CentenniAL

"I think anyone would agree with me that the head of the Public Relations Division and the editor of the Bulletin must be in sympathy with A.L.A. policies if she is rightly to hold that position. I am not in sympathy with A.L.A. policies.... The Association is inert where it should be active, and active where I think it should steadfastly refuse to act."

With those words, Beatrice Sawyer Rossell resigned as editor of the ALA Bulletin.

Her letter to the Executive Board, published in the September 1, 1940, issue (p. 477–478), cited only one issue that induced her to resign: the board's stance on the impending war.

"Compulsory military training in peace time will rob millions of these young people of their freedom and violate both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," Rossell wrote. "But the A.L.A. Executive Board accepts conscription even before it has been passed by Congress, and urges libraries, both public and college, to help with military training."

Rossell argued that the ALA had failed the nation's youth in peacetime, noting that while the board and Council had passed resolutions on federal aid to improve rural libraries and done some work in the area(at the prompting of the Library Extension Board), they had failed to mobilize libraries to truly address the issue. Conversely, she added, "Now when plans for American defense, in the opinion of some of our people, are chiefly destructive in emphasis, the Executive Board is taking action."

At issue seemed to have been a book list titled Industrial Training for National Defense, published by the ALA and publicized in the September 15 issue (p. 498). Rossell wrote: "The A.L.A. is to prepare reading lists for young people on democracy, not to help them live in accordance with its great traditions, but, like nazi youth, to die for those traditions, when they are called upon to do so."

There's little printed evidence that directly supports Rossell's concerns of an ALA leadership beating the drums for war. Minutes for the four Executive Board meetings prior to her resignation (December 27 and 30, 1939, and May 26 and June 1, 1940), yield but one potentially hawkish act, a letter to FDR explaining that another letter, sent by the Progressive Librarians Council and urging the president to keep the country out of war, was not affiliated with the ALA.

Likewise, the Bulletin published only a few articles on national defense issues in 1940, and those focused on the importance of protecting speech and the need to provide service to military personnel.

On the other hand, it's difficult to doubt Rossell's sincerity in her belief. "My religion, my experience, and my knowledge of history convince me that wrong means never achieve right ends," she wrote. "I did not realize that in the last war. I do realize it now, and I am therefore resigning from the A.L.A. staff rather than have any connection with its program of preparation for war service."

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant

I've got a few quickies for today. More in-depth postings will return once the crush of deadlines for the June-July issue (incidentally, our official Centennial issue) is past.

More on Rossell
This information comes from Mary Miller of the ALA Archives at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. A circa-1960 biography on Beatrice Sawyer Rossell, the first named editor of the Bulletin of the American Library Assocation, reported that she studied at the New York State Library School and began her library work in Albany, New York. After serving as editor of the Bulletin and head of public relations for the ALA, she became the first official lobbyist for the Illinois Library Association. She also worked for 10 years as a library consultant for Field Enterprises, and as librarian at Way County Library in Petersburg, Ohio. By 1962, she was living in Phoenix, as evidenced by a letter she wrote to Carl Milam, former ALA secretary.

Early Photos

In an earlier post, I noted that I thought a photo of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the January 1923 issue was the first picture published in the magazine.

Missed it by, well, 14 years.

I've since found pictures from the September 1909 issue. And the auspicious subject of those first photos?

Paper.

See, at the fifth general session of the 1909 Annual Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, one Cedric Chivers presented a paper titled "The Paper and Binding of Lending Library Books." Accompanying the published report were several photomicrographs of paper.

Two pairs of photomicrographs appear at right. The top set shows the transverse (above) and surface section of a "close, heavy, moderately calendered paper" praised for its close fibers and small air space." The bottom, however, shows the transverse and surface sections of a "thick, bulky, feather-weight antique." So if your paper looks like the one on the bottom, you know you've got problems.

But enough facetiousness; bookbinding was a highly visible issue in the Bulletin's early days, with an ALA Committee on Bookbinding whose reports regularly appeared in the magazine's pages.

Not-so-early photos

Apropos of nothing except historical interest, I'd like to share this photo of current ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels (with Madison, Wisconsin, librarian Faith Miracle) from the November 1985 issue. It was taken at the sixth annual meeting of the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services Taskforce September 12-14, 1985, in Princeton, N.J.; Fiels was at the time with the New Jersey State Library.

WHCLIS and WHCLIS II were also big events in their day, and their appearances in American Libraries will certainly be the topic of an upcoming post.

Finally...

Happy Bike-to-Work week! The cover of the September 1976 issue featured David P. Jensen, director of library services at Greensboro (N.C.) College, who biked 675 miles to ALA's Centennial Conference Fair in Chicago. I'd hoped to also include a photo of my bike—a delightful alternative to the trains here in Chicago—but a breakdown on Monday and the unlikelihood of being able to repair it before the weekend prevent that. Feh.

—Greg Landgraf, Editorial Assistant, American Libraries

In the beginning there was no editor—at least none anyone felt was worth naming in the issues of the Bulletin of the American Library Association (precursor to American Libraries) published from the first issue in 1907 to 1931. One can only assume that it was those much maligned, bun-toting spinsters of early librarianship who dutifully recorded the activities of ALA for the first quarter-century of the magazine’s tenure as “official organ,” a disconcerting moniker that ALA Policy 10.2—written before there was an internet—still forces us to carry.

Beatrice Sawyer Rossell

At the peak of its organ years, the Bulletin was a serious and complete-as-possible record of the activities of ALA. Few members today can remember farther back than Samray Smith’s 10-year editorship beginning in 1957 or Ransom L. Richardson’s five years beginning in 1952. It seems to most people that the chief editor’s office has always been a male domain. It certainly was for the last half the magazine’s history. But from 1934 until 1952, four women appeared as editor on the masthead: M. Alice Dunlap, Margaret Ritchie Post, Lucile Deaderick, and Beatrice Sawyer Rossell, the first named editor.

The December 1930 issue had reported the assessment of an unnamed special librarian: “The Bulletin, which presumably should keep one informed, is about as uninteresting and unenlightening as it might well be. It needs an editor who can present new developments, explain propositions which are under consideration and describe projects in operation. Also, it should welcome communications and thus offer a means of expression to intelligent and alert members who might, by chance, have real contributions to offer.” Rossell was apparently the answer, and she served as editor to 1941.

For the benefit of the “everything is on the internet” crowd, I tried Googling for information on the careers of these women editors. I found a PDF of the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences Newsletter that said Deaderick has been director of the Knoxville–Knox County Public Library and had died just last year. I could click up nothing about Post and Dunlap, but searching Beatrice Sawyer Rossell brought up an interesting item from the March 1935 issue of The Survey. Proudly identifying herself as editor of the Bulletin of the American Library Association, she wrote passionately, if within the constraints of her era, about the efforts of the Mississippi Library Commission's secretary, Elizabeth Robinson, to provide statewide library service.

“Approximately two million people, half of them white, half Negro, are scattered through eighty-two counties. When the library project started, forty-three counties were without a single public library. One county, Coahoma, had developed admirable library service over a period of ten years, including excellent service to Negroes, but elsewhere even such county service as had been attempted was handicapped by limited resources,” Rossell wrote. With a journalistic eye, she observed: "'The people are book hungry,’ said one of the librarians who has a reading-room in her home. ‘A little boy knocked at my door at six o'clock in the morning to borrow The Dutch Twins. I passed a house the other day where a little girl was sitting on the porch reading aloud to her family of five people, not one of whom could read. An old man who was once a school teacher and a young girl who loves reading are each walking miles carrying books to share with people who otherwise would be without them.’" Rossell’s writing offers a glimpse at the dedicated professional she must have been.

The Bulletin became American Libraries in 1970, under the editorship of Gerald Shields, and started behaving more like a magazine than a journal. Following Gerald Shields was John Gordon Burke, who lasted two years and was succeeded by Arthur Plotnik, who endured for a record 15 years until 1989, when Thomas Gaughan took charge.

In May of 1995, Tom quit. Looking back at the issues published during that period, I can’t help but wonder if readers thought we had lost our minds. The May and June issues looked completely different from one another, and then the next issue went off in another direction, with design elements changing whimsically. The July-August issue cover aptly represented the confusion that was going on behind the scenes as we instructed our cover artist to construct a drawing that would represent the reorganizational wringer the Association was being put through. I was acting editor during that chaotic period.

Acting editors and interim directors have always been around, but it wasn’t until it was my turn to be one that I realized what an untenable position it is. My advice is to avoid like the plague any job that is labeled “acting” or “interim” unless you plan to go away at the end of the gig. Being “acting” makes you feel as if you are just filling space until the real thing comes along. And it’s interesting to note that American Libraries has had at least five acting or interim editors, and all of them but one (the aptly initialed A.L. Remley in 1956) have been women—most recently Helen Cline for five issues in 1974–75 and Mildred Geshwiler for over a year in 1966–67.

There has been nothing quite so sobering as taking some time to look back through 100 years of the magazine and recognizing that the male domination of the second half of the century owes everything to the modest diligence of the forgotten women of the first half and to those noble souls who held down the fort while the Association looked for the right man to take charge.

—Leonard Kniffel, Editor in Chief, American Libraries