Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  48. “special manifestations of library work”: Council on Library Resources, Fourth Annual Report (1961; introductory essay by Verner Clapp), p. 10.

  49. Air Force Librarian: CIA file, Verner Warren Clapp.

  50. fired or allowed to resign: See Robbins, “Library of Congress and Federal Loyalty Programs”; Robbins cites one librarian’s plaintive appeal to Clapp in October 1952: “Next month it will be one year since I received the first interrogatory, and needless to say this matter has weighed very heavily on me.” Clapp answered that he was “anxious for settlement”; her case wasn’t settled for another six months. The well-placed hints of informants could be career-destroyers, as Clapp knew, and he was careful in his deliberations; his daily journal from the early fifties reveals the extraordinarily time-consuming work he performed as part of the Library of Congress’s three-man loyalty-review board, manned by Clapp, Frederick Wagman, and Burton Adkinson. Only two employees were fired outright from the library for political disloyalty between 1947 and 1956; but, as Robbins writes, “some resigned during the investigation process; some, after charges but before a hearing,” while others weren’t hired because “the loyalty panel concluded that a full field investigation would just be too costly”; and “at least ten lost their jobs during the purge of ‘perverts.’ ” When the American Library Association (rather bravely, considering the temper of the times) passed a resolution condemning loyalty oaths, Clapp stoutly defended their necessity; to oppose their use, he wrote, “is actually to aid and abet the hysteria which the tests are designed to counteract” (Library Journal, April 15, 1950).

  51. Office of Censorship: See Steven M. Roth, The Censorship of International Civilian Mail during World War II: The History, Structure, and Operation of the United States Office of Censorship (Lake Oswego, Oreg.: La Posta Publications, 1991). Censors slit letters open neatly on the left side (so that the examiner’s resealing label wouldn’t cover the stamp); they read the contents, noted certain items (discussions of enemy troop movements, for instance); sometimes photographed the letter and placed its sender or addressee on a watch list; “condemned” some mail; and returned to sender mail that contained prohibited material—e.g., statements “indicating low morale of the United States or its allies” (p. 98).

  52. Human Ecology Fund: See Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, chap. 9, which mentions Keeney on p. 156n. And see Andrew Sommer and Marc Cheshire, “The Spy Who Came in from the Campus,” New Times, October 30, 1978, p. 14, in which Keeney, interviewed in retirement, admitted that he had (according to the authors) “advised the Agency on ways of setting up covert funding operations” and said that he “was told by CIA officials that MKULTRA [one of the covert drug-testing programs] was designed to counter Soviet and Chinese brainwashing techniques, developed through the use of psych-chemicals and hypnosis.” The authors mention Keeney’s work at the National Endowment for the Humanities: “When questioned as to whether the NEH was ever used to cloak CIA operations, he [Keeney] asked incredulously, ‘Do you know what would happen to an agent who used the NEH as a cover?’ After a dramatic pause he answered, ‘He would be killed.’ He would not elaborate on this peculiar assertion.”

  53. Caryl Haskins: For Haskins’s work on the Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, see Susan Wright, Preventing a Biological Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 29–30.

  54. Project Artichoke: “Dr. Caryl Haskins was selected to head up the Panel and endeavored, in conjunction with OSI [the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence] to enlist the services of other qualified professional personnel.” Memo to Assistant Director, Scientific Intelligence from Project Coordinator, Subject: Project Artichoke, April 26, 1952. See Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX), record number c0022 (“CIA, Meeting Attendance”) at rex.dis.anl.gov.

  55. Haskins traveled to Canada: “The genesis for the mind-control research was worked out at a top-secret meeting June 1, 1951, at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal. . . .an anonymous handwritten note found in the archives identifies Dr. Caryl Haskins and Commander R.J. Williams as the CIA representatives at the meeting.” David Vienneau, “Ottawa Paid for ‘50s Brainwashing Experiments, Files Show,” The Toronto Star, April 14, 1986, final edition, p. A1, Nexis. And see related articles in The Toronto Star, April 15–17, 1986, and April 20, 1986. Haskins did not return calls from the Toronto Star reporter. (Haskins didn’t answer my letter, either, but his former assistant sent a polite note saying that Haskins was “in excellent health” but that I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t answer, as “1951 was such a long time ago.”)

  56. available to the CIA as a consultant: “Dr. Haskins indicated that the Panel had contributed about as much as it could for the present and until resources were built up in the agency to undertake the staff and field work necessary, the panel would hold itself ready (as individual consultants) to be of any further advisory assistance.” Memorandum to Assistant Director, April 26, 1952, Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX), record number c0022 (“CIA, Meeting Attendance”). Haskins was also (for over twenty years) an influential member of the executive committee of the Smithsonian Institution—and here’s the strange part: in the sixties, under director Leonard Carmichael (also a board member, like Barnaby Keeney, of the CIA’s Human Ecology Fund), the Smithsonian did germ-warfare research. After receiving a series of inoculations, Smithsonian researchers traveled to islands in the Pacific to study how birds transmit disease; avian blood samples were shipped, frozen, to the Army’s biological-weapons lab at Fort Detrick. The disease data was turned over to the CIA, whose MKULTRA program was studying “Avian Vectors in the Transmission of Disease.” The Smithsonian’s germ-warfare studies, and the CIA’s biological experiments for that period, are chronicled in two Washington Post investigations: Bill Richards, “Germ Testing by the CIA,” The Washington Post, August 11, 1977, p. A1, Nexis, and Bill Richards, “CIA Involvement at Smithsonian Called Limited,” The Washington Post, August 31, 1977, p. A12, Nexis; and Ted Gup, “The Smithsonian Secret: Why an Innocent Bird Study Went Straight to Biological Warfare Experts at Fort Detrick,” The Washington Post Magazine, May 12, 1985, Nexis. See also Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); and Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). It occurs to me that the CIA’s interest in the avian vectors of disease may possibly explain the otherwise puzzling choice of Wildlife Disease as the journal Verner Clapp published on Microcards.

  57. gruff and likeable: For an account of Louis Wright’s increasing doubts about the activities of the Council, see Deanna B. Marcum, “Reclaiming the Research Library: The Founding of the Council on Library Resources,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996). Marcum confirmed Wright’s doubts about Clapp in a phone interview.

  58. “the most informed point of contact”: Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” p. 93.

  59. “first library millionaire”: Paul Wasserman, “Interview with Paul Wasserman Regarding the Early History of CLIS,” Esther Herman (interviewer), January 11, 1995, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, www.clis.umd.edu/faculty/wasserman/pwinterview.htm. In 1947, at the Library of Congress, Mortimer Taube was put in charge of a project paid for by the Office of Naval Research to index and abstract scientific research and reports of interest to Navy weapons designers; see Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information, p. 149. Robert M. Hayes, former dean of the UCLA’s School of Library and Information Science, wrote me that Taube was “among the librarians who helped the CIA.” Having come up with his improved “Uniterm” method of indexing, Taube formed Documentation, Inc., and “received funding from the intelligence community, CIA included, to carry out the development of a variety of retrieval techniques based on that concept.” Robert Hayes, e-mail to author, 2
9 August 2000.

  60. didn’t work either: In 1967, the annual report mentioned the Council’s “continued but unsuccessful attempts to develop a hand-held portable inexpensive device for viewing microforms.” Having no luck with hand-helds, the Council proceeded to commission the Taylor-Merchant Corporation to build a prototype projector for microfiche and microfilm, whose “portability and economy should prove attractive to graduate students and others.” The microform projector never made it to market. Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 28.

  61. a conduit for CIA money: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment (New York: Bantam, 1967), p. 137; and Sol Stern, “A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with particular reference to the NSA, CIA, etc.,” Ramparts, March 1967. The sponsorship of the Independence Foundation is recorded on the title page of Carl F. J. Overhage and R. Joyce Harman, eds., Intrex: Report of a Planning Conference on Information Transfer Experiments (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

  62. “better and more economical systems for weeding”: Overhage and Harman, Intrex, p. 14.

  63. “digital storage of encoded full-text”: Also “transmission of a scanned-image electrical signal over a communication network and display and/or reproduction in full size or microform for temporary and/or permanent retention by the user.” Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 15.

  64. “Project INTREX fell very short”: Colin Burke, “Librarians Go High-Tech, Perhaps: The Ford Foundation, the CLR, and INTREX,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996).

  65. traditionalist members of his board: Besides Louis Wright, there was Lyman Butterfield, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, editor of the Adams papers. But the scientists dominated: in addition to Caryl Haskins, Philip Morse, and Warren Weaver, there was Joseph C. Morris, a large cigar-smoking physicist from Tulane who had worked on submarine warfare and then on the Manhattan Project (where he got a radiation burn on one hand), described in a eulogy as “a notorious gadgeteer” and an “inveterate dial-twiddler” (College of Arts and Sciences, Tulane University, “Resolution on the Death of Professor Morris,” Meeting Minutes, May 19, 1970, Tulane University Archives). And there was James S. Coles, president of Bowdoin College, where he built tall buildings and raised huge sums. Coles, a chemist, spent the war at the Underwater Explosives Research Laboratory at Wood’s Hole; there, according to The Boston Globe (June 14, 1996, p. 49), he “conducted research to improve [the] underwater ignition and explosive power of depth charges, depth bombs, and torpedo warheads.” He joined the Council’s board in 1960.

  66. “rescued many millions of pages”: Council on Library Resources, Second Annual Report (1958), pp. 25–26.

  67. “the destruction of the text”: Alan B. Pritsker and J. William Sadler, “An Evaluation of Microfilm as a Method of Book Storage,” College and Research Libraries 18:4 (July 1957).

  68. Crerar Library: Research Information Service, John Crerar Library, Dissemination of Information for Scientific Research and Development (Chicago: John Crerar Library, 1954).

  69. The library was moving: See Council on Library Resources, Seventh Annual Report (1963), p. 24; and Edward J. Forbes and David P. Waite, Costs and Material Handling Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals, Lexington, Massachusetts: Forbes & Waite, 1961, held by the University of Michigan Libraries.

  70. “Costs and Material Handling”: The consultants were Forbes and Waite, who specialized, wrote Clapp vaguely, in “information systems design including photographic applications,” for which imprecision one should perhaps substitute “defense and/or intelligence workers”; Clapp, normally a scrupulous bibliographer, doesn’t supply the full names of the consultants in the annual report for several years—an indication of some concern over secrecy. Edward J. Forbes and David P. Waite, Costs and Material Handling Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals (Lexington, Mass.: Forbes and Waite, 1961), held by the University of Michigan Libraries; Verner Clapp and Robert T. Jordan, “Re-evaluation of Microfilm as a Method of Book Storage,” College and Research Libraries, January 1963. Forbes and Waite write that the volumes under consideration are a collection of “older periodical issues (prior to 1920).”

  71. “considerable labor saving”: Clapp and Jordan, “Re-evaluation.”

  72. “except that of destruction”: Clapp and Jordan, “Re-evaluation.”

  CHAPTER 10 – The Preservation Microfilming Office

  * * *

  1. twenty-four microfilm cameras: La Hood, “Microfilm for the Library of Congress.”

  2. “otherwise beyond redemption”: Council on Library Resources, Twelfth Annual Report (1968), p. 28. See also Library of Congress, “National Preservation Program—First Phase,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 26:4 (January 26, 1967): “In its own preservation program, the Library of Congress has been segregating its brittle books for several years and microfilming thousands of publications too brittle to bind.”

  3. “Space was a key word”: Library of Congress, “Administrative Department.”

  4. “arrangements for assuring the preservation”: Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 34. See also Norman J. Shaffer, “Library of Congress Pilot Preservation Project,” College and Research Libraries, January 1969. Shaffer writes that the Library of Congress preferred to microfilm nonfiction, rather than fiction, since scholars interested in fiction “would probably want to use the physical volumes.”

  5. “safely discard”: Gordon Williams, The Preservation of Deteriorating Books: An Examination of the Problem with Recommendations for a Solution, report of the ARL Committee on the Preservation of Research Library Materials, September 1964, p. 17. In Library Journal, Williams compellingly wrote that “it will cost only about $2 more per volume to preserve the original for an indefinitely long future time and make a microfilm copy of it only when the book needs to be used, than it will cost to microfilm the original now and discard the original completely.” But Williams also condoned heavy discarding: “It is not necessary that more than one example of most deteriorating books be preserved” if “another example is being preserved” and a “usable copy of the text is cheaply and readily available.” Gordon Williams, “The Preservation of Deteriorating Books,” Library Journal, January 1, 1966.

  6. “varied greatly”: Shaffer, “Library of Congress Pilot Preservation Project.” Shaffer writes that “in nearly all cases the survey located at least one copy elsewhere which was, except for the brittleness of the paper, in excellent condition.”

  7. “the slums”: Richard L. Williams, “The Library of Congress Can’t Hold All of Man’s Knowledge—But It Tries, As It Acquires a New $160-Million Annex,” Smithsonian 11:1 (April 1980), p. 43.

  8. Frazer G. Poole: Library of Congress, “Frazer G. Poole,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 26:10 (March 9, 1967).

  9. at Clapp’s suggestion: Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” p. 86. Clapp rejected the traditional method of bookbinding, sewing through the fold, as too costly for most libraries (p. 88).

  10. indiscriminate rebinding: See Linda J. White, Packaging the American Word: A Survey of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Publishers’ Bindings in the General Collections of the Library of Congress, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, 1997; formerly available at lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/survey. “It is alarming to find,” White writes, “that of the general collections 93% of the sample items from the 1840s have been library bound; only 7% remain in original publisher’s bindings.” White’s paper was also presented at a conference entitled “Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians,” sponsored by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association, June 23–26, 1998, Washington, D.C.

  11. 98 three hundred thousand non-newspaper volumes: Lawrence S.
Robinson, “Establishing a Preservation Microfilming Program: The Library of Congress Experience.” Microform Review 13:4 (fall 1984).

  12. “embrittled to the extent”: Robinson, “Establishing a Preservation Microfilming Program.”

  13. “The volumes are cut”: Robinson, “Establishing a Preservation Microfilming Program.”

  14. “running our cameras against the clock”: William J. Welsh, “The Library of Congress: A More-Than-Equal Partner,” Library Resources and Technical Services 29:1 (January/March 1985): 89.

  15. Joanna Biggar: “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books to Save Them?” The Washington Post Magazine, June 3, 1984.

  16. not bound by the Freedom of Information Act: “Although the Library is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, as amended (5 U.S.C. §552), this Regulation follows the spirit of that Act consistent with the Library’s duties, functions, and responsibilities to the Congress. The application of that Act to the Library is not to be inferred, nor should this Regulation be considered as conferring on any member of the public a right under that Act of access to or information from the records of the Library.” Library of Congress Regulation 1917–3, September 18, 1997.

  17. shelving everything: The library receives three free copies of a great many books—two under the copyright-deposit program and one under the Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) program. “In fiscal year 1995, the Library obtained 49,201 books through the CIP program. These additional titles are either added to the collections or used as part of the Library’s exchange program.” They also receive the discards from other federal libraries; generally, they swap these for things they want, or they give them away. “In fiscal year 1995, the Library received more than two million items from Federal agencies, and, although only a very small number were selected for the collections, several thousand were used in exchanges with other libraries for materials needed by the Library of Congress. Many thousands of other Federal transfers were used in the Library’s surplus books programs.” In 1995, the estimated value of the books given to the library under the copyright deposits program was $20,158,594. General Accounting Office, Financial Statement Audit for the Library of Congress for Fiscal Year 1995, www.gao.gov/special.pubs/pw_loc.txt (viewed June 3, 2000). See also Linton Weeks, “Brave New Library,” The Washington Post Magazine, May 26, 1991, which describes the work of the Selections Office, where books that aren’t to be added to the collection are marked with a red X on the first page. Lolita Silva of that office told Weeks, “I think you develop a feel for the material. Sometimes with a book of poetry—how it’s published, how it’s presented to you—tells you it’s worth keeping.” Weeks writes that the library did not take elementary-school or high-school textbooks except those dealing with American history.