The Brush of a Comet: Archibald Macleish at the Library of Congress

The White House
May 3, 1939
MEMORANDUM FOR F. F.:
I have had a bad time picking a Librarian to succeed Putnam. What would you think of Archie MacLeish? He is not a professional Librarian nor is he a special student of incunabula or ancient manuscripts. Nevertheless, he has lots of qualifications that said specialists have not.
What do you think? You might consult with Sam Morison and any other Twentieth Century minds you think useful. I assume you will not revert to the Nineteenth Century in making your recommendation !
F. D. R.
May 11, 1939

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:
By your kind inquiry of me regarding Archie MacLeish as a possible successor to Herbert Putnam you touch a subject of very special interest to me. Not only have I had to think about the nature of a great library during my twenty-five years at Harvard, but I have been ancestrally concerned, as it were, with the problem, for since my early boyhood an uncle of mine was the Director of the great library of the University of Vienna. Ever since 1911, I have had more than casual acquaintance with the Congressional Library, and Archie MacLeish I have known in his various manifestations from the time that he first swam into my ken as a law student in 1915. I say all this by way of indicating the point of view and experience from which I have derived the observations that follow.
According to the best American and European tradition, the librarians that have left the most enduring marks have not been technical librarians. Every eminent librarian of the last fifty years in Oxford or Cambridge or the British Museum has been a scholar or man of letters. Dr. Richard Garnett and Sir Frederic Kenyon of the British Museum, Dr. Edmund Gosse of the Library of the House of Lords, and Sir K. W. B. Nicholson at the Bodleian Library immediately come to mind. The librarian of the Widener Library in its greatest formative days was, as you know, Archie Coolidge, who wasn’t a scholar and not a librarian. This is also true of the great library of the Harvard Law School. I should also mention John S. Billings, of the Army Medical Library. It has been true of similar institutions that the necessary technique for the technical running of a library can be supplied by subordinates. What is wanted in the directing head of a great library is imaginative energy and vision. He should be a man who knows books, loves books, and makes books. If he has these three qualities the craftsmanship of the librarian’s calling is an easily acquired quality. But only a scholarly man of letters can make a great national library a general place of habitation for scholars, because he alone really understands the wants of scholars.
The danger of the technical librarian is that he over-emphasizes the collection and classification of books — the merely mechanical side of the library — and fails to see the library as the gateway to the development of culture. I believe it to be true that the failures in the British Museum and elsewhere have been largely promotions from within the staff of people who have grown up with the job, and who were rewarded for the obvious fidelity which, happily, is rather characteristic of those in the Government service.
The need for qualities other than those which are trained in a professional librarian are accentuated in the case of the head of the Congressional Library. That Library is not merely a library, and in the immediate future even more so than in the past it will be concerned with problems quite outside the traditional tasks associated with collecting, housing, and circulating books. For one thing the Library of Congress is a museum as well as a library. It has a distinguished collection of etchings and engravings—an aspect of the library which was of the greatest importance and edification to a person like Mr. Justice Holmes. It has a great collection of music — especially manuscript music — and its general manuscript materials, especially recent acquisitions like the Taft papers and the Roosevelt papers, present delicate questions which can be adequately dealt with only by a person of sympathetic and imaginative insight.
But we are at the threshold of deeper problems than any that the foregoing present. Of course, the culture of books in the old-fashioned sense is still and will continue to be dominantly important. But in the educational influence of our democracy two new media are already competing for primacy with the printed page — the radio and the movie. In both of these educative forms Archie has been a pioneer. He was the first to experiment with a literary form constructed especially for its effectiveness through the unseen voice of the radio — he is the father of the so-called radio play. In the field of the motion picture he was the moving spirit in a series of “Contemporary History” which released two pictures that received widest acclaim — one a picture of the civil war in Spain with Hemingway commentary, and another on China done by Ivens, the famous Dutch picture photographer. With television entering the phase of practicality, the Government, through the Federal Communications Commission, will be presented with the most subtle and difficult problems pertaining to the movie industry.

Another factor is likewise not to be lost sight of — Latin America. If the various attempts at cultural exchange with Latin America are to be wisely pursued by the Government, the Library of Congress should play a new important part. Archie has a wide and sympathetic understanding of our cultural relations with Latin America. Indeed, this is only one phase of the whole gamut of culture over which Archie’s experience and human associations extend.
It must be remembered that Archie was one of the leaders of his class at the Law School, proved his metal as a very able lawyer, was invited to join the Harvard Law School Faculty, then pursued his poetic career, was the most effective editor of Fortune, and this year showed astonishing personal and organizing faculties in connection with the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard. He unites in himself qualities seldom found in combination — those of the hard-headed lawyer with the sympathetic imagination of the poet, the independent thinker and the charming “mixer.” He would bring to the Librarianship intellectual distinction, cultural recognition the world over, a persuasive personality and a delicacy of touch in dealing with others, and creative energy in making the Library of Congress the great center of the cultural resources of the Nation in the technological setting of our time.
Faithfully yours,
FELIX FRANKFURTER

That Mr. MacLeish’s influence was lasting is attested by DwID C. MEARNS, chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress and incumbent in its chair of American history.

When, on that Monday morning, October 2, 1939, Archibald MacLeish assumed the office of Librarian of Congress, the combination of the locks on the bronze doors of the treasure room was, without his knowledge, changed to conform with the date. This simple act marked more than dynastic transition; it was portentous, too, for it was, perhaps quite by coincidence, the day reserved for the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.

It was said at the time, and it has never been satisfactorily confuted, that Mr. MacLeish had been prevailed upon to accept the appointment as a consequence of glib representations that the Library was so mechanized and routinized, so aloof from the ordinary concerns of men, that its affairs might be administered in the course of the morning shave, thus freeing the remainder of each day for pleasanter and more engrossing pursuits. He had been misled — wittingly, or carelessly, or ignorantly — but discovery did not bring dismay.

Now, more than a quarter of a century later, it is still too soon to measure his achievement dctachecily, for the very reason that it is impossible to think of him impersonally. At the same time, it can be confidently, and even judiciously, declared that his mistakes were few, whereas his attainments were many, were great, and are enduring.

It is interesting to speculate about how he came first to be considered for the post. On December 10, 1938, there had been a luncheon at the White House to discuss the proposed library in Hyde Park, and the President had run over the guest list for the benefit of the press. Among many distinguished scholars it had included “Archie MacLeish, a writer, and I think he has been connected with ‘Fortune’; Professors Frankfurter and Morison of Harvard; Randolph G. Adams, director of the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan; and Julian P. Boyd, librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Dr. Adams had remarked to Dr. Boyd on the astonishing absence of the Librarian of Congress, and Dr. Boyd had replied that in his opinion the prospective holder of that august place must be present in the room.

In any event, when Mr. MacLeish’s selection was finally announced, the professional library associations, with degrees of intensity varying from petulance to passion, protested with prideful, proprietary indignation. He was not even a recognized amateur; he had no standing in the guild; whatever his gifts for other callings might be, he was starkly disqualified for a position to which only their own anointed might aspire. Happily, they were soon conciliated; a dutiful resistance was broken; angered shouts were hushed; he was accorded full faith and allegiance; and when they found their voice again they found that it was his.

Mr. MacLeish’s librarianship, to which he brought pace, style, taste, sagacity, and grace, extended over a period of a little more than five years. His tenure was brief, his accomplishment monumental. From the outset he understood the nature of his charge. He wrote: “the Library itself ... is an institution of learning unique among the learned institutions of the world — a library having the educational facilities and the educational excitement of a great university; a university having the timelessness and the enduring integrity of a great and ancient collection of famous books.”

He was at once an illuminating and a ventilating engineer. He became the Great Fenestrator. In consultation with examining committees, possessed of special skills and broad experience, he completely revised the Library’s administrative structure and fixed the broad design which still persists. With grants from foundations and private benefactors, he established fellowships for young American scholars and for war-displaced scholars from abroad, who tested the strengths and weaknesses of the collections and made recommendations for their development. He secured from cordial Congresses substantial increases in appropriations for personnel, equipment, and material, and with their consistent interest and support, radically expanded the Legislative Reference Service. In a ringing state paper, he enunciated for the first time the Library’s canons of objectives. He encouraged the staff in initiative and innovation and discarded antiquated methods in favor of modern practices. Under his direction, research was conducted in radio broadcasting and scriptwriting. He installed a soundrecording laboratory. He attracted munificent donations. Most important, he instilled a sudden sense of contemporaneity and an awareness of a world beyond the bookstacks.

He enlisted fine minds and great hearts: an Arthur Houghton for rare books, a Jerome Wiesner for technology, a Harold Lasswell for the study of wartime communications, an Allen Tate for the chair of poetry, an Alexander Woollcott zestfully to select mysteries for the President’s shelf, a Thomas Mann as consultant on German literature, a SaintJohn Perse as consultant on French poetry.

As Librarian he was in fact America’s minister of culture. It was in that capacity that he challenged the responsibility of the intellectuals, expounded this country’s cause, and participated in the drafting of UNESCO’s charter.

Memory catches him in flashes: climbing Capitol Hill with long and easy strides; dedicating the Hispanic Room on Columbus Day; receiving from Lord Halifax, for safekeeping, Lincoln Cathedral’s Magna Carta; mourning the fall of Paris; superintending the evacuation of priceless collections to less likely targets than was Washington; reading aloud The Dead young Soldiers; presiding over the Librarian’s Conference; leading a seminar on Jefferson’s bicentenary; instructing the honor guard formed for the return of the national muniments to their niches in the shrine.

When he resigned to become Assistant Secretary of State, the President wrote: “I think it is thrilling that you are not leaving us. The only trouble is that you jump from one mausoleum into the other. This is not meant to be derogatory on my part, for both the Library of Congress and the Department of State have long and honorable histories.” The message and its purport became known, and one saddened associate suggested a reply: “Tell him that a rolling stone gathers no mausoleum.” Later, that erstwhile colleague Would express his feelings differently: “The brush of the comet gave a new dimension to the library.”