AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
Ready for another highlight in the history of this holy land?
The date was April 24, 1800. President John Adams signed into law an act creating the Library of Congress. It was America’s first national library.
Today, it is one of the world’s largest such repositories of books, audio recordings, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, prints, photographs, films, videos, relics, keepsakes, knickknacks, tchotchkes, gadgets, and whatnots. It contains, in several locations both public and behind the scenes, upward of 180 million things. It maintains some 838 miles of bookshelves. It boasts a mint-ish condition Gutenberg Bible (the darned thing is going on 600 years old!) It has George Washington’s personal papers, Madison’s draft copy of the Bill of Rights, Jefferson’s draft copy of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis & Clark’s map, copies of Frederick Douglass’s North Star abolitionist newspaper, the contents of Lincoln’s pockets the night he was shot, a grainy film clip of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903, a comic book based on the life of Jackie Robinson, perhaps the smallest book in the world (it is tinier than the periods in this post), Harry Houdini’s collection of rare magic books…, in fact, the LoC acquires up to 15,000 items in a day (it employs about 3000 people — I imagine they scarcely have time to eat lunch.)
Unfortunately, neither you nor I can check out books or other materials from the Library of Congress. Dang. I would have loved to bring Rosa Parks’ peanut butter pancakes recipe home.
Rosa Parks’ “Featherlite Pancakes” Recipe, the Librrary of Congress.
The whole idea behind the LoC was to provide Congress, both the House and Senate, a place to do their homework. As the nation’s capital moved from New York to Philadelphia (or vice versa, I forget — the seat of government was awfully nomadic in the country’s early days) a sort of ad hoc congressional library moved with it. Congressbeings were expected to delve through books (imagine that!) to familiarize themselves with issues they’d be legislating on. Now, of course, they simply sit back and wait for lobbyists to bribe them; it’s more efficient. Adams’ signature on the LoC’s creation act authorized the purchase of 3000 tomes from a publisher in England. That collection, plus whatever remained from previous library incarnations, would be housed in the shiny new Capitol building.
Ironically, it was the English who destroyed that first Library of Congress. Our ex-cousins had been teed off that American forces had burned several towns and forts in Canada during the War of 1812, so when British Gen. Robert Ross marched into Washington on August 24, 1814, he ordered the burning of the Capitol as well as several other government buildings. The Capitol fire was a hell of a conflagration; after all, it was chock full of fuel, thanks to the thousands of books in the LoC.
Lucky for us, Thomas Jefferson was strapped for cash. The then-ex-president in 1815 sold his personal collection of 6487 books (he was an insatiable reader and an autodidact) to the United States for the princely sum of $23,950. That purchase seeded what would become one of the world’s biggest libraries. The LoC actually claims to be the world’s largest; other sources say the British Library is bigger. (Fun fact: the Russian and Turkish national libraries rank fourth and fifth in the world, oddly enough. You’d think China and India, each with a population well over a billion, would have bigger national libraries, but no.)
The Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress.
Over the years, the Library of Congress has evolved from legislators’ proto-Wikipedia to a destination for scholars, researchers, historians, you, and me to rifle through most of the world’s curated materials. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I’d bet the entirety of humanity’s knowledge, in some form another, can be found at the LoC.
The Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress.
In this day and age of greed monkey anti-intellectualism, the idea that the federal government should create and maintain such a place, had the LoC not been founded 226 years ago, seems preposterous. The Project 2025/Heritage Foundation/Trump Family Mafia/Christian nationalist/White supremacist/science-denying anencephalics who currently run this land would view any proposal to start a taxpayer-supported public library as the demonic fever dream of commie rats.
Me? I think the existence of the Library of Congress is one very big reason to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.