ARCHIBALD MACLEISH: Man of many occupations

Archibald MacLeish was a man of many occupations. He was a: teacher, lawyer, poet, journalist, playwright, “librarian”, and he held other high-ranking positions in government. His interests were wide-ranging. However, the two things that drove him in life were: 1) to be able to write the greatest poem, and, 2) to help a great cause. Here was a man who was a great thinker and was not afraid to speak his mind.

Archibald MacLeish was born on May 7, 1892 in Glencoe, Illinois. He was the third of five children born of the union of Andrew MacLeish and Martha Hillard MacLeish. (Andrew had been twice widowed and had three other children from his two previous marriages.)

Andrew was a successful dry-goods merchant from Scotland. He was over fifty years of age by the time “Archie” (as Archibald was called) was born. Thus, he paid Archie very little attention as he was growing up. It is said that this was the reason Archie felt he had to be, and was, successful at everything he did.

Martha “Patty” Hillard MacLeish was one of the most influential persons in her son’s life. She was the head of a small college prior to her marriage to Andrew. Thus, with her training, she taught her children by herself and read the great masterpieces of the written language to them daily.[1] While her teaching methods and philosophies worked well with her other children, she found Archie to be rebellious and challenging.

During his high school years, Patty decided to send him to Hotchkiss, a private boarding school. Although he hated the school at first, it was here that Archie developed and excelled in athletics and academics, especially in English. He participated in school government and other activities. He spent four years there before going on to Yale University.

At Yale, he majored in English and chaired the Yale Literary Monthly. Here, too, Archie did well in athletics and academics. He graduated in 1915 but decided that writing poetry alone would not feed him. So he decided to go into law. He was accepted into Harvard Law School.

Only after he completed his first year at law school would his father give him permission to marry Ada Taylor Hitchcock. They were married on June 21, 1916 and later had four children.

World War I interrupted his education. In 1917, he enlisted and was sent to France for military service. This war really affected him after his favorite brother, Kenny, was killed in Belgium. He became disillusioned but that did not deter him from his fight against fascism. This fight for democracy was one he carried throughout his life.

After being discharged from the service, he returned to Harvard Law School. He was elected to the Harvard Law Review and he graduated at the top of his class in 1919. Shortly after his graduation, he taught at Harvard in the Government Department.

He later went to work as an attorney for a prestigious law firm. He stayed there for three years but felt as though something was lacking. In 1923, he quit the firm and took off to Paris with his family so that he could pursue his poetry and his wife could pursue her singing. During those years, they met many famous and great people.

In 1928, when they returned to the United States, Henry Luce offered Archie a position at Fortune magazine. MacLeish wrote articles on current events that were happening in America and abroad. During this time, he also won his first Pulitzer Prize for his work, Conquistador in 1933. (He won two other Pulitzers for his works, Collected Poems 1917-52 and the play J.B., in 1953 and 1959, respectively.)

Archie left the Fortune in 1938 after he was offered a position as the curator of the newly created Nieman journalism program at Harvard. Here he met Felix Frankfurter who was his connection to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Then, in 1939, President Roosevelt offered him a nomination as the ninth Librarian of Congress. Roosevelt did so after asking the opinion of Felix Frankfurter. This met with much opposition from the American Library Association (ALA). However, his nomination was approved and he contributed much to the Library of Congress. (This will be discussed in detail in the next section.) Thus began Archie’s public and political career. While he was Librarian of Congress, he also served as the director of the Office of Facts and Figures, which was a propaganda agency, and also as assistant director of the Office of War Information.

In 1944, he resigned from his post, only to later become Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural and Public Affairs. Then, in 1945, he became the chairman of the U.S. delegation to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

All the while, Archie used his writing as a means of communicating his ideals and this earned him criticism and created foes along the way. Some people labeled him a “communist.” Still, he held onto his beliefs, trying to make the world a better place.

His final formal job was in 1949 at Harvard University where he became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. He taught creative writing and poetry until he retired in 1962.

Even after his retirement, he continued writing and people sought him for public speaking engagements. His eventful life ended April 20, 1982, two weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday.

MacLeish’s Contribution To The Field Of Library and Information Science

When Archie MacLeish became the ninth Librarian of Congress, many people had their misgivings because he was not trained to be a librarian. MacLeish himself admitted he could understand their uneasiness because he had no library background. The ALA was decidedly against his nomination. They wanted Carl Milam, ALA’s executive director, to be the next Librarian. Nevertheless, the Senate approved his nomination.

MacLeish had arrived on the job at a time when there was great uncertainty. With the war looming ahead, he felt that changes needed to be made. While MacLeish was Librarian, he made many sweeping changes at the Library of Congress. In the preface of Champion of a Cause, he says, “For what had to be done in the Library, as I had discovered in those few months, was to reorganize it from technical services to pay scales, and from general administration to the binding and care of books.” He went on to say, “My predecessor, Herbert Putnam, had been a great librarian, but he had run the Library like a feudal fief, and feudal fiefs had a way of hardening and solidifying in the mold.”

His reorganization of LC made it a more modern and functional institution. He redid the administrative structure, formed committees to develop and evaluate policies, and revamped personnel policies. He is also credited with improving employee relations and morale.

In 1941, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Archie was responsible for transferring the nation’s treasured documents (the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta, and other prized works) to the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox in Kentucky for safekeeping. He was a member of the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources (CCRP). There were concerns that in the event of an air raid on Washington, D.C., these important pieces could be destroyed.

He was a staunch advocate of the idea of the library educating people to value what democracy brought to their lives. He said that this was the only way to fight the condition of fascism. He called upon the librarians to feel a sense of pride, but to also have a sense of responsibility in their roles to actively promote democracy. He even took on the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover and was successful at blocking the FBI from using the library to conduct its spy missions. (This did, however, get him on the FBI’s list of people to watch for suspicious activities.)

Most importantly, being someone with a high profile and having many connections, Archie brought attention to the field of librarianship. From his controversial nomination until his resignation in 1944, he raised the status and awareness of librarianship. He used his connections to expand the library’s services and activities and used his position to speak up for democracy. The period of time in history in which he served made MacLeish arguably the most visible librarian in LC’s history.

Bibliographic Note

Of the resources used to do this paper, I found Champion of a Cause to be most relevant and useful when it came to learning about MacLeish’s contributions to the field of library and information studies. Reading this gives one insight as to what MacLeish’s thoughts were as he made certain decisions. Also, the article on his relationship with Carl Milam was useful in seeing what was going on in the background of librarianship during World War II. On the other hand, Uphill with Archie is a memoir written by his son and gives the reader a picture of a son’s memory of his father and presents the human side of Archibald MacLeish. While the other books provided facts, this book gave an added inside look at what Archie MacLeish was like.

This assignment was rather difficult to do because there were so many potential resources and it was difficult to be selective. This paper was interesting to do, however, and I would like to learn more about Archibald MacLeish. He truly was a great thinker of his time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Donaldson, Scott and R.H. Winnick. Archibald MacLeish: An American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

MacLeish, Archibald. Champion of a Cause: Essays and Addresses on Librarianship. Chicago: American Library Association, 1971.

MacLeish, Archibald. “Libraries in the Contemporary Crisis.” Library Journal 116, Issue 11 (15 June 1991): S10-12.

MacLeish, William H. Uphill with Archie: A Son’s Journey. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Stielow, Frederick J. “The FBI and Library Spying: A World War II Precedent.” American Libraries, September 1993, 709-11.

____________. “Librarian Warriors and Rapprochement: Carl Milam, Archibald MacLeish, and World War II.” Library and Culture 25, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 513-33.

[1] She also taught them by example, by serving in different capacities for various organizations. It is this example that shaped Archie’s beliefs of fulfilling one’s public obligations/responsibilities to society.