Library, Librarian

Franklin Roosevelt announced last Christmastide that he would leave to the nation all his private papers since 1910 (numbering some 8,000,000 items) if admirers would build, with private funds, a repository for them at Hyde Park on land which he would donate, and if Congress would keep it up in perpetuity with public funds. Last week this offer lay before the House for acceptance. To Mr. Roosevelt's admirers' dismay, it was declined.

Brought up first on the unanimous consent calendar, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Bill needed a two-thirds vote after Democrat Kent Keller of Illinois objected to postponing consideration, called for suspension of the rules. Opposition to the plan then became explicit.

"Why not provide for their keeping in the Archives Building in the national capital?" asked Republican John Schafer of Wisconsin.

Illinois' Keller: "[The] building was built so small that it is not in a position to take these papers."

Democratic Leader Sam Rayburn got so mad he accused Republicans, with apparent accuracy, of balking "just because he happens to be Franklin D. Roosevelt." The losing vote was 229-to-139, 49 short of two-thirds. The bill had to go back for rerouting through the Rules Committee.

Next day Franklin Roosevelt unveiled another plan he had been nursing. He nominated for Librarian of Congress one of the eminent literary persons whom he had consulted on the Hyde Park library idea: Poet Archibald MacLeish, 47.

Now the House rafters rang indeed with opposition. Republican John Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, member of the Dies Un-American Activities Committee, leaped up to flay Poet MacLeish as a "fellow traveler" of the Communist Party, a cofounder of the League of American Writers ("of the 23, twelve were well-known Communists"), an active sympathizer with Loyalist Spain.

Again Sam Rayburn leaped to the defense. "What [is a] 'fellow traveler?' " he roared.

"A man who is absolutely sympathetic with the Communist cause, but for various reasons does not care to be a party member," replied New Jersey's Thomas. "The Administration is now, and has been for some time, placing people in key positions who are either members of the Communist Party or fellow travelers. . . ."

"Little short of slander!" roared Sam Rayburn.

The MacLeish appointment was, of course, none of the House's business. But to the Senate, whence his confirmation must come, went protests against Poet MacLeish based on charges--more considerable than "Communism"--to which he humbly pleaded guilty. In announcing the appointment, Mr. Roosevelt explained that ever since 77-year-old Dr. Herbert Putnam (40 years Librarian, emeritus since last year) asked to be relieved, a search had been afoot for a successor possessing the many qualifications required. Mr. Roosevelt had finally decided that technical assistants could be hired for a librarian whose attainments as "gentleman and a scholar" are world renowned. To this, President Milton James Ferguson of the American Library Association, head of Brooklyn's public library, replied:

"The most important library in the world needs the skill of a trained and experienced library administrator. I have the highest respect for Mr. MacLeish as a poet, but I should no more think of him as Librarian of Congress than as chief engineer of a new Brooklyn Bridge . . . about the same as appointing a man Secretary of Agriculture because he likes cut flowers on his dinner table!"

Likelihood of the Senate rejecting Poet MacLeish was small. Recognition of his abilities beyond scholarship and gentility are not confined to the White House in Washington. There he was first introduced as a writer for FORTUNE during the New Deal's honeymoon in 1933, and Franklin Roosevelt was pleased to recall that they had a mutual friend in Felix Frankfurter, whom Archie MacLeish encountered at Harvard Law School, which graduated him in 1919 with top honors. For FORTUNE in 1935 he wrote The Case Against Roosevelt, unearthing from Massachusetts' constitution the basic American tenet (a prime plank of the Republican platform in 1936) that U. S. government shall be government of laws, not of men. A successful lawyer who turned poet (in 1923) as calculatedly as some lawyers turn politician, who made good at it by winning a Pulitzer Prize (Conquistador, 1933) and who supported his muse by diligent journalism, Archie MacLeish won the respect of Mr. Roosevelt and his Janizaries to such a degree that for two years past they have been contriving to draft him into their service.

His current job is curator of the Nieman Collection of Contemporary Journalism at Harvard. There he rides herd on eager reporters who come to steep themselves in history, literature, sociology and talk with visiting pundits. This job took more time than Poet MacLeish bargained for. But unless he should make a laureateship out of the librarianship, his new job will take hours longer beyond reckoning. Poet MacLeish accepted it because, he said, it is one of those posts which "no man has a right to refuse." That he will skimp it, let technicians do all the dirty work, can be suspected only by persons who have never seen tough-minded, tough-muscled Poet MacLeish at work; who do not know that he was a field artillery captain in the War, before that played water polo and football for Yale.

Merely the task of familiarizing himself with the Library of Congress, let alone running it, would make a more timid soul quail. Since Thomas Jefferson revived it with his books as a nucleus in 1815, after the British burned it (in the Capitol) in 1814, the collection has grown to some 6,000,000 volumes and pamphlets,* 1,500,000 maps and views, 1,200,000 pieces and volumes of music, 550,000 prints, 100,000 bound volumes of newspapers, uncountable manuscripts. In it is deposited by law a copy of every publication copyrighted in the U. S. With its Archives annex (completed last year), it contains 1,563,189 square feet of floor space (36.88 acres), 414 miles of steel shelving. It catalogues the important holdings of more than 700 other U. S. libraries, has published about 400 titles of its own, employs 1,055 People, has a $3,000,000 budget. Into it, before he takes office next autumn, will presumably go one more MacLeish opus, a poem on which he was working last week in the Massachusetts hills.

* As of June 30, 1938 the count was 5,591,710.

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