This month we celebrate the one year anniversary of the launch of Founders Online – a tool for seamless searching across the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. In the past year, the site has received over 400,000 visits.

An example of the power of the site shows in its great search results. When I searched for “Cotton,” “Beverly,” and “Washington,” the results returned the exact document I had in mind – a diary entry by George Washington written in 1789 remarking on his visit to the cotton manufactury in my home town of Beverly, Massachusetts.

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Miniature human face models made through 3D Printing (Rapid Prototyping) [Wikimedia Commons]

On May 15th, I attended an IMLS meeting at San Francisco Public Library on “Libraries as Learning Spaces,” one of three stakeholder meetings devised to focus on broad themes and gather community feedback (the other two themes are digitization and STEM). There were around 60 people attending the meeting (in addition to a livestream audience). I knew only a handful of people at the meeting (which I think is a good thing!). North Carolina State University, for example, represented the research library sector (with Susan Nutter presenting on the fantastically successful Hunt Library). There was no “center” for the meeting — there was broad representation from public and state libraries, academic libraries, library schools, and also a number of researchers and representatives from foundations, and several “miscellaneous” participants. A common theme from the podium was, “I’m so happy to be here, but I hardly know anyone.” The audience was quite engaged — so much so that although I put my hand up several times, the mic never made it’s way to me.

My intention is not to summarize the meeting (there is a Storify from Lisa Waite Bunker that does a nice job of that) but rather to call out a few things about the presentations and discussion that were noteworthy to me.

• I was expecting there to be at least some discussion about MOOCs – there was nothing. Someone uttered the word once. I don’t even think it was one of the panelists. [You might know that MOOCs, online learning, and the shifts that they may cause in libraries are of interest to me.]
• The meeting was mostly about public libraries, and mostly about youth and a lot about maker spaces. I don’t know a lot about maker or hands on innovation spaces in research or academic libraries. Am I missing something?
• There was a focus on skills for librarians, which of course we hear about all the time, but some of the presentations and discussion talked about  using maker and innovation spaces as a way to engage all or more staff in conversations around new skills, innovation, new services.
• There seems (to me) to be an unreasonable focus on creating learning spaces IN libraries (maker spaces, after school programs, writing programs) when libraries are embedded in communities where there are existing, active and credible examples of all of these already. Why recreate learning spaces in libraries? Why not get libraries and library resources embedded in those other spaces? I think this is particularly true for maker spaces, which require equipment, expertise and space that may not be found in the library. The panel that focused on partnerships never called out the library going outside as a feature of those partnerships (the panel focused more on what makes a good partnership — good content, but not what I would have hoped for).

The evening before the meeting, the Internet Archive hosted a reception for meeting participants. We were led on a tour by Brewster Kahle, who told us the big long story of the IA, starting with harvesting the web and ending with recording television news and investing in employee housing for foundation workers. Since I live locally, I’ve attended functions at the IA many, many times and I am always impressed by the ongoing activities and operations there.

My thanks to IMLS and the San Francisco Public Library for putting together an engaging and thought provoking day.

Who says civics is dead?  Click on the video and watch these 5^th graders in action!  And then read their petition.  Enough said!

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We are busy scanning images to add to the Historic Environment Image Resource, which will be coming online later this year.

Some of the lantern slide photographs are so good we want to share them straight away – like this one.

Its label reads “Spain: Alconétar. N. abutment”. We don’t know anything about the photographer or the women jumping on the ruined bridge. The clothing suggests a date in the 1920s…

Spot the donkey?

I am freshly returned to the Archives after a wonderful trip to Austin, TX to attend the annual conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). The conference was a fantastic gathering of people from all walks of life and I heard many inspiring presentations and talked excitedly about the research opportunities supported by the new collections at Amherst College.

Upon my return to the library this morning, I was greeted with two boxes full of books for our Native American collections donated by Peter Webb, Class of 1974. Before I get to some of the items Peter donated, I want to mention another gift from Bob Giddings, Class of 1965.

When Bob Giddings read the article about the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg collction in the Amherst Magazine, he thought this book might be a nice addition. While this item is not written by a Native author, it helps to fill out the historical context for early Native writing. One detail of this book that strikes me right away is that there was sufficient interest and demand to call for at least six editions by 1747. Samson Occom began his studies at Wheelock’s school in 1743, which makes this item especially relevant to our holdings.

Peter Webb’s interest in Native American literature grew out of coursework with Amherst Professor Barry O’Connell in the early 1970s. I have only had a quick look at the two boxes of books Peter dropped off, but these three caught my eye:

The more I work with these materials, the more I see the importance of anthologies in the field of Native American literature. This volume was published in 1974, and the introduction clearly states “This volume is intended as a first step toward establishing a body of standard works, a canon, of native American literature.” It is also noteworthy that the four texts range from the Iroquois in the Northeast, to the Southwestern Navajo, to the Aztecs and Mayans of Central and South America.

By this point, I know a book with a cover like this one — the phrase “We Indians” over a German author’s name — suggests something is up. The title page clarified the situation somewhat, though it raised several more questions and sent me searching for secondary literature about this title.

It turns out that “Big Chief White Horse Eagle” was an Osage who made some remarkable claims about himself, among them that he was 107 years old. This work is mentioned by Laura Browder in her book Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.  She writes:

“By the turn of the century, Native American autobiography held a special place in a culture that was concerned both with mourning a people who could never return and with using Indian narratives to maintain racial theories of the time. Indeed, We Indians: The Passing of a Great Race (1931), the prominent autobiography of White Horse Eagle, an Osage, was elicited by Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli, a German academic whose chief scholarly interest lay in demonstrating the inevitability of the rise of the German race in general and of Adolf Hitler in particular.” (123-124)

The third item that caught my eye is this collection of writings and photographs of one of the more famous Native impostors of the twentieth century: Grey Owl.

Grey Owl is a complicated figure — he was born in England in 1888 and given the name Archibald Stansfeld Belaney. After emigrating to Canada in 1906 he began working as a fur trapper, which is where he became deeply interested in the language and ways of the Ojibwe. To make a long and fascinating story short, he eventually became a popular lecturer who spoke passionately about nature conservation and Native rights and claimed to be of Apache descent. Although he was exposed as a fraud after his death in 1938, the editor of this volume (published that same year) does not mention Grey Owl’s true origin in his Introduction.

In spite of Grey Owl’s true biography, this volume is a fascinating example of both fraudulent claims to Native identity and the early twentieth-century conservation movement. The book is illustrated with dozens of photographs that show Grey Owl with his beloved beaver companions and the larger animals he sought to protect in the wilderness of Canada.

For those not yet aware of the Moose for Mascot Movement, I selected this image of “the most noble beast that treads the Northern forests” by way of introduction.

After escaping from China to the United States, a 20-year-old student leader of the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square gave a press conference.  On June 30, 1989, Shen Tong was hosted by the Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange in Newton, Massachusetts. He provided the first detailed, eye-witness account by a student leader of the Tiananmen Square massacre and of the events that led up to it.

Today we share our new Open Government Plan.

In the four years since we published our first plan, we have demonstrated our contribution to strengthening the principles of open government. We have implemented more than 90 actions to improve transparency, participation, and collaboration.

In our new plan we focus our efforts to engage the public in more than 160 external projects on more than 15 social media platforms, as well as through our public events, educational programs, Research Services, and Presidential Libraries.

At the same time we are working to improve internal communications and employee satisfaction, creating a cohort of managers and supervisors with a common ethos that supports the mission of the agency. And we have empowered Special Emphasis Program Managers across the agency to help create an environment that supports fair and open opportunities for all employees regardless of their differences.

Our Flagship Initiative, “Innovate to Make Access Happen,” describes our digitization, description, and online access efforts for the next two years. Check it out and track us as we develop a program to digitize our analog records, expand digitization partnerships, and update our digitization strategy.

In the next two years, I want the National Archives to become a leader in innovation and transform the way people think about archival collections! Join us in the journey.… [ Read all ]

Grover A. Whalen described himself as “Mr. New York” for his autobiography. Indeed, at various times he was the city’s official and unofficial greeter of royalty, celebrity and the political elite. He was a businessman and a public relations guru, and is perhaps best known as President of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair. He even had an unpopular stint as Police Commissioner during Prohibition. But without him, there would have been no WNYC Radio.

Oddly enough, Whalen made no mention of WNYC in his autobiography[1], but he sat down with a interviewers for the Columbia University Oral History program just before Thanksgiving in 1950. At that time, he somewhat modestly provided this account:

“In March, 1922, a proposal came before the Board of Estimate and Apportionment for the establishment of a Municipal Wireless Broadcasting Station. Upon my suggestion as Commissioner of Plant and Structures, the Borough President of Queens made the proposal, pointing out that recent scientific developments in this new medium made possible the dissemination of public information and transmission of non-commercial entertainment to the people of the City of New York upon an enlarged scale and therefore of a higher caliber than was possible heretofore.”[2]

Despite radio’s growing popularity and growth as an industry, Whalen said the Board was “rather skeptical” about funding such a project. They did, however, agree to appoint a committee to review the proposal, and by June he won the Board over. They approved $50,000 to build and equip “a complete radio-telephone broadcasting station.”[3] Finding the money was relatively easy compared to Whalen’s next step: actually getting on the air. Judging from newspaper accounts and public documents of the time, the effort turned into an extremely frustrating two-year struggle against the technical limitations of placing a transmitter at the Municipal Building but, more than anything else, it became a fight against the nation’s leading radio and telephone company’s efforts to thwart competition in the new media.

Getting the Runaround

With funding approved, Whalen issued a request for bids on a transmitter with the nation’s leading radio equipment manufacturers:  Western Electric, General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA and AT&T. Before proceeding, however, he needed to conduct suitability tests for housing a transmitter at the Municipal Building. Western Electric did a site survey and in December, 1922 concluded that the iron and steel in the building itself and interference from the Brooklyn Bridge next door made the proposed location a poor choice for reaching all New Yorkers with a radio signal. With the new year came a new site in Elmhurst, Queens and plans for developing it.[4]

But Whalen found Western Electric’s enthusiasm for the project “becoming lukewarm.”[5] He was told that the company could not furnish the necessary equipment unless it was leased by the City from the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T, the owners of New York radio station WEAF. In February, Whalen responded saying the City did not want to change its plans and must own the transmitter. Ignoring Whalen’s position, Western Electric submitted a proposal for the Elmhurst site with an assortment of leasing fees for land lines and equipment, a proposal which the commissioner deemed outrageous. He told the Board of Aldermen, “By the acceptance of this proposal the control of the municipal broadcasting station would have been placed in the hands of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”

By the summer of 1923, Whalen abandoned plans for Elmhurst in lieu of a site in Central Park he believed would relieve the City of Western Electric’s most onerous terms. The Department of Plant and Structures drew up plans for a Central Park transmitter site and sent them to Western Electric. Meanwhile, General Electric, Westinghouse and RCA claimed they were not licensed to sell broadcast equipment, forcing Whalen to move ahead with his plans for a radio station without public bidding. He was furious and convinced there was a conspiracy afoot with AT&T at its head. Whalen told the Board of Aldermen on December 11, 1923:

“After an investigation it was found that the Radio Corporation of America, the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., the General Electric Co., the Western Electric Co., and the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., through their ownership of radio patents, were in control of the radio industry and through mutual agreement were maintaining a monopoly of it…I feel that the City’s interest will best be protected against those who are seeking, if they have not already obtained, complete control of the air. I believe that the people of the city of New York, with its million radio fans, should be acquainted with the commercial aims and monopolistic tendencies of this company to coerce this city, which is endeavoring, by means of the establishment of this broadcasting station, to give maximum service and greater happiness to its citizens.”[6]

Busting The Radio Trust

By the end of February, plans for broadcasting from Central Park too had been cast aside and Whalen’s formal request for relief from public bidding went before the Board of Estimate. Here he underscored AT&T’s efforts “at complete control of the air,” by forcing New York City’s Health Commissioner to qualify his expert remarks over WEAF. AT&T Vice President W. E. Harkness responded, “We follow precisely the methods of the newspapers in selecting what we think worthwhile to broadcast.”[7]  By now critics of the industry were referring to ‘the radio trust,’ a conspiracy the manufacturers denied. For them it was an issue of protecting and controlling the use of their patented inventions. Harkness replied to Whalen and others, “Broadcasting is our business and we think we know something about it…it would be much cheaper to rent our station [WEAF] from time to time.”[8]  Yet, the Federal Trade Commission had recently issued a report confirming Whalen’s suspicions of monopoly practices in the manufacture, sale and distribution of radio equipment.[9] On March 5, 1924, in a letter to the Commission, he thanked the FTC for their work but said they had not gone far enough. He argued the monopoly “is even a more far-reaching and injurious monopoly than in the fields your commission so diligently investigated.”[10]

Release of the letter and the press it generated set the stage for the Board of Estimate vote freeing the Department of Plant and Structures from the bidding process in this instance. Whalen had driven home his point; how could the city possibly open up this project for bids in light of monopoly control? He told reporters:

“It means that we are throwing down the gauntlet to the radio monopoly, and that there will be a fight. It means that we will not have to take our religion or education or our politics from the radio trust. We will erect a broadcasting station as powerful as WEAF and the country at large will be able to listen to a station that is not operated for commercial gain.”[11]

Three days later, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (below left) was asked about the battle between the City of New York and AT&T. Hoover said that while he couldn’t comment on any specific case currently before the FTC, he condemned any private monopoly in broadcasting.

“I can state emphatically that it would be most unfortunate for the people of this country, to whom broadcasting has become an important incident of life, if its control should come into the hands of any single corporation, individual or combination. It would be in principle the same as though the entire press of the country was so controlled…I believe it is safe to say irrespective of claims under patent rights on apparatus that broadcasting will not cease and neither will our public policy allow it to become monopolized.”[12]

Next came the first of four days of hearings on Capitol Hill concerning sorely needed legislation to overhaul federal communications law left untouched since 1912. Unable to appear himself, Whalen sent Raymond Asserson, New York City’s Broadcasting Supervisor, to make his case. But even before the hearings began, Whalen believed he had succeeded in busting the trust. Asserson testified that just ten days earlier “purely by accident” they heard that Westinghouse had a transmitter to sell with no strings attached.[13] Whalen promptly wrote asking for a quote and on March 15th announced a deal had been made. In his statement to the press the commissioner said, “This action on the part of the Westinghouse Company of scrapping the terms of existing agreements will result in a ‘sink or swim’ policy and this company apparently has the jump.”[14] Industry officials argued otherwise given the unusual provenance of the equipment.

Whalen Declares Victory

The transmitter had been used previously by the 1922 Brazilian Centennial Exposition in Rio de Janeiro (below right) and was described as an exact duplicate of the one at KDKA, Westinghouse’s pioneering station in Pittsburgh. At 1,000 watts of power, and heard as far away as Hawaii, this second-hand unit would overcome the limitations of the Municipal Building and being next to the Brooklyn Bridge. Additionally, under the restrictive contract with Western Electric, the city had been limited to 500 watts.[15]

Whalen was now on the crest of a wave and riding high. He had beaten the giant AT&T and was promising the municipal station would be on the air in time to cover the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York City, a promise he was unable to keep.  Elated by his victory, he predicted the yet-to-be-named WNYC “will be one of the best stations in the East.” Whalen was also quite taken with Westinghouse chief Guy E. Tripp’s notion of a ‘super station,’ hoping WNYC would figure into those plans and exclaiming, “if carried out, [it] would result in the real development of radio beyond expectations.”[16] 

An experimental license was granted to the City of New York with the call letters, 2XHB and a few months later, WNYC went on the air on July 8, 1924. Here is Whalen in his tuxedo making calls prior to the station’s opening night ceremonies with an unnamed engineer (seated) and Public Service Director, Bert L. Davies. They are in the transmitter room on the 25th floor of New York City’s Municipal Building. (This photo, taken by Eugene de Salignac, and the one above* are courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives)

Soon after the opening, Whalen resigned from his post as Commissioner of Plant and Structures, thus ending his directorship of WNYC.

Still, whatever people may say about Grover A. Whalen, they all agree he was one snappy dresser.

                 Grover A. Whalen as New York City’s official greeter in the 1920s (WNYC Archive Collections)

____________________________________________________

[1] Whalen, Grover A., Mr. New York: The Autobiography of Grover A. Whalen, G.P.  Putnam’s Sons, NY, 1955.

[2] “Reminiscences of Grover A. Whalen,” November 22, 1950 on page 1 in the Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection (hereafter CUCOHC).

[3] Ibid., pg. 2,3.

[4] Writing in the February 17, 1923 edition of Radio World magazine, Whalen enthusiastically describes in detail the facility planned for Elmhurst and why the Municipal Building is an unsuitable location for a transmitter. 

[5] Whalen, Grover A., “Statement before The New York City Board of Aldermen,” December 11, 1923.

[6] Ibid.

[7] “WEAF Rules the Air is Whalen’s Charge,” The New York Times, March 1, 1924, pg. 9.

[8] “City in Radio Fight; $50,000 For A Plant”  The New York Times, March 8, 1924. pg. 4.

[9] “Report of The Federal Trade Commission on The Radio Industry,” December 1, 1923, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1924.

[10] Whalen, Grover A., letter to the Federal Trade Commission, March 5, 1924.

[11] “City in Radio Fight; $50,000 For A Plant,” Ibid.  

[12] “Hoover Condemns Private Monopoly of Broadcasting,” The New York Times, March 11, 1924, pg. 1.

[13] “Testimony of Raymond Asserson before House of Representatives Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries on H.R. 7357, March 11-14, 1924, U.S. Congress, House, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1924, pg. 95.

[14] “1,000-Watt Radio Obtained By City,” The New York Times, March 16, 1924, pg. 1.

[15] “City’s Radio Station Ready in Convention Week, Says Whalen,” The Brooklyn Standard Union, March 16, 1924, pg. 20.

[16] Ibid. Whalen again endorsed Tripp’s notion of ‘superstations’ just two weeks after WNYC went on the air. Writing in The Nation Magazine (July 23, 1924) the outgoing commissioner once more railed against corporate control of the airwaves and for government regulation. “Government regulation should be had by establishing in each area comparatively strong stations, such as the municipal broadcasting station which has just been put in operation in New York City, and by cutting out poorer and weaker stations which broadcast inferior programs,” wrote Whalen.  He  no doubt came to regret this less than democractic stance later when WNYC was forced to share its desirable frequency with WMCA and then subsequently lost this favored position on the dial. See:The 1931 Files.

*The above photograph of the Westinghouse 1,000 watt transmitter on location in Brazil prior to purchase by the City Of New York in 1924 courtesy of the New York City Department of Records, Municipal Archives Collection.

The recording of Grover A. Whalen at the opening of this piece is an excerpt from his remarks at the dedication of Idlewild Airport during New York City’s Golden Jubilee on July 31, 1948. You can listen to the full unedited ceremony from the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC collection at: WHALEN.

Lauren Love is an intern working in Special Collections.

While reformatting the finding aid for the collection of St. Andrews Covenant Presbyterian Church (also known as MS 180) an excellent piece of Wilmington art history was spotted. The small booklet from 1943 was created for “An Artistic Banquet” held at the Church of the Covenant just before it was merged with St. Andrews in 1944.

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