Arts and Letters

Herbert Putnam of the American Academy of Arts and Letters was a man neither of letters nor of art. His life was devoted to the public service. His many publications were, for the most part, official statements or technical comments. His great achievement was an institution. Nevertheless there was nothing anomalous about his membership in this body even by the standards which determine its membership now. Few men in American history have done as much as Herbert Putnam for the literature of the Republic and indirectly for the Republic's arts.

Without a national library a great nation is a fiction of the politicians or an hypothesis of the economists. It has no mind of its own and no more than a borrowed culture. Herbert Putnam, by the single power of his personality, the persistence of his purpose, and the adroitness of his intelligence created the national library of the United States. It is not called by that name. The legislative body which appropriated funds for its establishment never authorized its existence. But it does exist. And Herbert Putnam created it. If it is possible, as it now is, to speak of a distinctively American culture, meaning a culture not of automobiles and television aerials but of mind and emotion, it is in part because Herbert Putnam lived.

How he accomplished the mysterious metamorphosis of a mediocre legislative library into a great national library in the era of McKinley and under the eyes of a Congress which intended no such thing, can be better understood today than during his life, for certain documents have been published by David C. Mearns, the Chief of the Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, which were not previously available. One, and perhaps the most important, is an aide-mémoire submitted to Theodore Roosevelt at the time, toward the end of the year 1901, when Mr. Roosevelt was preparing his first Annual Message. Putnam, presuming, but not too much, on the fact that the President had also gone to Harvard and might share an enthusiasm for books kindled somewhere in the Yard, suggested that Mr. Roosevelt might wish to mention, in the course of his remarks, an activity of the federal government which "affects, and… is likely increasingly to affect, interests throughout the country which are already large and in the aggregate represent an entire system of education." "The Library of Congress," he continued, "began as a merely legislative library. While at the Capitol it could be little more than that…. The new building [he refers of course to the granite behemoth which faces the Capitol across the little wooded lawn], the new provision of space, equipment, and expert service denotes a purpose to elevate the Library into one national in scope and service. The Library is already familiarly entitled the 'National Library of the United States.' If it is not such there is none other that is."

That passage is pure Putnam: the prim stiffness of the style, the precise choice of the words, the quiet boldness of the implications. If the Library of Congress was "familiarly entitled the 'National Library of the United States'" it was only in the Librarian's office that it was so called. And as for the denoted purpose, it was only in the denotation that such a purpose was to be observed, then or since. Even in my time as Librarian there were always members of the Appropriations Committee who protested vehemently that Congress had never authorized the establishment of a library which would spend four million dollars a year to buy and circulate books no Congressman would ever look at; and a few years ago, with the appropriation close to ten millions, my successor was challenged to produce one enactment of Congress which justified the kind of business in which he was so expensively engaged. Nevertheless Mr. Putnam's aide-mémoire accomplished its aim. It was sent to the White House and, in Mr. Mearns's words, "it should not imperil the national security, pain the fastidious… or create convulsive surprise" to announce that its terms were incorporated in the President's Message. The only modification was that where Mr. Putnam had been guarded Mr. Roosevelt was forthright. Where Mr. Putnam had said that if the Library of Congress was not the national library no other library was, Mr. Roosevelt came out with it: the Library of Congress, he declared, though still called by that name, "is the one national library of the United States" and will shortly become "not merely a center of research, but the chief factor in great cooperative efforts for the diffusion of knowledge and the advancement of learning."

The flesh—or rather the granite—had been made Word and, it was thereafter too late for any Congressman, even a whole McCarthy of Congressmen, to protest that the diffusion of knowledge and the advancement of learning were no part of the business of the federal government—and that, in any case, the federal government had never authorized either. One man's imagination had authorized them both. For more than fifty years that act of the imagination has proved more powerful than any voice or combination of voices on Capitol Hill.

The possessor of this remarkable creativeness was a paradoxically impressive man. He had neither height nor bulk nor voice. In stature he could scarcely have topped John Keats. Indeed he was so small that he found it convenient to prop his feet on a hassock when he sat at his desk. But no human being in the Library where he lived and worked for forty years ever called him by his first name, and there was not one of his subordinates whom those uncanny brown eyes and stiff moustaches could not—and did not at one time or another—intimidate. Nevertheless, and it is perhaps the greatest personal tribute which was ever paid him, there have been few institutions of any kind in which the human relationships were warmer than in the Library of Congress under Herbert Putnam. I can myself testify to that. Though much in the Library, after forty years of a benevolent despotism, required change, and though a general reorganization of the Library's administration was found to be necessary, there was one thing, the most essential thing, which required only to be preserved—the devotion of the Library's staff to the institution they worked in: a devotion rare even among free universities and almost unheard of in the rigidity and restraint of the federal service.

That this was Mr. Putnam's personal achievement there can be no question. He was the Library of Congress. When members of the Library staff thought of their institution they thought, in the early days, of that neat small figure in frock coat, wing collar and ascot tie: later of a little man in a brown reefer, which somehow contrived to smell of the coast of Maine where he spent his summers, and a green felt Harvard bag which contained, as likely as not, a brace of detective stories for his evening reading. To me, if I may intrude my own recollections, he called to mind not a place but a period—the Victorian period which my own Scots father had always represented in my memory. It was not only that he was born in 1861—which would scarcely have qualified him. It was rather the formality and reserve of his manner, the cut of his clothes and above all his habits of work. Although he had a secretary of sorts he wrote most of his letters himself, arriving at the Library hours before his colleagues, meticulously replying in his own hand and in the fewest words possible, to every communication which deserved attention, and sending the letters along, when his secretary arrived, to be pressed in an old-fashioned letter-book which contained the sole copies of the Librarian's correspondence. I still see those green ink copies and smell that acid odor when I think of my first days at the Library. And the image they evoke is an image from the world of Dickens.

Herbert Putnam left behind him one self-portrait with which I should like to close this tribute. It comes from Mr. Putnam's daughter, Mrs. Eliot O'Hara, and was written about the handsome and expressive bust which his daughter, Brenda Putnam, made of him when he retired as Librarian in 1939. The title is "Owed To A Bust." I should add, to elucidate in advance the word "brazen" which appears in its text, that the bust, familiar to some of you, is cast in bronze.

Can this be me?
Does it intend at least to pass for me?

If so,
The puzzle's solved at last, for now I know
To what deceptive semblance of myself is due
The homage of the casual, even you:

The intrepid brow, the clear unfaltering eyes,
That would look "Shamel" on any compromise;
The firm pronouncement of the mouth and chin
Brazen denials of the doubts within;
The glib assertions of the smooth-tongued cheek
Sustaining the false witness of the beak;
The resolution of the stiff, unyielding neck,"
That would not bend at any alien beck;
The general air of self-sufficiency,
From hesitations or dependence wholly free:
Briefly, an exposition in exact reverse
Of all the inner traits which are my curse!

Yet since
It is not what we are, but what we seem
That yields us profit in the world's esteem,
I'll not evince
Surprise when you declare the likeness fit
Or scoff the virtues that you find in it;
Though, were I asked of what authentic stuff
The portrait's made, I'd have to answer
"Bluff!"

Of which one can only observe that a bluff which neither Congress nor the passage of time can call—a bluff which enriches a nation—is worthy of an artist's bronze and of this Academy's respect and praise.