A book of Carnegie libraries

Front matter

£>tate College of Agriculture

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A book of Carnegie libraries,

Preface

For the delay that has made this volume so far behind the plates which it was designed to accompany I make no apology. A combination of circumstances has prevented its earlier completion, and it has seemed better to follow the lines originally laid down for the work, rather than to delay it for still further revision. Plates and text together may have at least an historical value, and the Hbrary building development of the last decade might well be made the subject of a supplementary volume. The list of plates printed to accompany the original portfolio is bound with the present volume, as it contains in handy form for reference the names of architects and in some cases the amount of Carnegie donations. In making up the book, however, it has seemed advisable to rearrange the plates somewhat, and the list cannot be used as an index to the illustrations.

I am indebted to the publishers of the Century Magazine for their kind permission to reprint the valuable article by Mr. Mabie, and likewise to the publishers of the Criterion Magazine for the use of Dr. Bostwick's discussion of " Carnegie Libraries and Good Reading." To the many friends in the hbrary profession who so cheerfully aided me to secure the necessary data for the description of their buildings, and to all who have helped me to bring the work to its conclusion, I give my most sincere thanks.

T. W. K.

Introduction

The generosity of Andrew Carnegie in the library gifts, which are the greatest single benefaction in library history, has had purpose and result much broader than the mere building of public libraries. Like his rival in large giving, John D. Rockefeller, Mr. Carnegie has sought through his giving to stimulate public spirit, to raise standards, and to provide for social betterment, not by way of by-products, but as a chief aim. Thus he has made fundamental conditions of his library gifts, that the community should provide a site and that adequate maintenance, usually a tithe annually on the cost of the building should be assured, making himself a co-partner with the local citizenry in providing that people's university which in so many American cities and towns is to-day a central feature of architecture and of community life.

In 1907 Mr. Theodore W. Koch, in appreciation of the public spirit of Mr. Carnegie, undertook in his leisure time the public service to libraries and to the community of collecting plans and illustrations of typical or notable Carnegie buildings erected up to that date. The portfolio which resulted from that collection has been a useful presentation of library architecture, but it has lacked until now the accompanying text which should explain and describe the buildings illustrated. Mr. Koch's increasingly engrossing labors and other circumstances prevented earlier publication of the present volume, which brings the story of Mr. Carnegie's gifts up to ten years ago. This volume includes with its text the illustrations of the portfolio collection.

There has been no attempt to cover the succeeding ten years, beyond brief mention of the Carnegie Corporation, organized in 191 1 to continue permanently Mr. Carnegie's benefactions and to relieve him of the personal strain of this work. It is a correlative of the Carnegie Foundation and of the Carnegie Institution, each doing altruistic work in its separate field. Up to the year 1907 Mr. Carnegie's library gifts had provided for 1636 hbrary buildings, covering grants of $44,545,742 — 1014,

vii

INTRODUCTION

representing $32,734,267, in the United States, and the others dotted over England, Wales, and Scotland, Canada, South Africa, and other parts of the English-speaking world. A decade later, up to 1917, the total grants promised by Mr. Carnegie personally, and by the Carnegie Corporation, had provided for 2865 buildings amounting to $65,069,684.44, in itself an enormous fortune. It would be unfair not to recognize at this writing the part of Mr. James Bertram, first, as Mr. Carnegie's personal secretary for library purposes, and later as secretary of the Carnegie Corporation, and as the general channel of Mr. Carnegie's library generosity.

The earlier buildings figuring in the illustrations and described in the present volume show the development of library architecture under the early stimulus of Mr. Carnegie's gifts. In that time there was great progress, and in these later years there has been greater progress. Some features of these earlier buildings have been developed into greater usefulness and beauty, while others have not had so happy an experience, but have done their part in the evolution of the present library building, as early experiments to be discarded in favor of better methods. This is the story of all good development, and the text and illustrations of the present volume should be studied with careful discrimination as to what should be avoided and what copied or developed. In the past few years the Carnegie Corporation has worked out improved standards, especially for small library buildings, which represent a happy combination of good architecture and practical administration. It is perhaps not out of place here to emphasize the thought that a Carnegie library, while attractive in exterior, should be fundamentally of sound architecture, answering to practical needs and economy of maintenance. To-day the Carnegie name is associated with good architecture in thousands of places in this country and elsewhere, thus providing a monument more impressive, more useful, and more lasting than can be associated with any other life or name.

R. R. BOWKER.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Andrew Carnegie i-6

A character sketch by Hamilton W. Mabie.

Index to Plates 225

Appendix — List of Plates

An index of illustrations will be found at the end of the volume.

X

A BOOK OF CARNEGIE LIBRARIES

CARNEGIE LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES

Chapter I Andrew Carnegie

A Chaeacter Sketch by Hamilton W. Mabie.'

SOCIETY is fast becoming richer than was foreshadowed in the most audacious dreams of the past. Measured by the standards of to-day, Croesus was a person of very moderate fortune ; and the revenues of kings are of small account compared with the incomes of the leading capitalists of the twentieth century. There are those who think that the recent production of wealth is abnormal and who are predicting a return to the old scale of values in the near future. There are, however, no signs of any reduction of energy, any decline of force, any exhaustion either of the genius which creates wealth or of the material out of which wealth is developed. There are, on the contrary, many things which indicate that society is in the early stages of a wealth-producing period, the like of which has not only not occurred before, but has never been anticipated by the most sanguine men of affairs. Great changes will undoubtedly be made in the methods of distribution of wealth, but there will be no diminution in its production. Historic processes are now bearing the slow fruitage of time in the opening up of the entire globe, the drawing together of races in free competition in the field of the world, the discovery of the magical power of co-operation and combination and their application to commerce and trade on a great scale, and, above all, the application of science to business in all departments, from the uses of chemistry in manufacturing to the uses of electricity in swift communication and conveyance of goods.

1 From the Century Magazine, October, 1902, pp. 956-958. I I

It is probable that the severest test to which society is to be subjected hes before it in the opulence of the near future, and there is good ground for the forebodings of those who fear that in the greatness of their material fortunes the spiritual fortunes of men will suffer permanent eclipse. The great races have been great by virtue not of poss-essions, but of ideas, convictions, and character; and in this respect it is not dogmatic to affirm that history will repeat itself.

(The problem of the near future will be to keep the spirit in command of the body, the mind superior to the hand, the idea supreme above the material which gives it concrete expression, That problem will not be solved by any form of asceticism, by the preaching of poverty, by repression of the full and free play of human energy. Safety lies not in the mutilation of man as God made him, but in persuading him to accept a true scale of values, a real appraisement of his possessions. A complicated problem is never solved by going backward ; it is solved by going forward. Society will not be saved by making it poor, but by making it strong. So long as the genius of man has such subtle powers of insight, discovery, and adaptation, and so long as the earth on which he lives supplies him so abundantly with force, material, and method, it is as idle to ask him to limit production as to invite him to commit suicide ; he works, and he will work with an increasing skill, by the law of his nature, and he will grow rich by the law of the world in which he works. , The only real question, therefore, is. What shall he do with his wealth?

This question is probably more fundamental than any political or economical question now in discussion, and Mr. Carnegie's answer to it has made him one of the foremost men of his time. It is significant that the emphasis of interest in Mr. Carnegie's case has shifted from his wealth to the uses he is making of it ; from the material with which he works to the idea which he is expressing through it. He represents a new order of men in the world, and the instinctive feeling that a man's fortune is his private affair and that it betrays a lack of delicacy to speak of it has given place to a recognition of the public aspects of great fortunes when, by organization, they constitute the basis of a new group of forces in society. The great modern capitalist is not and cannot be a private person ; he is, by virtue of his power and his responsibilities, as much and as legitimately a public man as the Czar of Russia, the Prime Minister of England, or the President of the United States. He is no longer simply an employer of labor : he is also the controller and manager of the vast accumulations which numberless private persons have intrusted to him. His property is the security of countless small investments ; his integrity and capacity are elements in the well-being of the community.

( When great capitalists began to appear there was a great deal of idle and, in many cases, of vulgar curiosity about their habits of life, their amusements and occupations. That kind of curiosity will always exist, and is now the chief stock in trade of cheap newspapers which denounce the rich in leaded editorials and surrender page after page to minute and impertinent accounts of the dress, food, amusements, and dissipation of the same class. Rational interest has shifted, however, from the making of fortunes to their use — from accumulation to distribution.

In the development of the phase of modern life which has produced the great capitalist, Mr. Carnegie has been a significant figure. He was one of the first in point of time to arrive at the position of a great man of wealth by modern standards ; to acquire a fortune so vast that its possession gave him historical prominence. ^His success was the more dramatic because it was achieved by the use of so few tools at the start ; it had no visible foundations of inherited capital, organization, or opportunity; it rested solely on the character and force of the man; on his insight into the possibilities of the means, the openings, and the men about him ; on his courage, steadiness, power of combination, and sustained force of intellect.

The foundations of Mr. Carnegie's success were laid in his personality, and the work was done in large measure by his ancestors. He is often spoken of as the conspicuous example of the self-made man. If by self-made is meant the making of a powerful person in will, intelligence, and practical force with slight accidental aids from circumstances, Mr. Carnegie is self-made ; but if the phrase carries with it the idea of complete organization of character and mind without contribution from others, Mr. Carnegie is not self-made. To the making of every powerful man many agencies contribute : ancestry, racial tendencies, general conditions, local opportunities. No man succeeds without help from others ; no man becomes great in any field of endeavor by isolated growth ; all development is aided by co-operation ; every success is social in its conditions if not in its origin ; and, therefore, every success ought to be interpreted in terms of social service. No man secures anything for himself in isolation, and no man has a moral right to enjoy in isolation the thing he secures.

Mr. Carnegie made his fortune by virtue of qualities in his own nature and with little aid from without ; so far as outside help was concerned, he is a striking example of how much a man can accomplish with no tools except those which nature puts into his hands. In the new and greater stage of his career, Mr. Carnegie is now rendering his most distinctive service to the community by his interpretation of the uses and responsibilities of wealth. When the immense sums which he has given and will give for educational purposes in one form or another are added up and the total set down in figures, the imagination of the country will be impressed and its sense of obligation quickened ; but in the long run it will probably appear that the greatest service rendered by Mr. Carnegie was not his vast beneficence, but his attitude toward his success, his recognition of the social element in great enterprises, his return in kind to the community which made his rise to affluence and power possible.

The real test of a man comes when the necessity for work is past and he is able to give himself to the things for which he cares. It has often happened that a man has arrived at fortune and ease only to disclose the emptiness of his soul, the poverty of his ideals. It is the way in which Mr. Carnegie has met this test which has made him so interesting a figure of late years, and has revealed, as his years of active business life could not reveal, the variety and range of his interests, the deep springs of youth and activity in his nature. For this endowment of imagination, vivacity, spiritual energy, he owes as much to his ancestry as for his sagacity, energy, and thrift. He comes of a race of extraordinary capacity for dealing with aff"airs and of extraordinary capacity for living by ideas — a race which not only strikes hard and works hard, but which puts the same force into emotional and moral life ; combining in the same person the keenest shrewdness, the clearest judgment, and the capacity for absolute surrender to a great passion or a great cause. Scotland has been the home of " lost causes and impossible loyalties " ; and Scotland has also been, taking into account her size and her population, a country of unique spiritual and intellectual influence ; the home of thinkers, scholars, poets, romancers ; with universities which are the organized opportunity of the poorest, and a poetry which is the possession of the humblest and the most unlearned.

V The vast generosity of Mr. Carnegie to literature and scholarship — for the library is the storehouse of literature and the open door to scholarship — is not a matter of impulse and did not take its rise in suggestion from without. Love of poetry and learning came to him by inheritance, j His youth knew the spell and the inspiration of Burns and Shakespeare and those noble old ballads in which the idealism, the passion, and the tragedy of Scottish hfe found such moving and dramatic expression. Self-made in his independence of material help, Mr. Carnegie was singularly fortunate in the ancestral influences which penetrated and enriched his nature far below the region of his practical activity and efficiency, that deeper part of him which has found expression in these later years, and has asserted its priority of spiritual importance over the executive side of his character.

This background of early life, becoming constantly more distinct in Mr. Carnegie's later career, must be taken into account in any attempt to explain the man, but can only be lightly touched here. In a Scottish home of the kind from which Mr. Carnegie came there are to be found not only the qualities which command success in affairs, but the higher qualities which weigh and measure success in terms of spiritual values. Among those vigorous, honorable, thrifty Scottish folk, with their keen native sagacity and their equally keen appreciation of learning, of poetry, of the finer things of the spirit, several figures may be recalled : a father endowed with the gift of imagination, poetic in temperament, eloquent in speech, passionately interested in all movements for the betterment of his kind ; ^ a mother from the Highlands, with the Celtic sensibility and fire, an inexhaustible store of old ballads in her memory; an uncle who became a foster-father, and who has but recently gone to his rest, feeble with the weight of years but of an unbroken courage and that

^ The father was one of three Dunfermline weavers who pooled their book possessions and thus instituted the first library in that town. The son has recently presented a handsome hbrary building to this his native place, having already built a tecknical school and other municipal buildings there.

sweetness which is the flower of a lifelong rectitude and a lifelong cherishing of the traditions, the songs, the spiritual impulses of a race whose labors and hardships have never lacked the illuminating touch of the imagination. This uncle, who loved liberty because it is the heritage of brave souls, in the dark days of the American Civil War stood almost alone in his community for the cause which Lincoln represented. He loved education with the passion of an ardent nature, eager to open the doors of opportunity, and his happiest hour came when Mr. Carnegie endowed a school for manual training in the Scottish town in which he lived and attached his name to it. His working hours knew the constant solace of poetry, and he taught the boys growing up about him the songs of Burns, the Scottish ballads, and the plays of Shakespeare as they learned their crafts. " I made myself a boy that they might be men," he once said, recalling the days, when, as they worked together, they impersonated the actors in the great stories of Scottish history and tradition. His eyes kindled when the old songs were sung, and his youth came back to him as, with undimmed memory and unspent feeling, he recited the lines which he carried in his heart. A beautiful figure, this old uncle, venerable and yet touched with the spirit which knows not age, in deep sympathy with the upward movement of the world, and one in heart with the struggle for larger opportunities everywhere. In the light of the memory of such an ancestry it is easy to understand why Mr. Carnegie has ceased to be an organizer of industry and has become an organizer of opportunity, and is now, on a scale unpractised before, transmuting fortune into knowledge, thought, freedom, and power.

Chapter II

Hercules refusing to help the carter who did not put his own shoulder to the wheel, and Carnegie, turning from the submerged tenth, to devise means for encouraging the swimming tenth, — these are the ancient and modern expressions of the same eternal truths that, i?i this life at least, by works are ye saved, and he that will not work neither shall he eat. — Whitelaw Reid.

The "Gospel of Wealth" — Mr. Carnegie's Library Creed — Colonel James Anderson of Allegheny and his Library Institute — The Anderson Memorial — Methods of Giving — President Roosevelt ON Carnegie Libraries — The Maintenance Requirement — The Value of Mr. Carnegie's Example — Some Doubts and Criticisms — Popular Misconceptions — Mr. Horace White Quoted — Carnegie Corporation Organized — Total Benefactions to Jan. i, 1917.

IN the North American Review for June, 1889, Mr. Carnegie published an article on " Wealth " which attracted marked^ attention both in England and America, calling forth comments and criticisms from Gladstone, Grover Cleveland, Cardinal Gibbons, Cardinal Manning, Bishop Potter, Rabbi Adler, and others. At the request of the editor, Mr. Carnegie contributed to the December number of the Review a second article, in which he pointed out what were in his judgment the best fields for the use of surplus wealth and the best methods of administering it for the good of the people. The two articles, slightly revised and co-ordinated, are reprinted as the title essay of his book, "The Gospel of Wealth, and other Timely Essays." In his first paper Mr. Carnegie had said that " the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves ; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so ; to give those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise ; to assist, but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance."

This thought was continued in his second paper. " The first requisite for a really good use of wealth by the millionaire who has accepted the gospel which proclaims him only a trustee of the surplus that comes to him, is to take care that the purposes for which he spends it shall not have a degrading, pauperizing tendency upon its recipients, but that his trust shall be so administered as to stimulate the best and most aspiring poor of the community to further efforts for their own improvement."

Mr. Carnegie's answer to the question, What is the best gift which can be given to a community? is that in his judgment " a free library occupies the first place, provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution, as much a part of the city property as its public schools, and, indeed, an adjunct to these." Mr. Carnegie, in explaining his reason for having decided upon the building of libraries as the field for the distribution of his money, said : " I think it fruitful in the extreme, because the library gives nothing for nothing, because it helps only those that help themselves, because it does not sap the foundation of manly independence, because it does not pauperize, because it stretches a hand to the aspiring and places a ladder upon which they can only ascend by doing the climbing themselves. This is not charity, this is not philanthropy, it is the people themselves helping themselves by taxing themselves." " It is, no doubt, possible," says Mr. Carnegie, " that my own personal experience may have led me to value a free library beyond all other forms of beneficence. When I was a working-boy in Pittsburg, Colonel Anderson of Allegheny — a name that I can never speak without feelings of devotional gratitude — opened his httle library of four hundred books to boys. Every Saturday afternoon he was in attendance at his house to exchange books. No one but he who has felt it can ever know the intense longing with which the arrival of Saturday was awaited, that a new book might be had. My brother and Mr. Phipps, who have been my principal business partners through life, shared with me Colonel Anderson's precious generosity, and it was when revelling in the treasures which he opened to us that I resolved, if ever wealth came to me, that it should be used to establish free libraries, that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which we were indebted to that noble man."

Colonel James Anderson established in 1850 the " J. Anderson Library Institute of Allegheny City," which was open for the free circulation of books at stated hours on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The bookplate which Colonel Anderson had devised for his institute, with a collection of tools for its most characteristic feature, shows clearly that the founder's intention was to furnish reading for the mechanics and working-men who made up the largest part of the community. It has the apt motto : " Take fast hold of instruction : let her not go, for she is thy life." (Proverbs, chapter 4, verse 13.)

The Anderson Library was closed shortly after its founder's death in 1861, not perhaps so much on account of lack of public interest in keeping it open as owing to the all-absorbing interest in the Civil War. The books were boxed up and stored in the basement of the city hall until shortly after the close of the war, when they were entrusted to the charge of the recently organized Allegheny Library Association. In 1871 the management of the Association was placed in the hands of the board of school controllers, who, during the next year, were empowered to appropriate from the school funds a sum of money for the maintenance of a free public library. When the Carnegie Free Library was organized in 1890, it was generally expected that the Public School Library would be merged into the new institution, but there were unfortunately legal difficulties which prevented the amalgamation. The Public School Library now numbers 26,000 volumes, including about four hundred books from the original Anderson Library.

Mr. Carnegie has on several occasions paid fond tribute to Colonel Anderson's memory, and on June 15, 1904, there was unveiled in Allegheny as a gift from him a lasting memorial to the man who inspired the great steel king with the idea of his library crusade. The monument is at the corner of the Carnegie Library lot and consists of a portrait bust by Daniel Chester French. In front of the large granite slab which supports the bust is the figure of an iron-worker, who sits bared to the waist, upon an anvil, and rests from his labor long enough to glance at the large open book which he holds on his knees.

Mr. Carnegie does not care to be known as a philanthropist, whom he defines as one who not only gives his wealth, but also follows it up by personal attention. The claims upon Mr. Carnegie's time and the wide area over which his benefactions have been spread have not permitted of his carrying out the second stipulation to any great extent. Yet it must be said that he has followed with very keen interest and wise counsel the development of many of the institutions which owe their existence to his liberality, notably those in and around Pittsburg which serve the large communities immediately interested in and dependent upon the works and industries by means of which Mr. Carnegie's wealth was largely acquired.

Mr. Carnegie has expressed great admiration for the method of giving employed by Mr. Enoch Pratt, of Baltimore, who not only gave to his city the library which bears his name, but also watched constantly over its growth and development, sharing with the trustees the burden of the many problems which beset them from time to time, helping with practical suggestions and cheering all by his optimism. On the occasion of the formal opening of the magnificent library building which Mr. Carnegie had presented to the District of Columbia, he said with genial modesty : " It is so little to give money to a good cause and there end," then turning to the commissioners and trustees, " and so grand to give thought and time, as these gentlemen have done."

" It seems to me that the man has a right to call himself thrice blessed," said President Roosevelt on this occasion, "who has in him the combined power and purpose to use his wealth for the benefit of all the people at large in a way that can do them real benefit, and in no way can more benefit be done than through the gift of libraries such as this, — a free library, where each man, each woman, has the chance to get for himself or herself the training that he has the character to desire and to acquire. Now, of course, our common school system lies at the foundation of our educational system, but it is the foundation only. The men that are to stand pre-eminent as the representatives of the culture of the community must educate themselves, and the work done by this library is interesting because it represents one side of the way in which all this self-educational work in a community must be done.

" Mr. Carnegie," continued the President, " neither you nor any one else can make a man wise or cultivated. All you can

lO do is to give him a chance to make himself so, to add to his own wisdom or his own cultivation, and that is all you can do in anykind of genuine philanthropic work. The only philanthropic work is work that helps a man to help himself. This is true in every way, socially and sociologically. The man who will submit or demand to be carried is not worth carrying. [To this Mr. Carnegie ejaculated, ' Hear ! Hear ! '] Every man of us needs help, needs more and more to be given the chance to show forth in himself the stuff that is in him, and this kind of free library is doing in the world of cultivation, the world of civilization, what it should or may do for the great world of political and social development; that is, it is as far as may be equalizing the opportunities, and then leaving the men themselves to show how able they are to take advantage of those opportunities. To quote an expression that I am fond of, this sort of gift is equally far from two prime vices of our civilization, hardness of heart and softness of head."