“The Library of Congress Goes to War”
At the end of January 1942, with the nation and the Library of Congress on full war footing, Archibald MacLeish dispatched the keeper of collections, Alvin Kremer, on another long road trip.
A month earlier, the library had begun transferring the first of its 5,000 boxes to the university repositories—staff members loading large moving vans and panel trucks, mostly at night and in the early-morning hours, braving freezing cold and winter storms to remove the library’s documents, books, maps, and artifacts to safety. MacLeish expected the entire process to take until May. It was becoming clear quickly, however, that the three locations Kremer had secured the previous spring would not contain sufficient space for the entire inventory of items scheduled for transfer. Plus, MacLeish and his staff members worried that the library’s collection was concentrated in too few locations and in the same state; one or more additional storage locations had to be found.
To this point, the relocation process had gone relatively smoothly, with one scare. After arriving at Washington and Lee University with the second and third truckload of the collection, an assistant librarian at the school casually mentioned to Library of Congress staffer Edward Waters that one of the local newspapers in Lexington, Virginia, wanted to do a story on the transfer. Sensing potential danger, Waters “deemed it advisable to talk with the young lady.”
The young lady in question was Guy Nelson Forrester, managing editor of the Rockbridge County News in Lexington, a respected journalist with a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City. As Waters later told MacLeish, “I found Miss Forrester to be a very intelligent person, naturally anxious to secure a good story, but sympathetic to our point of view.”
Forrester told Waters that the arrival of the library materials in Lexington “was perhaps the biggest event in the history of the town.” She also pointed out that as soon as the first truck had opened its doors, the stenciled legend on every box—PROPERTY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS—had “proclaimed the news to the town at large.” Finally, there was word-of-mouth and gossip that had—or would—potentially spread the news. “The two trucks I accompanied south were unloaded by about a dozen Negroes of the college janitorial staff in addition to several white men,” Waters stated. Forrester concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the “sisters, wives, and sweethearts of the Negroes were employed in many homes in Lexington and that they would promptly spread the news as rapidly, perhaps less accurately, than a newspaper account.”
Nonetheless, Forrester agreed to refrain from publishing until Waters could supply her with an official statement from the library.
Waters urged MacLeish to agree to Forrester’s request. “I believe that a sober unvarnished account of the Library’s evacuation efforts would be of value both to us and to the residents of Lexington,” he said. “It is no more than a Declaration of our awareness of responsibility and an expression of confidence in the chosen repository.” Waters acknowledged that it would be wise to be “entirely non-committal” about the types of materials arriving from Washington, “so that no one could essay a guess regarding the contents of every single box.” Such a compromise would demonstrate the library’s willingness to be informative “without being indiscreet.” A well-written story would make the residents of Lexington “properly aware of the treasures in their midst.”
MacLeish received Waters’s letter on January 8, and not only was he unconvinced by his arguments—he was stunned and furious that Waters had even considered sharing information with a journalist. MacLeish had stressed repeatedly to his staff the need for utmost secrecy; there could be no room for leaks where the nation’s irreplaceable documents were concerned. Contrary to Waters’s desire, the last thing MacLeish wanted was for residents of Lexington to be aware of the treasures in their midst; the entire Library of Congress relocation plan was predicated on secrecy. Townspeople and workers who saw the Library of Congress boxes being unloaded might very well wonder what their contents contained. Perhaps that could not be helped because of logistical limitations; but that was a far cry from revealing the secret relocation project to a journalist
The very next day, MacLeish phoned Forrester, declined her request, and asked her to keep secret the Library of Congress work in Lexington.
No story ever appeared.
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ALVIN KREMER AND HIS assistants set out on January 29 in search of one or more additional locations, their ten-day automobile odyssey this time taking them to thirty-four locations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio.
The search for storage locations had specific parameters. “Chief factors [we] considered were distance from areas of strategic significance, freedom from danger of damage by floods, freedom from likelihood of excessive atmospheric humidity, or pollution by noxious smokes or gases,” Kremer reported. The additional locations also had to have fireproof construction, proper ventilation, sufficient capacity, accessibility, and an absence of “plumbing pipes or fixtures from which steam or water might escape.” In his lengthy February 11 report to MacLeish, Kremer detailed his visits and reasons for his recommendations, though he acknowledged that the number of places visited and their scattered locations made it difficult to gather “more than fundamental and essential facts concerning storage conditions.”
Still, he was able to dismiss several potential facilities. Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, for example, offered a private and fireproof gymnasium building basement, but the room was adjacent to a swimming pool, “which could possibly be a source of humid atmosphere unless controlled by guard.” The Veterans Administration Hospital in Oteen, North Carolina, had “exposed pipes overhead,” a potential disaster for the documents if one burst. Clemson’s Agricultural College offered a possible location, but its basement was “unfloored” and a new concrete floor would cost $872, Kremer noted. The Library would have to consider the cost and the time to install flooring. The library at Bowling Green College in Kentucky was well-ventilated and dry, “but some signs of termites had recently been observed in the corners of one of the rooms.” College officials were planning to call in an exterminator, but time was of the essence for Kremer and MacLeish. Both men were mindful of an assessment from the Committee on Conservation of Cultural Resources that “those areas of the continental United States within roughly 100 miles of any coast or border [would be] exposed to attacks.” Indeed, the report continued, such attacks on large coastal cities and other prominent military objectives near the coast “are likely to occur.”
In the end, Kremer and MacLeish decided on one additional suitable location: Denison University in Granville, Ohio, about 400 miles from Washington.
Ultimately, more than 1,200 boxes—about 25 percent of the total number relocated—were moved to Denison. Included in these treasures were Samuel Morse’s first telegraph paper-tape recording of his historic “What hath God wrought?” message, transmitted on May 24, 1844; two Stradivarius violins that had been donated by private collector Gertrude Clarke Whittall in 1935; and perhaps most valuable of all, George Washington’s diaries and other papers, including the entries that recorded the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, “their Drums in front beating a slow march, Their colours furl’d and Cased,” as the defeated enemy troops marched through a gauntlet of American and French troops. In Washington’s eyes, “the sight was too pleasing to an American to admit description.”
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THE PRECAUTIONS TAKEN BY the Library of Congress and other repositories were based on credible intelligence and military events suggesting that an attack on the American mainland, and particularly on Washington, was not only a distinct possibility but a likely one. Unlike several of James Madison’s advisers in 1814, Roosevelt and his administration took them seriously in 1942.
Adolf Hitler had long expressed a desire for Germany to develop long-range bombers and rockets that could reach North America from Europe or from U-boats in the Atlantic. After Germany had conquered and occupied Denmark, Americans feared that the Danish territory of Greenland—located a few hundred miles from northern portions of Canada and perhaps 2,000 miles from New York City—might also be used as a staging and refueling area for German and Italian bombers. In April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it against a possible invasion by Germany.
For his part, President Roosevelt was well aware of the potential for an attack on the United States. At a February 1942 press conference, while the Library of Congress was searching for additional storage locations, Roosevelt told the nation that the enemy “can come in and shell New York tomorrow night, under certain conditions. They can probably … drop bombs on Detroit tomorrow night under certain conditions.” During the first six months of 1942, German U-boats crept perilously close to the East Coast of the United States, and, with impunity, sank more than 600 merchant ships, many as horrified coastal residents looked on. Roosevelt and his advisers worried about German saboteurs reaching North American shores after being dropped off by U-boats. (Indeed, this did happen in June. Their efforts were thwarted by law enforcement; they were captured and imprisoned, and several were executed.) The Japanese floated balloon bombs over the West Coast. Japanese ships shelled the coast near Santa Barbara in February and Fort Stevens, Oregon, in June; some damage occurred but there were no casualties. Japanese troops did take two islands in the Aleutians, the only actual occupation of American soil in World War II. Meanwhile, the Germans were working furiously to mount bombing raids against the U.S. East Coast, particularly against war factories and larger ports.
American fears of attack and saboteurs on U.S. soil reached their peak during the first few months of 1942. From strengthening the country’s intelligence-gathering operation, to air-raid drills at all hours, to rooftop patrols to watch for overhead bombers—American cities, including Washington, D.C., were on full war footing.
* * *
MACLEISH AND THE Library of Congress also swung into action.
In June 1940 MacLeish had wept when a colleague informed him that the Nazis had marched into Paris, goose-stepping their way down the Champs-Elysées, and it infuriated him that even now—even after, “in country after country, it was the intellectuals, the artists, the writers, the scholars who were searched out first” by the Nazis “or left to rot in concentration camps”—even now, some of his fellow writers and intellectuals still clung to the fiction that “the world of art and learning was a world apart from the revolution of our time.”
MacLeish ignored them. In addition to relocating America’s documents, the Library of Congress, under MacLeish’s leadership, played a critical role in the war efforts—from providing military planners with extensive world maps; to staffing FDR’s Office of Facts and Figures (OFF) and, later, the Office of War Information (OWI); to answering questions from reporters, diplomats, and members of the military; to leading the efforts of the CCCR, whose mission was to protect and preserve irreplaceable documents, paintings, photographs, and other “essentials of culture” in the United States.
“The Library of Congress goes to war,” was the theme of many press and academic accounts in late 1941 and throughout 1942.
Even as the critical documents were being trucked away from the library, MacLeish and his team created an air defense collection that included course outlines for air wardens as well as handbooks on firefighting, poison gas, first aid, and protection of buildings. Along with libraries across the United States, the Library of Congress also established war information and civil defense reference services to assist the military and civilians who had questions. “What is the formula for blackout paint for windows?” one curious patron asked the Cleveland Public Library. Many libraries also became air-raid shelters. Dozens of academic libraries followed suit, creating special collections of war information. For example, the University of North Carolina’s library became a busy conduit for civil defense information for the entire state, mailing out kits of civil defense materials on a daily basis in 1942.
All of these efforts were front-of-the-house activities in plain view of the general public each and every day. Behind the scenes, MacLeish and his staff assisted the country’s early intelligence networks by collaborating with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). With MacLeish’s blessings, more than fifty Library of Congress staff members became spies when they went to work for William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the first OSS director, a story largely untold as part of World War II history. These Library of Congress personnel, many of them scholars, served in OSS’s research and analysis section and analyzed intelligence reports from overseas to determine Axis strengths and vulnerabilities.
MacLeish also recruited several leading East Coast academics to serve in the OSS section and helped organize them into a unit that eventually gave OSS its renown as a “brain bureau.” Donovan recruited the president of Williams College, Dr. James Phinney Baxter, to head the bureau, and he quickly built a staff of historians, geographers, political scientists, and economists to analyze a steady stream of vital intelligence throughout the war. MacLeish would write in 1945 that the role the library played in the area of military intelligence was “a matter of public interest, but limited public knowledge.”
Thus, Archibald MacLeish not only led the effort to safeguard America’s important historical documents, but he converted the machinery of the Library of Congress to meet the information demands of the war effort in no less a fashion than American factories transformed themselves to meet the industrial and production demands of war. He believed libraries, academics, writers, and thinkers had a duty to resist fascism and to promote the virtues of American democracy.
It was for this reason, along with his disdain of Nazism, that MacLeish had been President Roosevelt’s selection for the librarian’s job in the first place.
* * *
BY EARLY MAY, ALL of the thousands of boxes that had been stacked in the Library of Congress basement had been moved. In the end, more than 1,000 boxes were shipped to the University of Virginia, more than 1,300 to Washington and Lee University, nearly 1,400 to the Virginia Military Institute, and nearly 1,200 to Denison. Subsequently, officials decided that unexpected dampness at VMI could damage the documents, so they relocated the boxes at VMI to Washington and Lee. Another 800 storage cases were moved to higher floor levels at Denison “because of the threat from possible humidity-laden atmosphere.”
In the three final locations—Denison, the University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University—four guards monitored the documents day and night, prepared daily reports, and took regular atmospheric readings of each storage area using instruments provided by the library. Alvin Kremer said the library received “unlimited cooperation” from authorities at the repositories, and from “many other officials at other institutions covered in surveys for national repositories.” Librarians at the repositories regularly reviewed reports prepared by the guards “and have frequently written to inform us of certain matters deserving our attention.”
Kremer also marveled that “during days of actual shipment of materials, officials at one repository used to remain up until early morning hours for no other reason than to offer hospitality to our weary convoyees; in most cases storage was not undertaken until daylight.”
Archibald MacLeish wrote that the relocation of documents was “the most extensive, laborious, and significant series of operations … perhaps in the Library’s history.” He reported that the collections had been examined “piece by piece,” and that “dummies were ready to be placed on the shelves in place of the items” removed. One historian would later call the effort “Herculean” and the relocation of documents “unprecedented in American library history.”
And, of course, MacLeish wrote that “suitable depositories had been located and secured” for the library’s documents. He added: “To these custodians—who cannot of course be named now—the Library is very deeply indebted for the facilities thus granted.”
By housing the priceless documents, these university libraries had donned the mantle as stewards of American democracy.