The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  As the nineteenth century yielded to the twentieth, books in America multiplied faster than a child prodigy at math camp. At the Library of Congress, which by law received two copies of every newly copyrighted work, books and other deposits arrived so fast that they were stacked on the floor in great hoarder’s piles. “By 1897,” wrote Library of Congress historian John Y. Cole, “the collections of the Library had overflowed into over a dozen different locations throughout the Capitol, including the attic and the cellar.”6

  It was an era of cultural abundance. The periodical press continued to trump literature in popularity and circulation. America boasted approximately 2,226 daily newspapers and magazines in 1899, up from 254 in 1850,7 and publishers profited from new printing improvements that raised production capacity while lowering production costs.8 The boundaries of the known cultural universe expanded to include new commercial and artistic technologies. Some, such as motion pictures and recorded sound, composed brand-new artistic media. Some were used to change extant art forms—not only did the electric light transform live performance, it also made it easier for homebodies to read themselves to sleep. Some, such as the telephone and the mimeograph, revolutionized the transmission and dissemination of information. All of these new technologies emerged in the decades preceding 1900, and with them emerged a new cultural economy.

  “Managing the production, marketing, and distribution of goods in this new national arena required a new cadre of administrators and professionals,” the cultural scholars Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway have observed. “In creating and training such a cadre, corporate capitalists created a virtually new social class, one that Marx had not anticipated.”9 These administrators’ livelihoods were supported by proprietary media, yet they were rarely creators themselves. Their rise to prominence was inevitable. As Christopher P. Wilson put it, this was an era when literature “could be conceived as a product of labor rather than romantic inspiration.”10 The product of labor is property. Information wants to be expensive.

  But the rise of the public library in America had institutionalized the notion that information wants to be free—and that there is national benefit in its liberation. Libraries “represent the accumulated experience of mankind brought to our service,” Putnam wrote in the North American Review in 1898. “They touch the community as a whole as perhaps does no other single organized agency for good.”11 While librarians imagined new ways for preserving and sharing this new cultural abundance, this emerging cadre of middlemen were determined to find new ways to make it pay.

  * * *

  ON December 5, 1905, as part of his lengthy annual message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt advocated a total revision of the nation’s “confused and inconsistent” copyright laws to better meet the “modern conditions” of the machine age. The man charged with shepherding this law was Herbert Putnam, the former head of the Boston Public Library, who had served as librarian of Congress since 1899. Putnam was a lawyer by training and a bibliophile by birthright. He was one of those Putnams, a scion of the New York publishing family that, for decades, had promoted literature as a sort of civic vitamin, and life as a civic duty. As a child, his elders described him as “plain but interesting,” and as a young man, he initially seemed disinclined to reach for anything more.12

  “I have not indulged an appetite for exploration,” he informed his far-flung former Harvard classmates in 1886, when he was twenty-four. “No books, pamphlets, articles, addresses, or other literary progeny rest upon my conscience.”13 Instead, he chose to spend his life managing other people’s output, intent on improving the world from behind the circulation desk. In Boston, wrote historian Jane Aikin, Putnam extended the library’s hours of operation and opened one of the nation’s first dedicated reading rooms for children. He appointed women to prominent administrative positions and implemented performance-review policies that “favored the enterprising and accomplished over the less educated and less energetic.”14 Putnam was small and gouty and meticulous; his brother John later observed that “the learned gentleman,” as he called him, “fully believes it is his duty to endeavor to improve on existing methods if these seem, in any particular, imperfect.”15 He was a natural choice to lead the nation’s largest library into the twentieth century.

  “A Conservative and Cautious Man,” read the Washington Evening Star’s appraisal of Putnam on the day of his arrival at the Library of Congress.16 “He loves hard work, he says, and has come to Washington with full appreciation of the fact that there is plenty of hard work before him.” In the capital, he sought to modernize the Library of Congress and expand its collections—literary and otherwise. “A book is not the only nor necessarily the most effective vehicle for conveying knowledge,” Putnam wrote in the North American Review a year before he came to Washington. “And photographs and process reproductions are now part of the equipment of a public library almost as conventional as books.”17 Photographs, lithographs, sound recordings, piano rolls, the telharmonic dynaphone of Dr. Cahill—all were elements of culture, and all fell within the ambit of the modern library. In 1904, the Library of Congress acquired its first phonograph recording, a cylinder featuring the voice of Kaiser Wilhelm II.18 Many more would follow.

  As new forms of content emerged, legal questions abounded: How far should copyright extend? Whose interests should the laws protect—consumers or producers? And what sort of producers? Should copyright be used to encourage new industries, or to protect old ones? To ask these questions is inevitably to find them tedious and complicated—which explains why copyright statutes only get revised once or twice a century.

  “If you can get the interests represented, the interests practically concerned, to agree upon a measure, then we will endeavor to deal with it,” the Senate Committee on Patents airily told Putnam, who supervised the office of the register of copyrights. “We do not want to have a series of hearings in which adverse interests shall appear and oppose and demand, and so on.”19

  Thus tasked with devising a new omnibus copyright bill that would be palatable to congressional and business interests alike, Putnam decided to bring the relevant parties together and convene a series of copyright conferences at the City Club in Manhattan—the old headquarters of the men who had fought for international copyright. But circumstances had changed since those debates, and copyright advocacy was no longer the sole purview of authors, editors, publishers, and other genteel literary entrepreneurs.

  When Putnam called roll at the beginning of these conferences, he was answered by men representing myriad creative professions: lithographers, photographers, theater managers, advertising men, telephone-directory publishers. Not all of these representatives were themselves active practitioners of the arts. The public ethicists and civic activists who had masterminded the international copyright campaign shared few personality traits with these newer arrivals, men such as the headstrong George W. Furniss of the Music Publishers’ Association, who, early on, admitted that “it was unusual for us to be in the presence of eminent people,” and soon demonstrated the truth of that assertion with his plainspoken contributions to the convocation.20

  Putnam, whose professional life had been dedicated to collecting and distributing books for the public benefit, made for an odd collaborator with men such as Furniss, who was most concerned with securing his constituents the copyrights to their tinny, middlebrow nonclassics, and putting sheet-music pirates in prison. “We have just now succeeded in locking up a man in your prison here,” Furniss announced at one point. “He will probably get a term of one year. When he gets out, we will probably get him in New Jersey and lock him up for ten years.”21

  The sessions were characterized by this sort of plain and aggressive talk. The moral overtones of the earlier copyright campaigns had been muted; at the beginning of the first conference session on May 31, 1905, Putnam noted, “In our proposals for copyright we had, I think, better leave the moral yearnings to a later generation or at least a later session
of Congress.”22 Instead, the attendees worked to entrench the idea of intellectual property as, indisputably, property. Plenty of disputes erupted along the way, including one long and odd digression about whether sculptors and painters seeking copyright protections should have to inscribe a copyright notice on “some visible portion” of their works (the answer, ultimately, was yes), but all participants were basically in accord on several essential points: copyright terms should be long and easily renewable; scofflaws should face civil or criminal penalties; the public benefit in copyright was identical to the author’s benefit; and those who felt differently were probably pirates.

  Once the conferences had concluded, Putnam and the staff of the Copyright Office devised some draft legislation and prepared it for Congress. In June and December of 1906, the joint House and Senate Committees on Patents held hearings on the bill, and its framers convinced various cultural celebrities to speak on its behalf. Samuel Clemens, better known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain, delivered a rambling, vaguely funny speech on the merits of extended copyright terms: “Make the limit the author’s life and fifty years after, and, as I say, fifty years from now they will see that that has not convulsed the world at all. It has not destroyed any San Francisco. No earthquakes concealed in it anywhere. It has changed nobody. It has merely fed some starving author’s children.”23

  The composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa claimed that the sale of recorded music—from which composers received no royalties—imperiled not just his own livelihood but the entire American musical tradition. Sousa cut perhaps the most memorable figure at the hearings, with his charming testimony and comical insistence that, in the absence of new copyright laws, human vocal cords would soon atrophy, then ultimately vanish, like early man’s vestigial tail.24 “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country,” Sousa warned. “When I was a boy—I was born in this town—in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. To-day you hear these infernal machines going night and day. [Laughter.] We will not have a vocal cord left. [Laughter.]”25

  But Sousa’s imaginative evolutionary theories failed to close off debate on the relative merits and demerits of the “infernal machines.” George W. Pound, who represented two musical-machine concerns, one in Cleveland, Ohio, and the other in Tonawanda, New York, claimed that “as a matter of fact every composer in the land and every music-publishing house in the land is glad to get the advertisement following from the mechanical reproduction of their music. It is regarded in the trade as the best assistant to the sales of their music of any form of advertising.”26

  Others noted that some of the same composers who testified that new copyright protections were needed in order to prevent unauthorized recordings of their works were simultaneously corresponding with phonograph companies, requesting that they produce recordings of their latest sheet-music publications.27 “Mr. Sousa himself does not scorn, as he pretended to the other day, these ‘infernal talking machines,’ ” charged S. T. Cameron of the American Graphophone Company:

  He to-day is under contract, and he plays into these “infernal machines” with his band, and he is contributing, as he told you a few days ago, to stifle these “beautiful young voices that now have disappeared throughout our city and our land.” [Laughter.] He does it for the almighty dollar. That is what he is after, and he frankly told you so.

  Mr. SOUSA. I am honest, anyway. [Laughter.]28

  Inventors and entrepreneurs from across America traveled to Washington to protest the bill, which they considered a conspiracy devised by moneyed interests to enrich themselves at the expense of emerging competition. This was a common theme in the era’s polity. The copyright deliberations came at the height of the trust-busting years, when President Roosevelt was swinging his big stick at industrialists’ knees, and the American public imagined tentacular corporate machinations behind every closed door. In this environment, a new copyright law was bound to be seen as a monopolist’s ploy. “I say that we can hope for neither glory nor popularity with this measure,” Putnam predicted in December 1906. “Out of favor with the proponents, denounced by the opponents, unpopular with the public, and probably more or less discredited by the committee—that was the prospect!”29

  Putnam was prescient. Independent operators railed against the “star-chamber proceedings” in which the bill was devised and saw malfeasance in the apparent exclusion of outsiders from the proceedings. The most-cited monopolistic copyright conspirator was the Æolian Company, a player-piano manufacturer based in New York, whose presumed intentions seemed as sinister as anything Standard Oil had ever devised. The Æolian Company had convinced various music publishers to assign it the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their music in piano-roll format if piano rolls were found to be copyrightable content. Those piano rolls would, of course, only be compatible with an Æolian pianola, and this exclusionism would drive all other manufacturers out of business and inhibit innovation in the player-piano industry.

  The litany of complaints against the professional practices of the Æolian Company and the presumed conspirings of the copyright advocates stretched on, ultimately becoming the early focus of the Senate copyright hearings. “If the inventors of this country knew what was in this bill, there would be enough here to fill up every room in this great building, but they do not know it,” exclaimed the inventor G. Howlett Davis.30 If the copyright bill went through unamended, “the Æolian Company and the concerns affiliated with it will have millions of dollars turned into their coffers. And the net result is that the public will pay,” insisted the attorney John J. O’Connell.31 The copyright advocates “profess great interest in the public and in the cause of musical education,” Pound said, “but it seems to me that the public is the one and the sole element which has been omitted in their consideration.”32

  Though Putnam expected neither glory nor popularity for his copyright labors, he certainly did not expect to have his sincerity called into question. “What was the consideration, the inducement to the Copyright Office to enter into this conspiracy?”33 the learned gentleman asked in frustration after a particularly pernicious attack on his probity. There was no conspiracy—or, at least, none of the tinfoil-hat variety. The law’s framers’ narrow conception of what constituted the public’s best interest was less a function of malice or sedition than of selection bias. The bill had been conceived and written by “the most representative organizations that we could think of or that were brought to our attention as having practical concern in the amelioration of the law, but especially, of course, those concerned in an affirmative way—that is to say, in the protection of the right,” Putnam acknowledged at the outset of the hearings.34 One man’s right is another’s wrong.

  The committee’s hopes of avoiding a long and disputatious copyright debate had been in vain. The bill, first brought to Congress in 1906, would not be signed into law until 1909. The new Copyright Act increased the standard copyright term for new works to twenty-eight years, with a twenty-eight-year renewal period, and expanded the universe of copyrightable content. Most notably, as a compromise between musicians and recorded-music concerns, the act created the “compulsory license,” by which record companies and mechanical-music manufacturers would pay musical composers a small royalty for each song of theirs that had been recorded and sold.

  The law remained more or less unchanged for nearly seventy years. “We want a copyright of the future,” Sousa said, one that did not differentiate between a written work and a musical recording in terms of the protections offered to its authors.35 He and his fellow musicians got one, eventually. But the vexing thing about the future is that it soon becomes the past.

  * * *

  HERBERT Putnam served as librarian of Congress for forty years, retiring in 1939 but remaining in Washington as librarian emeritus. In a 1903 commencement speech to the graduates of Columbian College in Washington
, DC, Putnam had proclaimed that “the world is a cheerful world today, and the most interesting world that ever was.”36 As the years passed, the world grew more interesting and less cheerful. During World War I, Putnam headed the American Library Association’s Library War Service, supplying soldiers with books on relevant subjects such as “French history, mechanics, topography and strategy in war, self propelled vehicles, hand grenades,” and seemingly random topics such as stage directing and American business law.37 “The Library has its part to play [in the war effort]—an indispensable one. Its efficiency must be maintained,” he told his staff.38

  For decades, Putnam presided over a regular “Round Table” luncheon society in the Library of Congress’s dining room, hosting guests from the worlds of business, politics, academia, and the arts. There he watched as silent films became talking pictures, produced by great film studios; as piano rolls and wax cylinder recordings gave way to vinyl records and radio broadcasts. Motorized public trolleys came to Washington, and Putnam became a dedicated customer. When he didn’t ride to work, he walked; on at least one occasion, he reportedly roller-skated from his house on O Street NW to his office at the library.39 He acquired for the Library the personal library of the stage magician Harry Houdini; he opened a center for Hispanic studies. In 1928, the New York Times called him “not only a ‘model librarian’ of a library which he has made a model. He is an outstanding citizen of the world.”40

  In 1939, on Putnam’s fortieth anniversary as librarian of Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote him a letter announcing his “unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.”41 Putnam retired six months later, two years before the United States would enter and be forever transformed by its participation in World War II. In 1954, he told the Washington Post and Times Herald that “I keep alive intellectually by contact with my friends at the club. Men of science are the nucleus. They are men whose language I don’t speak. But to listen is an education.”42