by Kate Stewart
Apparently, during her break after Vietnam, Ruth came to stay with Pat and Bob, or at least used their address for a few months. She started applying for cataloging jobs at the Library of Congress, hoping to utilize her expertise in sociology or German, and probably socialized with her friends and made new connections at the library. She eventually got a job at the end of August 1971 as a sociology cataloger under the supervision of Nick Hedlesky, the head of the Social Sciences Subject Cataloging Division.1 Although the job itself wasn’t prestigious, any librarian would consider it an honor and a privilege to work there. After traveling the world for thirty-three years and never staying in one place for more than a few, she was finally ready to put down roots. This palace of books and the cosmopolitan neighborhood that sprawled behind it would be the home and community—her “true chaverim”—that she had been seeking for so long.
The Library of Congress was founded in 1800 as a small library for congressmen in the Capitol. By 1975 it had grown to be the second largest library in the world, with seventeen million books, a staff of forty-five hundred, and a $116 million budget.2 In the late nineteenth century, with title, author, and subject access, it had set the American standard for the card catalog system; in 1901 it began distributing copies of cards to other libraries, saving them time and money.3 The post–World War II period of the Library of Congress was marked by an enormous increase in the acquisitions of collections and the development and expansions of its complicated cataloging system.4 The library published the Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the United States, a landmark guide for librarians. Cataloging in the United States had developed into three distinct branches: description (transcribing information from the front matter of a book into a catalog record), subject access (assigning linked subject headings to classify the book), and filing (assigning a call number to the book that facilitates discoverability both on the shelf and in physical relation to books on similar topics). Librarians across the country, and later the world, would look to LC to standardize its increasingly complicated rules into a universal and uniform cataloging system that would be adhered to in every library.
During World War II and its immediate aftermath, LC staff realized how crucial it was to increase the amount of international publications held by the library. Gathering recent publications from every country around the world, especially maps and newspapers, was vital so that librarians could fulfill reference requests for Congress, which was increasingly concerned with the Cold War. Besides hiring catalogers to handle the enormous volume of new acquisitions for English-language books, the library employed more catalogers and reference librarians with foreign-language expertise. Like Ruth, many of these catalogers were immigrants, and like her, some of them were refugees from countries undergoing great upheaval. Ruth’s friend and coworker, Kay Elsasser, was a Romance-language cataloger for many years. She remembers this group (American-born catalogers too) as “odd ducks” that probably wouldn’t have thrived in any other working environment. But LC welcomed foreigners, introverts, and anyone who had the needed expertise, regardless of personality quirks. And while arguments could be heated (especially about cataloging rules), these catalogers shared a close bond. They were able to come together at the Library of Congress to process the vast number of books coming down the pike, share their cultures with one another, and forge a truly global workplace.5
In the fall of 1971, Ruth started her new job on the second floor of the Annex Building, across Second Street from what was then called the Main Building.6 The annex was the hub of cataloging and book processing. Built in the 1930s to accommodate the overflow of books, it was now overflowing itself, and funding had been approved in 1965 for another new building. Three months before Ruth began her new job, construction started across Independence Avenue for the new building, which would be named for James Madison. One of her coworkers, Thompson Yee, remembers that Ruth would show up late nearly every day, rushing into the annex to sign her time card. Ruthless supervisors would put the cards away at 8:05 sharp and mark down anyone who was late.7
One of Ruth’s first projects was to recatalog the library’s Delta Collection, which included pornography, erotica, race-track guides, and other items confiscated by the FBI, the postal service, and other federal agencies. It also included other items considered obscene or at risk of theft that were acquired through copyright deposit (LC manages copyright registration for the United States and acquires much of its collection by requiring publishers to submit two copies of all publications registered).8 The Delta Collection was available to the public but was kept in a locked room and closely monitored. Until 1992 researchers could openly browse the general collections, but keeping these items in a locked room ensured that the library could monitor exactly who used them. According to a 1951 Library of Congress manual, the Delta Collection was stored near the Microfilm Reading Room, and researchers could view items there. The official justification for their separation from the rest of the collections was that “though not of unusual rarity or value in themselves, [the books] are nevertheless particularly liable to theft or mutilation if shelved with the general collections.”9 Furthermore, the library would not encourage researchers to use the collection and made it as embarrassing as possible to request items:
No reference service is given in connection with this Collection. Readers must obtain from the Public Catalog the author, title, and call number of any volumes they wish to see. They are allowed to have only one book at a time and are not permitted to take books out of the reading room area. Loans are made for official use only.
New books for the Collection reach the Microfilm Reading Room accompanied by two copies of the printed cards. These cards are used to maintain a classified shelf list and an author catalog for the staff’s own use. No subject entries are made.
Each reader on entering the Microfilm Reading Room signs his name and address in a register maintained exclusively for readers of Delta materials, and for each book which he requests he makes out a charge slip in duplicate. Statistics are obtained from the register and the charge slips.10
The fact that “no subject entries [were] made” was significant. Author Melissa Adler wrote that the books were not completely cataloged to the standards that other books were but were flagged with a delta symbol on the spine.11 A researcher could find the materials if they knew of a specific book or magazine title or author. But by denying these books subject headings, the Library of Congress would not encourage research on the topics of pornography, erotica, or gambling. Forty books that are now housed in the Rare Books Reading Room still have a note in their catalog records that reads, “Formerly in Delta Collection.”
By the 1960s the library had stopped accepting items from the FBI and did not continue to collect much in this area, because the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University had started broadly collecting pornography and erotica.12 Ruth most likely recataloged the items from the Delta Collection that were transferred to the social sciences collection. These would have included scientific books on sex in the areas of psychology and sociology or perhaps books on these topics in German. It’s unclear whether Ruth did this job alone or was continuing the work someone else had started. She had no qualms about sharing what her new job entailed and in fact joked about it in letters to friends. A man named George, who was stationed in Hawaii in February 1972, wrote to her:
You seem to have a good job and I envy you the chance to do something productive. Even though it is erotica, it’s needed by somebody or it wouldn’t have been written . . . Do you suppose you could absorb—along with the “expertise” in cataloging—enough of the subject matter and the technique to put out some of your own? It might pay the rent.13
After a page break, he continued, “I must have been a little drunk last night when I batted out the above, but I will let it ride.”14
Chapter 31
In August 1973 Ruth bought her first and only home. Built in 1937, it was a three-bedroom row house at 117 Third Street NE, just
two blocks from the library’s Annex Building. She paid $31,500 for it ($178,776 in 2018 dollars). While many residents of DC were moving out to the rapidly expanding suburbs, Ruth chose to live as close as possible to her job. This may have been because by the time she left Vietnam, she preferred not to drive, owing to her eyesight problems. Not only did she have a lazy eye, but her eyesight got worse as she aged as well. She never owned a car when she lived on Capitol Hill, and it seems to have never affected her quality of life—the neighborhood was very walkable, full of shops and corner stores and just blocks away from two stops on the city’s new metro system that would open in 1976.
Just five years earlier, in April 1968, riots had broken out across the city after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The commercial strip on H Street NE, the boundary of the north side of Capitol Hill and a historic black neighborhood, was decimated. The area developed a reputation for muggings, drug dealing, and murders. Eastern Market was a known site for picking up prostitutes. The fact that so much crime was so close to the Capitol was an embarrassment to the city, and many people who worked there or came to visit refused to walk around the neighborhood after dark. But Ruth was not deterred from buying a house in a neighborhood with such a reputation. After living in two war zones, she was not fazed by a high crime rate. Her house, with a wide front porch and ample room for her books and worldly possessions, would suit her for the next thirty-seven years. She soon got to know her neighbors, many of whom were also federal employees or Capitol Hill staffers, and joined several neighborhood organizations. Many of these residents bonded over their refusal to give up on this historic, interracial neighborhood, no matter how blighted it was or its souring reputation.
In the fall of 1973, Ruth’s coworker Gabe Horchler, a Vietnam veteran and a social sciences cataloger, decided to take a position as a United Nations volunteer librarian.1 He moved to Niamey, Niger, to establish a library at the École nationale d’administration, a school for civil servants. He wrote to Ruth for advice about building a library in a developing country and jokingly asked if she wanted a new job. She responded, “The answer is definitely NO, NO, No . . . A job I have . . . What I’m looking for is a POSITION and this doesn’t exactly include remote control library construction and administration!”2 (Whether she was actually looking for a new position outside LC is unclear from this letter.) Upon Gabe’s request, Ruth sprang into action, circulating his letter around the library and searching for any resource that might help him. She listed helpful cataloging manuals and guides on the construction of libraries, promising to find them and mail them to him. She answered his questions on library management in detail, reminisced about the difficulties of her work in Vietnam, and admitted what she would have done differently in hindsight. She closed with some good advice: “There is nothing, nothing, nothing that can ever substitute for personal observation and creative thinking . . . no authority in the world can tell you what you need . . . They can only help you think.”3 The four long letters that Ruth wrote to Gabe over two years at the beginning of her career at the Library of Congress, along with another letter she wrote after her retirement, are the only surviving documentation, in her own words, of what she really thought about working there.
In 1974 she wrote to Gabe that she was renting a room to an army chaplain, making minor renovations on her house, and busily attending meetings of the Bicentennial Commission. In her characteristic run-on sentences full of ellipses, Ruth described some of her frustrations with her coworkers and supervisors:
Lately I’ve been letting loose at both David Remington and Ed Blume about their being totally disorganized… unsupportive of their staff; misusing their employee time, etc. etc. At least they’ve started to listen! No, not do anything about it, but used to be they didn’t even listen…. Now, after I make my comments I get feedback which at least tells me they’ve understood […] Nick’s been behaving like Nick…sometimes missing his points when he could make them because he blows up at the wrong time… Powell hasn’t been quite the same since I insisted on setting up Group Sex with a see ref. from “Swinging (Sex)” and gets all shook up every time the Sunday supplement refers to Kissinger or the King of Sweden as “Swingers”…4
The main problem of the broader Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate, which had been an endless source of conflict for decades, was the growing backlog of books that the staff simply could not keep up with. Ruth complained, “At work we have been hellishly busy . . . even with an average of 25 (and over) books per day, my backlog is building at the rate of 20 to 25 books a day! Even more on days I devote to my schedule. Oh yes . . . schedule . . .”5 Ruth was referring to the Library of Congress Classification schedule, a manual published by the library for the assignment of call numbers. LCC, as it is known, is a system used by most academic libraries, and it is more in depth than the Dewey decimal system, which is commonly used by public libraries. Broad fields of knowledge are assigned a letter or two letters, with each subtopic (which could branch into many levels) assigned a number. A Cutter number, named for the librarian Charles Cutter and designed to alphabetize books primarily by last name of the author, is then added on to the class number. Subject catalogers at LC were assigned the onerous task of revising the schedules for new editions of the LCC.
Ruth’s area of expertise, sociology, fell under the letters HM. She described to Gabe how time-consuming and tedious this job was:
Have expanded the Soc. part and practically redone all of Soc. Psych….from 4 pages I now have 19, and from 1 through 291, numbering will probably go from one (1) to 3500 plus (of course I’m leaving plenty of room for someone else to expand!) It’s been going in typical LC fashion…“no major changes.”…well, yes, maybe you better move this too….OK shift that…yes, cancel that….Too bad I had to do it all so piecemeal and literally fight for every new number, but even I feel it’s now beginning to take on some shape…though I’m getting a little saturated with it all…in the long run it’s probably been a hell of a good review for me in the fields of social. & soc. psych.6
The schedule for sociology had not been revised since 1967, and the revision that Ruth was working on in 1974 would not be published until 1980. The preface for the publication, written by the chief of the Subject Cataloging Division, Mary K. D. Pietris, gave an explanation for the long delay:
For the past ten years, the Subject Cataloging Division has wanted to issue a revised edition of Class H. However, the desire has been continually frustrated by the shortage of staff time to review the existing schedule, to propose badly-needed changes, to review and approve those proposals, and to prepare the new edition editorially. In 1977 the decision was made to publish another edition of Class H without fail, and catalogers began to review and prepare extensive revisions . . . It was, therefore, decided to follow an unusual course of action. It was previously decided that Class H would be published in two parts: H–HJ and HM–HX. However, the first part would represent a completely revised edition, whereas the second part would be merely an unrevised cumulation, incorporating changes made since the third edition, without any necessarily time-consuming attempt to update concepts and terminology. As a result, this edition of HM–HX, an unrevised cumulation, reflects the basic outline, tone and terminology of the early twentieth century in which it was developed.7
Classes H through HJ cover economics, commerce, and finance, all straightforward fields of knowledge.8 While new theories arose occasionally over the twentieth century, such as Keynesian economics, classifying them in relationship to older, established areas of the field would not have been complicated. However, HM through HX covered the following fields, listed in the synopsis of the 1980 edition:
HM: Sociology.
HN: Social History and Conditions. Social Problems. Social Reform.
HQ: The Family. Marriage. Woman.
HS: Societies: Secret, Benevolent, etc.
HT: Communities. Classes. Races.
HV: Social Pathology. Social and
Public Welfare. Criminology.
HX: Socialism. Communism. Anarchism.
Over the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, debates raged among academics, professional experts, and the public about the above topics, especially concerning women, sexuality, race, and class. The civil rights and feminist movements had created entirely new academic departments and fields of study, such as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and what would later be termed queer theory. Conservatives complained that these new fields were not serious lines of academic inquiry. The debates filtered down to the field of librarianship, and catalogers had to decide how to classify this new knowledge and what exactly was the correct terminology. Pietris did not explain that this was likely another reason that the publication of the HM–HX schedule was delayed for so long. Part of the staff time to “review and approve proposals” was surely spent debating what these new fields meant and how LC would appropriately deal with them in a way that would avoid criticism or backlash from the rest of the library community, which relied heavily on these manuals.
As Ruth had noted, her colleagues were uncomfortable with openly discussing topics like “swinging” at work. She may have been one of the only catalogers in her department who, quite frankly, didn’t mind these discussions or outright enjoyed the embarrassment of her more conservative colleagues. Ruth mentioned in 1974 that she was trying to expand the numbering system in the HMs from 291 to 3500, but six years later the schedule still only covered 291 numbers.9 Today the numbers range from 1 to 1281, a large expansion but nothing close to what Ruth had originally envisioned.
