What of religion? Prof. George E. Woodberry, in his interesting book on North Africa, says in substance that there are only two kinds of religion, the simple and the complex. Mohammedanism he considers a simple religion, like New England Puritanism, with which he thinks it has points in common. Both are very different from Buddhism, for instance. Accepting for the moment his classification I believe that the facts show an effort to combine the two types in the United States. Many of the Christian denominations that Woodberry would class as “simple”—those that began with a total absence of ritual, are becoming ritualized. Creeds once simple are becoming complicated with interpretation and comment. On the other hand we may see in the Roman Catholic Church and among the so-called “High Church” Episcopalians a disposition to adopt some of the methods that have hitherto distinguished other religious bodies. Consider, for example, some of the religious meetings held by the Paulist Fathers in New York, characterized by popular addresses and the singing of simple hymns. As another example of the eclectic spirit of churches in America we may point to the various efforts at combination or unity, with such results as the Federation of the Churches of Christ in America—an ambitious name, not yet justified by the facts—the proposed amalgamation of several of the most powerful Protestant bodies in Canada, and the accomplished fact of the University of Toronto—an institution whose constituent colleges are controlled by different religious denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church. I may also mention the present organization of the New York Public Library, many of whose branch libraries were contributions from religious denominations, including the Jews, the Catholics and the Episcopalians. All these now work together harmoniously. I know of nothing of this kind on any other continent, and I think we shall be justified in crediting it to the present American tendency to eclecticism.
Turn for a moment to philosophy. What is the philosophical system most widely known at present as American? Doubtless the pragmatism of William James. No one ever agreed with anyone else in a statement regarding philosophy, and I do not expect you to agree with me in this; but pragmatism seems to me essentially an eclectic system. It is based on the character of results. Is something true or false? I will tell you when I find out whether it works practically or not. Is something right or wrong? I rely on the same test. Now it seems to me that this is the scheme of the peasant in later Rome, who was perfectly willing to appeal to Roman Juno or Egyptian Isis or Phoenician Moloch, so long as he got what he wanted. If a little bit of Schopenhauer works, and some of Fichte; a piece of Christianity and a part of Vedantism, it is all grist to the mill of pragmatism. Any of it that works must of necessity be right and true. I am not criticizing this, or trying to controvert it; I am merely asserting that it leads to eclecticism; and this, I believe, explains its vogue in the United States.
It would be impossible to give, in the compass of a brief address, a list of all the domains in which this eclecticism—this tendency to select, combine and blend—has cropped out among us Americans of today. I have reserved for the last that in which we are particularly interested—the Public Library, in which we may see it exemplified in an eminent degree. The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, a wider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in any other part of the world. Foreign librarians and foreign library users look at us askance. They wonder at the things we are trying to combine under the activities of one public institution; they shudder at our extravagance. They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they are compelled to foot the bills for what we do. But the taxpayers do not seem to mind. They frequently complain, but not about what we are doing. What bothers them is that we do not try to do more. When we began timidly to add branch libraries to our system they asked us why we did not build and equip them faster; when we placed a few books on open shelves they demanded that we treat our whole stock in the same way; when we set aside a corner for the children they forced us to fit up a whole room and to place such a room in every building, large or small. We have responded to every such demand. Each response has cost money and the public has paid the bill. Apparently librarians and public are equally satisfied. We should not be astonished, for this merely shows that the library is subject to the same laws and tendencies as all other things American.
Hence it comes about that whereas in a large library a century ago there were simply stored books with no appliances to do anything but keep them safe, we now find in library buildings all sorts of devices to facilitate the quick and efficient use of the books both in the building and in the readers’ homes, together with other devices to stimulate a desire to use books among those who have not yet felt it; to train children to use and love books; to interest the public in things that will lead to the use of books. This means that many of the things in a modern library seem to an old-fashioned librarian and an old-fashioned reader like unwarranted extensions or even usurpations. In our own Central building you will find collections of postal cards and specimens of textile fabrics, an index to current lectures, exhibitions and concerts, a public writing-room, with free note-paper and envelopes, a class of young women studying to be librarians, meeting places for all sorts of clubs and groups, civic, educational, social, political and religious; a bindery in full operation, a photographic copying-machine; lunch-rooms and rest-rooms for the staff; a garage, with an automobile in it, a telephone switchboard, a paintshop, a carpenter-shop, and a power-plant of considerable capacity. Not one of these things I believe, would you have found in a large library fifty years ago. And yet the citizens of St. Louis seem to be cheerful and are not worrying over the future. We are eclectic, but we are choosing the elements of our blend with some discretion and we have been able, so far, to relate them all to books, to the mental activities that are stimulated by books and that produce more books, to the training that instils into the rising generation a love for books. The book is still at the foundation of the library, even if its walls have received some architectural embellishment of a different type.
When anyone objects to the introduction into the library of what the colleges call “extra-curriculum activities,” I prefer to explain and justify it in this larger way, rather than to take up each activity by itself and discuss its reasonableness—though this also may be undertaken with the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in the United States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its own being; it has been following the whole stream of American development. You can call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simply drifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submit to be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In so doing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing but fatigue, or he may use the force of the stream, as far as he may, to reach his own goal. I like to think that this is what many American institutions are doing, our libraries among them. They are using the present tendency to eclecticism in an effort toward wider public service. When, in a community, there seems to be a need for doing some particular thing, the library, if it has the equipment and the means, is doing that thing without inquiring too closely whether there is logical justification for linking it with the library’s activities rather than with some others. Note, now, how this desirable result is aided by our prevailing American tendency toward eclecticism. Suppose precisely the same conditions to obtain in England, or France, or Italy, the admitted need for some activity, the ability of the library and the inability of any other institution, to undertake it. I submit that the library would be extremely unlikely to move in the matter, simply from the lack of the tendency that we are discussing. That tendency gives a flexibility, almost a fluidity, which under a pressure of this kind, yields and ensures an outlet for desirable energy along a line of least resistance.
The Englishman and the American, when they are arguing a case of this kind, assume each the condition of affairs that obtains in his own land—the rigidity on the one hand, the fluidity on the other. They assume it without stating it or even thoroughly understanding it, and the result is that neither can understand the conclusions of the other. The fact is that they are both right. I seriously question whether it would be right or proper for a library in a British community to do many of the things that libraries are doing in American communities. I may go further and say that the rigidity of British social life would make it impossible for the library to achieve these things. But it is also true that the fluidity of American social life makes it equally impossible for the library to withstand the pressure that is brought to bear on it here. To yield is in its case right and proper and a failure of response would be wrong and improper.
It is usually assumed by the British critic of American libraries that their peculiarities are due to the temperament of the American librarian. We make a similar assumption when we discuss British libraries. I do not deny that the librarians on both sides have had something to do with it, but the determining factor has been the social and temperamental differences between the two peoples. Americans are fluid, experimental, eclectic, and this finds expression in the character of their institutions and in the way these are administered and used.
Take if you please the reaction of the library on the two sides of the water to the inevitable result of opening it to home-circulation—the necessity of knowing whether a given book is or is not on the shelves. The American response was to open the shelves, the British, to create an additional piece of machinery—the indicator. These two results might have been predicted in advance by one familiar with the temper of the two peoples. It has shown itself in scores of instances, in the front yards of residences, for instance—walled off in England and open to the street in the United States.
I shall be reminded, I suppose, that there are plenty of open shelves in English libraries and that the open shelf is gaining in favor. True; England is becoming “Americanized” in more respects than this one. But I am speaking of the immediate reaction to the stimulus of popular demand, and this was as I have stated it. In each case the reaction, temporarily at least, satisfied the demand; showing that the difference was not of administrative habit alone, but of community feeling.
This rapid review of modern American tendencies, however confusing the impression that it may give, will at any rate convince us, I think, of one thing—the absurdity of objecting to anything whatever on the ground that it is un-American. We are the most receptive people in the world. We “take our good things where we find them,” and what we take becomes “American” as soon as it gets into our hands. And yet, if anything new does not happen to suit any of us, the favorite method of attack is to denounce it as “un-American.” Pretty nearly every element of our present social fabric has been thus denounced, at one time or another, and as it goes on changing, every change is similarly attacked.