‘Correct provision can be made for their wants’: the reading rooms of the Santa Fe Railroad

Abstract

Private libraries for the use of the working man were established throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, beginning in 1820 in large Eastern cities. These libraries were often part of institutes which included museums, schools, and exhibits of mechanical inventions, and were intended to ‘promote orderly and virtuous habits, diffuse knowledge and the desire for knowledge, improve the scientific skills of mechanics and manufacturers’. With the rise of organised labor movements in the 1870s, the purpose of such libraries shifted to serve as ‘antidotes of strikes and communism’. At this time, the work of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) with railroad and industrial workers began to focus on promoting loyalty to the corporation and rejection of unionisation and political unrest through the Railroad YMCA and Industrial YMCA divisions. Multiple railroads both partnered with the YMCA and opened their own libraries and reading rooms to achieve similar goals. One of these was the Santa Fe Railroad, which established reading rooms throughout the Southwestern United States in large part to serve as a ‘civilising’ influence on railroad employees and towns. Initially restricted to Santa Fe Railroad employees and their families, these reading rooms soon became the social and intellectual centres of the communities in which they were established. The vast majority of reading rooms closed between 1929 and 1940, owing in part to the Great Depression, but also as victims of their own success, as the communities in which they were located grew and expanded and provided alternatives such as churches, schools, and public libraries. Their history mirrors the history of the establishment of public libraries during the same period – they were even being called ‘quasi-universities’ – and reveals much about the greater social and cultural climate in which both institutions developed. Like those of public libraries, the users of these reading rooms utilised them for their own purposes, regardless of the intentions of the founders, and turned them into public places and spaces.