Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

Abstract

Events forty-five years ago qualify me, I suppose, to harken back to a previous generation. I accept that designation gratefully with the hope that these remarks might prove useful to a future historian. The story of the library, writ large, had been our central concern. We sought to examine the purpose and meaning of the library in society: the citizens we served, how we served them, how they were impacted, why we existed as a profession, who we were, and the values we adopted, revised, and promoted on behalf of the interests of our readers. The story of the library was our heart and soul, and the LHRT became the tissue connecting us one to another and thus enlivening our conversations over common pursuits.The year 1977 was one of those times when events coalesced to redirect my personal journey. I attended the ALA summer conference in Detroit, witnessing the ALHRT session, the Harris-Dain debate on factors motivating the founders of the American public library. On the podium were Michael Harris (University of Kentucky professor), Phyllis Dain (Columbia University professor), Ed Holley (North Carolina library school dean), and Peggy Sullivan (Chicago Public Library assistant commissioner). Harris had earlier launched the dialogue with “The Purpose of the American Public Library: A Revisionist Interpretation of History,” Library Journal 98 (September 1973): 2509–14, and he continued to develop the topic on this day forty-five years ago. He challenged the dominant view that the public library had emerged from democratic impulses, a desire to provide citizens with the tools that would grant them political access in an open society. Having studied the founders of the Boston Public Library, he offered an alternative, that the public library had been established by elites committed to maintaining political and economic privilege, and that the library was intended as a tool essential for social control. Dain responded that her study of the New York Public Library illustrated energetic interest in stories about migration to American shores as well as the plight of ethnic minorities in general, and that marginalized peoples who sought passage into American life had been welcomed and encouraged by the public library. In other words, library services to the disadvantaged—terminology popular in the 1960s and ’70s—were nothing new. Holley appreciated the lively dialogue, honored the concept of respectful disagreement, and urged scrupulous attention to primary sources. Sullivan described the importance of primary sources in researching her book, Carl H. Milam and the American Library Association (1976).Another event from 1977 was meeting Art Young (University of Alabama associate dean of libraries). Art had been the first student to write a doctoral dissertation directed by Donald W. Krummel at Illinois. Art provided wise counsel about the culture of the library school, about graduate research in general, and about the university library system. When the fall 1977 semester rolled around, Krummel conducted a doctoral seminar on the history of libraries, and seven of us engaged in our own versions of the Harris-Dain debate. I would eventually become the third student, following Young and Dave Zubatsky, to complete a dissertation under Krummel. Thus, with Dain, Harris, Holley, Sullivan, Young, and Krummel having begun the dialogue, ALHRT became my intellectual home at ALA. Many participants I met were people who taught in schools of library and information science; as an academic librarian (ACU, Purdue University, Wabash College), it was unlikely that I would have interacted with them had it not been for the round table.In 1980 I attended Library History Seminar VI, hosted by Don Davis at the University of Texas. Don enjoyed guiding younger scholars in the fields of librarianship, having acquired ideas about mentoring from another Illinois professor, Rolland Stevens, who had directed Don’s dissertation and with whom Don had coauthored Reference Books in the Social Sciences and Humanities (1977). Thus, as Rolland encouraged Don, so Don would encourage me, and together we produced American Library History: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature (1989), a revision of the Davis-Harris tome, American Library History: A Bibliography (1978). Holley had graciously written introductions to both volumes.In the crusty old pre-internet, pre-email days, we conducted business by telephone and snail mail. We might have been better acquainted with one another than subsequent generations because we were meeting in-person twice a year, holding business meetings at both summer and midwinter ALA conventions. Thus in 1983, Holley, chair of the LHRT nominations committee, called and asked me to run for vice chair/chair elect. Like others, I had been blessed by Holley’s mentoring impulses—he and I had the same educational trajectory (Lipscomb for undergraduate, Peabody College for the MLS, and Illinois for the PhD)—so we knew some of the same people. I agreed to run against Laurel Grotzinger, one of my guiding lights at Illinois, and she won easily. This was better, no doubt, for LHRT but also for me personally since I needed to focus on finishing my dissertation. But I became fully engaged in LHRT; the conversations were stimulating, and I met remarkable professors and academic librarians. I served as membership liaison from 1985 to 1991, though I seem to have had minimal success at recruiting new members. I chaired the publications committee from 1991 to 1993, with the thoroughly thrilling task of revising and publishing bylaws.In the late 1970s and into the ’80s, the round table was pushing the boundaries of research interest. In 1979, for example, ALHRT morphed into LHRT, acknowledging the influence of international topics, and three years later the round table presented groundbreaking work on women in librarianship. We heard presentations by Barbara Brand (SUNY Stoney Brook library), Dain, Grotzinger (Western Michigan graduate dean), Suzanne Hildenbrand (SUNY Geneseo professor), and Mary Maack (University of Minnesota library school). This was 1982 in Philadelphia, and it was for me an unforgettable turning point, given its emphasis on applied theories and forgotten stories. The round table was trending steadfastly toward matters of gender, ethnicity, race, and inclusion and, over the next fifteen years, created programming on feminist theory and women in librarianship (six times), African Americans (four times), LesbiGay issues (once), and a much-needed comparative analysis of social service professions (once).By 1983 LHRT had added a research forum, at Maack’s suggestion as I recall, in addition to the program session for summer conferences. The forum typically featured a call for papers, expanding permanently the number of speakers and the range of subjects under consideration. To be able to connect program session and research forum papers was helpful to me when I chaired the round table a decade later. It was 1994 in Miami Beach, and we chose themes that coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of a major civil rights event, Mississippi Freedom Summer, designating them “Libraries, Books, and the Civil Rights Movement” and “The History of Black Librarianship in America.” The Black Caucus of ALA and the Social Responsibilities Round Table cosponsored our programs, and Eric Moon recommended them to conference participants. Presenters included Rosie Albritton on African American social libraries and historical societies, 1828–1918, Davis and Cheryl Knott on freedom libraries established by civil rights activists, and Jessie Carney Smith on Black women librarians. Holley and Charles Churchwell offered a retrospective on racial integration of faculty and staff at the University of Houston. My call for additional papers resulted in a cohort of eight Black and eight White contributors responding with essays grounded in oral history and other primary source materials. Thus, the contributors gave me the opportunity to edit Untold Stories: Civil Rights, Libraries, and Black Librarianship (1998).Over the years, my interests had tilted less toward narrative history and more toward editorial work, including Untold Stories, but also Festschriften for Frances Neel Cheney and Davis and anthologies of previously printed sources: User Instruction in Academic Libraries: A Century of Selected Readings (1986) and The Academic Library in the United States: Historical Perspectives (2022). The latter volume addresses the matter of public libraries overshadowing academic libraries as a subject of historical research (an intriguing irony given my impression that LHRT membership is constituted primarily of academic librarians and i-school professors). In The Academic Library in the United States, Mark McCallon and I acknowledge the relative popularity of the public library, but we also offer rationales for the academic library as meriting much closer historical attention than in the past. By editing collections I have followed, just a bit, the path taken by ALHRT cofounder John David Marshall, an accomplished anthologist and academic librarian (Middle Tennessee State University). I am deeply thankful to my coeditors for their diligence, academic savvy, and scholarly perspectives: Hermina Anghelescu, Don Davis, Ed Gleaves, Larry Hardesty, Cheryl Knott, Mark McCallon, and John Schmitt, four of whose personal stories are intertwined with LHRT. When I reflect on the resourcefulness of these scholars, I am reminded of the core values that brought members of the round table together, values that have sustained us and that promise to lead our community into a meaningful future.My participation in LHRT began in the 1970s, years immediately following major social movements and federal legislation from the 1950s and 1960s. Fresh emphasis on opportunities for women, people of color, and ethnic minorities had been challenging Americans to create a more open society, and academe likewise was changed by expanding research interests and curricular reform. In fact, journalist Fred Powledge has written that the civil rights movement was able to “generate a wave that washed over the entire nation, that spawned similar movements in a dozen fields.”1 In librarianship we had our own version of wider movements, depending on and promoting an open society, and thus the 1970s and ’80s constituted a period long overdue in addressing the intellectual interests of marginalized peoples. Despite the progress we have made, whether we seek to recover the past or to shape the future, the task ahead remains as complex and perilous as ever. We will continue to press these concerns and trust future generations to rise to the challenge.