A History Long Overdue: the Public Library and Motion Pictures

1 Chapter 5 A History Long Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures Jennifer Horne In a report written in 1870 on the state of the Boston Public Library, the first municipally-funded library system in the United States, an examiner observed that "the assembled crowd is often motley. But, the more motley, the more various and dissimilar its ingredients, the better the proof of the widespread influence of the library. Rich and poor assemble together and alike in this narrow dispensary, and a great many of them too."1 Striking, at first, for how the picture of class and social mixing stands out against Americans' present experience of stratification in central and branch libraries, it also recalls characterizations of early moviegoing audiences issued by Progressive era reformers. To the author of the Boston report, whose job was to recommend building a new library, the public library's civic body was just a crowd. Largely unconcerned with books and reading, or the private and contemplative reader, the report's recommendations hinged on the social production of space. Championing the library's capacity for creating a heterogeneous public, the observer set the disorder of that utterly modern mass against the ordered shelves of new and old knowledge.2 This view of the library as a utopian social space was and is persistent. Hugo Münsterberg, professor of psychology at Harvard University (and later, of course, the author of one of the first psychological studies of film), turned a social-scientific eye to this cultural apparatus in his book The Americans (1904), celebrating the American 1 Fred Lerner, The Story of Libraries (New York: Continuum, 1995), 146, 247n6. 2 Lerner, The Story of Libraries, 146. 2 public library as a "general meeting-place and substitute for the saloon and the club."3 In addition to seeing exemplary instrumentalism in its structure, he was most impressed by what was precisely public about it. By Münsterberg's assessment, the library had superceded the church as a monument to self-discipline and correction; as he observed, "the American taxpayer supports [public libraries] more gladly than any other burden, knowing that the public library is the best weapon against alcoholism and crime, against corruption and discontent, and that the democratic country can flourish only when the instinct of self-perfection as it exists in every American is thoroughly satisfied."4 Whether established by a charitable donation, philanthropic gift, or legislative act the public library is founded on the belief that a democratic state should provide its citizens free access to tools of education, expression, and self-improvement. For Münsterberg, and indeed many others, the public library stood as a symbol of the American postindustrial demand to bring the divergent goals of self-improvement and social control closer together.5 Writing about the powerful effect of libraries on readership, Thomas Augst observes that the public library building and the rituals of reading life it promotes can be better understood as a public expression of "secular faith."6 Libraries, he notes, were established to serve specific "spiritual functions," one of 3 Hugo Münsterberg, "Public Library in America," in The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses, ed. Arthur E. Bostwick (1921; repr., Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 84. 4 Ibid., 85. 5 Boris Raymond presents a parallel assessment, albeit with a Canadian focus and with respect to the changes in librarianship in his chapter "Paradigms in Conflict" in Richard Apostle and Boris Raymond, Librarianship and the Information Paradigm (Lanham, Md: The Scarecrow Press, 1997), 1-35. 6 Thomas Augst, "Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion," in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, eds. Thomas 3 which was to make reading one of the central "pieties of secular modernity."7 Public libraries, Augst argues, "helped to institutionalize leisure as moral education" and "became a temple to a civil religion, a site not only to borrow books but also to practice devotions of self-realization that embody freedom in liberal democracies."8 For many scholars of non-print media cultures, the didactic social function and non-commercial, bureaucratic status of the public library has inhibited analysis of it as a vital network of knowledge and information circulation. In fact, the public library has been overlooked by scholars, treated as a mere repository of recreational reading and popular publications or as a bastion of censorious forces. But patterns of readership and moving image spectatorship have long existed in a complicated latticework of entertainment, education, and social control. The quaint metonymy between the public library and the book has also obscured how integral multimedia collections became to libraries as early as the turn of the twentieth century, and how public libraries have helped to keep outmoded recording technologies from immediately passing into obsolescence. As public libraries shed their 16mm film and VHS collections and library administrators struggle over decisions about new media acquisitions and access, past debates over the public value of moving images become all the more relevant, precisely because they return us to the origins of the library's self-conception as a public utility. The uselessness of media formats at the moment they are de-accessioned makes it difficult to recall the "usefulness" that encouraged their integration into library Augst and Kenneth Carpenter (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 153. 7 Ibid., 153. 8 Ibid., 154. 4 collections in the first place. In what follows, I trace the introduction of motion picture use into library services, in order to illustrate how cinema forced libraries to decide how they could be useful to their patrons or to the civic sphere more generally. As one might expect, debates over cinema's respectability and its purported potential to degrade or elevate its spectator deeply influenced librarians' attitudes to film. The beginning of library-film services coincided with the controversies over the public exhibition of entertainment film and the period of the film industry's self-regulation, a particularly active period for organizations such as the National Board of Censorship (1909-1922), the National Board of Review (NBR), and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), begun in 1922, and its Studio Relations Committee. The actions of state and municipal censor boards and studio public relations offices, as well as the legal decisions that, as Lee Grieveson puts it, guaranteed the "social functioning of the cinema," determined in large measure how the library would utilize particular types of motion pictures.9 Librarians were invited by the MPPDA to serve as motion picture previewers issued by the Studio Relations Committee during its "Open Door" policy, a policy that Richard Maltby has referred to as "a containment exercise" in the larger project of fending off the reform lobby and cementing the cultural legitimacy of the motion picture industry.10 The end of the period I'm concerned with here overlaps with Martin Quigley's crafting of the code of ethics in 1929 and the adoption of the code in 1930. Grieveson's approach to the cultural context of the cinema, especially his emphasis on the productive aspects of regulation, is particularly germane to 9 Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. 10 Richard Maltby, "The Genesis of the Production Code," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15.4 (1995): 11. 5 my interpretation of library concerns over and interests in motion pictures, moviegoing and film culture. What I attempt to illuminate in what follows are librarians' attitudes toward motion pictures. Given public libraries' deep investment in cultural respectability, these attitudes are more varied than one might expect and the desire to treat the cinema's inherent publicness itself as a social good equally surprising. During the years in which the public library became an auxiliary site for motion picture spectatorship, several phenomena critical to our understanding of the cinema intersected: competing ideological agendas, motion picture regulation and legislation, exhibition practices, economic interests, and technological innovations. The function of the public library as juncture or source of these contending and intersecting film-cultural functions were part of the library's institutional self-understanding. The physical site of the library helped cultivate habits of moviegoing that were often regionally inflected and community-based, and the policies and profession of the librarian established lasting taxonomies of motion picture subjects. By looking more closely at the intersection of the two sites—the public library and the movie theater—and their respective publics we can ask a number of questions about their reciprocal impact: where did the library's public and the cinema's public overlap? Where did they diverge? To what extent were these otherwise discrete social formations mutually affected by emerging habits of spectatorship, modernizing conceptions of information and knowledge, and the respective publicness or privacy of both media sites? And what accounts for the persistent characterization of these two spaces as separate and dichotomous: contemplation versus distraction,

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