The United States of the late nineteenth century provided Carnegie with an ideal setting for his convictions. Called upon on one occasion to exalt the merits of American institutions in comparison to those of his native Scotland, he described his adopted country as "the perfect place to pursue one's business." In the United States, he argued, "the mind is freed from superstitious reverence to old customs, unawed by gorgeous and unmeaning show and form." As his biographer Peter Krass points out, in Carnegie's description of the American utopia "there was no mention of the cotton and iron riots in which the police forces were routed, no word of slavery, Indian relocation, or women's suffrage in discussing equality of voice.
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Carnegie presenting his trust as "a Trustworthy Beast" to Uncle Sam, a cartoon from Harper's Weekly.
[Carnegie] had a selective memory; he preferred to ignore America's underside, as he would when making his millions in steel while his exploited workers died by the dozens."118
Carnegie believed that a man must be ruthless if he was to become wealthy, but he also believed that such wealth should be employed in "illuminating the spirit" of the community he exploited. To his detractors, the libraries he funded were merely stepping-stones to personal glorification. He very rarely gave money for books, only for the building in which they were to be lodged, and even then he stipulated that the town provide the site and the cash to maintain the library. He insisted that his libraries run as efficiently as his mills, and that no extravagance be indulged in. Nor did he give to state libraries or subscription libraries, because these institutions had access to alternative funding. "He has bought fame and paid cash for it," Mark Twain once quipped.119
Many criticized the Carnegie libraries as antidemocratic, judging them "centres for exerting social control on the working-classes," "forcing upon the readers capitalistic ideas and values in an attempt to control their thoughts and actions."120 Whatever the case, these libraries served a purpose well beyond Carnegie's self- aggrandizement. When the architect who designed Carnegie's first library asked for the millionaire's coat of arms to be carved over the entrance, Carnegie, who had no such distinction, suggested instead an allegorical rising sun surrounded by the words "Let There Be Light."121 For decades the Carnegie libraries remained a paradox: a monument to their founder, and a fruitful cultural instrument that helped awaken thousands of intellectual lives.
Dozens of writers have acknowledged their debt to the Carnegie libraries. John Updike, describing his own experiences as a teenager at the Carnegie Library of Reading, Pennsylvania, spoke of his gratitude "for the freedom given me in those formative years when we, generally speaking, become lifelong readers or not." He concluded, "A kind of heaven opened up for me there."122 Eudora Welty traced back to the Carnegie Library of Jackson, Mississippi, the beginnings of her literary life. As Carnegie had stipulated, his donation was conditional
Andrew Carnegie's bookplate.
on the community's undertaking to guarantee the upkeep and smooth administration of the library; in Jackson, in 1918, the librarian in charge of these tasks was a certain Mrs. Calloway. Mrs. Calloway, Welty recalled, "ran the Library absolutely by herself, from the desk where she sat with her back to the books and facing the stairs, her dragon eye on the front door, where who knew what kind of person might come in from the public? silence in big black letters was on signs tacked up everywhere." Mrs. Calloway made her own rules about books. "You could not take back a book to the Library on the same day you'd taken it out; it made no difference to her that you'd read every word in it and needed another to start. You could take out two books at a time and two books only; this applied as long as you were a child and also for the rest of your life." But such arbitrary rules made no difference to Welty's reading passion; what counted was that someone (she did not then know who this distant benefactor was) had set up a treasure trove for her personally (she believed), through which her "devouring wish to read" was instantly granted.123
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The sarcastic critic H.L. Mencken objected. "Go to the nearest Carnegie Library," he instructed, "and examine its catalog of books. The chances are five to one thatyou will find the place full of literary bilge and as bare of good books as a Boston bookshop."124 But for most writers, even if the stock of books is not formidable, to be able to enter a place where books are seemingly numberless and available for the asking is a joy in itself. "I knew this was bliss," Welty wrote late in life, "knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end."
Carnegie himself may have believed that the buildings he paid for would serve as proof of "my efforts to make the earth a little better than I found it."125 Whatever his desire may have been, for hundreds of thousands of readers the Carnegie libraries became not the proof of any selfless or egotistical concern, or of a millionaire 's magnanimity, but the necessary intellectual stronghold at the heart of any literate society, a place where all citizens, provided they can read, are granted the basic right to make themselves "powerful against the Devil."
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THE LIBRARY
AS SHADOW
But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical hierarchy of exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences. Of Aeschylus's 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides, only 18 (if we include the Rhesus, of doubtful authenticity); of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7.
If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be. Even within the strictest circumscriptions, any choice of books will be greater than its label, and
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A book-burning in Warsaw, Indiana.
an inquiring reader will find danger (salutary or reprehensible) in the safest, most invigilated places. Our mistake, perhaps, has been to look upon a library as an all-encompassing but neutral space. "The keepers," wrote the American poet Archibald MacLeish during his posting as librarian of Congress, "whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral."126 Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.