American Hero

John Jay

In 1934 the NY Society Library found a discarded box in the basement of their building at 109 University Place.  Inside was a long lost, deteriorating treasure:  the library ledger from the 1700s.

As I read through the list of borrowed books, I noticed that John Jay was a particularly avid borrower and, as William J. Dean points out in his article, he was checked out books in many different subjects, with the exception of law.  He checked out books by Johnathan Swift, a history of the Five Nations in Canada, Captain Cook’s story about his voyage to the South Pole, a book on Natural History and a book entitled Arabian Nights Entertainment.  You can tell a lot about a person by reading their library history, which is why I keep mine private.

I vaguely remembered the name John Jay from 12th grade American History class.  When I went back for a refresher course I was reminded that not only was he a founding father, but he was also the first Justice of the Supreme Court.  In fact I learned that he was a classic colonial overachiever; his roles included President of the Continental Congress, Ambassador to France and Spain, negotiator of  the Jay Treaty,  co-writer of the Federalists Papers and  Governor of New York.  But none of those roles provided him with his enduring passion:  abolishing slavery.

In 1785 owning slaves in New York was as common as having a profile on Facebook.  Jay himself bought and owned slaves whom he freed when they became a “proper age”.  According to an article by Jake Sudderth and included in the papers of John Jay at Columbia University, John Jay’s father, Peter, was one of the largest slave owners in New York. It would have been easy and acceptable for John to continue in his father’s footsteps and make things easy for himself while he was at it.

Instead he decided to fight for what he had come to believe was right.  He got together some powerful friends and established the Manumission Society in 1785 to abolish slavery in New York.  The Society set up boycotts, entered lawsuits on behalf of slaves and set up “African Free Schools”.  In a 1785 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush Jay wrote,

“I consider education to be the soul of the republic. I wish to see all unjust and all unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished, and that the time may soon come when all our inhabitants of every colour and denomination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberty”

Not to be picky but how about gender?  While I’m glad that Jay can’t see the racial inequalities of education today, 225 years later, it would be something to see the look on his face when he discovered who the president was.

John Jay did not rest until he was Governor of New York and finally passed a law gradually abolishing slavery in 1799.  Finally he had won his fifteen year fight.  Jay passed his passion to his  son, William, who was one of the most prominent abolitionists of his time (and a N.Y. Judge) and his grandson,  John Jay II,  also a part of the Anti-Slavery movement (and a founder of the Republican Party in NY).  

John Jay should be remembered in American History classes, not because he was the first Supreme Court Justice or President of the Continental Congress or even as the Governor of NY.  He should be remembered as an American Hero that stood up for his beliefs.   He should be remembered as a hero because he showed Americans that values are worth standing up for, even when they make people around you uncomfortable.  John Jay didn’t necessarily put his life at risk, like Harriet Tubman, but he did jeopardize his reputation and his ability to gain political power.  It would have been a whole lot easier to keep his mouth shut and go with the flow.

I’m so glad he didn’t.

If Walls Could Talk

NYSL in 1840, photo from NYSL website

If the New York Society Library walls could talk we’d be in for some juicy stories (see Reform and Fever posts).  Thanks to Henry Cooper and Jenny Lawerence’s book,  The New York Society Library:  250 Years, I can share a few with you.  By 1840 New York City’s population and economy had exploded.  The city had outgrown it’s modest borders and spread it’s tentacles across the island of Manhattan.  Most library patrons, prominent business men, had followed the flow and moved uptown.  The Society Library on Nassau Street needed a makeover and a facelift.  

It arrived in two forms.  First, the  New York Athenaeum (a competing private library)  entered into a real estate/merger deal with the Society Library and soon discovered it was unable to make ends meet.  The Athenaeum was forced to dissolve and its members, collections and space were absorbed by the Society.  Secondly, the library moved to a new location, far more convenient for it’s patrons and the new members from the Athenaeum, I guess what they say about location is true.

Leonard Street and Broadway was the address of the new library, and it certainly attracted some attention from the writers, readers and thinkers of the time.  In 1840 The New Yorker described the newly constructed library this way:

"The New York Society Library has lately been re-opened in its new and beautiful edifice...a new ornament of our principal avenue.  A spacious hall occupies the middle of the building. The visitor enters this and ascends a broad flight of stairs, which leads to the reading room in the rear. This is a lofty and well proportioned apartment, with windows at each end, and in it are four commodious tables covered with rich food for the literary appetite.  This room, brilliantly lighted at night, with its soft carpets deadening the sound of footsteps, its cushioned arm chairs, and its rich supplies of periodicals, renewed by every steamship, forms the perfection of literary luxury.”

The interior may have been luxurious, but the real treat came from who you might bump into:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a series of six talks in 1842.  He later wrote in his diary that the audience was somewhat puzzled by his ideas and that he made about $200.
• Walt Whitman attended Emerson’s talks and the two men met. When Whitman published  Leaves of Grass, several years later, Emerson declared him “the great American poet.”
• Henry David Thoreau wrote that the librarian permitted him  to “take out some untake-out-able books, which I was threatening to read on the spot.”
• Edgar Allen Poe followed a few years later with a series of lectures on poetry in America.  The New York Herald reported that his opinions were, “venal, ignorant, and entirely unfit to form a judgment on the most humblest [sic] productions of the writers of this country—of course, his own included."
• Tourists were also spotted in among the shelves and included “Prince Bonaparte (the young Napoleon III, in temporary exile in America), Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Fenimore Cooper (who afterward became a member), Francis Parkman, W. Ellery Channing, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John James Audobon.”
• Herman Melville used the library to write and research Moby Dick.  Records show that he checked out Bougainville's Voyage Around the World in January 1848, Scoresby's Arctic Regions and North Whale Fishery in April 1850.  Moby Dick was published in 1851.

Just imagine being a mosquito on those walls...watching Dickens browse the shelves, Thoreau beg the librarian for a book, Emerson expounding or Melville scratching out his story about a whale.

Forget the books,  just let me rub some elbows.

Library Fever

Creepy

“Resilient” should be carved in stone above the door of the New York Society Library.  Its first 40 years saw more action than most cities see in a lifetime.  But there is a limit to how much a library can take.  The Society Library’s limit came in 1803 when librarian Jonathon Forbes closed the doors to all subscribers for three months.  

Closing the library seems like a radical move and three months is a lifetime when you’re waiting to get your hands on the latest bestseller.  What could have caused Forbes to take such radical action, to deny his patrons access to intellectual stimulation and fellowship ?  The words would strike fear in the hearts of all who heard them in the 1800s, especially those in the close living quarters of big cities...  

Yellow Fever.

Yellow Fever was a horrific virus that spread through cities in North America in waves.  Thousands of citizens in Philadelphia suffered and died after a major epidemic in 1793.  George Washington and his colleagues, who had recently moved the Federal Government to Philly, were so alarmed by the outbreak that they fled the city and headed for their estates (imagine the media coverage that brave move would have garnered today).  

When New York heard the reports of thousands of citizens dying from a plague that turned its victims a shade of yellow (caused by jaundice) and weakened them with bouts of vomiting black bile until they expired, they rushed to shut  ports and set up quarantines.  Sadly, viruses have a way of getting around quarantines, and the summers of 1795, 1799 and 1803 hit New Yorkers hard.  The 1803 epidemic was so severe that it led to the establishment of the first NY Board of Health.  But preventing large scale epidemics was a new challenge for America, it’s hard to protect your citizens when you don’t know the enemy.  The Board of Health did their best to react to each outbreak but little to prevent new epidemics or to discover the causes of the horrendous illness.  John Pintard, a trustee of the Society Library, became the first City Health Inspector, which may have led to Forbes decision to temporarily close the library.

Little did anyone know that Yellow Fever was (and still is) a virus spread by mosquitoes.  It can not be passed from one human to another.  Avoiding mosquitoes is the most effective way to prevent the virus.  It wasn’t until the late 1800s that doctors and scientists finally figured out the culprit and it took until 1900 for Walter Reed and the Reed Commission to prove that the vector was the ubiquitous mosquito.  Meanwhile, New York City continued to suffer.

More than 100,000 people died from Yellow Fever outbreaks in North America, which seems like a huge number until you learn that 200,000 people in Africa and Latin America continue to contract Yellow Fever today, leading to 30,000 deaths each year.  According to the World Health Organization, Yellow Fever infections have increased over the past 20 years due to declining immunity in the population which is more transient than ever.  This shocking trend is more disturbing because of the availability of a low cost vaccine.  

The WHO operates the Yellow Fever Initiative in Africa, where the most outbreaks have been reported.  Their recommendations include infant vaccinations and mass vaccination in response to reported cases.  

So, as it turns out, Jonathan Fobes didn’t need to close the library...all he had to do was close the window.  But in Africa they aren’t that lucky.

How's That For Reform?

Photo from Bonnevillemariner.com

John Scott and his Yale buddies were worried about their community.  Even though their town was growing and business was booming, they noticed a lack of intellectually curiosity, people they met didn’t seem to be particularly interested in serious conversation anymore and everyone was paying too much attention to having fun and feeling good.

Sound familiar?

The dumbing down of America is certainly a familiar lament of our modern times.  But  John and his friends are not modern guys.  They lived 250 years ago, in New York City, before America existed.  I read their intriguing story in the book  The New York Society Library:  250 Years by Henry Cooper and Jenny Lawerence.  

To keep their minds from turning to the sensuous pleasures around them,  William Livingston, John Scott and William Smith decided to meet each week to discuss serious ideas and publish their opinions in a journal called “The Independent Reflector”.  And so the Society for Improving in Useful Knowledge was born (colonial bloggers).  By 1754 the small group had grown and the men decided to start a subscription for a “useful, ornamental publick” library that “anyone” (relatively speaking) could join.  The Society’s collection, nicknamed,’ The City Library’, was created in City Hall on Wall Street.  Membership was a whopping ten shilling a year.  In 1772 they received a charter from King George.   

It’s hard for me to imagine New York, a city more American than peanut butter, as a British Colony.
But it’s even harder to imagine what happened to New York City in 1776. George Washington lost the Battle of Long Island and British troops flooded the city.  It was soon the Tory capital of America and remained so for the duration of the war.   Fires raveged the city and soldiers looted the library, using book pages for rifle wadding and as trade for grog.

After seven long years the war ended and amazingly the library emerged in tact.  Hidden books were slowly returned to their shelves from hiding places and private homes around the city.  The City Library was then granted a monumental reward for it’s years of service and suffering; it became the original Library of Congress.  

In 1785 New York City was America’s first Federal Capital.  City Hall became Federal Hall and Congress, including President Washington and VP John Adams moved in and got to work.  The new members of the government frequented the upstairs library, which now included 3,100 books and 239 members.  You may be familiar with some of its regular customers:  Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr,  Chief Justice John Jay and Rufus King.  Always fastidious, the library still has records of what the men checked out (Burr borrowed a volume of Swift).

Alas,  fame and fortune are fleeting and the City Library was left behind on the noisy streets of NYC when the Federal Government moved to Philadelphia in 1790.  The City Government moved back to City Hall and the Library was born again as the New York Society Library.  By 1793 the library had 892 members and 5,000 volumes and it was finally time to build a place of their own.  The library trustees, all city big wigs, leased land on Nassau Street, five blocks from City Hall,  and started building what would be the library’s home for the next 40 years.

So the next time someone complains that the library is slow to adapt, tell them about the New York Society Library that started as a British men’s club for serious thinkers, received a charter from King George, hunkered down to survive the Revolutionary War and the occupation of  NYC, served its new country as the Library of Congress and then began an illustrious career, now in its 3rd century.  

I’d call that pretty flexible.