THE NEWSPAPERS[135]
It is the glory of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin that Draper gathered into its collections the papers of the Ohio Valley migrations, that Thwaites added the records of the fur trade, and that neither forgot while pursuing these remote and unique sources to assemble day after day the current accumulations of the people among whom they lived. As the latter collector and editor loved to say: The history for tomorrow is preserved in the waste paper baskets of today. The society that lays aside the policy of accumulating accessions to devote itself to the conscious pursuit of particular treasures can never become more useful than its curators or wiser than its superintendent. The greatest libraries are those whose growth has been chiefly in the routine addition, from year to year of all that has been regarded as worth saving, and of much more whose immediate value has been doubtful.
The State Historical Society of Wisconsin has for so many years followed the practice of saving its daily newspapers, and adding to them as opportunity occurs, that it now owns one of the notable American collections. From the middle of the last century, when the state came into being, the development of its people can be traced in the detail
which only the inquisitive county daily can follow. Its relations to the Northwest and to the rest of the nation can be checked in the selected files which have ever been cherished. Through the wise foresight of its founders it owns the great sources for all of modern history—for in our day the course of the historian is more and more fundamentally laid among the newspapers.
It has not been altogether easy to build up this collection. A metropolitan daily of today means twelve large volumes to be bound, shelved, and housed each year. The cubic contents of the sources know no limit. There is some room for fear that after they have been stored away they may rot in their bindings before any scholar uses them.
But no society which understands the course of modern history can fail to run the risk of dry-rot or to preserve such records as exist. For no period before the present is there such a factual reconstruction possible as we possess. No newspaper can lie and live—very long. The user must correct for bias, and careless error, and malicious misstatement, all of which occur in nearly every issue of any paper. But no student can read a continuous series of files for twenty years without knowing that he has before him the truth, and more of the truth than society has known in any earlier period.
In our judgment one of the great functions of any historical society today is to collect ephemeral literature, beginning with the newspapers of its immediate region and extending as far as its money and its shelves permit. No Society should be too poor for the town dailies and one New York file. Larger societies may take in the county, or the region, as the area for their collections, and may increase the selected list of remote journals to be preserved. All will be judged in the future by the intelligence and patience in this direction which their shelves may finally reveal. None can
be permanently of greatest use with a policy such as is exposed in the journal of a sister society:
“The State of * * * has thousands of them [newspapers] in the Libraries of the State House. Many of them are bound, others are unbound, tied in bundles and carefully stowed away. Their day is done; rarely has any one in our knowledge asked to examine any of these newspapers for any date or facts. History has culled from them such truths as could point a moral, or hold out a danger signal to the world of the present time, and they are closed, perhaps never more to be consulted.”
REMOVING THE PAPACY TO CHICAGO