Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS Philadelphia Libraries. A Survey of Facilities, Needs and Opportunities. A Report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York by The Bibliographical Planning Committee of Philadelphia. (Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania Press, 1942. vi, 95 + 46 p. $3.50.) Some explanation is needed of why a technical report of this kind should be reviewed at length in a journal devoted to American history. Two explana- tions can be given: first, this report gives both theoretical and practical con- sideration to improving the tools of scholarly research; second, it has buried away in its statistical tables and it reveals in its final conclusions a very interesting commentary on the history of Philadelphia and on the history of American culture. Any research worker in almost any field, who has at heart the best interests of scholarship, will find this Report worth reading. The complex relationships that are involved in handling the materials of research are here uncovered, analyzed and their costs estimated. Inefficiencies and inadequacies are studied; suggestions are made; the directions that must be taken if improvements are to be effected are indicated. But it is the historical implications that are the chief interest here. Two sets of facts stand out in a marked way, and I quote in both instances the words of the authors of the Report: (1) "We have in the aggregate a magnificent collection of books in this city. We have the material at hand to encourage a great awakening of its intellectual and cultural life." (2) "It is very distressing that Philadelphia, which was the recognized leader of the American library world a century and a half ago, has slipped back into a relatively obscure place, and that its chief library glories are relics of the past, not creations of the present." The significance of these generalizations lies in the difference between them; and the reasons for the existence of this gap throw considerable light on the history of Philadelphia. It touches also the whole question of institutions, their relation to the cultural backgrounds from which they emerge, and the grounds of their survival. The Philadelphia area happens to provide an excellent case history, because this area has been a scene of continuous institutional development for a longer period than any other American urban center. For example, the range is from the library that James Logan formed in 1699 "for the use of the public in order to prevail on them to acquaint themselves with literature"; to The Commercial Museum, founded in 1894 "to foster the expansion of American foreign trade." 216 1942 BOOK REVIEWS 21"] Between these dates Philadelphia spawned institutions of all sorts and kinds. It was driven by strong cultural compulsions to do this; compulsions that worked through individuals, through groups of like-minded men and through the needs of social classes. These institutions, singly or taken to- gether, reflect in their annual reports and minutes, a remarkable record of the social forces and the cultural tendencies that operated on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American mind. The drift from the eighteenth-century pattern institution of the discussion group and corresponding society type—as illustrated by the Royal Academy in England and The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia—to the more utilitarian and broadly based nineteenth-century types—as illustrated by The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the popular instruction and lecture societies abroad, is clearly marked. The push and pull of retreat and anticipation in the nineteenth-century temperament is also revealed by the formation, on the one hand, of institutions in which the glories of a vanishing past could be savored under the wing of history; and, on the other, of institutions such as The Apprentices Library, The Free Library, and public museums, through which the mass democratization of American society began to make itself felt. This drift obliged older institutions to make constant readjustments both of organization and intention. Their annual reports provide an intimate picture of human minds struggling with those rapid currents of change that characterized the history of the nineteenth century. One of the most surprising things is the constant evidence of a wish to adjust on the part of all these institutions. The notion that an institution had to be in some clear relation to contemporary needs seems to have been strongly held, even though the reason for holding it was often no more glorious than the necessity of appeal- ing for public support. This wish to adjust curiously dies in the early twentieth century. Some of the causes of this historical phenomenon are uncovered by the Report. Briefly, the pace of social change went beyond the capacity of institutions to alter their characters. The dignified progression of the nineteenth century was no longer adequate. Two major shifts in population were important factors. (1) The movement of long-established social groups to the suburbs. (2) The mass immigration into the urban center of adults from areas that were culturally retarded. And there was also a disproportionate increase in the number of adults with specialized technical training and specialized cultural interests. Such a combination of economic, social and cultural factors resulted in a set of circumstances to which the existing institutions of the area could not be geared with sufficient speed to prevent the formation of an unfortunate gap between the public and those institutions that had been created and been preserved to serve the public. Yet, by virtue of long existence and ample funds, these institutions had become through a process of inevitable accretion the repositories of collections of all kinds and of immense cultural importance. This underlies the statement 2l8 BOOK REVIEWS April in the Report about material being at hand to encourage a great awakening. The apparent incoherence of the twentieth-century handling of these tra- ditional institutions gives the background of the Report, explains the form it inevitably took and provided the impetus that brought it to completion. It will be noticed that the authors, disregarding for a moment their statistics and their technical analyses, are primarily struggling at close quarters with the problem of adjustment. They find the key to the solution of this problem in a term that has become one of the major terms of reference for our thinking —"cooperation." They apply this concept to the problem and, in the implications of this concept, they find their answer. It is not the function of a reviewer to exhort. It is enough that he recom- mend this Report to the attention of students of history, to those who are concerned with the administration of institutions of all kinds and to those members of the general public who want to use but are discontented with their institutions. The detailed suggestions need not always be accepted, but the evidence laid out is instructive. The criticisms of particular institutions may not always be fair, but the general grasp of the problem in its historical and its present form is admirable. And the introduction ends with a very human warning: "But the essence of any cooperative enterprise is cooperation. Without community support, without the whole-hearted assistance of the individual library (institutional) units, we shall never be able to realize . any plan for the effective integra- tion of our resouces." The Historical Society of Pennsylvania WILLIAM REITZEL Letters of Robert Carter, 1J20-1J2J: The Commercial Interests of a Virginia Gentlemen. Edited by Louis B. WRIGHT. (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1940. xiv, 153 p. Illustrations, appendix. $2.50.) Plantation life and economy in Virginia reached its highest development in the eighteenth century, and yet, strangely enough, there has been compara- tively little modern historical writing on this most important era. For the preceding century, we have the works of Thomas J. Wertenbaker and Philip A. Bruce, but conditions were materially changed by 1720. It is true there are numerous biographies of eighteenth-century Virginians, but these volumes deal largely with the part played by statesmen and soldiers in the events leading to the Revolution. Little attempt has been made to depict these men as planter-merchants, with the result that certain popular misconceptions have arisen, one of the most flagrant of which is the notion that the planters consciously sought to avoid all taint of trade. A reading of the Letters of Robert Carter, 1720-172J will remove such misapprehensions. Robert Carter of Corotoman (1663-1732), commonly known as "King," was the wealthiest and probably the most influential man of his day in Virginia. Capable, dominating, assertive, possessed of a genius for acquisition, a tremendous energy and a dominating personality, he quickly achieved dis- tinction. He was appointed, in rapid succession, Justice of the Peace, Burgess, i942 BOOK REVIEWS 219 Speaker of the House, Treasurer, Councilor, President of the Council, and acting Governor. For almost twenty years he was agent for the Fairfax interests, and thus was able to patent out in his name and in that of his sons and grandsons, some 300,000 acres of land. He owned also over 700 slaves and stock in the Bank of England to the extent of £6,OOO. These letters, most of them written in 1720 and 1721, are from copies now in The Huntington Library. Of approximately one hundred letters, more than half are addressed to British factors, about a dozen are addressed to John Carter, eldest son of "King," and the remainder to various persons in England and Virginia. They show clearly that the great planter was more than a landed aristocrat; he was also a business man, anxious for the op- portunity to "turn a neat profit." As a man of business, Carter was vitally concerned with the price of tobacco and slaves, land values, freight rates, and the cost of materials required in the operation of the plantation.

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