by Kate Stewart
She further explained to Gabe the issues with a new program called Cataloging-in-Publication. Called CIP and pronounced “sip,” the new system allowed publishers to send in a form and, optionally, a galley copy of a book to LC well in advance of a new book’s publication. The catalogers made a temporary, brief catalog record (this information is also printed on the back of a book’s title page), which was revised later when the official copy of the book was sent to the library. Copies of the catalog card were sent out to libraries that had preordered the book, a practice that saved time and increased efficiency for libraries across the nation. Ruth explained how difficult the process was and how the target rate of books cataloged per day was impossible to achieve:
At a meeting in which “low cataloging productivity” was the subject[,] I finally let them have it about retyping my own schedule in clean form for each meeting and asked whether they really thought I got my pay for typing! […] [CIPs] are increasing by leaps and bounds[,] and without galleys it’s becoming more and more of a crystal ball game. Bill Goslin disagrees with me…he’s so anxious to sign up publishers that he’s willing to settle for anything he can get from them. Personally I’d play the game differently…if the books show top-notch cataloging then the receiving librarians will press for [CIPs] and since they are the “buying public” for many publications they can or could exert the clout on both the library and the publishers to provide [CIP] info. If we go slapping any old number and heading on the books and then redo the printed cards with the corrected numbers we’ll ultimately defeat the [CIP] program.10
Furthermore, she noted that when the upcoming presidential impeachment hearings would be broadcast live during the day, no one would get anything done. While Ruth knew that the expectations of management were absurd, she also recognized that the distractions and disgruntled feelings among staff didn’t improve anything. In February 1975 Ruth wrote again to Gabe, updating him on more LC news:
At the moment morale (as usual in subj. cat.) is fairly low…I just mind my own business and keep much busier away from work than at work! Since the new catalogers have started I’m getting only foreign language weirdo books and porno…they get the easy stuff and some days I wonder what ever made me become a cataloger…but that too will pass???11
In December 1974 Librarian of Congress Quincy Mumford retired. Mumford had been one of the only men to lead LC with past experience, having served as both the director of the Cleveland Public Library and the president of the American Library Association. He faced a Congress increasingly hostile to his efforts to expand the services of the library to the public (rather than focusing on serving Congress) and reluctant to supply it more funding. But Mumford had led the charge to fund the Madison Building construction and had increased the library’s yearly funding from $9.4 million to $96.7 million over his twenty years in office.12 The uncertainty of who would be nominated to replace Mumford surely was a cause for concern among the staff.
Ruth knew that Gabe Horchler was interested in coming back to LC sometime after November 1975, when his job in Niger would end. She kept an eye out for any position that might interest him and notified him of upcoming retirements. She sent him a vacancy posting that was essentially the same one he had before at LC. Ruth explained to him the confusing application process and how she had talked to a woman who worked in the Placement and Classification Office. She was a friend of one of Ruth’s employees in Vietnam, and Ruth told her who Gabe was and that he wanted to return to LC. When Ruth revealed what she had done to Ed Blume, her supervisor, Blume was very annoyed by her meddling. She explained to Gabe:
The trouble is, everyone is so afraid of equal opportunity employment that everyone is playing games and it takes a lot of guess work to figure out what people are really telling you… Personally I don’t see how they can possibly come up with a more qualified applicant since for all practical purposes you’ve had experience on the very job they are advertising. However, I’d follow the rules of the game and play it their silly way.13
Ruth was referring to the recent turmoil at LC concerning job discrimination. Although libraries may appear to be democratic institutions rooted in equality and opportunity, there is an ugly history of discrimination at many of them. Several investigations and court cases emerged in the 1970s and ’80s that exposed the fact that the world’s largest library had been systematically discriminating against women and minorities for decades.
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.