A Well-Read Woman

by Kate Stewart

  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.

  Part IX:

  Come Sit Awhile

  WASHINGTON, DC, 1993–2010

  Chapter 34

  As a librarian and reader, I can’t resist a good library book sale. The Federation of Friends of the DC Public Library chapters at both the Southeast Neighborhood Library and Northeast Neighborhood Library on Capitol Hill host used book sales every few months. When I started writing about Ruth, my browsing and buying at these sales and bookstores swerved toward any topic, no matter how tangential, related to her life and the historical period she lived through. At one of these sales at the Northeast Neighborhood Library, I approached the cashier with a huge stack of books on Nazi Germany, Judaism, and the Vietnam War. He seemed amused by my purchases: “You must really like history,” he said. He eventually got it out of me that I was writing a book and asked what it was about. I explained it was about a woman named Ruth Rappaport, who had lived in this neighborhood for many years. His eyes lit up and he said, “Ruth! Oh, I knew Ruth.” Over many years Tom Fenske had run into her at meetings of the Friends of the Northeast Library and the Stanton Park Neighborhood Association. Time and again I was reminded that it seemed like everyone in this neighborhood had known Ruth and that everyone had a story about her.

  After Ruth retired, she found it easy to stay in touch with her coworkers and friends from the Library of Congress. Because she lived just two blocks away, they could easily stop by her house, and she ran into them while walking near the library. She recalled that they came by to “pick her brains” and ask her advice related to work, especially about how to supervise difficult employees.1 She had tried to start an official Library of Congress group for retirees to meet and stay in touch, but library administrators shot down the idea.2

  Ruth had joined many organizations as soon as she moved to Washington, but one issue in particular became important to her as she aged: preserving historic buildings and the Capitol Hill neighborhood. In 1976 she had joined DC’s commission to celebrate the American bicentennial, and she had also helped preserve the Sewall-Belmont House (now the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument), a historic building and museum—across the street from the Capitol—dedicated to the history of the women’s suffrage movement. Also in the 1970s she protested the renovation of Union Station, an ill-thought plan that gutted the station to build a visitors’ center in time for the American bicentennial and that moved the Amtrak station to an ugly nearby building. The renovation was so unpopular that it was redone in the 1980s, bringing back its function as a train station and adding many new shops and restaurants. Ruth joined the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, an organization founded in 1955 that successfully worked toward the goal of getting the neighborhood designated a historic district and placed onto the National Register of Historic Places.

  Raymond Gamble was a deacon and custodian at the Faith Tabernacle Church, just a few doors down from Ruth’s house. Ruth approached him about hiring him to mow her lawn. He agreed and the two became friends. Ruth often enlisted his help in her disputes with neighbors about following the rules set by the DC Historic Preservation Review Board, which governed what homeowners in historic districts could do concerning renovating the exterior of their homes and landscaping. Ruth often spotted violations of these codes, and she badgered Raymond to help her report them to the authorities.3 She earned a reputation as a busybody, nosing her way into neighborhood squabbles and eager to enforce preservation rules that, to some new neighbors, were a bureaucratic headache.

  She also joined causes that impacted her quality of life, particularly as a carless resident of Capitol Hill. Ruth was appointed to the advisory commission on Eastern Market, the historic food market and flea market at Seventh and C Street SE that was easily walkable from her house. She also joined an effort to change the laws regarding how DC cabs charged customers. The move would switch cars from a zone-to-zone system to time-and-distance meters that were used in other major cities.4 The meters were more beneficial, financially, to customers who used cabs to travel short distances, much like Ruth did. Even though she supported public transportation and walkability, she was irritated when bus routes were diverted around the Capitol in 2004 by new security checkpoints built around the complex. Several bus lines now went by her house on Third Street, which was not a thoroughfare that could easily handle bus traffic. Her complaints about the pollution and noise were quoted in the Washington Post, and soon enough the routes were changed.5 She could get back to reading and visiting on her front porch in peace, one of her favorite activities in retirement. One neighbor later praised the efforts of Ruth and another woman in the neighborhood, Margot Kelley, and noted that they were an incredible team known for getting things done to help their community.6

  Sig Cohen started a group for Jews on Capitol Hill because there was no synagogue in the neighborhood. He invited his Jewish friends to a seder and encouraged them to invite other Jews who lived nearby. This group later officially organized as the Hill Havurah. Ruth heard about it and started coming in its early days, sometime after the year 2000. By then she was already in somewhat poor health and needed assistance getting to the group’s meetings and events. Ruth “was a presence,” Cohen said. “You could feel her presence . . . and was fascinating to talk with . . . She embodied the word ‘chutzpah.’” Laurie Solnik, another leader of the group, met Ruth through the Hill Havurah. She said Ruth was very wary of institutional Judaism and warned them not to become too big or to become a synagogue (the organization is led by lay members). She remembered that Ruth said she had no use for established synagogues or the patriarchy of the rabbinate.7

  Ruth summed up her involvement in the Capitol Hill community in an email to Cohen:

  Surely even you will admit that by comparison, serving on the DC Bicentennial Assembly, helping to keep Sewall-Belmont House as a historic structure, being active on the Eastern Market in its various incarnations
, Stanton Park Neighborhood Assoc., CH Restoration Society, AFSCME Local 2910 and AFSCME Council 26, Havurah and CHV [Capitol Hill Village] are pretty tame and lame activities! I wonder if to some extent my DC activities benefited me more by keeping me active and involved than I contributed to their success. Oh I guess I did some good…..I think my fight against the “hole in the ground” at Union Station was commendable. I think my efforts at residential parking enforcement have proven worthwhile, and lastly, but NOT LEAST, it looks like I’m on the winning side of the cab zone-vs-meter controversy. I spent a lot of time these past few months lobbying city council members for meters….had interesting conversations and emails with Ward 6 member, and Jim Graham, and Carol Schwarz…..years ago, when she ran for mayor, I started the “Democrats for Carol” movement.

  I guess to some extent staying involved helps me as much or more than I help the causes I’m involved with.8

  Although Ruth seemed to be firmly rooted in Washington once she got her job at LC and bought a home, she still traveled regularly and sated her wanderlust with at least a few overseas trips. In 1983 she took two separate trips to Spain and the British Isles, and in 1984 she traveled to China. She wrote a long, travelogue-style letter to friends, detailing China’s customs, clothing, food, and historic sites.9 At some point before the reunification of Germany in 1990, one of Ruth’s friends convinced her to take a trip back to the country of her childhood, despite her deep misgivings.

  Her friend Alice was working as a teacher in Frankfurt at a school for American children. Ruth decided it would be a decent place to visit, because she could do many day trips by train from there. As she put it, “There’s nothing to do in Frankfurt except have coffee at a coffeehouse . . . And that takes care of Frankfurt.” She took boat trips up and down the Rhine River, and visited smaller towns such as Otzberg. She and Alice rented a car and drove along the Danube River to Vienna and Budapest. But due to the fact that Leipzig was still under Communist control in East Germany, Ruth was unable to go back to her childhood home.