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Abstract
In 1918, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) partnered with libraries to develop International Mind Alcove collections in the United States and abroad. These collections aimed to help put an end to war by encouraging international understanding and developing cosmopolitan perspectives across the globe. During the programme’s forty-year history, the alcoves grew from a group of small informal collections to a well-funded and highly organized operation. As the programme evolved, it utilized libraries, books, and the media to advocate for internationalism, educate the public about other nations, and instil cross-cultural understanding in children before they became embroiled in political controversy. The Mind Alcove programme and the work of librarians in its creation represents a significant episode in library history, placing the library profession within the early twentieth-century development of international organizations and global information networks that are the forerunners of contemporary international non-governmental organizations and global social movements.
Notes
1 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 33.
2 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book for 1915 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1915), p. 1.
3 W. F. Kuehl and L. K. Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (New York: Kent State University Press, 1997), p. 64.
4 N. Butler, ‘The Development of the International Mind’, Advocate for Peace, 85 (1923), 344–45.
5 N. M. Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (New York: Scribner’s, 1912). Butler was the President of Columbia University in New York from 1902 to 1945 and was closely involved with the work of the CEIP, serving as President from 1925 to 1945. In 1931, he won the Nobel Prize for peace for his role in the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, which attempted to outlaw war.
6 Ibid.
7 Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 390.
8 Kuehl and Dunn, p. 64.
9 A. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 3.
10 A. Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 18.
11 Several library historians analyse the international work of the CCNY and CEIP and contribute to the global perspectives of library and information history. These include Rochester’s documentation of the CCNY’s international library-related activities that helped to establish the library profession and libraries throughout the British Commonwealth and in other nations: M. K. Rochester, ‘Bringing Librarianship to Rural Canada in the 1930s: Demonstrations by Carnegie Corporation of New York’, Libraries & Culture, 30.4 (1995), 366–90; M. K. Rochester, ‘American Philanthropy Abroad: Library Program Support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York British Dominions and Colonies Fund in the 1920s and 1930s’, Libraries & Culture, 31.2 (1996), 342–63; M. K. Rochester, ‘The Carnegie Corporation and South Africa: Non-European Library Services’, Libraries & Culture, 34.1 (1999), 27–51. Hary’s history provides an excellent catalogue of the CEIP’s international activities as they related to libraries and the CEIP’s motivation to utilize libraries as tools to develop information networks and curry favour with strategic organizations: N. Hary, ‘American Philanthropy in Europe: The Collaboration of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with the Vatican Library’, Libraries & Culture, 31.2 (1996), 364–79; N. Hary, ‘The Vatican Library and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: The History, the Impact, and the Influence of their Collaboration in 1927–1947’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1991).
12 See D. Rossini, From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1995) for analysis and discussion of the various forms of United States internationalism and isolationism during this period. United States isolationism and internationalism is also discussed further in Steven Witt, ‘Merchants of Light: The Paris Library School, Internationalism, and the Globalization of a Profession’, Library Quarterly, 83.2 (April 2013), 131–51.
13 M. E. Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1963).
14 ‘Church Peace Union Will Start Library: Rev. Dr Lynch, Secretary, Named to Collect Literature Religion and Ethics to be Large Factors Project Primarily for Clergy, who will be Promoters of Propaganda’, New York Tribune, 25 May 1914.
15 ‘Books to Play Part in Ousting War: Union Founded by Carnegie will Establish Peace […] in Germany’, New York Tribune, 2 May 1914.
16 W. McElveen, ‘The International Mind’, The Advance, 12 June 1913.
17 G. F. Bowerman, ‘How Far should the Library Aid the Peace Movement and Similar Propaganda?’, Bulletin of the American Library Association, 9 (1915), 129–33.
18 Ibid.
19 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1916), p. 38.
20 W. A. Wiegand, An Active Instrument for Propaganda: The American Public Library during World War I (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 193.
21 Ibid., p. 193.
22 M. N. Chase, ‘The New Hampshire Peace Society: February, 1918–1919’, The Advocate of Peace, 81.12 (1919), 361–63.
23 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1918), p. 76.
24 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1919), p. 67.
25 A. H. Jones, International Mind Alcoves (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933).
26 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924), p. 21.
27 ‘Training Librarians’, New York Times, 16 October 1921.
28 ‘Scope of Propaganda’, Berkeley Daily Gazette, 10 September 1927.
29 ‘Virtue for Tiny Tots’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 February 1930, p. 14.
30 Florence A. Wilson, Near East Educational Survey: Report of a Survey Made during the Months of April, May, and June 1927 (London: Hogarth, 1928), p. 15.
31 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1927), p. 27.
32 ‘Many Study World Topics’, New York Times, 7 December 1930.
33 ‘Library Receives Fine Collection of Books’, Charlotte Observer, 12 November 1922, p. 7.
34 T. L. Brown, ‘What the People Reading’, Tulia Herald, 21 June 1928.
35 Jones, p. 5.
36 ‘Rotarians Make Gift to Library’, Heraldo de Brownsville, 16 October 1938, p. 5.
37 G. H. Tinkham, ‘Nicholas Murray Butler’s Attitude “Seditious”’, Milwaukee Sentinel, 26 February 1933.
38 Ibid.
39 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1939), p. 21.
40 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (1927), p. 27.
41 Ibid., p. 28.
42 US Office of War Information, ‘Davis Tells Librarians they are Combatants’, Victory, 6 October 1942, p. 29.
43 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1943), p. 19.
44 A Mind Alcove collection’s contribution to community was also noted for the collection’s support of national defence by Wiegand in his history of rural public libraries in America. See W. Wiegand, Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876–1956 (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 2011), p. 36.
45 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Annual Report (1943), p. 29.
46 Wiegand, An Active Instrument for Propaganda, p. 193.
47 D. F. Ring, ‘Some Speculations on Why the British Library Profession Didn’t Go to War’, Journal of Library History, 22 (1987), 249–71; Wiegand, An Active Instrument for Propaganda.
48 In 1946, Alger Hiss, who was Secretary General of the United National Conference in San Francisco, became President of the CEIP. His tenure at the CEIP was halted when he was accused of being a communist and Soviet spy in 1948. For further reading on the Hiss case see Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013). Rosalee McReynolds and Louise Robbins, Librarian Spies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009) also places the Hiss case, United States cold war, and anti-communist trials in the context of library history.
49 US Congress, House, Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, Tax-Exempt Foundations: Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations. 83rd Congress (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 1.
50 W. Fulton, ‘Foundations Wander into Fields of Isms: Divert High Aims; Probe Planned Diverted to Globalistic and Red Propaganda’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 October 1951, p. 1.
51 ‘Foundation Inquiry’, New York Times, 11 December 1952.
52 The work of Louise S. Robbins describes in great detail the role of the library profession in responding to and confronting efforts to censor and inhibit intellectual freedom during the cold war. See Louise S. Robbins, ‘After Brave Words, Silence: American Librarianship Responds to Cold War Loyalty Programs, 1947–1957’, Libraries & Culture, 30.4 (1995), 345–65; Louise S. Robbins, ‘The Overseas Libraries Controversy and the Freedom to Read: U.S. Librarians and Publishers Confront Joseph McCarthy’, Libraries & Culture, 36.1 (2001), 27–39; Louise S. Robbins, ‘Publishing American Values: The Franklin Book Programs as Cold War Cultural Diplomacy’, Library Trends, 55.3 (2007), 638–50. Other scholars such as Christine Pawley have also addressed the role of public libraries during this era: Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
53 US Congress, House, Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, p. 926.
54 Ibid., p. 595.
55 Ibid., p. 1063.
56 Ibid.
57 US Congress, House, Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, Tax-Exempt Foundation: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations House of Representatives Eighty-Third Congress Second Session on H. Res. 217. 83rd Congress (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 19.
58 Ibid., p. 178.
59 E. C. Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
60 Pawley.
61 Ibid., p. 4.
62 Curti. Edward Berman’s Ideology of Philanthropy analyses critically the efforts of foundations such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller to use the education, cultural affairs, and the development of professions as a means to promote United States values and policy initiatives that included exporting American democracy and developing educational programmes that fostered shared values among elites. Like Lagemann, Berman focused on the role of foundations in producing and disseminating specific kinds of knowledge and ideas that supported each foundation’s objectives. He argued that these foundations achieved a great deal of influence over the production and dissemination of ideas, impacting ‘the way in which people view the world and the commonsense categories into which they organize their knowledge and by which they conduct their lives’. E. H. Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (New York: SUNY Press, 1983), pp. 11–17.
63 Ibid., p. 17.
64 Kuehl and Dunn, p. 64.
65 For further and more in-depth discussion of the significance of the information networks and international organizations that developed in the early twentieth century, see Iriye, Global Community; T. Matysik, ‘Internationalist Activism and Global Civil Society at the High Point of Nationalism: The Paradox of the Universal Races Congress, 1911’, in Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, ed. by A. G. Hopkins (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 135; Gorman.
66 Iriye, Global Community, p. 25.
67 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gorman.
68 Beverly J. Brewster, American Overseas Library Technical Assistance, 1940–1970 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 198.
69 Witt, ‘Merchants of Light’, pp. 131–51.
70 Brewster.
71 Gary E. Kraske, Missionaries of the Book: The American Library Profession and the Origins of United States Cultural Diplomacy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).
72 Wiegand, An Active Instrument for Propaganda; Ring, pp. 249–71.
73 Iriye, Global Community; Gorman.
74 Benhabib.
75 Gorman; Benhabib; Iriye, Global Community.