Library of Congress: Massive Multimedia Trove of Yesterday and Today

You can get mad at Congress across the street or the Supreme Court next door or the White House down the avenue. But you can hardly get mad at the Library of Congress.

It is smaller than almost any arm of government yet mightier than the Pentagon, richer than the Treasury and just plain bigger than all of us.

Here, behind the commanding bronze doors, along the endless, whispering stacks, in the reverent hush of the reading rooms, under the ornate statues and soaring mosaics, here more than in any other single place on Earth reside the collective knowledge and wisdom of humanity. This is the tip of man’s reach, so far.

An extraordinary place, a library--a temple, a museum, a rich man’s attic.

Socrates is a tenant here. So is Groucho Marx. So are Johannes Brahms and Jelly Roll Morton, George Washington and Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein and Donald Duck.

Browsing, you might care to see Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence or Harry Houdini’s postcard to his mother. The Gutenberg Bible or “Weird Tales” among the pulp magazines. Maps used by sailors before Columbus or maps of the back side of the moon or maps of the distribution of black-owned businesses in New York City.

A handbill offering a $300 reward for the return of three runaway “Negro boys--Albert, Sam and Bailey,” Albert being the one with whiskers and Sam the one with a scar over his left eye, about 35 years old.

You might also want to see Abe Lincoln’s handwritten draft of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves--maybe Albert, Sam and Bailey too. Or a Sumerian tablet written 2,040 years before Christ. Or the Johnny Carson Show taped last night.

Altogether, a place of boggling scope, unique in the world, begun 190 years ago by a poor, new country that couldn’t know what it was getting into. The hope was that the library would “enable statesmen to be correct in their investigations and, by a becoming display of erudition and research, give a higher dignity and brighter luster to truth.”

Whether Congress has added luster to truth or even a semi-gloss is an open question. But the Library of Congress did its part and now is a world capital of superlatives:

The most books (20 million) in the most languages (470); the most maps (3,500,000); the largest law library; the most complete global collection of government documents; the most Stradivari instruments (five); the most flutes (1,600), including Frederick the Great’s; the most motion pictures (100,000); the most television programs (80,000), including, you’ll be relieved to know, one of “Chinese Cajun Cooking,” and the complete speeches of Fidel Castro.

More than a library, this is a massive multimedia storehouse of yesterday and today. And tomorrow?

“It’s been said that the only crystal ball man has is a rear-view mirror,” says James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. “Here, in this place we have the widest-angle rear-view mirror in the world.”

The mirror grew that wide because this library, unlike other national libraries, belonged to a nation of immigrants, to a past of many languages, cultures and histories. And this nation, unlike others, declared the pursuit of happiness an inalienable right.

“We must seek the whole experience--whatever has filled the consciousness of Americans past and present,” said Daniel Boorstin, former librarian. “In the United States, the pursuit of happiness is everybody’s business, and any American institution which forgets that is failing in its mission.”

Even at the start, with only 3,000 volumes down the hall from Congress, for which a member would leave the floor “to get proof of my assertions,” this library housed more than the predictable volumes of history, law and government. It also had current English plays, poetry and novels.

From that beginning, it grew to a truly international library seeking to gather “everything known by all cultures.” It now has 5 million books in English and 15 million in foreign languages. It has more volumes of Russian and Japanese literature than exist anywhere else outside those countries.

It has Charles Dickens’ walking stick and the contents of Lincoln’s pockets the day he died, including an unexplained Confederate $5 bill. It has Hitler’s last library in that bunker in Berlin and the last to console Czar Nicholas in the Winter Palace in Petersburg.

It has the papers of 23 Presidents, Sigmund Freud and Danny Kaye and the personal photo album of Herman Goering. It has American folk ballads recorded in jails, remote mountain villages and Indian pueblos and Franz Lizst’s manuscript of his first Piano Concerto with his changes pasted in with paper flaps.

It has the first book printed in America (the Bay Psalm Book of 1640), the radio scripts of W.C. Fields, the surrender signed by Washington and Cornwallis at Yorktown, and Alexander Graham Bell’s original working sketch of something he called “an instrument for the transmission of vocal utterance by telegraph.”

Emboldened by its landlord to acquire “all library materials currently published throughout the world which are of value to scholarship,” the Library of Congress has grown to three buildings named after Jefferson, Adams and Madison. The Great Hall and the Main Reading Room of Jefferson are closed for restoration work. That leaves 22 reading rooms.

Madison alone is the largest library building in the world, and among the behemoths in this town ranks third in size behind the Pentagon and the FBI. Every room is wired for television and computer data transmission. Billington is pushing a program to make this a “library without walls” and to share its materials electronically with libraries around the country.

Congress remains its first priority. Nine hundred specialists out of a total staff of 5,000 work exclusively for the Congressional Research Service, which is described as the biggest think tank in creation. They may not take calls from any other branch of government, be it the White House or Supreme Court. The rest of the library is open to all, even the President.

The specialists supply senators and representatives with cost projections, pro and con studies, legislative analyses and answers to a multitude of questions.

Who is this Saddam Hussein? How much oil do we import from Iraq? How many Americans are buried in Flanders’ Field (asked during debate on the flag amendment)? (Answer: 368.) What is the significance of the Maltese falcon (asked by a member about to meet with representatives of Malta)? Did Vince Lombardi say: “Winning isn’t everything--it’s the only thing?” (No, it was Red Sanders of Vanderbilt.)

The original Library of Congress was destroyed at the tender age of 14 when the British burned the Capitol in 1814. School kids are rarely told that American troops did the same thing to the Canadian Parliament and library the year before.

In any case, Congress needed a library and Thomas Jefferson, in retirement with no pension, needed money. He sold Congress his library, one of the best outside Europe, 6,487 volumes for $23,950. They came bumping over the pitted roads of Virginia in 10 horse-drawn wagons.

Jefferson was the library’s first hero. The second was Lincoln’s choice of librarian, a dynamo with the catchy name of Ainsworth Rand Spofford. He yearned for “oceans of books and rivers of information.”

He got himself a tidal wave by persuading Congress to move the Copyright Office from Interior to the Library. Henceforth, anyone claiming a copyright on any book, map, chart, play, music, engraving, cut, print, photograph or negative thereof had to send two copies to the Library. You can get a lot of free books, etc., that way and the Library did and does.

Books etc. were soon spilling over into the halls, closets, basement and committee rooms of Congress. The Library desperately needed its own building.

What it got in 1897 was one of Uncle Sam’s most lavish productions, a temple of culture for an adolescent nation still growing, strong and rich and showing off. Fifty-two leading artists and 20 sculptors and tons of majestic marble from around the world were used to show that Uncle could rise above materialism.

As a result, Demosthenes, Emerson, Goethe, Franklin, Macaulay, Dante and many others emerge larger than life. The Main Reading Room rises 125 feet to a magnificent dome ornamented with seashells, griffins, cherubs and garlands. The ceilings of the Great Hall are done in stained glass, 23-karat gold leaf, marble mosaics, stucco sculpture and huge frescoes.