarian in the matter of invitations, introduction of wall-flowers and how a dance is to be ”run off” generally, than they would copy her taste in dress, which they invariably consider very ”old-maidy.” The standards to which social clubs adhere rigidly are those observed in places of commercialized amus.e.m.e.nt. One group of boys met to teach each other dancing, where the girls would not see them. As it was a case of the blind leading the blind, a volunteer who had been teaching folk-dancing to the girls all winter, offered her services. After one trial she was _persona non grata_, because she wouldn't let them ”rag.”
Some of the dances are quite grim. One will not hear a note of laughter all the evening. Five or six girls will often come together. Those who know boys will dance with them, and between dances will not make the slightest effort to introduce their friends to possible partners. The friends, instead of resenting this inactivity, often sit all the evening on the side lines watching and chewing gum, apparently perfectly satisfied.
At the opposite pole is the wild desire for ”rough house.” In the early stages of auditorium work and before these days of H.C.L., pieces of cake have occasionally gone flying across the hall.
As soon as branch libraries recognized these facts, and it was very soon, the application for dances became fewer and of better quality.
Leavings from other club rooms no longer apply, and disgruntled alumni a.s.sociations in schools have ceased to contemplate a move to the nearest branch library.
No effort has been made to advertise the club rooms, beyond these statements of the branch librarians in pa.s.sing, except the exhibiting of the rooms themselves to visitors who ”stop in to show our library to cousin Sarah, from Davenport,” or Illinois, or Oklahoma, as the case may be. Word-of-mouth publicity accounts for the gradual steady growth in the use of the rooms. One of the many examples began with a stenographer who sewed, ”in secret,” as she said, at noon in the club room. She was embroidering an engagement present for one of the girls in her office.
Needless to say, she scattered information about the rooms, and the rules governing them, wherever any one would listen. Eventually a Sunday School cla.s.s, to which her cousin belonged, gave a St. Patrick's Day party in the library. As an indirect result, a School Patron's a.s.sociation now holds five or six meetings each Spring, to make preparations for its annual picnic. So the ball of publicity rolls along of its own momentum.
At branch libraries, the auditorium and study rooms are as a rule closely connected architecturally with the reading rooms, and club members usually pa.s.s through the main part of the library to reach the meetings. One or two at least from each group stop to chat with the workers, or to read. At Crunden the a.s.sistants say that whenever a Yiddish meeting is to begin at nine, the men come at eight and read.
Then there are the isolated individuals from the club who stumble on the resources of the library quite by accident, and later grow communicative. Occasionally some one rushes up stairs to borrow the telephone book, and when, after an unsuccessful quest, he is offered the city directory by the librarian, he finds it hard to realize that any library can contain a book as useful as that. One man who saw a magazine lying on the desk while he was asking to be directed to the auditorium, said, ”I had no idea the library handled magazines.”
Libraries try as faithfully to reach every one as if they were commercial enterprises, but there will always be a certain number of persons who have never been in a library building, not to speak of knowing the location of the nearest branch and realizing its resources.
A Harvard graduate said he had walked past a branch every day for a year and had thought it was a branch post-office. If there were no other arguments in favor of adding auditoriums to the library's list of activities, there is this: that they introduce to the library large groups of people who have had no connection with it before. The horse at least has been led to the water.
If clubs meet regularly, there is always a small proportion who make meeting-night their library night. They consequently read and want to calculate all fines with reference to the night of the last meeting. I once heard one young woman telling another how she finally had her reading ”doped out into a system,” by beginning on her seven-day book just as soon as she reached home after the meeting, and using the fourteen-day book only on the street cars.
With the establishment of libraries in small towns and rural communities, there is at present a tendency to make social centers out of library buildings, even at the sacrifice of the books, rather than to establish libraries in connection with social activities. This is also true in those cities where ”field-houses” in parks are well developed.
Without holding a brief for either school, we may properly emphasize three principles. The first is that a librarian holds her position by virtue of being a librarian, and that her duty and training require her full time for the purpose for which she is employed--the fitting of the proper book to the individual. The second is that if the community needs to have the social center stressed more than the books, a social worker must direct the center and the librarian must contribute in a subordinate capacity to make the center a success. For example, the St.
Louis Public Library has equipped a room with books and is furnis.h.i.+ng an attendant at a colored social center in a church building at Garrison and Lucas Avenues, but it does not thereby put forward any claim to control and stimulate the social activities of the neighborhood. The third principle is that if the library plant is already in operation, it is a waste to exclude neighborhood groups from rooms not being used directly for the reading and circulation of books, inasmuch as overhead expenses continue.
WHAT OF THE FUTURE?
A forecast, not of library progress alone, but of civilization itself, by one who declares himself ”a simple-minded visionary optimist.” It is of the warp and woof of visions like this that the fabric of a better world is woven. Frederick Morgan Crunden, who delivered this address at the public session of the Philadelphia Conference of the American Library a.s.sociation, 1897, was not, it is true, the technical founder of the St. Louis Public Library, but in his thirty-year administration of it, he originated and kept in motion the forces that have given it the position that it now holds in the community. These forces and their results were both social, and his address forms a fitting conclusion to this compilation of material on ”The Library and Society.” A sketch of Mr. Crunden appears in Vol. I of this series.
The present Victorian jubilee has naturally brought out a fresh group of reminiscences comparing conditions at the beginning of the reign with those now existing. The most striking contrast between the two periods lies in the advances made in the material comforts of life--improvements in lighting and heating, in locomotion and intercommunication. The progress of applied science has been so rapid that some of its most notable achievements have come within the memory of young persons still at school. Telephonic conversation between New York and St. Louis is only a thing of yesterday; aerial navigation is evidently near at hand; and already daring scientists speak hopefully of electric communication with the planets.
But it is not only in this line that the world has advanced. To note great changes in social customs, we need not go back to the last century. Sir Algernon West in a recent magazine article refers to the matter-of-course manner in which his chief was in the habit of announcing to the head clerk that he would not be at the office the following day, as he was to dine out that evening. As an indication of the social changes brought about in his lifetime, he quotes this significant sentence of Mr. Charles Villiers: ”In his young days,” said Mr. Villiers, ”every young man, even if he was busy, pretended to be idle; now every young man, even if he is idle, pretends to be busy.”
There is great import in this. When every member of society is usefully employed, our social problems will be well on the way to solution.
To note progress in another direction we need not turn back to the acts of the 14th century, which made it a crime to give or receive more than the wretched wage fixed by law. At the beginning of the Victorian era boys and girls as young as six years worked in mines and factories longer hours than are now required of strong men; and the ma.s.ses of people were compelled to pay an artificially high price for their bread, in order to increase the unearned wealth of the few.
And in our own country we need not go back to the Salem witchcraft or the persecution of the Quakers. There are still eye-witnesses to tell us that men and women in this ”land of the free,” were lawfully sold like cattle or flogged to death at the will of their owners. It was a few months after Queen Victoria's accession to the throne that Elijah Parish Lovejoy was killed for daring to say that human slavery was wrong--for advocating, not forcible abolition, but gradual emanc.i.p.ation as ”the free, voluntary act of the master, performed from a conviction of its propriety.” For maintaining his right to express his opinions on this or any other public question, he was driven from place to place and finally shot down in cold blood. In the city where 60 years ago he fell, a martyr to the cause of free speech, a stately monument--one of the most imposing in the country--was the other day dedicated to his memory. No American better deserves a monument. No leader in the Revolution or the Civil War was a greater hero. In my opinion, the unquestioned courage of the great Union commander is dwarfed and paled by the simple heroism of this young preacher-editor, who gave his life to a greater cause than even the preservation of the Union. Yet for some years after his death, in many cities of this country, it would have been hazardous for a man to utter his eulogy.
Here, then, is a marked advance. But we have not yet obtained entire freedom of speech on live topics. Was it not as late as last year that we hear of two librarians holding opposite political views, whose positions were rendered insecure by an unfortunate misadjustment of longitudes and political opinions? And not many miles from here a score of good, earnest men were jailed for advocating, disinterestedly, and at considerable self-sacrifice, a method of taxation that did not meet the approval of the city authorities. Still we have made great progress toward a broad tolerance. We not only permit the practice of all religious forms, but we even allow a man to deny himself the consolations of religion in any form if he chooses to do so.
In science, at least, there is absolute freedom of thought and expression. One may publish arguments to prove that the world is five thousand, or five hundred million years old, and no one will molest or denounce him; or he may announce a new theory of the universe with our moon as the stationary centre, and no state or church will anathematize him or compel him to recant. It is not till he enters the field of politics, i.e., the discussion of economic and sociological questions with a view to immediate practical results, that the advocate of new ideas reaches the danger-point. Here he finds vested interests--self-styled ”vested rights,” but as often vested wrongs--on guard and alert to repel intrusion and resist inquiry. These summon to their aid the legions of unreasoning conservatism; and the innovator is made to feel the truth of the saying that there is no pain so keen as the pain of a new idea--from which, therefore, mankind has always shrunk, as a child shrinks from the surgeon's knife. We have pa.s.sed the period of rack and stake; but social and business ostracism are pretty effective, while occasionally there are suggestions of tar-buckets or bullets. For the most part, however, we content ourselves with denouncing the proposer of any marked departure from existing political or sociological conditions as a ”socialist,” a ”communist,” and an ”anarchist,” using these terms indiscriminately as abusive epithets without any definite knowledge of their meaning. From the beginning of time every social advance--and until recently every forward step in science or religion has been regarded as menacing the very foundations of society. The Reform Act of 1832, which simply took the first step towards correcting the grossest political abuses, was looked upon by the Duke of Wellington and other good men as threatening the very existence of the kingdom. The condition of affairs then existing, they considered, if not the best possible, at any rate vastly better than the political chaos that would be sure to result from change. Speaking on this blind conservative opposition to the Reform Bill, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, said: