In discussing this question I should have preferred to use the term "business men" in a liberal sense. We are all more or less "business" people at times, but for this occasion I am directed by our president to limit it to that one of its 24 different meanings which applies to employer rather than employee in "the occupations of conducting trade or monetary transactions" and in "employments requiring knowledge of accounts and financial methods."
Before proceeding further permit me to state my conviction that the greatest service the library is doing for business men is not to business men personally, but rather for them through their employees,—in supplying knowledge and in promoting the general intelligence and the social welfare of the community. These things are of the greatest importance to every employer, for they are the foundations on which all efficiency is built. The social welfare work of the Panama Canal, much of it the kind libraries are doing, is a conspicuous example of the immense financial value of such work.
The male portion of adult society we may roughly divide, so far as occupations are concerned, into manual workers (laborers and mechanics), professional men, business men, and drones (the idle class) who, like the lilies of the field, neither toil nor spin, but who frequently outshine Solomon in the gorgeousness and variety of their array. They live a parasitic life on the productive labor of their fellow men, giving no adequate return. In the administration of our public libraries most consideration has been given to the idle class and to the professional classes. Real service for the manual workers and business men has been largely neglected until within recent years.
There are several reasons for this neglect. Among these may be mentioned the following: Working men and business men are expressing themselves in deeds and in things rather than in words and books; and therefore until recently there has been relatively little worth-while material available for the libraries to put on their shelves for the men directly engaged in industrial or commercial pursuits. Furthermore there has been a long standing prejudice on the part of these men (those who are rule-of-thumb men) against the reliability and the utility of things in print for their everyday work. And in certain quarters this prejudice still exists to a very considerable extent. They are inclined to look upon the writers and users of books as theoretical and impractical.
A further handicap in the use of libraries by business men, is the fact that so few of us in library work know the contents of books and things in print that might be useful to them in their daily work; and oftener we know still less of the problems business men must deal with. Therefore we cannot relate the inside of books with their work.
Much of the work of the public library is a kind of salesmanship, even though there is no direct exchange of the coin of the country. Salesmanship in its best sense is service, and service is what a city is buying for all its people when it puts into its annual budget a more or less (usually less) adequate sum of money for its library. As things are today I fear that in too many cases the public instead of drawing a plum from the library pie is not infrequently handed a lemon.
Recently I had the pleasure of dining with the vice-president of a department store that employs over 2,500 people to sell nothing but clothes—wearing apparel. He told me that the great secret of the success of his institution, through whose doors there enter from 30,000 to 40,000 people every day (and remember that nearly all these people enter with the expectation of parting with some of their good money), is the fact that every employee has instilled into him or her the fact that the salesmanship that brings success is service and that it is founded on knowledge; for, said he, "No one can sell goods satisfactorily unless he knows all about them,"—where they are made, how they are made, what they are, their history, etc. And these things everyone in this store is systematically taught. Incidentally, I may add that this department store starts its people at a minimum wage higher than the minimum in many libraries, and the maximum for women in this store is double the maximum of the highest paid women in library work in this country. This store uses the public library of its city and has a library of its own whose librarian is at this convention at the expense of the store. When a department store finds such a policy a wise one the business men responsible for its management will be the first in the community to support a policy of library service based on knowledge. But business men must be shown that the library is delivering the goods.
The business man places his establishment so far as possible where it will best serve the purposes of his business, and he spends loads of good money in the first place, and annually in the form of taxation, to get his building at the right place. Besides getting his establishment at the right place he also spends more loads of good money to arrange it for the economic and expeditious handling of his affairs in it. So far as libraries relate to serving the business man, as well as nine-tenths of the other people in the community, I am convinced that 95 per cent of the library buildings of the country are badly located, and furthermore that the large proportion of these buildings are badly arranged for the work they have, or ought, to do.
The place to serve the people is where the people daily congregate and pass by in the largest numbers. This is never on a side street or in the "best" residence section of the city. Your average "best" citizen today gets more satisfaction out of his public library in showing his visitor from out of town the Greek temple set back in a beautiful grove or garden as he whirls by in his six cylinder, 60 horse-power, seven-passenger touring car than in using the books and periodicals inside. Such a building in such a setting has a value as a work of art, but not as a library for service. Incidentally, it is only fair to say that business men in most of our cities are largely responsible that we have library buildings for show rather than for use.
Every block that separates the library from the principal lines of the movement of the people, every foot that people must walk from the sidewalk to the entrance of the building and then to its books, every step that must be climbed above the level of the sidewalk to reach the first floor, are all so many hurdles, barriers, which the people are obliged to overcome before they can get to their own books, whether it be to use them for business or pleasure, for education or recreation. The bad location and arrangement of library buildings in the United States are keeping hundreds of thousands of potential users and supporters of libraries away from them and out of them every day of the year. And there is no class of persons in the community more affected by such things than business men, for they recognize (consciously or unconsciously) better than any other class the commercial value of time and convenience.