Books, Bluster, and Bounty: Local Politics and Carnegie Library Building Grants in the Intermountain West, 1890-1920

3. Boom Towns: Carnegie Libraries and Boosterism

66 3 Boom Towns: Carnegie Libraries and Boosterism “A distinct acquisition and credit to the city” One popular myth of the American West holds that the region once witnessed a golden age of idealistic support for books and reading. In the early days of settlement, as the story goes, pioneers who believed that life without literature was not worth living struggled to ensure that their new homes would have books, laboriously transporting volumes to the West and sacrificing to buy books once they arrived. According to this “books-inevery -wagon” narrative, the pure desire for reading material was so intense that Westerners who could find no other printed volumes read the dictionary , and even sheepherders customarily built bookshelves into their wagons.1 Certainly many early Intermountain West citizens did value books for the sheer pleasure of reading, just as many residents do today. Unfortunately for commentators who take satisfaction in proclaiming the steady decline of the human race, however, the region’s Carnegie library applications suggest that less idealistic notions more often inspired support for institutions that provided the printed word a hundred years ago. One particularly philistine—and common—theme in pro-Carnegie library rhetoric held that a Carnegie library would enhance a community’s bottom line.2 In about a quarter of Intermountain West building grant 1 Bobbie Magee Hepworth, 28 and William Targ, The American West, 485. 2 See Van Slyck, Free to All, 136; Ring, “Carnegie Libraries as Symbols for an Age”; and Swetnam, “Pro-Carnegie Library Arguments,” 64–65 for discussions of economic motives in Carnegie library development. Boom Towns: Carnegie Libraries and Boosterism 67 applications, it did not occur to the men who shaped public discourse to speak idealistically about the power of books to enrich the lives of their fellow citizens or their children; they did not suggest that books could help promote democracy or bootstrap self-education. Nor did they plead their desire for personal intellectual enrichment. Instead they evoked a more literal kind of profit: the power of Carnegie libraries to provide economic advantage in the battle for municipal regional dominance. To read their words is to enter a West driven by self-interest and aggressively on the make, a reality nothing like the idealistic Jeffersonian polis of legend. If these men had carried books in their wagons, they would not have been reading them but flourishing them proudly, taunting their fellow travelers with this evidence of their own inevitable success. So direct were the commercial metaphors these men used in conjunction with Carnegie library applications that their words seem crass. Supporters in Prosser, Washington, for example, promoted a new Carnegie library as “an investment that would repay itself many times over.” Beaver, Utah’s, Carnegie building was touted as “a distinct acquisition and credit to the city.” In Milton, Oregon, a newspaper editor concluded, “All things equal, the merchants will receive a direct gain in dollars and cents” from the proposed Carnegie library. The structure, he explained, would encourage rural trade, drawing outlanders to Milton rather than to rival business centers because it would offer a place “where the farmer who comes to town to do his week’s trading can take ‘mother and the girls’ to rest and refresh themselves before they begin their shopping tour of the town.”3 The men themselves, however, would have been surprised—and hurt— by suggestions that their arguments were philistine, for to them “booster” was not a slur but a term of commendation for a most worthy vocation. By the time the Intermountain West was beginning to be settled, boosterism had been widespread in the American West for many decades, as Daniel J. Boorstin has noted, and many of these men would have grown up in communities where boosters were respected as men who worked for community stability and progress.4 These energetic turn-of-the-twentieth-century citizens , as David Wrobel has written, possessed “psychological attachment” to their towns; they were men with “deep personal investment in lauding the 3 Prosser (WA) Record, Jan. 11, 1907; Beaver (UT) Weekly Press, Jan. 1, 1915; Milton (OR) Eagle, Mar. 19, 1908. 4 Boorstin, The Americans, 113–68. Books, Bluster, and Bounty 68 new areas they called home because the very survival of those places, and consequently their own well-being, depended on others viewing their . . . town as a promised land and moving to it.”5 Many were merchants and...