Fall 2014

MAGAZINE STAFF

EDITOR Alex Teller

DESIGNER Andrea Villasenor

PHOTOGRAPHER Catherine Gass

The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually by the Newberry’s Office of Communications and Marketing. Articles in the magazine address major archiving projects, digital initiatives, and exhibitions; the scholarship of fellows and Newberry staff; and the signature items and hidden gems of the collection. Every other issue contains the annual report for the most recently concluded fiscal year. A subscription to The Newberry Magazine is a benefit of membership in the Newberry Associates. To become a member, contact Vince Firpo at f irpov@newberry.org.

Unless otherwise credited, all images are derived from items in the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry, and have been provided by the Newberry’s Digital Imaging Services Office.

Cover image: A Burlington Zephyr crosses a bridge out of Minneapolis. Photograph by Russell Lee, 1948.

In light of the attention regularly afforded to such Newberry collection items as the Shakespeare First Folio, maps of North America dating back to the beginnings of European colonization, and our copy of the Popol Vuh, it may surprise some readers of this magazine to know that the Newberry has a large collection devoted entirely to what we call “modern manuscripts.” Of course, we have lots of notable handwritten documents that were produced before the era of the printing press. Our modern manuscripts are quite different. They include diverse formats from handwritten and typescript items of a more recent vintage to photographs, videos, audio recordings, drawings, and maps. The modern manuscript collections contain letters from Midwest pioneers to their East Coast relatives, notes Chicago journalists took in preparing big stories, records that reveal the inner workings of private companies, and sketches typographers made as they perfected a new typeface.

At the Newberry, collecting materials such as these—especially those related to Chicago and the Midwest—was first pursued in a programmatic way in the middle of the twentieth century, under Director and Librarian Stanley Pargellis. Today, items that are among our most frequently requested entered the collection because of Pargellis’s direct intervention or precedents set by him in the 1940s and 1950s. In the case of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Com-pany (CB&Q) Records, it was as a result of both.

In 1943, the CB&Q made a first deposit with the Newberry of private archives documenting the company’s early history. Further deposits, expanding the chronological scope of the collection, followed in the succeeding years and decades. Pargellis fought hard for that original accession, believing that to provide access to the previously unavailable documents of a major American corporation was to lay the groundwork for a variety of research opportunities. Today these opportunities come to fuller and fuller fruition in the Newberry’s Midwest Manuscript Collection, of which the CB&Q archives form a significant part. A major cataloging project recently completed by the Modern Manuscripts Department, and led by Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts Martha Briggs, is making CB&Q materials available to a range of users that even Pargellis could not have foreseen: not just historians and scholars interested in the Midwest or business per se, but also genealogists, graphic designers, photographers, those who investigate visual culture, and many more. These important constituencies come to the New-berry to read our modern manuscripts, and in doing so they help bring to life the cultural heritage that we preserve.

In this third issue of The Newberry Magazine, we invite you to read about the dynamic ways in which this heritage has been built by Newberry staff and donors and is constantly enriched by our readers. Thank you for your support of the Newberry, and happy reading.

David Spadafora, President and Librarian

Illuminating Modern Manuscripts

/newberrylibrary

ContentsFEATURES

The Right Track 3By Alex Teller

In 1943 Newberry Director and Librarian Stanley Pargellis convinced a major American railroad to bring their private records out of the shadows and into the library’s collection. It was hard work.

The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Archives Today 9By Alison Hinderliter and Kelly Kress

Woman of Letters 10By Alex Teller

Jerri Dell researches and rediscovers her grandfather, novelist and literary critic Floyd Dell.

Maps and Atlases 13Roger Baskes receives the Newberry Library Award and, in his acceptance speech, shares his thoughts on Chicago, the humanities, and a life of collecting in cartography.

Fit to Print and Then Some 18By Karen Christianson

The Newberry began systematically collecting the personal papers of Chicago journalists in the mid-twentieth century. What purpose do these materials serve today?

DEPARTMENTS

Dear Walter 2

RETROSPECT: The Shakespeare Exhibition That T’was 21

RETROSPECT: Recent Events 22

PROSPECT: Upcoming Events 52

ANNUAL REPORT

Letter from the Chair and the President 26

Continuing Education 29

Research and Academic Programs 30

Honor Roll of Donors 36

Board of Trustees and Volunteer Committees 47

Staff 48

Financials 50

3

10

13

18

21

22

22The Newberry Magazine 1

Dear Walter:

The Newberry building is so beautiful. Who designed it?

— Jenny Arches-Chesterton, Evanston, IL

My Dear Ms Arches-Chesterton,

The news I relate herewith may elicit a Smirk or some other Expression of Bemusement, but no matter: the veracity of my Reply is beyond reproach. Construction of the Newberry building in which you presently stand (or sit, which is perhaps more likely the case) and enjoy the Fruits of Scholarship stirred up quite the controversy—a Charybdis of competing Wills and Visions toward the finale of the 19th C.

The Newberry opened its doors to the Public in 1887, and the Great Institution would christen more than a few additional portals with the act of Door-Opening. Amid a series of temporary locations, the Board of Trustees initiated plans for a permanent home for the library, securing the services of architect Henry Ives Cobb. Cobb was a gentleman of relative Callowness and inexperience (a mere 29!). An unaffiliated observer with a Cynical inclination might divine a concealed Motive: the selection of a youthful architect who would readily defer to President and Librarian William Frederick Poole. That Unaffiliated Observer with a Cynical Inclination might be correct.

Poole was something of a Luminary in the field of Library Science, and he harbored uncompromising views regarding the design of libraries. Chief among these was the belief that a library’s collection must be dispersed among its Rooms so that Readers may interface—there’s one for all you MILLENIALS— with the items directly. No centralization of storage, no Cabal of Corrupt Librarian-Gatekeepers for Old Mr. Poole! Neither would he countenance any Pomp or Grandiosity. “Convenience and utility shall never yield to architectural effect,” he once told the American Library Association.

Cobb proved no obedient underling, however. The young architect returned from a trip to Europe in 1889 with visions of centralized storage and Architectural Effect. Poole, ever-attuned to his Rivals, published his views in Chicago’s newspapers in order to galvanize Public sentiment in his Favor. The Newberry’s Board of Trustees sensed a public relations Fiasco of unprecedented proportions and intervened, placating Poole and retaining a few of Cobb’s architectural Predilections. A Symbol of this great compromise (of which Henry Clay would be most proud) is the staircase which greets visitors in the Lobby: a grand unrolling of Marble whose ambition seems to have been constrained, tempered, what have you. Alas…

Dear Walter:

I recently finished watching the World Cup this summer, and was hoping to feed my newfound love for the game of soccer. What do you recommend?

— Franklin S. Weeper, Fort Collins, CO

My Dear Mr Weeper,

Soccer: the word’s utterance requires the most oppressive Phonemes of Midwestern speech. It verily takes up residence—establishes a Domicile—in the nasal passages, wouldn’t you agree? As for the Object to which it refers, I am a gentleman of Leisure, a citizen of the Mind, and so cannot pretend to declaim upon it as an Authority. Give me the “Sport” of gathering the final volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the topmost shelf in my Study any Day of the Week. However, I grant all queries an equality of consideration, and shall vouchsafe a Reply.

The Newberry does have in its Collection, Dear Franklin, a Volume that may prove edifying to your Soccer-addled mind: Athletics and Football, published in 1894 as part of the Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes series. Perhaps a smattering of background information will be of some Utility.

For a good deal of Time, while the Glorious 1800s (from which yours truly hails) waxed their way mid century, “Football” was played primarily among the youthful Britons fortunate enough to attend a Public School. Of course, in contrast to the Semantics on this side of the Atlantic, British “public” schools were the province of the Elite: those whose Genealogy included William the Conqueror and Beowulf and so on and so forth. The exclusivity of the Pursuit, however, did not suppress a litany of Opinions and Sentiments regarding the Proper way to engage in It. Each school, seemingly, promoted its own Rules, which varied according to the Allowances made for the hands and feet. For reasons that should be Self-Evident, this inconsistency would prove untenable; with the passage of Labor Laws (adieu, 16-hour workday!) and the ensuing Democratization of Leisure, the demand became all the greater for a codification of rules capable of governing a larger collection of Players. Two unified systems emerged: that which we recognize today as Rugby, and…FOOTBALL—ahem, soccer.

A culmination in this movement to Codify the rules of the game arrived with publication of Athletics and Football by Montague Sherman (which includes, lest we forget, “a contribution on paper-chasing by W. Rye”).

Enjoy! Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve grown faint (I feel as though I Myself have raced several Leagues along the pitch), and Gibbon beckons.

2 Fall 2014

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Dear WalterWalter L. Newberry exploits a rift in the space-time continuum to respond to friends of the library. Follow the blog at www.newberry.org/dear-walter; submit a query to dearwalter@newberry.org.

The Newberry Magazine 3

Stanley Pargellis came to the Newberry in 1942, from Yale University, where he taught history. He had already begun work on a bibliography of eighteenth-century British history that would become, after its publication in 1951, a standard resource for the field. His résumé, however, could attest to no experience in library management. Pargellis would be a scholar-librarian: scholarly instinct would come first, guiding him early in his tenure as president of the library; a feel for administration would come later. Pargellis was himself disarmingly serene about this progression. In a January 16, 1942, letter to President of the Newberry Board of Trustees Alfred Hamill, Pargellis expressed his interest in becoming the capital L Librarian of the Newberry: “I like libraries, I like what I saw of the Newberry Library, and I think I should like to try my hand at running it.” (All quoted material, unless otherwise noted, comes from letters in the Newberry Library Archives.)

Pargellis would run the Newberry for the next 20 years, expanding its collection to include the records of major American railroads and the papers of twentieth-century journalists (of which Karen Christianson writes in this magazine). Pargellis’s legacy today appears strikingly in the Newberry’s Midwest Manuscript Collection. A pivotal moment in the development of the collection came with the scholar-librarian’s 1943 acquisition of the early archives of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q), a corporate titan

that, together with its subsidiaries, had created a rail network extending from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. (Burlington President Ralph Budd once remarked that his company “not only brought the first effective means of transportation to much of this region, but also took an active part in its settlement and colonization.”) Pargellis’s private correspondence with the Burlington reveals the vexed back-and-forth that led to the landmark acquisition.

Having recently taught a class on American economic history at Yale, Stanley Pargellis sought to collect local business records almost as soon as he arrived at the Newberry. The idea was to support the work of scholars of economics and social and business history (who generally couldn’t access the archives of the corporations that, for better or worse, had shaped American life) and to build the Newberry’s repository of materials illuminating the development of Chicago and the Midwest. But the new librarian didn’t know a whole lot about building a collection, much less one consisting of items—correspondence, balance sheets, employee records—that had been closely kept by companies and boards and executives with much to lose.

Late in 1942, Pargellis wrote to Arthur Cole, librarian of the Harvard University School of Business’s Baker Library, for advice. Cole essentially told Pargellis to think like a businessman, to frame his argument in terms of mutual advantage when convincing businesses to let him hold their private records. The Newberry librarian expressed his thanks in a follow-up letter: “I begin to see that a businessman’s interest

By Alex Teller

The Right TrackStanley Pargellis and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company Records

This promotional poster from 1858 trumpeted the extension of a Burlington route in southern Iowa. The poster is one of the oldest pieces in the Newberry’s CB&Q archives.

“ I like libraries, I like what I saw of the Newberry Library, and I think I should like to try my hand at running it.”

Newberry Librarian Stanley Pargellis in the library’s stacks, ca. 1959.

4 Fall 2014

is at once awakened if you suggest that you can save him storage charges on his dead files, and if one follows along those lines in reaching a negotiation, it is almost bound to be one which leaves legal ownership in the firm.” Pargellis was already pulling from a commercial lexicon like a veteran of the boardroom. But negotiating entailed some measure of sacrifice, and if firms retained ownership of their records after depositing them at libraries, it might restrict the freedom of scholarship.

By the early 1940s the railroad industry was coming to terms with the existential threat of other modes of transportation. Road, water, and air travel were all—like rail—subsidized in one form or another by the federal government; and yet the ways in which the Interstate Commerce Commission (or, in the case of air, the Civil Aeronautics Board) regulated those industries allowed them to claim increasing portions of freight and passenger mileage in the United States. A rapidly expanding highway system diverted more and more traffic from railroad companies. Already by 1930 there were about 660,000 miles of highways, supporting 10 times as many passenger-miles as the railroads. Meanwhile, the development of military aeronautics—accelerated by the Second World War—virtually guaranteed comparable development in commercial air travel. According to R.C. Overton, of the Burlington’s research department, in The Burlington Route, “Aircraft manufacturers ready to meet the demands of war could be encouraged only if commercial aviation itself was constantly expanding.” The federal government did this by improving airway infrastructure (systems providing more accurate weather information, for example), resulting in an increasingly reliable alternative to travel by rail.

In addition to fierce competition in the field of transportation, the tweed-and-elbow-patch-wearing crowd was causing the railroads great consternation. “I am particularly concerned with the attitude of the members of university and college faculties, an attitude which has worked incalculable harm to the railroad industry,” wrote one major-railroad executive in a letter to Stanley Pargellis. The harm, the executive implied, came from strident pronouncements of the corrupt relationship between the railroads and the federal government. The accusations trickled down from ivory towers to inf luence impressionable students and, over time, national convictions.

Scholarship, according to railroad companies, unfairly associated the ruthless expansiveness of modern American capitalism with the railroads — a mere component of the capitalist system. Scholars (so the argument went), consulting labor union proclamations and other biased sources, had greatly

exaggerated the incentives offered to the railroads to settle the West: land grants, tax breaks, and so on.

Especially controversial was the railroads’ acquisition of public land in the form of land grants. In theory, the railroads would finance their operations by selling land to farmers and other settlers; farmers would benefit from their proximity to a train route, shipping their crops faster than they had before; and the government would see an increase in the value of the land to which it retained title. Over time, however, the scale with which government and the railroads pursued their public-private partnership bred resentment: railroad firms would receive more than 223 million acres from state and federal grants.

The railroad firms’ quibbles with their critics within the academy and specialized fields like cartography could be, well, academic. A textbook containing a map of “Land Grants Made by Congress to Aid in the Construction of Railroads” caught the critical eye of the Association of American Railroads (AAR). Robert S. Henry, assistant to the president of the

Among the railroads’ business practices, the use of federal land grants to finance expansion across the United States was especially controversial. This map originally appeared in The History of Our Public Lands, 1882. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Newberry Magazine 5

association, wrote to the authors of America that their map was inaccurate. “The actual grants were only a little more than one-fourth as much as the area shown in these maps,” he pointed out. The United States government, in other words, hadn’t been that generous. And the railroads in any event had more than made up for it, according to Henry, in reduced shipping rates for government accounts.

Implicit in Henry’s rebuke is the notion that unf lattering portrayals of the railroad industry were linked to inaccurate information. Inaccurate information could be corrected only with more reliable sources, of which the railroads considered themselves the gatekeepers. This line of thought led to the conclusion that providing access to company records must result in more favorable reviews. After all, it couldn’t get much worse. As R.C. Overton wrote of an Illinois Central executive, in a letter to Burlington President Ralph Budd, “If there was any ‘dirt’ in the records, he hoped it would be made public, because he was sure that it would not be nearly so bad as some of the things that have already been said about the railroads.”

In Chicago, the president of a major research library was hoping to build a collection of business records. He and the great Burlington Railroad, also based in Chicago, soon realized their interests overlapped.

Stanley Pargellis had been meeting, throughout late 1942 and early 1943, with a group of college professors who called themselves the “Lexington Group.” Members varied in their feelings about the railroad industry’s intention to make materials available for research, but they all agreed there was a gap in the sources available for current scholarship. Pargellis emerged as a mediator of sorts, assuaging his peers’ concerns over corporate meddling and working to understand the railroads’ own apprehensions. Notes taken by Pargellis at this time ref lect a keen awareness of the assumptions and prophecies that the public had affixed to the railroads in general and to the Burlington in particular: “Not public servants primarily…. Land grant mismanagement…. RRs have gotten far more out of the public than they have ever given…. RRs doomed to fail with post-war air transport developments.” This aptitude for understanding the state of the industry and the Burlington’s anxieties earned Pargellis the trust of the railroad’s executives.

Already by October 26, 1942, Pargellis could report to Overton that the Newberry Board of Trustees had voted to accept the central office papers of the CB&Q should they be offered.

The vote was an act of theater, a declaration of intent without hope of imminent action; the Burlington chain of command was conducting a cost-benefit analysis regarding the release of its records that they would not resolve until the spring of 1943.

In the meantime, the company did begin to take at least the principle of transparency seriously. In a letter from November 1942, Overton told Budd that “from a public relations point of view, I believe the Burlington has a great deal to gain by the mere fact of deposit of these specific records, or even, to a lesser extent, by our serious consideration of the project.” The observation added an element of sophistication to the Burlington’s calculus. According to Overton (and in the minds of other Burlington people as well), the goodwill curried by the gesture of releasing company records could potentially negate whatever “dirt” those records contained. If the Burlington were to act as if it had nothing to hide, it could condition public opinion. After all, why would a company release a cache of private documents if it were anything other than a corporation with a clean record, in thrall to the public trust?

The Newberry’s proposed stewardship of once-private business records seemed to have strong support within the Burlington company. But uncertainty lingered. Nearly a hundred years of zealously guarding trade secrets had formed the Burlington psyche. Its fortifications could not be overcome so easily. Releasing documents meant relinquishing control of the ways in which those documents were interpreted; it meant not just having to tolerate but actually to invite outside participation in the construction of the Burlington narrative. The railroad’s executives agonized over the inevitable question: how might the Burlington retain some control over its own story? The mixture of resolve and doubt that characterized the Burlington’s attitude toward greater transparency ref lected, in many ways, the binary composition of the railroad industry as a whole: its mighty legacy and uncertain future.

A March 1943 memo from the Burlington to the Newberry conveyed the merits and hazards of providing readers and writers with research materials. Under “General Assumptions,” the Burlington noted:

It is desirable if not essential to obtain the support of students, teachers, writers, and the reading public for the railroads…. In the past, and to a considerable degree at present, these groups have held and expressed generally unfavorable or skeptical opinions concerning the policies and practices of railroads….The facts, if known (specifically in regard to the Burlington), would force to a greater or lesser degree a revision of these opinions in a direction favorable to the railroads…. The only way to make the facts known is to open fully all of the railroad archives available that do not deal with current transactions.

According to Overton, the goodwill curried by the gesture of releasing company records could potentially negate whatever “dirt” those records contained.

The company, however, held onto the possibility of regulating use of its deposit in some way. The same memo asked, “Will availability of this material to qualified research men lead to publication of information ref lecting favorably upon the Burlington? Will making the material available to qualified research men produce a reaction favorable to the Burlington?” The criteria for determining who counted as “qualified research men” were never spelled out, but it was standard practice among research libraries of the time, when making archival materials available, to hold readers to this ideal. (The gendered nature of the ideal, it should be noted, was also standard.)

If Pargellis acquiesced in the Burlington’s public relations campaign and its attendant terms and restrictions, he took issue with the railroad industry’s larger project of reputation management. This effort was being spearheaded by the Association of American Railroads and its Assistant-to-the-President Robert Henry. Henry’s plan had three goals: to create a network of public relations representatives from each of the major railroad companies who could provide materials to writers curious enough to ask for them; to encourage research in the history of railroads; and to publish the results of that research. When Pargellis caught wind of Henry’s ideas, he was livid. In an April 1 letter he explained to Henry that the AAR’s publication initiative would spook the very “qualified research men” the Burlington was trying to court: “[It had been agreed that] the Association of American Railroads had to tread cautiously in its dealings with academic people, that it had to avoid every act which, in this propaganda-ridden world, could be interpreted as railroad propaganda. [Academics see] corporation-subsidized literature a mile away. Most of them chuck it into a wastebasket without reading it.”

Pargellis believed historical inquiry, held to the highest academic standards regarding diversity of sources and soundness of argument (“dissemination of information which meets all scholarly tests and commands respect,” he told Henry), would vindicate the railroads. The keepers of their records, therefore, should be not the railroads themselves but the institutions in the business of facilitating research and writing: libraries. Pargellis thus stood up for both the existing best practices of the academy and the interests of big business. Some within the academic community doubted the two could coexist in the same scholarly effort; the Burlington was convinced that they could and that Pargellis, the head of an independent library, could help in the creation of its new public image.

On April 21, 1943, Ralph Budd wrote Pargellis, letting him know the company had decided to deposit with the Newberry its business records from 1849 to 1887. The 10 tons would include correspondence to and from Burlington executives, as well as files related to the construction and operation of the

railroad—from the original, 12-mile Aurora Branch to thousands of miles of track laid during the CB&Q’s westward march to Omaha, Minneapolis, and Denver. The Burlington would retain title to its materials, but made Pargellis the final arbiter in making them available to Newberry readers. “We understand that…you will not permit anyone to have access to our records or to publish material drawn from them unless you are satisfied that he is qualified by training and experience to work in this type of material,” Budd wrote. “No one will have access to [the Burlington files],” Pargellis replied, “who fails to convince me that he is well qualified to handle material of this sort and that he has a comprehensive and well-founded plan of objective research.”

The acquisition was monumental: a librarian in the Midwest had persuaded a major American corporation to take a step out of the shadows. However, to have any hope of securing additional deposits from the Burlington (and other midwestern businesses, for that matter), Pargellis needed to do more than just prevent “unqualified” researchers from defaming the Burlington. He had

6 Fall 2014

Inside the CB&Q Archives: Travel BrochuresThough automobiles were already, by the 1920s, becoming the preferred form of transportation for short trips between American cities, trains remained the most convenient and efficient way to cover larger distances. The railroads preserved their competitive advantage in this area in part through the promotion of tourism. The Burlington travel brochures pictured here come from the mid-1940s, when the United States’ emergence as a global superpower provided the backdrop for the brochures’ vivid appeals to racial superiority. There is nothing subtle about “From Indian Trails to Steel Rails.” Or about an image of a gleaming product of twentieth-century industry roaring through the prairie, disturbing the ghostly presence of Indians on horseback. The display of ideological certainty, however, disguises the rhetorical maneuvers the brochure makes in order to captivate prospective travelers. As the cover image’s narrative of progress is elaborated throughout the rest of the brochure, it takes on some surprising dimensions. 

Trains not only overran American Indian communities but disrupted Anglo-American institutions along the frontier as well. The Pony Express, while it “lived to become a symbol of western heroism,” according to the brochure, “operated only 19 months”—a casualty of the railroads’ systematic handling of mail sorting and delivery. Steamship travel along the Missouri River floated increasingly toward obsolescence with the Burlington’s expansion in the Midwest. As the brochure boasts, “Service, established over this route in 1870, virtually ended the steamboat era along the Missouri.” This record of dominance raises the question of the future of the railroads themselves. What technologies, in turn, will replace the trains? 

The Newberry Magazine 7

to rally his peers so that a larger community of bibliophiles might normalize the practice of collecting corporate files.

To this end Pargellis committed himself wholly, becoming something of an evangelist. He wrote to other libraries and cultural institutions that were either hoping or planning to receive railroad archives, urging them to release statements promising fair use of materials. As he told the American Historical Association, “My own hope is that this deposit may be the first of many, and not merely as far as the Newberry Library is concerned. The country is full of similar records that ought to be in safe hands.” He even prodded the Burlington’s

publicity director, who had been caught f lat-footed in the wake of the Newberry-Burlington agreement, to alert trade magazines of the development: the industry needed to know that a major corporation had eschewed secrecy and the business world hadn’t been engulfed in f lames.

The May 1944 issue of Nation’s Business published Pargellis’s “Business Can’t Escape History,” an article addressed to the constituents of the Chamber of Commerce. Pargellis, in just four words, was right. History will judge the mergers and acquisitions, the supply chains and trade agreements that define the global economy—private firms might as well share their records with those who are doing the judging.

The inverse of Pargellis’s four-word formulation is actually what inspired his crusade to collect corporate archives in the first place. The last decade (to say nothing of the past few centuries), buoyed by boom and rattled by bust, has proven it true: history can’t escape business.

The acquisition was monumental: a librarian in the Midwest had persuaded a major American corporation to take a step out of the shadows.

Inside the CB&Q Archives: Travel BrochuresA related question underlies the “From Wagon Wheel

to Stainless Steel” brochure; it, too, has to do with the gaps between the past, present, and future. How do you seduce passengers with the luxury of modern rail travel, while also charming them with the rugged romance of the frontier? The solution seems to be some variation of the past is always with us. This brochure takes the historical figures who settled the West and imagines them as ghosts traveling with the passenger-reader: “We, of the Burlington, on occasion, like to live again those days of the winning of the West. An old superstition has

it that ever since the first train ran on the Burlington, an unseen delegation has made every trip.”

A less whimsical idea suggests itself in each of these brochures. It is that the luxurious accommodations of a Burlington Zephyr train or Empire Builder are simply the latest state of American ingenuity—a tradition whose mythic roots extend to the early days of colonization. The very act of shaving in a dressing room, while the train rolls smoothly through the prairie, is an act of communing with the past: the passenger trimming his beard or reclining in his seat is part of the same historical continuum as Buffalo Bill and Lewis and Clark.

8 Fall 2014

Stanley Pargellis and the Newberry Library spearheaded publication of Granger Country: A Pictorial Social History of the Burlington Railroad to commemorate the CB&Q’s centennial mid-twentieth century. Photographers Esther Bubley and Russell Lee were enlisted for the project. Only a fraction of the thousands of photos Bubley and Lee took made it into the book — the rest languished in obscurity until being processed by the Newberry, decades later. The photographs capture not only midwestern landscape at high speed but also the lives of Burlington employees and passengers and those of residents along the railroad’s tracks.

Working, Traveling, Living on the Railroad

The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company (CB&Q) Records have grown considerably since Stanley Pargellis first brought the collection to the Newberry in the 1940s. Donations from the company, former employees, and company historian and author R.C. Overton augmented the archive of existing corporate records with nearly 1,000 linear feet of additional materials. The new magnitude and variety provided different channels through which to access the collection and extended its scope well into the twentieth century.

Photographs from the CB&Q advertising department added a strong visual element to the collection: images of personnel, trains, and scenic views of destinations such as Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains. Another substantial set of prints and negatives, images from Depression-era documentary photographers Russell Lee and Esther Bubley, depicted the social and economic impact of the railroad along routes in the Midwest and Great Plains. And after the initial CB&Q deposit, company records followed in waves, rounding out the archive with such resources as maps, employee payroll books, promotional materials, and scrapbooks.

Researchers could always refer to the Guide to the Burlington Archives in the Newberry Library, 1851-1901, compiled in 1949. But for a collection that had expanded so much in breadth and research potential, it eventually became time for an overhaul.

In 2011, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Newberry a $300,000 grant to arrange, describe, and make electronically accessible the archives of the CB&Q. A team of professional archivists, technicians, and interns, headed by Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Project Director Martha Briggs, spent the next two and a half years arranging and describing the Newberry’s largest archival collection. This involved unfolding, cleaning, and rehousing the bundled, folded, and bagged documents in archival boxes and folders; incorporating the additions; and describing the entire collection according to current archival standards. Now that the collection has been fully organized and processed, it can be used in ways once-Burlington President Ralph Budd and other railroad executives could have never imagined.

Genealogical research is a prime example of how to use the CB&Q records for something other than direct inquiries into railroad history. The CB&Q had its own substantial Land Department that managed sales of land to farmers, many of whom were European immigrants. Using the Land Department records and its indexes of names, individual land applications and contracts, correspondence, and maps, a researcher can with

a little effort discover a great deal of information about a person, a family, or a place. Because the records are all interconnected with contract numbers and geographic locations (section, township, and range), a researcher could start from any jumping-off place and follow the thread through all the various parts of her investigation. To make it easier, the CB&Q archivists also laboriously recorded land purchaser names and place names for many of the contracts, so a line of inquiry could begin with a simple keyword search in the finding aid and develop from there.

Of course, railroad enthusiasts, too, can pursue exciting research using the collection. The CB&Q records have already been consulted by business historians, labor historians, engineers, and academic researchers interested in everything from early advertising campaigns to construction of refrigerator cars. Perusing old brochures and timetables, one can get a sense of how important the CB&Q was to American industry, business, and recreation.

The new online resources created by the Newberry archivists promise to deliver better and broader access to the CB&Q archives, both in the library and remotely. In addition to improving access with standard archival web-based inventories and catalog records, Newberry archivists created a web gallery focusing on topics like labor, the environment, advertising and design, and travel and tourism. Linked to the inventories, the gallery opens up the massive CB&Q archive, introducing scholars, local historians, railroad enthusiasts, and genealogists to the collection’s diverse content. The web gallery also includes essays, called “panoramas,” detailing some of the important historic milestones of the company, such as the Strike of 1888 and the debut of the Burlington Zephyr.

The legacy of Stanley Pargellis is evident in the Newberry’s robust holdings of midwestern business history materials, which continue to be an active collecting area for the Newberry’s Modern Manuscripts Department. Especially strong in railroad and printing history, Modern Manuscripts houses the records of the Illinois Central Railroad and the Pullman Company; publishing companies A.C. McClurg, Charles H. Kerr, and Rand McNally; and the papers of individuals and entrepreneurs working in Chicago and the Midwest.

The Newberry Magazine 9

The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Archives TodayBy Alison Hinderliter and Kelly Kress

Alison Hinderliter is manuscripts and archives librarian of the Modern Manuscripts Department.

Kelly Kress is senior project archivist.

For finding aids providing access to the CB&Q Company Records, visit http://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_ files/CBQ_Main.xml

10 Fall 2014

Jerri Dell grew up with a grandfather who had once been a famous writer. He did not carry himself lugubriously around

the house as some famous writers, treating the patterns of domestic life as a threat to their work, were known to do. He was a family man. He had happily chosen to be one, in the tradition of American self-actualization that he celebrated in his novels. And yet he frequently spent long hours at work in his study. He kept the door closed. Jerri knew her grandfather had stopped writing novels long ago, and she wondered what he was doing. She would not f ind out until she came to the Newberry, to dig into the Floyd Dell Papers, over 40 years later.

Floyd Dell was a linchpin of the literary culture that emerged in Chicago in the f irst decade of the twentieth century. In 1911, at the age of 24, he became the editor of, and chief contributor to, the Friday Literary Review, a supplement of the Chicago Evening Post. An avowed socialist, Dell gleefully presented viewpoints in opposition to that of the paper’s conservative owner, John Shaffer. Dell encouraged his writers to emphasize the primacy of the text over sentimental considerations of its author’s life. This political-aesthetic constellation made the Friday Literary Review one of the best-known literary supplements in the country.

Like many of those who contributed to what would later be known as the “Chicago Renaissance,” Dell was a transplant from the Midwest periphery, come to the metropolitan center to achieve fame as a writer; he arrived in 1908 from Davenport, Iowa. The f ledgling community of artists that migrated to Chicago had a quality of improvisation and spontaneity. Informal get-togethers engendered big ideas. Margaret Anderson’s magazine the Little Review, which introduced American readers to James Joyce’s Ulysses, grew out of conversations Anderson had at the parties Dell and his

f irst wife, Margery Currey, threw at their studios on the south side of the city. Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Harriet Monroe would attend these parties as well, debating questions like how literary techniques might be used to register the disruptions and elisions of urban American life.

In many avant-garde circles, this question led to a radical rejection of the realistic transcription of life into art. The formal experiments of Dada and Cubism, for example, made the medium of art itself the subject of art rather than the hidden means by which a painting became a window onto the world. Novelists experimented with stream-of-consciousness devices that, while sometimes used in the service of aesthetic indulgence, were capable of evoking the overstimulation of modern transportation, media, advertising, etc. Take as an example this passage from The 42nd Parallel, part of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy: “…and She was saying Oh dolly I hope we wont be late and Scott was waiting with the tickets and we had to run up the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and all the little cannons kept falling out of the Olympia and everybody stooped to pick them up and the conductor Allaboard lady quick lady…”

Floyd Dell, in his own writing, had no use for modernism and its stylistic fugues. To him, the realism of Dickens remained suff icient for capturing the sights, smells, and sounds of the industrial city. Chicago was f irst and foremost a physical space that should be described in vivid detail. He deplored writers who treated the city as “a condition and not a place.”

Woman of LettersJerri Dell Rediscovers Her Grandfather, Floyd Dell, in the Newberry CollectionBy Alex Teller

Jerri Dell goes through materials from the Newberry’s Floyd Dell Papers, 2012.

Floyd Dell, 1921.

The Newberry Magazine 11

Dell’s literary predilections were, from a certain vantage point, reactionary. He moved to New York City in 1913, and though he wrote progressively on feminism and served on the editorial staffs of Masses and then the Liberator, his success as a novelist (beginning in 1920, with publication of the autobiographical Moon-Calf ) compromised his socialist-bohemian credentials. After Dell resigned from New Masses in 1929, for example, Editor Michael Gold bitterly responded, in the July issue of the paper: “At no time was Floyd Dell a real revolutionist. At all times he had a distaste for reality, for the strong smells and sound and confusions of the class struggle.” By the 1930s Dell had begun to recede from the public life of a distinguished writer.

When she f irst arrived at the Newberry, in 2010, Jerri Dell used the Floyd Dell Papers as a resource for work on a memoir. “I wanted to learn more about my grandparents—especially my grandmother, B. Marie Gage—and fill in the gaps of stories she told me as a child,” says Jerri. Jerri studied Dell and Gage family photographs, listened to an audio cassette of Dell reading poetry in 1954, and sifted through hundreds of letters and penny postcards Floyd wrote to B. Marie.

As Jerri made her way through some 870 folders containing all sorts of writings and ephemera related to Floyd Dell (including his correspondence with writers such as Theodore Dreiser, H.L. Mencken, and Edna St. Vincent Millay), she began to realize the extent of her grandfather’s inf luence, which in turn inf luenced the nature of her research. “With each letter I read, I felt my role shifting from memoirist to literary historian and critic.” Jerri was especially compelled to respond to Dell’s critics, the people like Michael Gold who had questioned her grandfather’s revolutionary sensibilities.

By May 2013 Jerri thought she had read everything the Newberry had on Floyd. Then she found 635 pages of letters he had written, between 1960 and 1968, to Miriam Gurko, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s biographer. ( Jerri had only then become aware of a separate collection, the Miriam Gurko-Floyd Dell Papers, which contained the letters.) The letters at once fueled Jerri’s literary criticism and her desire to clarify the past. They provided her access to Dell’s thoughts on literature, society, and culture, delivered with a candor that publication tends to soften; and they gave her an at least partial answer to the question of what Dell had been writing with such focus behind the closed door of his study.

Floyd Dell met Edna Millay in Greenwich Village in December 1917. Their affair was as tempestuous as it was brief. Wary of the emotional entanglements that might infringe on her work as a poet, Millay could be mercurial, and she rejected Dell’s professions of love and proposals of marriage. Dell believed love to be an immersive state of existence, that it could be permanent; Millay believed it ephemeral.

It did not take long for Dell to find his enduring love: soon after he and Millay parted for the final time, Dell met B. Marie Gage. They were married in February 1919, to the chagrin of the Greenwich Village bohemians, who espoused free love and other values antithetical to bourgeois domestic stability.

Miriam Gurko’s interest in Floyd Dell lay in his intimacy with a poet on the verge of greatness (Millay would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923). “Dell’s letters reveal Edna Millay at a crucial moment in her career,” Gurko wrote, in

“Dell’s letters reveal Edna Millay at a crucial moment in her career. We have here a first-hand record of what she was like as seen by a man—himself a trained and highly intelligent observer—who was her friend, companion, and lover.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay, ca. 1925.

“With each letter I read, I felt my role shifting from memoirist to literary historian and critic.”

the foreword to a collection of her correspondence with Dell which she never published. “We have here a f irst-hand record of what she was like as seen by a man—himself a trained and highly intelligent observer—who was her friend, companion, and lover.”

For Jerri, what emerges in these letters is an arresting contrast between Millay and Dell, between the public demands of poetry and the private contentment of family life. In the production of art and in the production of families, coordinates of the public and the private do not always align neatly with those of exposure and control. The celebrity Millay achieved as a poet in the 1920s and ‘30s meant the public consumed news of her alcoholism and extramarital

affairs with as much (if not more) relish as it did her writing. Her privacy fodder for mass-media sensationalism, she tightly policed the boundaries of her emotional life. The close watch she kept over her own inner turmoil, the source of her poetry, was not to be superseded by any other bond. Dell’s withdrawal was geographic (from the city to the country, as he matured and his career as a novelist progressed) and domestic, and yet he opened a number of interpersonal pathways to accommodate the loved ones with whom he was populating his life.

“The poet is more used to making poetry out of unhappiness than out of joy,” Dell wrote to Gurko in 1960. “The impulses toward lovemaking that can be carried out in actuality produce no poetry. And the poet may turn impatiently from mere happiness back to grief.” (Dell was content with the “mere happiness” he found within his home—a contentment that was, perhaps, dependent on the affairs he pursued outside of it.) Jerri remembers her grandfather going on about Millay at the dinner table when she was a little girl. Her grandmother betrayed no jealousy. Rather, she was sorry for Millay—for, Jerri now understands, the poet’s inability to submit to the human relationships she regarded as a threat to her artistic production. “Poor Edna, poor Edna,” Jerri’s grandmother would intone.

Jerri now plans to publish a selection of the letters Gurko and Dell exchanged, adding some of Dell’s other writings—both published and unpublished—for good measure. She is calling the compilation Blood Too Bright, an

allusion to a poem by Millay called “Weeds.” In the poem, the speaker contemplates a surplus of feeling that, untamed by the unwritten rules of civilization, leads to a life along its margins. She can f ind peace only among the discarded ruins of agriculture (“a worthless crop of crimson weeds, / cursed by farmers thriftily”). She rests: “And here a while, where no wind brings / the baying of a pack athirst, / may sleep the sleep of blessed things, / the blood too bright, the brow accurst.”

According to Jerri, Dell believed this poem expressed how Millay always thought of her life—as one of marginalization, of vehement passions in excess of modern structures of feeling. It is perhaps how all poets must live.

12 Fall 2014

Jerri Dell, during a spring 2014 visit to the library, beneath a painting of Floyd Dell hanging in the Newberry’s Special Collections Reading Room.

The Newberry Magazine 13

The Newberry Library Award, the highest honor the library bestows, recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the humanities, particularly in fields of endeavor related to the Newberry’s collection and activities. This spring, the Newberry recognized a most deserving honorand—our own trustee and friend Roger Baskes.

On May 5, more than 200 guests gathered at the Newberry to celebrate Roger. The event, chaired by David and Celia Hilliard and Michael and Christine Pope, was a fundraising success for the Newberry, and included several surprises for Roger, including a predinner performance by singers from the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago, in which Roger and his wife Julie have a special interest.

In his remarks, David Spadafora called Roger “an inspiration to others, because of what anyone who comes to know him soon realizes is a deep-seated conviction of his: that the humanities and the arts, ideas and beauty matter, and matter to everyone, for they enrich our interior lives while connecting us with each other and the heritage of the past; and that well-run and well-funded humanities and cultural organizations provide perhaps the best means of stimulating this enrichment and these connections.”

Roger has done much to support the cultural institutions he holds dear, both in Chicago and farther afield. But he is a particular friend of the Newberry, serving as a trustee since 1995, board chair from 2006 to 2010, and co-chair of its recent fundraising campaign. Roger has also contributed greatly to the Newberry as a collector.

Since the late 1980s, Roger has assembled a collection of more than 19,000 volumes, chief ly “atlases,” a term that he defines broadly to include almost any work that contains five or more maps. His definition embraces not only what most of us would recognize as dedicated atlases, but also geographies, travel guides, and books for migrants, railway and ocean-liner travelers, motorists, and wanderers of all sorts. To date, Roger has donated some 10,000 items from his personal collection to the library,

now housed as the Baskes Collection. When his gift is complete, it will more than double the Newberry’s atlas holdings, firmly establishing the library as having one of the most comprehensive collections of atlases to be found anywhere in the world. The collection’s breadth and diversity will also change the way scholars and other readers think about maps, their history, and their relevance to diverse fields of study.

During this event, David Spadafora announced that in recognition of this and other extraordinary gifts, the Newberry has named the position of Vice President for Library Services for Roger and Julie Baskes. Currently held by Hjordis Halvorson, the Vice President for Library Services provides leadership for numerous initiatives to improve access and management of the collection, and oversees collection development, cataloging, conservation, digital initiatives, and reader services. Says Halvorson, “Few people understand and encourage the work of Library Services like Roger. I am most deeply honored to take on this newly titled position, and profoundly grateful to both Roger and Julie for their support of the Newberry and its staff, and for the monumental Baskes Collection itself, which we are privileged to steward and share with readers.”

Maps and atlases Roger Baskes Receives the Newberry Library Award

Newberry Trustee Roger Baskes receives the Newberry Library Award from Board of Trustees Chair Vicki Herget and President David Spadafora.

14 Fall 2014

On a number of occasions, on behalf of the Board of Trustees, I have physically presented the Newberry Library Award. It is most often given to honor the professional lives and work of great scholars in the humanities. From those past evenings I’ve learned two valuable lessons which are relevant to tonight. The first is not to hold the sculpture from the top, as the bottom might then fall on Vicki’s [Chair of the Board of Trustees Vicki Herget’s] foot. But the second, more importantly, is not to attempt to present a competitively scholarly paper. Fortunately, it is the case that the humanities, and the Newberry Library, have many and diverse constituencies, not all of which are scholarly. And I will urge that recognizing, and serving, all of these constituencies may well be more important today than ever before.

At least in 2013 and 2014, few weeks went by without a piece in the national media asking “what is the future for the humanities?” or “is there a future for libraries?” These are two serious, and different, questions. A piece in the current, May-June 2014 issue of Harvard Magazine reports that although since the 1970s there has been a nationwide long-term decline in the percentage of college and university undergraduates majoring in the humanities, it has gone down precipitously since 2008. At Harvard the decline in English and history concentrations has been as much as 50 percent.

My wife, Julie, our three children, and, so far, two of our grandchildren, were in one way or another all history majors, and for years I told the false and tasteless joke that I had to practice law to support all these history majors. Still, the quite rational concern by undergraduates and their parents about value for money and securing employment must be part of the reason for students’ selecting majors in various health, therapy, or technology fields, or in criminal justice. Another may be that exciting reality shows are much more likely to feature cool and beautiful actors doing crime scene investigation than doing poetry. And of course the kids are right—there are not many poetry jobs and even fewer which will enable them to repay their student loans.

A choir to whom I can’t presume to preach about the value of the humanities is certainly present in this room. And most of you will agree that support for humanities education should not be restricted to our colleges and universities, or its success tested only by the number of undergraduate majors. I did an unscientific survey of several excellent businessmen I know, and got them to confirm my opinion that critical thinking, understanding diverse human nature, and clarity of expression were good for business. And that is not an inconsequential consideration as we decide how to educate our own and, in an inherently messy democracy, the nation’s, children and grandchildren.

Many of you know of a widely discussed report in this past year by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences entitled “The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a vibrant, competitive and secure nation.” It begins:

Who will lead America into a bright future? Citizens who are educated in the broadest possible sense, so that they can participate in their own governance and engage with the world.

An adaptable and creative workforce. Experts in national security, equipped with the cultural understanding, knowledge of social dynamics, and language proficiency to lead our foreign service and military through complex global conf licts. Elected officials and a broader public who exercise civil political discourse, founded on an appreciation of the ways our differences and commonalities have shaped our rich history. We must prepare the next generation to be these future leaders.

So the humanities are good for business and good for the country. Every bit as important, as again you will all agree, is the impact of the humanities on the quality of our own lives. How effectively could we face and live the human condition without the knowledge, beauty, and enrichment of literature, and art, and music, and theater, and philosophy, and history?

Most of us live in Chicago, a city which is today as physically beautiful as almost any in the world. It has social problems which make life here dangerous and difficult for many, and it is insolvent, two realities which we must address and bear the burdens of changing. Yet Chicago in the twenty-first century is a mecca for the humanities. We are very lucky! Our theater is as good as any in America. We have world-class opera and orchestral music, great universities and great museums. We have the largest and best American festival of the humanities. And we have the Newberry Library.

The Newberry’s mission is four sentences. (Only in cities like Chicago, with some 1,000-foot-high elevators, could it accurately be called an “elevator speech.”)

The Newberry Library, open to the public without charge, is an independent research library dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, especially in the humanities. The Newberry acquires and preserves a broad array of special collections research materials relating to the civilizations of Europe and the Americas. It promotes and provides for their effective use, fostering research, teaching, publication, and lifelong learning, as well as civic engagement. In service to its diverse community, the Newberry encourages intellectual pursuit in an atmosphere of free inquiry and sustains the highest standards of collection preservation, bibliographic access, and reader services.

It’s all about the collections, isn’t it? The knowledge that the Newberry Library commits to advance and disseminate is in its collections. Those who come to the Newberry to consult our collections, whom we still call “readers,” are themselves more than one constituency. The most “glamorous” of these are professional scholars, both working academics and independent scholars, whose research in the Newberry’s collections will typically result in whole or in part in a monograph or journal article. Scholars come to the library from all over the world, much of the cost of which is subsidized by short-term or long-term “fellowships.” For many years support for these fellowships has come largely from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, but often in grants that have been matched by individuals, including some of you here this evening.

Roger Baskes’s Newberry Library Award Acceptance Speech

The Newberry Magazine 15

Mapping a Legacythe 2014 newberry library

award dinner

honoring

Roger Baskes

May 5, 2014

Trifold.indd 1 3/18/14 6:30 PM

16 Fall 2014

Since the 1890s, the Newberry has collected local and family history materials, and most of the readers of such materials have been not professional academics but literate individuals studying their own genealogical history. They are part of a Newberry constituency which our mission expressly recognizes, of lifelong learners, to whom an increasing share of the activity at the library is directed. Much of the nonscholarly community knows the Newberry by reason of about 150 seminars each year, a series of fine exhibits, and the best used-book fair in Chicago.

After Julie had returned to graduate school in the early 1970s, she came to the Newberry, armed with a letter from her professor—as was then required. Before the library’s stacks building had been built, books were everywhere in this building, which had been designed by Henry Ives Cobb in the 1880s. There were too few places to sit and not very efficient delivery of materials. Julie would usually bring an extra book to read while waiting for the books she had paged. Today the average wait for a book at the Newberry is only five minutes. In 2008 David Spadafora and I went to the White House to accept from Laura Bush a medal presented to the Newberry by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. Officials from the institute could not have been more outspokenly complimentary of the Newberry’s services to its readers. We were honored, and thrilled.

Today the Newberry has the space and resources to welcome diverse “humanists” with diverse projects. Our grandson Jacob is a sophomore at Walter Payton High School, a quarter-mile from here. He was assigned by his American history teacher to write a paper based upon viewing the Newberry’s (and the Terra Foundation’s) wonderful exhibit this winter on the Union “home front” in the Civil War. Incidentally, Walter Payton is only one example of the extent to which this has become a fine neighborhood. By the magic of real estate, which the Newberry’s founder, an earlier Walter, would have certainly understood, the former “Skid Row” of North Clark Street has in the twenty-first century become part of Chicago’s “Gold Coast.” The Newberry’s neighbors have become another important constituency and, with David’s leadership, our Board of Trustees is actively exploring ways of making this beautiful building more welcoming to its community, perhaps with a coffee shop adjoining our bookstore.

I mentioned the Newberry’s recent collaboration with the Terra Foundation. Collaboration is part of the Newberry’s DNA. In 1896 the Newberry joined with the John Crerar Library (now part of the University of Chicago), and the Chicago Public Library, all three then recently established, to minimize the duplication of their collections. The Newberry agreed to become a noncirculating library for research in the humanities. Then, and since then, many trustees of the Newberry have also served in the leadership of other Chicago institutions; institutional collaboration is a fact of cultural life in Chicago. In recent years the Newberry has jointly acquired especially expensive manuscripts with other libraries in the Midwest. In November of 2007 and for months thereafter, more than 30 Chicago institutions collaborated to present exhibits and programs in a Festival of Maps. The largest exhibit, at the

Field Museum, was curated by Newberry Library staff, and the Newberry mounted two other concurrent map exhibits. The city itself has become the object of much of Chicagoans’ collaborative leadership and philanthropy, of which the most visible recent example is Millennium Park.

Many lifelong learners, including many of you, are part of the Newberry’s indispensable constituency of financial supporters. Unlike most of Chicago’s other wonderful major cultural institutions, almost 100 percent of the Newberry Library’s current $10-million annual budget must come from philanthropic sources, received annually or drawn from its endowment. Being “free and open to the public,” the Newberry sells no tickets, and unlike many other Chicago nonprofits, gets no financial support from the city or the Chicago Park District.

The case for private support of the humanities, and the arts, is not universally accepted. As most of us know, it’s largely an American tradition. Many Europeans value the humanities and the arts, but expect that their governments will fully finance them and consequently will decide what is important, worthwhile, and beautiful. Last year, interviewing Bill Gates, the Financial Times reported that Gates questions the morality of supporting a new wing for a museum rather than spending that money to prevent illnesses that lead to blindness. From the standpoint of a rich society, it is hard to see why these are exclusive alternatives, but are not these the very sorts of questions which the humanities themselves can help us consider?

The Newberry is especially dependent for support from those of us who feel that the future of the humanities should continue to include the written or printed word in other than exclusively digital form. That is not a certain or self-evident result. When Princeton Professor of History Anthony Grafton, one of the very best-known American scholars of the history of the book and of libraries, spoke here in 2008 at this very occasion about the future of libraries, he described some newly built libraries as among “the world’s most beautiful Internet cafes.” But he used the Newberry as an example of a library which would be the least irrelevant in the digital age. His expectation is that special collections are least likely to be replaced by digitized versions, and that much can be learned from the physical condition of rare books and manuscripts and past readers’ responses to them. But it certainly is the case that much scholarly work in the humanities can be greatly enhanced by digitization. No amount of human diligence can search or count like a computer. There is already an “Association for Computers and the Humanities” and even an “Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.”

Although those of us who are collectors of books are signif icantly attracted by their artifactual or physical aspects, general readers today consider whether or when to forgo what may have been their lifelong pleasure in the look, feel, and smell of printed books in exchange for the convenience of carrying around a year’s worth of reading on a single iPad or Kindle. As there are collectors of everything, some individuals must have already downloaded terabytes of books. (If you care, a trillion terabytes, a kilobyte to the eighth power, is a yottabyte!)

The Newberry Magazine 17

In the last 50 years, the Newberry has sometimes called itself “An Uncommon Collection of Uncommon Collections.” As is well known, and unlike most of the other major independent research libraries of America, the Newberry Library did not begin with a gift of its founder’s book collection, but rather with his extraordinarily large bequest of money. The Newberry immediately became a major book collector, especially of bibliographical and research materials. The library attracted collectors, many of whom joined its Board of Trustees and contributed their collections to the Newberry. To some extent, and this best describes my own collecting, the Newberry has created collectors. This is the result of knowledgeable and encouraging curators, comprehensive bibliographical research materials, and very professional and complete cataloging standards.

Some years ago I participated in founding the Newberry’s Society of Collectors, which meets about three evenings a year in a social setting and presents talks about book collecting by both private and institutional collectors. The society’s annual dues have provided an important fund for the library to buy rare materials when available book funds are too often in these times consumed by the rising cost of journals, even in the humanities. The leadership of the Newberry wish to support book collecting for the same reasons that art museums support art collecting—some of these collections will be given to the institution and at the least collectors are often involved with and knowledgeable about the library’s collections and its mission. You need not be a collector to join the society.

The collecting of rare books and manuscripts has certainly preserved materials for study that would have been discarded or lost but for their collectors. The market for rare books and manuscripts has often encouraged booksellers and auction houses to conduct serious bibliographical research to make their inventory more interesting. Collectors themselves are often as knowledgeable about their specialized materials as professional librarians and academics. Collectors are amateurs, often as obsessed as other lovers.

What I have collected are books with maps, of which atlases are the most obvious examples. There are many collectors of old maps, and very few collectors of old atlases. Most old maps survived only because they were bound into an atlas or other book. But gradually many old atlases were broken up so their maps could be sold separately, and today many atlases are very rare. A dealer in England knows today that if he buys an eighteenth-century atlas of English counties, he can quickly sell off separate maps of Cheshire, Dorset, or Leicestershire to collectors, often inns or pubs in those counties, or their interior decorators, and still have maps of the other 41 counties to keep in his stock. Ironically, and sadly, there are now even collectors of atlas title pages and of empty bindings.

I began serious book collecting 30 years ago, and that was a very positive change in my life. In June of 1987 and the following 21 Junes, Julie and I went to London. I bought books at the annual June book fairs and auctions, and from bookshops in London and the countryside. Julie became very adept at doing other things in London, spending entire days at the Imperial War Museum, Portobello Road, and Hatchards. Hatchards has sold books, mostly new books, on Piccadilly since 1797.

Almost from the beginning, my collecting was closely related to the Newberry Library. I took a course in the history of cartography taught by David Buisseret, then the director of the Newberry’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center. I learned much from Bob Karrow and Jim Akerman, successively curators of maps at the Newberry. The encouragement and education of book collectors is a role which had historically been more often associated with bookdealers than with librarians and curators. But curatorship at the Newberry Library, more like most art museums than most libraries, is a very successful process. It is a material way in which an independent research library like the Newberry is different from a university research library. A great university will have hundreds of faculty members knowledgeable about existing library materials in their fields and with ideas and requests about what they would like to add to the collections for their own or their students’ study. This is appropriately consistent with the university’s mission. The Newberry’s collecting is typically directed to enhancing the strength of its collections in many fewer fields, in which its own curators have become expert.

The first major collection of books and manuscripts donated to the Newberry Library, by its trustee Edward Ayer in 1911, continues to be its most important. It included 17,000 pieces on American Indians and on their early contacts with Europeans. An endowment which accompanied this gift has allowed the library to acquire another 130,000 titles and a million pages of manuscript. Edward Ayer was also a great atlas collector. The Ayer collection of the first printed atlases, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia, is as complete as any in the world.

When I decided in the 1990s that I would begin to give my map books to the Newberry, collecting comprehensively in a sense became much easier because the library already had so many wonderful atlases and travel books which I didn’t need to duplicate. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to find such books published before the last 100 years which are not already in our joint collections. The Newberry’s Cartographic Catalog, which includes my collection, has over 85,000 titles.

Almost from the beginning, apart from collecting, I became fascinated with the Newberry Library itself. I wasn’t sophisticated or lucky enough to have had an intensive undergraduate liberal education like our children and grandchildren, and much of what was being talked about at the Newberry was new and exciting for me. Shortly after the term entered the English language, I became something of a “groupie” of the Newberry. As an adult, I had read political history and modern literature, but I learned for the first time at the Newberry Library at least something about such subjects as humanism and the history of printing. As often as I can, I have attended the weekly colloquia for fellows and staff. It has been very gratifying to share with my Newberry colleagues, both senior staff and fellow trustees, the satisfaction of being part of the leadership of this great institution both in prosperous and difficult times. I am very grateful to all of them and to all of you here this evening for this honor and for your friendship. I could not have imagined being given the Newberry Library Award, and it means the world to me.

18 Fall 2014

Fit to Print and Then SomeJournalism in the Midwest Manuscript Collection

From the late nineteenth century on, newspapers and reporters in Chicago played key roles in the development of modern journalism. The legendary Chicago Daily News eschewed political partisanship and sensationalism in favor of solid reporting and community advocacy, and its publishers contributed to creating the Associated Press. Exceptional writers who went on to stellar literary careers started as Chicago journalists, among them Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Margaret Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. Innovation in Chicago continued through the twentieth century, with Chicago newspapers instituting some of the first permanent foreign correspondent services as the United States emerged as a world power. The more than 50 collections relating to Chicago newspaper journalism in the Newberry’s Midwest Manuscript Collection provide a window into the development of both the news industry and the regional, national, and world history of the period.

The men and women involved in these writing and publishing endeavors witnessed that history firsthand. Much of

the journalism-related material at the Newberry includes their unpublished letters and diaries in addition to published articles and columns. They corresponded with luminaries of their time in fields as diverse as government, social activism, literature, and the arts. Among the highlights, corporate records of the 100-year history of the Chicago Daily News, of the Chicago Sun-Times and its predecessors, and of the weekly alternative newspaper the Chicago Reader stand out. Papers of individuals comprise those not only of news reporters who covered the regular unfurling of historical events, but also of columnists like Mike Royko and of book, theater, dance, music, and art critics who documented and analyzed the cultural scene.

Stanley Pargellis became the Newberry’s Librarian in 1942, and his interests in regionalism, the Midwest, and manu-script materials shaped the library’s collecting efforts in the 1940s and ’50s. He soon recruited the Chicago journalist Lloyd Lewis as a manuscript scout, and Lewis turned to his many friends in Chicago intellectual circles to acquire the personal papers of literary authors and, later, journalists. The Newberry became an early collector of such compilations of writers’ manuscripts.

Lewis sent a f lurry of letters to writers or their descendants, securing among others the papers of Henry B. Fuller, Francis F. Browne (publisher of the Dial), Joseph Kirkland, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Kitchell Webster, Victor Lawson (publisher of the Chicago Daily News), and Mary Hartwell Catherwood. Lewis’s power of persuasion is evident in a letter soliciting Catherwood’s papers: “Her papers and letters would be, like those of the other significant Chicago authors, placed in a special and separate collection bearing her name, and would not be buried, but indeed kept alive, with young students using them as source material and inspiration.” Lewis’s letters often express his belief that these accumulations could instruct the next generation of authors, as when he wrote, “we want to make this part of the Library a great source of information and inspiration to young writers by letting them read the private papers of successful Chicago authors.”

The certainty with which Lewis regarded the significance of the Newberry’s journalistic holdings was matched by the tenacity he employed to secure them. Shortly after the death of Ray Stannard Baker in 1946, for example, Lewis wrote to the executors of Baker’s estate, applying a thin layer of

The Chicago Daily News was an early proponent of establishing permanent foreign news bureaus. This photograph shows the exterior of the paper’s London office in the 1910s.

By Karen Christianson

The Newberry Magazine 19

decorum while cutting to the chase: “Disliking to advance this matter so soon after Mr. Baker’s passing, I feel that it should be presented to you for consideration at the first proper moment and, therefore, enclose copies of Mr. Baker’s letters showing his thought [of entrusting the Newberry with his papers] shortly prior to his death.”

Pargellis and Lewis also collected papers of foreign-language journalists. One such was Hermann Raster, who from 1867 to 1891 served as editor of the Illinois Staats Zeitung, America’s most inf luential German-language newspaper. Raster swayed German popular opinion through his antislavery, pro-Union, and antitemperance articles. His papers include correspondence in English with many notable Chicago leaders, including Joseph Medill, celebrated editor of the Chicago Tribune, and the educator Francis Parker, as well as story drafts and clippings.

The Newberry has continued collecting journalism-related manuscripts through the present day. The collections of father and son journalists Carroll and David Binder exemplify the kind of window on the past these materials afford. Carroll Binder, eventually the foreign service editor at the Chicago Daily News and editor of the Minneapolis Star, also served, during a career spanning much of the first six decades of the twentieth century, as a labor reporter, war correspondent, publisher’s assistant, and editorial writer. In addition to personal and family correspondence, clippings, and photographs, his papers include material on the Workers Party of America, the Industrial Workers of the World, and other leftist organizations.

David Binder, Carroll’s son, followed his father as a career journalist, writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service, and the Minneapolis Tribune before becoming a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. During stints in eastern Europe and Germany, he covered both the set-up in 1961 and the dismantling in 1989 of the Berlin Wall. He also wrote about the 1968 Prague Spring, the decline of the Soviet bloc during the late 1980s, the fracture of the Balkans in the early ‘90s, and the lingering social and economic problems of the region. It was natural for Binder to choose as a repository for his papers the

Newberry, where they join those of his father. Binder recently explained, “My father had an enormous inf luence on my decision to deposit my work with the Newberry—on my pursuit of journalism as a career in the f irst place. We both followed a calling to inform and enlighten the reading public of America about the important events of the day.” His papers, which include dispatches and scrapbooks of clippings, make fascinating reading.

Several years ago the Newberry’s current Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts, Martha Briggs, initiated an effort to obtain more collections from contemporary female journalists, garnering papers from, among others, Alison True, former editor-in-chief of the Chicago Reader. When True left the Reader in 2007, she arranged for both the Reader’s corporate files and her personal papers related to the publication to come to the Newberry. The former comprise original copies of articles, legal and administrative files, unsolicited manuscripts with original artwork, and theater programs, press releases, and other materials that encapsulate Chicago theater history from the 1970s on. The bulk of the collection constitutes photographs used in music, drama, dance, neighborhood news, columns, and feature articles. Among True’s personal papers are style manuals, surveys, a collection of monographs by Reader contributors, materials about a proposed redesign of the paper in 2003-04, and original artwork submitted to the paper.

True says these collections chronicle journalism’s transition from mechanical to electronic technology. When she started at the Reader in 1984, articles were typed on typewriters and carried by hand to typesetters. The typesetters provided printed proofs that

had to be picked up and taken back to the office to be proofread, then returned for corrections. The process changed gradually with the use of word processing

and, later, sophisticated desktop publishing software.

According to True, these technological

changes paralleled more substantive

changes in news reporting.

Lloyd Lewis, ca. 1940.

20 Fall 2014

The Reader began as an exercise in “alternative journalism.” Unlike a magazine, it was printed on newsprint; unlike a traditional newspaper, it appeared weekly, not daily. It focused on long-form investigative reporting and thorough, penetrating reviews of the arts and culture. With the rise of the 24/7 news cycle, and constantly updated reporting on the Internet, True sees alternative journalism as a moment in the history of news that may have come and gone. “I think that alternative journalism may historically be seen as something of a blip, between the mid-1960s and 2010. The ongoing conversation is what are we alternative to? Alternative newspapers have become somehow mainstream.” At one time, Chicagoans interested in the city’s theater and other cultural activities couldn’t get through the week without a copy of the Reader. Now that niche audience has been splintered by the multitude of online sources for that kind of information. The Reader-related manuscript collections provide a rich trove of documentary evidence of this shift and of the culture of the time.

A final example from the Newberry journalism collections is that of Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago journalist and novelist Jack Fuller, president of the Tribune Publishing Company from 1997 to 2004. Fuller wrote mainly for the Chicago Tribune, but also for the Washington Post and, while serving in Vietnam, the Pacific Stars and Stripes. His papers include literary and journalistic works, correspondence, and personal documents, as well as newspaper articles written by Fuller’s father, Ernest Fuller, a former financial reporter for the Tribune.

Like True, Fuller sees his papers as primarily valuable to scholars studying the enormous change over the last few decades in how the news is written and disseminated. Fuller’s latest book is What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism, in which he explores what he sees as journalism’s descent into sensationalism and a lack of objectivity. Asked recently about the future of journalism, Fuller said, “A major challenge is the need to understand the appropriate ethical limits of appealing to the emotions of an audience.” He points out that this is not a new problem: in the heyday of American journalism in the 1960s and ‘70s (and much longer ago as well), front pages

were often bloody, sensational, sentimental. But they served a specific purpose: making the public aware of atrocities of war, the consequences of newly discovered diseases, and so forth. “These days, with the busy information environment that so many people are immersed in, writers are tempted to resort to sensationalism to capture readers’ attention,” he said. “Too often, writers begin with stories that are inherently emotionally provocative and sentimental. The question should be what should be said and then how do you say it?”

Given our current “busy information environment” and the upheaval it has wrought within the field of journalism, Lloyd Lewis’s original dream—of aspiring journalists learning the craft from their predecessors—may be difficult to reclaim. “There are qualities of twentieth-century journalism that are still relevant—clarity of writing, for example,” says Fuller. “But some are not, in the new media landscape. Regarding my papers, as new generations come into journalism unencumbered by the twentieth century, they may find these papers useful. I can’t say that they will be deemed important, but I know they will at least be part of the stuff of history.”

For inventories of the Newberry’s journalism holdings, visit www.newberry.org/search/modern-manuscripts, and click Journalism in the left navigation bar.

Ben Hecht, whose papers are a frequently consulted collection within the Newberry’s journalistic holdings, made a name for himself as a Chicago Daily News columnist in the 1920s. Hecht, mustachioed, stands here with a cigar; Lloyd Lewis is seated farthest to the right.

Karen Christianson is associate director of the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies. In a previous life, she worked as a reporter for the Vancouver Columbian.

The year 2014 marked the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. Drawing from the most distinguished collection of Shakespeare materials in the Midwest, the Newberry’s exhibition The Bard Is Born, called attention to Shakespeare’s prominence from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, with a focus on Henry V. Along with early editions of plays, manuscripts, and documents relating to previous birthday celebrations, the exhibition featured scripts, photographs, and ephemera documenting recent productions by Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Shakespeare Project of Chicago. Related programming included “Shakespeare as Literature and as Theater,” a conversation between Chicago Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Barbara Gaines and Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library Gail Kern Paster.

Henry V, probably written by Shakespeare in 1599, did not en-

joy the same seventeenth-century popularity as some of his other history plays. The Newberry owns one of the earliest editions (1619), which is markedly different than the version that appears in the folio edition of 1623; the two books on display next to one another al