© 2014 Derek Attig HERE COMES THE BOOKMOBILE: PUBLIC CULTURE AND THE SHAPE OF BELONGING BY DEREK ATTIG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Kathryn Oberdeck, Chair Associate Professor Tamara Chaplin Professor Kristin Hoganson Professor Rayvon Fouché Associate Professor Lori Newcomb ii Abstract This dissertation explores the peculiar history of the bookmobile in the United States from the close of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In the process, it insists that a spatial politics of shared information was key to constructing and contesting community in twentieth-century America. Grounded in cultural geography, American Studies, and book history, it is an interdisciplinary investigation of the roles that bookmobiles played in efforts to build what some reformers called “common consciousness,” a sense of cultural and spiritual connection. Indeed, the bookmobile emerged not just as a tool for getting books into far-flung hands but also as a way to confront two persistent questions: What should our communities look like in this new century, and who should be included in them? This dissertation argues that the bookmobile’s answers to those questions both shaped and were shaped by three factors—racial segregation, imperial expansion, and consumer capitalism—that ultimately exposed the limits of the dream of a common consciousness. Drawing on research in archival and published sources, this dissertation looks at a series of moments when bookmobiles, by moving purportedly public culture through supposedly shared space, forced Americans to consider what it would mean to hold ideas and objects in common. A set of five thematically distinct and roughly chronological chapters allows the dissertation to touch down in particular times in particular places—in Progressive-Era Kansas, in the Jim Crow South, in New Deal New Mexico and Cold War West Germany, in suburban supermarkets, and in Silicon Valley—while offering an expansive view of the relationship between community, space, and culture in America. iii For Bodel, of course “It is you talking just as much as myself” iv Acknowledgements This dissertation is very much a product of a time and place—of my years as a graduate student at the University of Illinois. Indeed, the project began in the excited, anticipatory weeks before my first semester, when I discovered a romance novel called Books on Wheels in the library catalog. And it ends, or perhaps begins again in new form, with the pages herein. From the start, faculty at the University of Illinois have supported and challenged me, helping to make this dissertation what it is. My committee, of course, has been crucial. From my very first semester at Illinois, Tamara Chaplin pushed me to think hard about the history of media and supported my work in myriad ways. Kristin Hoganson made my writing clearer and my arguments sharper. Ray Fouché supervised my first foray into bookmobiles and encouraged an imaginative approach to technology and American Studies. Lori Newcomb kept me thinking about books and readers, and about print culture before the 1890s. And Kathryn Obderdeck, my advisor, encouraged me to think creatively and pushed my ideas to be both more capacious and more precise. In addition to my committee, enormous thanks go to other Illinois faculty— including Sharra Vostral, Clare Crowston, Dana Rabin, Bonnie Mak, Rebecca Ginsburg, Megan McLaughlin, and Adrian Burgos—for contributing to this work and giving me opportunities to present and discuss it with others. The History Department staff make everything that happens in the department possible, including this dissertation. So thanks to all of the staff, especially to Tom Bedwell, Elaine Sampson, and Stephanie Landess. I would not have made it to Illinois, and I would not have managed to write this dissertation, without the teachers and professors who taught me before I came here. Ellen Joyce and Catherine Orr at Beloit College, in particular, were instrumental in the development of my v thinking about books, ideas, institutions, and identities. And, before that, it was Jeanne Hanigan who taught me how to really read a text and encouraged me to write. This project benefited significantly from institutional support within and beyond the University of Illinois. A Twentieth Century History Grant from the Massachusetts Historical Society funded the research that made a large portion of Chapter Two possible. The project incubated and developed through collaborations with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and during my time as a Google Policy Fellow at the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. Fellowships from the History Department helped support the research and writing processes, and a Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship gave me the time and space to finish. This project came into being and developed during my time here in large part thanks to conversations and collaborations with my fellow graduate students. Particular thanks to Stephanie Seawell, Emily Pope-Obeda, David Greenstein, Jenny Schwartzberg, Scott Harrison, Heidi Dodson, and Chris D’Arpa for ideas, encouragement, and well-timed distraction. More thanks than I can articulate to the dear friends who kept me sane (and, if we’re honest, drove me productively crazy) while I researched and wrote. Thanks to Ariana Ruiz, Irina Spector-Marks, and Eszter Sápi for making Urbana home and to Rose and David Robertson for creating a home away from home. And thanks to Rose Pink for, well, everything. Reading to me every night, telling me stories as I fell asleep, my parents first taught me that books could connect, that stories could link people together. Without that lesson, and without decades of support, I could never have done this. And—“(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house / that supports them?)”— incalculable thanks to Bodel, the foundation of everything. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: ON COMMON CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC CULTURE………………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER ONE: “WE NEED UNION OF FORCE…AND GOOD LITERATURE”: BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURES OF FEELING IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA AND BEYOND………………………………………………………………………………………...28 CHAPTER TWO: “SPREAD BY THE EXCHANGE OF BOOKS”: THE PERILS OF PROXIMITY IN A SEGREGATED SOCIETY...........................................................................89 CHAPTER THREE: “A POWERFUL SPEARHEAD FOR ALMOST UNLIMITED PROGRESS”: MANAGING TIME AND SPACE ON THE FRONTIERS OF BELONGING…………………………………………………………………………………..155 CHAPTER FOUR: “HEMINGWAY AMIDST CHEESE AND CRACKERS”: PUBLIC CULTURE AND THE COINCIDENCES OF CONSUMER CAPITALISM.………………...234 CHAPTER FIVE: “UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO ALL KNOWLEDGE”: DIGITAL BOOKS, PHYSICAL SPACES AND THE REINVENTION OF COMMON CONSCIOUSNESS…….291 CONCLUSION: THERE WENT THE BOOKMOBILE?..........................................................340 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………350 vii “These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe.” –Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855) 1 INTRODUCTION On Common Consciousness and the Politics of Public Culture “Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” –Walt Whitman (1855) 1 In twentieth-century America—in newspapers and magazines, novels and children’s books, memoirs and annual reports—a certain phrase appeared over and over again. “Here comes the bookmobile!” children shouted, headlines blared, book covers declared.2 The phrase captured the intense optimism the bookmobile represented in the face of staggering and often discomfiting change. And, indeed, confronted by a host of transformations that challenged older ways of thinking, Americans repeatedly mobilized books in search of solutions. More than traditional libraries, and differently than the car itself, their combination in the bookmobile captured the minds and eyes of Americans and encapsulated their hopes (and fears) about the 1 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 2005), 64. 2 See, for example, Dirk Gringhuis, Here Comes the Bookmobile (Chicago: Albert Whitman & Company, 1952); Clair K. Knox and Jane C. Cotner, “Here Comes the Bookmobile,” in Up the Hemline: Being a True Account of One Hundred Years of Classroom Experiences in Colorado (Colorado Springs: William and Field, 1975), 166-167; Frank Trippett, “In Indiana: Here Comes the Bookmobile,” Time, September 8, 1980; Cherry Hills Newsflash (Champaign: Cherry Hills Homeowners Association, May/June 2008), 2; “Here Comes the Bookmobile,” Daytona Beach News-Journal, March 19, 1999; “Here Comes the Bookmobile,” Idaho Librarian 15-16 (1963): 67; “Here Comes the Bookmobile,” The [Greensboro] News-Record, January 3, 1957; Herbert Mutschler, “King County Library,” Hawaii Library Association Journal 12