A Well-Read Woman

Chapter 32

President Nixon had resigned five months before Mumford’s retirement, and the outrage and chaos of those events still lingered in Washington. The following spring, President Ford nominated Daniel J. Boorstin to be the next Librarian of Congress. At that time, he was the head historian of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History and Technology (today the National Museum of American History). Previously he had been a history professor at the University of Chicago and had recently published a Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Boorstin was an avowed conservative, who had named his fellow student Communists at Harvard during the McCarthy trials and admitted that he had briefly joined the party.1 As the Library of Congress turned another page in its history, many librarians, especially those with a more politically liberal bent, were wary of this man nominated for the most powerful position in the field of librarianship. They wondered what would happen to this increasingly complex and troubled library if he was confirmed.

At Boorstin’s confirmation hearings during the summer of 1975, Robert Wedgeworth, the president of the American Library Association, stated, “After consulting the record of his achievements, after speaking with friends and colleagues of Dr. Boorstin, the officers and members of the American Library Association have concluded that there is no relationship between his career and the ability required of the Librarian of Congress at this time in history.”2 Wedgeworth explained the many different programs and projects of the library, some of them highly technical, and how experience as a library administrator was vital to move the Library of Congress forward. He made an apt analogy by pointing out how unreasonable it would be to appoint an attorney general with no experience in law.

It was not just outside librarians who were worried about Boorstin taking the helm of the library. LC employees, and especially minorities, vocalized their concern at the hearing. Joslyn Williams, the executive director of Council 26 (the Capital Area Council of Federal Employees, number 26, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO) and a former LC employee, submitted a damning statement for the record about LC’s past practice of discrimination and his doubts about Boorstin. He described the recent investigation and report by the American Library Association on patterns of discrimination at the library and argued that Boorstin’s past statements against affirmative action indicated he would not do much of anything to fix the problem.3 Despite these firm protests, Boorstin was confirmed by the Senate, with the understanding that he would not use the position to write more books, although he would continue to publish a few more while he was the Librarian of Congress. There is no doubt that many LC employees, including Ruth, were disappointed with his confirmation.

On June 23, 1971, just a few months before Ruth started her job, twenty-eight black employees of the Library of Congress were suspended for staging a sit-in along with about a hundred total black employees in the Main Reading Room. They had decided to protest the low pay and the discrimination in promotions they had faced for years. Most of the twenty-eight staff members who were suspended were deck attendants, who primarily pulled, delivered, and reshelved books for researchers.4 This job, which could be physically demanding, offered very low pay and few chances to move into another position at the library. Nearly everyone who had the job was black, as they are at the time of the writing of this book. Two months before the protest, a group called the Black Employees of the Library of Congress (BELC) had led a “tour of racial discrimination” for the news media and the staffers of black members of Congress

.5 According to an ALA report, 38 percent of the library’s employees were black, but they held 76 percent of the GS 1–4 jobs, which were the lowest paying. They held only 13.9 percent of the GS 9–11 jobs and none of the highest paying GS 16–18 positions.6 Considering that the population of the District of Columbia at this time was 70 percent black, the discrimination was obvious.7 And it was not just employees who had long faced bias at the Library of Congress; the library buildings had segregated spaces, likely bathrooms, for black employees and researchers until the mid-twentieth century.8

BELC was led by a Library of Congress employee named Howard Cook. He had started out as a deck attendant and had been denied several opportunities to move up the ranks at the library. He explained many years later, “We saw what was happening here, where Blacks were qualified for promotions but were denied. Instead, we had to train these Whites, who later became our superiors.”9 Along with another black employee, David Andrews, the two founded BELC but soon came to realize that discussions and protests were not resulting in any significant progress. In 1975 they filed a class-action lawsuit against the Library of Congress with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Cook retired in 1989, when the case was still unresolved but had moved through several layers of the court system. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case that year. A lawyer named Avis Buchanan took it on, probably because her mother was one of the plaintiffs.10

In 1993 the Subcommittee on Libraries and Memorials of the Committee on House Administration in the House of Representatives held the hearing Library of Congress Personnel Policies and Procedures to understand exactly what was going on at the library and why this lawsuit was taking so long to resolve.11 After James Billington, the new librarian of Congress, spoke along with several library administrators, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents DC in Congress, made a statement. Norton had been a leader of the civil rights movement and as a lawyer had represented a group of women who sued Newsweek for discrimination; she had also later served as chairwoman of the EEOC. She said:

What is disturbing here is the long-term nature of the suit against the Library, pending 17 years, and the Library’s apparent failure to move forward with significantly improved results in the face of that lawsuit. Had the Library moved more aggressively during the long period of a lawsuit that is not yet over, it might have mitigated potential liability, improved its hiring practices, and raised the morale of its employees.12

Finally, in 1995, a US district-court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs for an $8.5 million settlement, the largest ever against a federal agency for discrimination.13 But the case did not end discrimination at the library. As of 2016 at least fifty others had sued the library for discrimination.14 Staff have also sued because library administrators have prevented some organizations, particularly those founded to support black employees through the legal process, from being deemed “official” LC staff organizations. That meant that employees who wanted information or help on a discrimination case could not spend any official staff time seeking assistance, at least not from those organizations.

Kathy Sawyer, a Washington Post reporter, summed up the library’s appalling record of job discrimination in 1979:

The history of employee-management relations at the Library is written in stacks and stacks of court documents and a trail of yellowing newspaper articles about protest groups formed and sit-ins or marches at the Library.

As an extension of Congress, which has exempted itself from its own laws, the Library’s employment practices lie beyond the reach of the official equal employment opportunity enforcers who monitor other private and public employers.

Thus, while the Library has filled its ornate archives with every word written about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, some employees and critics have charged, the white men who ran the institution failed to respond to that spirit internally.15

Unfortunately, Sawyer’s points are in many ways still true today, not only at the Library of Congress but also at other libraries across the country.

African Americans were not the only group that faced discrimination at LC. Women were in the majority at LC, as they were at every library across the country. But while many women librarians had somewhat comfortable salaries, most of them were single, especially before the 1980s. These women were continually passed over for raises and management positions, with the reasoning that men librarians had families to support on one salary.

Barbara Ringer was not a librarian, but she had started working in the library’s Copyright Office as a lawyer in 1949. She steadily moved up the ranks from an examiner position to a section head, then assistant chief. After serving as chief of the Examining Division, she was appointed assistant register of copyrights.16 During the June 1971 sit-in at the Main Reading Room, Ringer had publicly sided with black men and women who claimed they had faced discrimination. When Ringer applied for the position of register of copyrights (the director of the division) she was the only person who initially applied. George Cary, the deputy register, got the job. Ringer sued the Library of Congress for discrimination and quickly won her case. The court ruled that she had been deliberately passed over because she was a woman and because she had spoken out in defense of black employees at the library. In 1972 she was appointed register of copyrights.17

Ruth, too, had faced an extraordinary amount of sexism, sexual harassment, and ethnic discrimination in her lifetime, of course, from her outrage at the Protektia in Israel in 1948 to being stuck in secretarial positions for so long in her twenties and thirties. The cloud of anti-Semitism always hung around her as well. I have no idea if she felt empathy for those who sued the Library of Congress for discrimination, but she probably saw the situation from many sides. Whereas she had taken a job with a lower pay grade and fewer responsibilities at the Library of Congress—probably because she felt she needed a break after Vietnam—she itched to return to a job that would fully engage her expertise and abilities.

The discontent of minority and women employees seemed to spread among all LC employees in the early 1970s. In 1976 the library’s professional employees, most of them librarians, decided to band together and start their own union, the Library of Congress Professional Guild, which became Local 2910 of AFSCME.18 The guild had originated among catalogers fed up with the way administrators were tracking the number of books they cataloged. While libraries had always tracked statistics concerning number of patrons who visited the library per day or reference questions answered per day, there was something about the way LC administrators tracked the catalogers’ work that felt very factorylike and almost corporate. The catalogers tried to explain that books were not a uniform widget to be processed; some were very simple and quick to catalog, while others presented problems that took considerable time to solve. Every time catalogers agreed on a new official rule, along came a new book to break it. Promotions and demotions based on such a simplistic rubric could not be a true reflection of an individual’s cataloging productivity.

In June 1977 the guild’s new newsletter, the Local News, reported that members had been forbidden from circulating union flyers inside the library. They had been forced to stand outside to distribute their information to passing employees. Library administrators went so far as to stop all LC organizations from distributing flyers desk to desk.19 In October a hearing examiner ruled that LC’s practice of banning the distribution of union literature in the workplace was unconstitutional. LC administrators compromised by providing individual mail slots for every employee near his or her work area.20

Guild members got creative about spreading their message and convincing other bargaining-unit members to join. They created new logos, wrote songs and chants for rallies, drew cartoons, and wrote poems and humorous stories for the guild’s entertaining newsletter. Many stories were blatantly satirical; “Gil D. Steward” regularly interviewed his friend, “Max von Obmann-Dusel, who hangs out in various libraries.” One interview, structured as a satirical Socrati

c dialogue, addressed LC’s stance on the distribution of union literature and exposed the hypocrisy of banning it, in violation of the First Amendment.21 Whoever wrote the interview seemed to be alluding to Nazi or Communist censorship; regardless of the political persuasion, it is notable that the author chose a fake German name.

Once the guild was firmly established, Ruth enthusiastically joined and soon became an officer. In the fall of 1976, Ruth, along with a small group from LC, was elected to be a delegate to Council 26, a regional group of locals.22 She held this position several times, and in 1980 she was chosen as the guild’s executive board member to the council. Part of this position would have been to serve as a liaison between the local union at the library and Council 26; she attended regular meetings of both organizations and wrote articles reporting on Council 26 news for the guild’s newsletter. In the summer 1980 issue, Ruth probably wrote the article about Council 26’s sponsorship of a Vietnamese family. With a matching grant, the guild had raised $2,000 toward helping the Hung family emigrate from Saigon to Washington. The article directed those interested in more information to contact Gabe Horchler or Ruth Rappaport.23 Ruth served as executive board member to Council 26 until June 1982, when she was elected a trustee of the guild, a position she likely held until 1983, when she was promoted to a management position at LC.

The guild’s progress over the next few decades in securing more rights and benefits for its workers was remarkable. The administration compromised with staff on how to accurately track work accomplished. The practice of snatching away time sheets right after 8:00 a.m., which had been so troublesome for Ruth, was abolished. Credit hours and flextime, which allowed staff to arrive between 6:30 and 9:30 a.m., was instated at the library as well as across most of the federal government. Employees also won the option to work nine- or ten-hour days, with a corresponding Monday or Friday off. With the rise in personal computers, library employees who qualified could work from home one day a week. Staff members could donate their unused annual leave to another staff member undergoing a health problem or a family emergency. The guild also helped start a new day-care center, a few blocks away from the library, for library employees with children. And while the library’s practice of racial discrimination would continue, workers could be assured that at least they could file a grievance with the guild or another one of the library’s unions. Inch by inch, Library of Congress staff members have battled administrators to try to improve the workplace experience, not only for themselves but also for those fortunate enough to follow in their footsteps.

Chapter 33

When she started her position as a cataloger in 1971, Ruth was probably aware of Barbara Ringer’s lawsuit, and she had observed that her women colleagues were not being promoted, despite their organizational skills and deep knowledge of library science. After Nick Hedlesky’s retirement, Myrl Powell took over as section head of Social Sciences II for a few years until he was promoted to Assistant Chief of Subject Cataloging.1 In the spring of 1983, Ruth temporarily replaced him. She returned to her old rank for one month and then was permanently promoted at the end of June, to the rank of GS-13 as head of the section. Ruth was probably the most qualified person for the job and may have had the most seniority in her department by this time. She had worked at LC for twelve years as a subject cataloger, had past supervisory experience, and was fluent in German. Her knowledge of cataloging rules and practices was also impressive.2

Ruth was now a supervisor again, but her new role may have made her coworkers uneasy. She might have started out optimistically in this position, convinced that she could reform the section (or possibly the wider Subject Cataloging Division) with her organizational methods and her ideas for greater efficiency. But Ruth ran into the same problems that she had faced as a supervisor in Vietnam: the same old bureaucracy and the same old issues with her subordinates. She would also be caught in the middle of one of the most controversial aspects of librarianship in the 1980s.

A vital task of every subject cataloger at LC is to submit proposed subject heading changes to LC’s system of subject heading authorities, which are used in libraries throughout the world. Known as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), the system uses a controlled vocabulary, meaning that every word or phrase (there are now about 420,000 subject terms in the system3) must be approved as an “official” term. For instance, when searching for the word “cars” in LCSH, you will be redirected to the term “automobiles,” which is an approved heading. Theoretically, every book on cars in a library will be listed under the subject heading “Automobiles.” These headings can be strung together to be more specific. For example, a book on the history of Ford Motor Company could be given a heading “Automobiles—History—United States.” Each subject heading has its own catalog record called an authority record, which lists when it was created, other terms that are similar but are not the authorized heading, and the rules that govern its use as a subject heading. When a subject cataloger comes across a book that contributes new knowledge, he or she must consider whether a new term should be authorized or if a rule change to an older heading is necessary. Until 1992, when the Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) was founded as part of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), only LC catalogers could propose changes to this system. Afterward any librarian who worked at a library that was an institutional member of PCC and who was trained in LCSH could nominate changes to the committee at LC.4

Ruth and the other subject catalogers in the Social Sciences II Section proposed many subject heading changes over the years. Until 1980 very few headings changed in LCSH, due to the manpower necessary to update thousands of catalog cards and to refile them.5 The records of who submitted which proposed changes were not retained by LC. But the staff of the Policy and Standards Division (which is responsible for maintaining the LCSH system) found a memo that Ruth wrote in 1985 about the possibility of changing the heading “Crime and criminals” to “Criminology.” She wrote about the complex problems that were endemic to all major changes:

We have been holding off establishing the Subject Heading “Criminology” because the changes would be too voluminous, i.e. 750 corrections out of a 2,800 file under Crime and Criminals. The longer we wait to establish Criminology the larger and more unwieldy the file under “Crime and Criminals” becomes….. therefore, [supposing] we establish “Criminology” with a note, saying prior to 1985 books on this subject were entered under “Crime and criminals.” This would still leave room, if and when the time comes that corrections could be done by computer programs, or if there were a period of fewer books coming in and personnel available to make changes they could always be done and the split file notation taken out of the database.