"One cathedral more" or "mere lounging places for bummers"? The cultural politics of leisure and the public library in Gilded Age America.

This article contextualizes the history of public libraries during their formative periods, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, within U.S. cultural history. It argues that the triumph of consumer capitalism, the dominance of hierarchy as an organizing principle, and the process of sacralization shaped public libraries' policies and procedures. The essay explores some of the ways that public libraries gave leisure an institutional form, helping to spatially and temporally particularize the abstract concept of the public through their policies related to access--to the buildings, collections, and people.

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In fact, it [the Sunday opening of the Philadelphia Mercantile Library] 
is only the opening of one cathedral more, where those who hunger and 
thirst during the busy week may come and be filled. 
S. C. Hallowell to Henry Ward Beecher, 1872 
 
They [New-York City Mercantile Library and Cooper Institute Reading 
Room] were poorly patronized.... [T]he reading-room was made a mere 
lounging place for bummers. 
Rev. Carlos Martyn, 1886 

It is well known that differing conceptions of "the public" framed early debates about public libraries in the United States. One newly professionalized librarian observed in 1880, "'The public' is a plural personage which cannot all be suited at once." (1) As did the founders of Boston's Public Library, some proponents of tax-supported libraries optimistically posited that the public was "a reading, self-cultivating population." (2) After the Civil War many of these liberal-minded and idealistic reformers fashioned public libraries, as well as museums and world's fairs, into "vestibules of churches," while the most ambitious among them envisioned the public library as "one cathedral more" in America's bustling cities. (3) Other reformers, however, were less sanguine about the public's demand for cultural advancement, its capacity for self-improvement, or its ability to follow the conventions of polite culture. (4) They worried that the expansion of hours, collections, and services would turn libraries into "mere lounging places for bummers." (5) Whether mired in anxieties about idleness or steeped in aspirations for uplift, public librarians understood their work as being in opposition to and in competition with commercial, mass culture. To prevail in this contest they had to formulate both positive and negative attitudes toward leisure. This essay explores some of the ways that public libraries gave leisure an institutional form during the Gilded Age, helping to spatially and temporally particularize the abstract concept of the public through their policies related to access--to the buildings, collections, and people. (6)

By the late nineteenth century leisure had matured into a distinct set of experiences and priorities that challenged the centuries-old Anglo-American dichotomy between work and rest. During the colonial period and early decades of the antebellum period most Anglo-Americans, as well as their apprentices, servants, and slaves, divided the week into six days of work and one of rest. In general, rest was firmly located within the confines of Christian belief and practice, which is to say that it was associated with worship, prayer, and Bible study. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the stark division between work and rest underwent dramatic change due to new technologies, new immigrants, new possibilities, and new beliefs. (7) At this time the first public library opened in Boston (1852); across the nation over the next half century city councils and philanthropists marshaled funding for libraries--some magnificent, others serviceable. Often housed in city council chambers, these early public libraries soon outgrew their quarters and in some cases moved into separate buildings. In fashioning activities and spaces for a community's free time, public librarians and their supporters mediated between fears of "idleness"--embodied in loafers and bummers--and hopes for re-creation implicit in the public library's association with cathedrals and vestibules of churches.

We must remember that libraries began as collections of books and that for centuries books had been considered the preeminent symbols and signs of "Culture." Elite and learned Americans, in their efforts to fashion the nation into a civilization, posited that freely accessible and ever-dynamic city libraries--and, indeed, a great national library such as the Library of Congress--would, along with the achievements of great poets, foster Culture. However, after the Civil War, when the means for achieving these goals seemed to materialize, three deep and significant changes in the relationship between Americans and culture shook the bookish foundations of civilization. First, a flourishing market for culture--in its sacred and secular forms--produced both mass leisure and mass culture. Second, as an array of persons and institutions separated the popular from the "serious," the "commodified" from the "pure," and the professional from the amateur, they created a cultural hierarchy that segregated objects, texts, and audiences. Third, liberal Protestants engaged in a process of "sacralization" that legitimated culture in all its permutations but the vulgar and the prurient. The cultural politics of leisure coursed through each of these reorientations, and in doing so new models for culture, for leisure, and for the public framed the emergence of tax-supported libraries. The remainder of this essay explores the implications for public libraries of each of these cultural shifts.

The Market for Culture