“An Easy Chance to Do a Good Thing”: The Paris Tribune’s Campaign to Save the American Library

Abstract

“There has never been a local movement among the Americans of this city that offered everybody such an easy chance to do a good thing,” declared the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition on October 21st, 1919. The “good” and “easy” action the paper encouraged was donating money to the campaign to fund the ongoing existence of an American library in Paris. The next day, the paper continued its appeal — asking sentimentally, “who of the native sons and daughters has not felt the lo[n]ging for the boo...