"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

It is clear that public libraries took shape within an extraordinarily vibrant market for culture. The disestablishment of the church in the late years of the eighteenth century and early ones of the nineteenth century gave rise to a dynamic market for religious experience, publications, and institutions. (8) Although there had always been impresarios and entrepreneurs willing to fulfill demand for less-than-godly entertainment, their numbers exploded after the Civil War. In catering to the public's whims and tastes they fed an appetite for spectacle, fantasy, and experience. The circus shows of P. T. Barnum, the vaudeville theaters of B. F. Keith, the baseball stadiums of the National League, and amusement parks of Coney Island and other cities' peripheries--all of these entrepreneurial offerings and more sat squarely within the market. (9) As the nation slowly became a "land of desire," public librarians felt strong imperatives to respond to and to shape demand. (10)

Somewhat reluctantly, they did so. They acquired fiction of the day, newspapers, and magazines. (11) They improved circulation mechanisms, largely by standardizing catalogs, opening stacks, inaugurating branch libraries, and introducing distribution points and delivery stations. (12) With Boston in the forefront again, branch libraries began to open in 1870, usually in neighborhoods crowded with recently arrived and deeply impoverished immigrants from Europe and migrants from the countryside. (13) By the turn of the century, the principle animating the formation of branch libraries--access to books could Americanize and improve potentially unruly and uncivilized urbanites--underpinned the development of a system of distribution points: patrons could order and pick up books from public and private schools, firehouses and police stations, department stores and pharmacies, among other places. These delivery and deposit stations complemented the extension of the main branches' hours and days of service. (14)

Public librarians further embraced the new tools meant to enhance distribution of goods that were emerging out of the commercial sphere. They publicized their services in a variety of ingenious ways. For instance, in the 1890s notices concerning the public library's collections, hours, and location were distributed to some workers as they left factories; in the twentieth century radio spots highlighted the reference services of New York City's public library. (15) When librarians worried that cheap amusements and bustling streets prevented men and women from coming to the library, they fashioned competing and comparable amusements--musical concerts, motion pictures, exhibitions, and the like. (16) Public librarians even engaged in market research, counting how many men, women, and children came through their libraries' doors, recording what they read, deriving statistics that contrasted weekday with Sunday attendance and usage. (17) Apprehensive that Americans did not read enough, librarians went to the children,…