A Well-Read Woman

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The term “Jewish question” is still an established heading, although now there are no books cataloged with this heading.

Several of the librarians who worked under Ruth remembered that she was not an ideal boss. Even coworkers who considered her a friend found her to be infuriating at times. She could be highly critical, micromanaging her staff and then turning around and blaming them for not being more independent in their work. She had long, drawn-out fights with staff members but then acted like nothing had happened. Like in Vietnam, she had a notoriously messy desk. Kay Elsasser described an incident when Ruth was completely enraged that one of her supervisors wanted her to clean her desk. Ruth’s chain-smoking habit was well known around the library. When she first started in 1971, anyone could smoke anywhere, but over time new rules were instated about smoking only in designated lounges and then, eventually, only outside. Ruth often tried

to convince colleagues to chat with her in the smoking lounges, probably to both gossip and have serious discussions on her own turf. She also wanted to conduct annual reviews with her subordinates there, which made some of them uncomfortable.21

In October 1992 Ruth wrote a long letter to the parents of David Rudman, a former Library of Congress employee who had recently passed away. She had supervised David, and the two had become close. While the purpose of the letter was to provide Rudman’s parents with more insight into his work as a librarian, Ruth went off on several tangents that revealed the office politics of LC and her surreptitious and fairly immature methods of dealing with them. Ruth detailed the early years of her mentorship of David:

Perhaps the first common bond we found was the discovery that neither of us suffered fools gladly and this led to various conversations of how to deal with certain higher up staff members and their “dumb” decisions, instructions, etc. I think our earliest discussions, perhaps more aptly called “chats,” revolved around cataloging issues and different points of analyzing books and how to sway the fools and getting the right thing done without offending the fools.22

Ruth also wrote about how much she admired the way that David dealt with conflict, particularly when disagreeing with her about book analysis or how cataloging rules should be applied when a confusing situation arose. These tiffs were common among the Subject Cataloging Division, and as a supervisor Ruth had to navigate these conflicts regularly. In describing his approach, she also inadvertently revealed how other colleagues vexed her:

I soon discovered if we had any differences of opinion on book analysis, David always offered valid reasons for disagreeing and if he felt his reasons were more cogent than mine, he would defend his opinion to the bitter end. But it was never because it was his opinion, it was because he had thought it through or researched it to the best of his ability and was convinced that the reasoning was correct. However, when given the right kind of reasons he could easily be convinced and would gracefully give in. He never argued just for the sake of argument or just to be contrary; he never argued just to win and on the rare occasions when we could not find a compromise or solution he was always willing to defer to higher authority and defer to higher judgment, usually gracefully and in good humor. This was the intellectual aspect of the work. On the procedural and technical aspects of the work he was a joy to deal with. He was the quickest study I ever had. He listened attentively, remembered accurately, and even if he didn’t like certain ways of doing things, my telling him I didn’t like it either, but until we could develop and sell a better way of doing things we better keep mum and do what had to be done he could be as docile and obliging as a little lamb.23

Of course, not all the librarians that Ruth supervised were “little lambs.” Catherine Hiebert Kerst described to me how difficult it was to work for Ruth and how she pitied other LC employees who had worked with her. Cathy struggled to please her but left LC to earn her PhD in American studies. She later returned to work at LC as a folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center. Years later, after Ruth retired, Catherine ran into her on the street nearby the library, and the two had a nice conversation. Ruth wrote her a card immediately after:

It was really wonderful to be able to speak with you really spontaneously and to find that you seem to have become the kind of person that I always felt you could be—should be—whatever? While I know that employee-supervisor relations necessarily have limits, constraints & at times tensions, I always felt we had more common [interests] than differences, but somehow I felt I could never reach you—obviously part of it may have been my fault[,] & shared interest do not necessarily make for “liking.” …At any rate I felt you have become much more relaxed, much more mature & balanced & sure of yourself & it really makes me feel good…please believe me that I’m happy to see that you’ve made such strides & have become “a REAL mensch.”24

Ruth obviously had regrets about how she had treated her former employees. Her over-the-top flattery in this letter was also typical of how Ruth sometimes manipulated friends and acquaintances she had formerly mistreated.

In 1992 the Library of Congress started a reorganization plan. This involved splitting up and reorganizing the cataloging departments. One goal of the reorganization was to move away from a top-down, hierarchical management to one that was more team based. Contractors were brought in to manage the process, which irritated many staff members. Ruth chafed at these changes and didn’t seem to understand what her new employees wanted. They tried to tell her that she didn’t have to treat them like children. Kersti Blumenthal worked under Ruth when Ruth became the head of a new section that cataloged German and Scandinavian materials. She remembered that Ruth probably felt “clobbered” by the whole process and her new team.25

A search in the Library of Congress’s staff-only catalog—known as Voyager—for Ruth’s cataloger codes (she had at least three) will bring up a list of almost 8,000 books that she worked on. About 2,400 of them are nonfiction books in German. Over 5,100 are sociology-related books in English. Every time Ruth created a new catalog record or modified it in some way, she entered her code into the record, letting other catalogers know she had done something to it. These catalog records live on not just at the Library of Congress but also in libraries across the nation. After Ruth’s twenty-one and a half years at the library, throughout all the endless work and frustration, her catalog records had ended up in libraries just like the ones she had walked into in Zurich, Seattle, Israel, Berkeley, and Vietnam. Over the past forty-five years, readers and researchers from all walks of life have unexpectedly stumbled across these books by searching library catalogs or browsing the stacks, thanks to Ruth’s steady handiwork as a cataloger. By the end of 1992, Ruth was ready to finally retire. She was almost seventy years old and had worked as a librarian and federal employee for thirty-three years, most of them at LC. Ruth retired on January 3, 1993.26

During Ruth’s tenure at the Library of Congress, the staff created an exhibit titled Nazi Book Burning and the American Response. Professor Guy Stern spoke on the topic at the opening, and a small exhibit catalog was published. As the Library of Congress Information Bulletin reported, the exhibit included examples of condemned books, photographs, contemporary newspaper accounts, editorial cartoons, posters, and manuscripts. It was installed in the first-floor lobby of the Madison Building, which Ruth walked through at least twice a day. She might have attended the opening or viewed the exhibit later on her own. She would have remembered the book burning she saw as a ten-year-old girl in Leipzig, and it may have brought back horrible flashbacks. She rarely talked with coworkers about her earlier life, and many of them never knew what she had gone through in Germany and why she felt so strongly about the minutiae of their daily work. But when the exhibit ran during that April in 1988, twice a day Ruth was reminded of why she chose this profession, why she cataloged books, and why she wanted everyone, everywhere, to read whatever the hell they wanted.

I didn’t get that first job I applied for at the Library of Congress. But soon after that interview, I got a job with ProQuest, a library database company that funded this split position in the International Standard Serial Number Center at LC. I cut my teeth there learning how to catalog brand new magazines and journals, and later I worked for five years at the American Folklife Center on an oral history project about the civil rights movement. I can look back now and say that working there was probably the most exhilarating professional experience I will ever have but, at times, also the most frustrating. I immersed myself in the arcane rules of cataloging and creating finding aids for the fascinating collections I worked on. I loved learning about the library’s history and went to any free lecture or concert I could. When we finally got the oral histories cataloged and streaming online, my job transitioned to working on a related exhibit and promoting the collection to scholars and teachers. I met people across the library who were as excited as I was to work there and others from outside the library who told me how amazing the whole experience must be.

When my job was nearing its end, I applied for a Senate archivist position with a vague description. I quickly got a call from the office of Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, one of my heroes, who had recently announced her retirement as the longest-serving woman senator and longest-serving woman in Congress. I took the job knowing I was ready for a new challenge, even though I understood that preparing her thousands of boxes of records for transfer to Johns Hopkins University by the time she retired would be backbreaking, frantic work. The resources of the Senate were vast, and it was remarkable to ask and quickly receive whatever I needed to do my job. But I also missed my LC coworkers and our camaraderie.

While I worked in the Senate, damning Government Accountability Office reports were published, revealing LC’s inadequate technology funding and inept policies. Articles in the New York Times and Washington Post reported on Dr. Billington’s irascibility and the fact that he communicated with staff while he was at home only through his fax machine.27 He announced that he would retire at the end of 2015 but abruptly left in September. The next spri

ng, I was amused by the national news stories on the LC Policy and Standards Division’s decision to change the subject heading “Illegal immigrants” to “Noncitizens” and “Unauthorized immigration.”

I had heard a rumor years earlier that President Obama wanted to appoint Dr. Carla Hayden, an old friend of his from Chicago, to be the next librarian of Congress. As far as I was concerned, it would have been difficult to find a better candidate. She had worked as a children’s librarian in Chicago, earned her PhD in library science, taught as a professor, served as the president of the American Library Association, and transformed the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore into a modern, urban library system. The library had recently received attention because one of its branches had refused to close during the 2015 riots, even though it was physically located at the heart of them. Besides her stellar qualifications and the fact that she was an actual librarian, Hayden is a woman and she is black, two firsts that were deeply symbolic to many LC employees. The demographics of the person at the helm of the library wouldn’t necessarily mean that the history of the library’s discrimination would change overnight. But it would certainly send a strong message to all staff members that someone who looked like and had a similar background to many of them could make it to the top.

Just as I had hoped, President Obama nominated Hayden, and Senator Mikulski accompanied her to the hearing and introduced her. At the swearing-in ceremony, where the senator gave a rousing speech about Hayden’s work in Baltimore, I watched from the back of the Great Hall. Even though I had a fantastic view, I wished I was watching from the balcony with other LC staff members who had won a ticket lottery to witness the swearing in.

I wrote this section of the book on Saturdays in the Main Reading Room, which bustled with activity despite the frequent reports that libraries are unnecessary in this digital era. With a new leader at the helm, librarians and researchers around the world are waiting and watching to see if the Library of Congress can finally catch up technologically and return to being the leader of libraries worldwide. Time will tell, but for now I’m betting on it.