The Idealists
Page 7
In his thorough 1937 University of Illinois master’s thesis about the post–Civil War cheap-book trade in America, Raymond Shove briefly profiled one of the most polarizing bargain dealers, an Iowa native named John Berry Alden, dubbed “the Messiah of piracy” by Publishers’ Weekly.50 Alden bragged that he offered prices “low beyond comparison with the cheapest books ever before issued.” He wasn’t exaggerating. In a June 1880 advertisement in Publishers’ Weekly, he listed his wares at prices twenty to thirty times cheaper than the same titles from traditional publishers: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was available for six cents; Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield for five cents; and Carlyle’s Life of Robert Burns for three cents.51 At prices that low, Americans almost couldn’t afford not to buy them.
Alden styled his business as a “Literary Revolution,” with himself as its leader, seeking to overthrow the cartel that had for too long taxed the common reader. The Literary Revolution was “the most successful revolution of the century,” Alden boasted in magazine advertisements, “and, to American readers of books, the most important.”52 Be that as it may, this particular revolution was an unmitigated financial failure. Alden sold his books below cost, which made him at best incompetent and at worst charlatanic. His business was destined to blaze brightly and briefly. But he was more than willing to burn down the rest of the industry with him, and this act of corporate arson helped convince the orthodox publishers that they needed new methods to extinguish his flame.
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AS the 1880s began, most Americans harbored little sympathy for the cause of international copyright. “The Congressmen were ignorant of the subject and not easily to be interested in it,” wrote Putnam. “To the general public, the idea of property in literature was something of which there was no general understanding and in which there was but a very limited interest.”53
Many Americans remained desperately poor, and the general sentiment held that “the educational development of the country was more or less dependent upon the possibility of getting the best literature at the smallest cost,” Putnam remarked.54 But Putnam—who inherited his father’s business—scoffed at the notion that a nation’s “moral and mental development can be furthered by the free exercise of the privilege of appropriating its neighbor’s books.”55 The public, he clearly felt, couldn’t be trusted to act in its own interest.
“If the teaching of history makes anything evident, it is that, in the transactions of a nation, honesty pays, even in the narrowest and most selfish sense of the term, and nothing but honesty can ever pay,” wrote Putnam in reference to international copyright.56 This statement, self-serving and ahistorical, indicates the orthodox publishers’ blind, if benign, paternalism, their desire to dictate policies that they claimed were best for others while also, not coincidentally, being best for themselves. “Do I favor an international copyright?” the publisher O. J. Victor asked, with rhetorical incredulity, in an April 1879 issue of Publishers’ Weekly. “Would you imply that any honest man does not? Not to favor it, not to demand it, is simply to assent by silence to a wrong equally disreputable and fatal to business probity.”57
While the cheap-book dealers used revolutionary rhetoric as a sales tactic, the orthodox publishers invoked traditional Christian morality in order to convince the public to support international copyright. “Our idea is to try to bring the matter before the public especially in its moral aspect and to try and educate public opinion in the direction of honesty and fair dealing,” Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Century Magazine, wrote to a friend in 1883 upon the foundation of the American Copyright League, a group comprising many of the era’s best-known authors and editors.58 The league actively recruited literary celebrities—Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell—and then encouraged them to write and speak on the topic incessantly.
Even before the league and its affiliated organizations were formed, George Haven Putnam had been a fount of articles and opinionating on international copyright. Afterward, Putnam’s stream became a torrent. As secretary of the American Publishers’ Copyright League, a sister organization that was founded in 1887, Putnam diligently penned a minor library’s worth of propagandistic speeches, pamphlets, articles, and editorials. (“The trouble with Mr. Putnam,” one of his ideological opponents would later say, “is that he writes too much.”)59
If he wasn’t producing his own work, he was promoting someone else’s. At the time, many small American newspapers in drowsy towns were accustomed to filling their pages with syndicated material that was shipped from New York or Chicago in preset plates of type.60 Overworked editors liked this “boilerplate” material because it made their jobs easier. Putnam and his colleagues contrived to insert international copyright propaganda into that boilerplate. As a result, thousands of readers in the American interior were fed a steady diet of international copyright–related content that they would not have otherwise consumed. An added bonus, Putnam recalled, was that legislators from these remote districts “could not get over the impression that an article printed in the home paper must represent, to some extent at least, the opinion of the constituents”; thus, by means of this subterfuge, Putnam won both citizens and lawmakers to his cause.61
The league members contacted various ministerial organizations in hopes of convincing their members to work pro-copyright messages into their Sunday sermons.62 One of the most famous of these homilies, preached by the Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke, was later published in book form by Charles Scribner’s Sons under the title The National Sin of Literary Piracy. “It is altogether idle and irrelevant to talk of ‘the lonely rancher in Dakota and the humble freedman in the South,’ and their consuming desire to obtain cheap literature,” Van Dyke insisted. “The question is, how do they propose to gratify that desire, fairly or feloniously? My neighbor’s passionate love of light has nothing to do with his right to carry off my candles.”63
For all of this literary moralizing, international copyright still almost didn’t succeed. Throughout the 1880s, every time legislation was proposed, it was thwarted by manufacturers and tradesmen who feared that the law would be bad for business, and by others who saw copyright as a form of monopoly and expansive copyright terms as a “tax on knowledge.”64 In the first of his two nonsequential terms, President Grover Cleveland encouraged Congress to heed the “just claims of authors” with respect to international copyright; his advice was ignored.65 “There are some things that make me, at times, ashamed of being an American, and the absence of copyright is one,” Gilder wrote to Henry Adams in 1889.66
Finally, in 1890, a bill got some traction. Critically, it addressed domestic printers’ concerns by stipulating that, to be eligible for international copyright protections, a work would have to be “printed from type set within the limits of the United States.” In his report to the full House of Representatives from the Committee on Patents, the House bill’s sponsor, one-term Connecticut congressman William E. Simonds, wrote that “the intelligent voice of the whole country asks for the passage of a measure substantially the same as this; authors, publishers, printers, musical composers, colleges, educators, librarians, newspapers, and magazines join in the prayer.”67 At long last, it seemed like that prayer would be soon answered.
Then, disaster: the November elections overturned the House of Representatives’ Republican majority, and the incoming Democrats were unmoved by the league’s cries for copyright justice. In December 1890, Republican representative Henry Cabot Lodge, a longtime copyright supporter, wrote a blunt letter to Richard Watson Gilder: “There will be absolutely no chance for the [international copyright] bill in the next Congress. Everything depends on passing it now. . . . No time is to be lost.” If an international copyright bill was to win the day, it would have to do so before the current legislative session expired and the Democrats took control of the House. March 4, 1891, was the deadline.
The copyright advocates dispatched one of their best me
n to Washington, DC: Robert Underwood Johnson, secretary of the American Publishers’ Copyright League, who, since 1889, had largely abandoned his responsibilities as the associate editor of the Century to focus on getting international copyright through Congress. (“But for Underwood Johnson, there would have been no bill,” Mark Twain later wrote in his autobiography.68) By the time Johnson came to Washington in the winter of 1891, he was already an experienced lobbyist, and he knew what he had to do to bring the copyright bill home.
“I at once organized a systematic appeal to every doubtful Senator, through the newspapers of his State or through constituents or others who we discovered were likely to be influential with him,” Johnson wrote in his charming memoir, Remembered Yesterdays. “A meticulous study of each man was made from various points of view, and his classmates, clergyman, former business associates and others were enlisted in the good cause.”69 Johnson proved adept at brute-force persuasion, too. After New York senator Frank Hiscock, a Republican, voted to obstruct the bill, Johnson and a colleague representing the typographical unions contrived to have typesetters barrage Hiscock’s office with angry telegrams demanding that he reverse his position. The tactic worked: “From that time forward we had no trouble with Senator Hiscock,” wrote a satisfied Johnson.70
The bill passed the Senate at approximately 1:00 a.m. on March 4—mere hours before the legislative session would expire. It was sped to the House for final approval, which it received, though not without some agony. Johnson recalled that during the final House debate over the copyright bill, “its noisiest opponent, [Lewis] Payson of Illinois, could be seen by us asleep on a bench at the back of the chamber, his face covered by a newspaper which rose and fell with his stentorian breathing. When at last the roll call came we had an unpleasant quarter of an hour for fear he might awake and rush into the fray.”71 But Payson remained dormant, and the bill passed the House.
Then, disaster, again. Around 2:25 a.m., Samuel Pasco, a Democratic senator from Florida, speaking for a group of senators who believed the bill had been “railroaded through,” moved to reconsider the Senate’s vote to pass the international copyright bill.72 (Pasco, oddly, had voted in favor of the bill not two hours earlier.) Democratic senator John W. Daniel of Virginia charged that the measure had been “put through under the instigation and lash of the monopolists who are seeking to aggrandize themselves by it,” and insisted that the Senate reconsider its decision and “remedy the wrong which has been done.”73 The league members were briefly struck dumb. “If that bill doesn’t pass,” remarked Henry Cabot Lodge, speaking for just about everyone in the copyright coalition, “I’ll go into a corner and cry.”
Finally, at 6:07 a.m., with the legislative day almost finished and Pasco’s motion still pending, the spent senators moved to recess briefly and reconvene at 9:00 a.m. to consider the motion and decide the fate of international copyright. “The cup of trembling,” wrote Johnson, “was once more at our lips.”74
By that point, the Senate chamber was nearly empty. The international copyright advocates, bleary and exhausted, had three hours to locate as many friendly senators as possible and herd them back to the chamber to defeat Pasco’s motion and pass the bill. Johnson and the publishers William Appleton and Charles Scribner were given the relevant lawmakers’ home addresses and dispatched into the rising dawn.
“No one of us will ever forget the experience of that sleepless night,” wrote Johnson.75 “Outside was raging one of the bitterest storms I have ever known. Rain was falling and blowing in gales and freezing as it fell.” To make matters worse, the absurdity of the hour and the severity of the weather meant that no carriages were to be found. Despite these adverse circumstances, when the Senate reconvened at 9:00 a.m., the chamber was filled with the friends of international copyright. Pasco’s motion failed. With seventy-five minutes remaining in the legislative session, President Benjamin Harrison signed the international copyright bill into law with a quill pen made from an eagle’s feather.76 At once, Johnson cabled Gilder at the Century offices in New York: “The bill has been signed by the President! Sound the loud timbrel!”77
The legislative process demands compromise, and the final international copyright law was hardly the ideal, unadulterated statute that Putnam and the rest would have preferred. But, still, the law was a meaningful achievement. For the first time ever, mainstream American publishers had unified to lobby for legislation that would protect their businesses and their intellectual property. Their success encouraged them to advocate for even more favorable copyright reforms. In a celebratory April 1891 address to the American Copyright League, the poet Edmund Clarence Stedman put it well when he said, “It cannot be denied that our new Copyright law, if not perfect, wins at least nine-tenths of the battle. If it were quite perfect, perchance we might not feel so sure that this revolution is one of those which never go backward.”78
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THE international copyright law did indeed transform the publishing industry, though not in the way its advocates had expected. Christopher P. Wilson, in his intelligent book The Labor of Words, described how, after 1891, American publishing became “a best-seller system which allowed American authors to consistently better their European counterparts for the first time.”79 Trade courtesy crumbled as publishers began to bid competitively for manuscripts and actively market their books to national audiences. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1905, the publisher Henry Holt bitterly described a business environment in which a publisher’s “interests in authors are narrowed to the moment and to dollars and cents; the dignity and intellectuality possible to his functions—his professional career, as distinct from his money-grubbing career—are destroyed; and his old-time friendships with his authors and ‘professional’ brethren are reduced to games of dog-eat-dog.”80 American print culture had become, irrevocably, a mass culture.
The international copyright advocates had hoped—at least publicly—that literary professionalization would incubate better books. Instead, literary merit was subsumed in importance to marketability. Wilson observed that the professionalization of authorship in America, “hinging as it did on the legal recognition of [the author’s] intellectual property, also coincided with a drive by publishers for greater market predictability and power.”81 Publishers began to act as employers rather than patrons, as businesses instead of benevolent societies. The rhetorical logic of the international copyright debate, through sheer reiteration, led to the development and consecration of the notion of copyright as a property right, and literature as property. And the people who controlled that property resolved to protect it.
3
A COPYRIGHT OF THE FUTURE, A LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE
In 1895, the people of Boston gathered to christen the nation’s nicest public library. Forty-one years earlier, in 1854, the city had opened America’s first urban lending library that was free to all and sustained by municipal taxation. Now it had redoubled its commitment to the notion that, as the library’s founding trustees put it, “the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order.”1
The new Boston Public Library, which cost the city $2,756,384,2 was a beaux arts palace designed by the architect Charles Follen McKim, with a large interior courtyard, a majestic barrel-vaulted main reading room, and the phrase FREE TO ALL engraved above its main entrance. In an article in the Forum, Herbert Putnam, Boston’s thirty-three-year-old head librarian, noted that the building represented “a sort of apotheosis of the confidence which the American people have come to feel in the public library as a branch of education.”3
Though the national supply of cheap British fiction had dwindled after the passage of the international copyright law, American enthusiasm for free or inexpensive culture remained high. The free public library helped meet this continued national interest in frugal autodidacticism. And much as the rise of barga
in literature had helped motivate American publishers to unify behind an international copyright bill, the rise of public libraries in America—and all that those libraries represented—would help catalyze the copyright revisions that were to come.
The number of free public libraries in America grew prodigiously in the 1890s and 1900s, precipitated by grants and donations from rich men, such as the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who hoped to whitewash their fortunes by erecting “a brown-stone buildin’ in ivry town in the country with me name over it,” as the columnist Finley Peter Dunne wrote in the voice of his Mr. Dooley character. Carnegie began to spend millions of dollars founding libraries for the benefit of the American underclass not a decade after sending armed Pinkerton strikebreakers to quell a labor dispute at one of his steel plants in Homestead, Pennsylvania. (After subduing the Homestead union in 1892, Carnegie subsequently blacklisted many of its members from steel-industry employment.) Six years later, when Carnegie dedicated the library he founded in Homestead, he spoke of his hope that it would serve to “establish a higher code of conduct, a stricter regard for the proprieties of life, and to produce the class of man incapable of anything disgraceful”—such as going on strike, presumably.4
The donors’ dappled motives notwithstanding, their charity had essentially benevolent results. In town after town across America, public libraries stood as monuments to the idea that the entire nation benefited when information was allowed to circulate freely. In 1895, Herbert Putnam wrote of the American public’s conviction that “literature being indispensable, books cannot be too greatly multiplied, or, so far as the readers are concerned, too freely accessible.”5 In an era of rapid mechanical change, the free library qualified as a technological innovation of its own; unrestricted access to books via libraries promised to improve Americans’ lives as surely as the automobile or the electric light.