In Memorial Hall in the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress, eight quotes of Madison’s are carved into the wall and painted in gold leaf. Like so much of our forebears’ wisdom, his words feel unusually relevant now. “THE ESSENCE OF GOVERNMENT IS POWER, AND POWER, LODGED AS IT MUST BE IN HUMAN HANDS, WILL EVER BE LIABLE TO ABUSE,” one says. Another is very pro-library, and makes you want to join with your fellow-Americans and delve into the stacks: “LEARNED INSTITUTIONS OUGHT TO BE FAVORITE OBJECTS WITH EVERY FREE PEOPLE. THEY THROW THAT LIGHT OVER THE PUBLIC MIND WHICH IS THE BEST SECURITY AGAINST CRAFTY & DANGEROUS ENCROACHMENTS ON THE PUBLIC LIBERTY.”
The new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, is highly motivated to make this library, and all libraries, a favorite object of the people. Hayden is the first person of color, and the first woman, to lead the Library of Congress; she is also the first actual librarian to lead it since 1974. Her predecessor, Dr. James Billington, a distinguished Russia scholar appointed by Ronald Reagan, was beloved for his intellect but criticized for mismanagement; he neglected, for many years, to appoint a chief information officer, which was required by law, and he also didn’t use e-mail. Hayden, a former head of the American Library Association, revitalized and modernized Baltimore’s twenty-two-branch Enoch Pratt Free Library system. President Obama nominated her, in 2010, to be a member of the National Museum and Library Services Board, and, last year, to become Librarian of Congress.
Hayden met a bit of opposition on her way to confirmation—the usual resistance to Obama’s later appointments, for one, and a tempest in a teapot about the use of Internet filters at public-library computers. More significant, some Republicans didn’t like Hayden’s firm resistance to the privacy encroachments of the Patriot Act when she was head of the A.L.A. Her opposition to what she saw as potentially McCarthyite government intrusion into citizens’ privacy earned her a Ms. Woman of the Year distinction in 2003. (“When the FBI came snooping, Carla Diane Hayden proved librarians are more freedom fighters than shushers,” Ms. wrote.) Mention her name to a New York Public Library staffer, and there’s a frisson of excitement; at her raucous and bustling sendoff in Baltimore, a high-school librarian, quoted in the Washington Post, called her a “rock star.”
The week after the Presidential Inauguration, hoping for some perspective on things, I visited the Library of Congress for the first time. In the morning, I explored the Jefferson Building, the palatial Italian Renaissance-style building that most people associate with the Library of Congress: winged figures of genius; Minerva mosaic; display case containing one of three perfect copies of the Gutenberg Bible; reading room that evokes the Florence Duomo. Then I met with Hayden in her expansive office in the Madison Building, completed in 1980. It’s contemporary-federal and grand, with floor-to-ceiling windows. Hayden is compact, with a short hair style that expresses contained fun, and an expression of amused, no-nonsense warmth. She dresses in the kind of elegant public-servantwear—jackets in rich hues—that we’ve seen on Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Angela Merkel. She has a large, imposing desk, but we sat by the windows at a more companionable table, on which there was an ornamental bowl commemorating the Jefferson Building. It was full of butterscotch candies. When I looked at Hayden from where I sat, the Capitol loomed behind her head. “Well, we are the Library of Congress,” she said.
The Library of Congress has three massive main buildings, a staff of some thirty-two hundred, and a collection of more than a hundred and sixty million items. It runs the Congressional Research Service, which Hayden has called “the Special Forces of analysts,” and the U.S. Copyright Office, and special archives like the American Folklife Center. It hosts dozens of free public events a year, including concerts. It contains everything from Ralph Ellison’s personal library to Rosa Parks’s peanut-butter-pancakes recipe to Bob Hope’s joke collection and George Gershwin’s piano. (Here’s Hayden leaning on it, talking with Smokey Robinson, who just received the library’s Gershwin Prize.) The library was started, in Congress itself, in 1800; re-started with Thomas Jefferson’s own books after the British burned the Capitol, in 1812; and has expanded ever since.
When Hayden was formally asked to serve by the Obama Administration, she told me, “It was that word, ‘serve,’ that helped me. With the Baltimore experience, you really were almost touching the people who were benefitting from the work of the library. And I had to think about, How can I make this library that relevant, and that immediate?”
Hayden was the deputy commissioner and chief librarian of the Chicago Public Library, in the early nineties. In 1993, she became the director of the Pratt, in Baltimore, where she still lives. When she first moved to Baltimore, she recalled, many people came up and told her what she came to call “Pratt stories.” “Everybody—senators, medical doctors, people at the grocery store—all told me, ‘Pratt helped me’ . . . fill in the blank,” she said. “A distinguished African-American medical researcher said, ‘That was the only place that the races could mingle in the city, and where they were accepted.’ ”
In 2015, during the protests after Freddie Gray’s death in police custody, Hayden decided to keep the Baltimore libraries open, including the branch in the center of the unrest; all week, it functioned as a refuge, and a resource for information, comfort, even food. After a couple of days, Hayden’s mother came to help out. “That community, like so many communities across the country, depends on the library,” Hayden said. “And not just urban libraries, rural libraries. Tribal libraries, on reservations. See, that’s what people don’t realize. That’s where people get their high-speed Internet access, all that.” Later, Hayden got to know Scott Bonner, the Ferguson librarian who kept his branch open during the protests there after the death of Michael Brown. “We were talking about it yesterday, actually,” she said. They’d been at the A.L.A. midwinter conference, in Atlanta. “And how it wasn’t even a choice—you didn’t really think about should you or shouldn’t you. It’s just like, ‘Yeah—that’s what we do.’ ”
Like many librarians, Hayden is a big believer in the rights of all people to educate themselves, and in the importance of open access to information online. (This inclusive spirit has become more urgent nationally in recent weeks: see “Libraries Are for Everyone,” a multilingual meme and poster campaign, created by a Nebraska librarian, Rebecca McCorkindale, to counter the forces of fake news and fearmongering.) In September, Hayden gave a swearing-in speech in which she described how black Americans “were once punished with lashes and worse for learning to read.” She said that, “as a descendent of people who were denied the right to read, to now have the opportunity to serve and lead the institution that is our national symbol of knowledge is a historic moment.” She also talked about the Rosa Parks archive, now at the Library of Congress and available online. In a letter it contains, Parks wrote, “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it anymore.” That letter, Hayden said, is now available “in the classrooms of Racine, Wisconsin, in a small library on a reservation in New Mexico, and even in the library of a young girl in Baltimore, looking around as her city is in turmoil.”
In that same speech, Hayden recalled having once been a “little eight-year-old girl with pigtails who checked out ‘Bright April’ ”—a children’s book by Marguerite de Angeli, from 1946, and one of the first to address racism—“over and over until the fines came in.” Hayden’s childhood was shaped by two very different libraries. She was born in Tallahassee. Her father, a music professor, started the string department at Florida A. & M., a historically black university; her mother taught music and later became a social worker. She grew up in “several places,” including Illinois and New York. “I was fortunate to spend summers in Springfield, Illinois, with my grandparents,” she said. (“We would go on trips to New Salem, where Abe Lincoln spent most of his childhood,” she said. “You see the log cabins, and then Lincoln’s home right there in Springfield.” Her relatives and Lincoln are buried in the same cemetery.) Her grandfather, a retired postal worker, was the messenger for the state-capitol complex in Springfield, and young Hayden would accompany him on his rounds: governor’s office, archives, state library. “I think about it a lot now,” she said. “That one of my earliest introductions to a library was actually a state library, and going into a building that was a miniature—definitely miniature!—version of a Jefferson Building.”
Her other formative library was in Jamaica, Queens, near P.S. 196. “The little branch storefront library right across the street, where you’d go after school,” she said. “My early experiences with libraries were all about being comfortable with being around books, being around stacks, feeling free to be around them.”
Hayden, like Obama and Trump, was sworn into office on the Lincoln Bible. The week I visited, the Bible was on display in a public exhibit, called “Presidential Inauguration Treasures,” which I went to see before I met Hayden. The Bible—placed not far from a letter written by a nervous pre-Presidential George Washington (he wrote that he felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution”)—was small, like a very dignified mass-market paperback, and bound in red leather, with gold-trimmed pages. The curatorial placard said “Gift of Mary Lincoln.” A librarian said that at the Inauguration Trump had kept Lincoln’s Bible in a box—it was misting out—and had laid his own Bible on top of it. A woman next to me hooted. “It’s very symbolic, isn’t it?” she said. “The height of ego!” In the next room, a TV played clips of Inauguration speeches, and you could hear past Presidents talking about national sacrifice.
It was unexpectedly moving to see the old pageantry, the context of Lincoln’s era: the Inaugural Ball dance cards, the bizarre, elegant dinner menu (grouse, pickled oysters, calf’s foot and wine jelly). There was Roosevelt’s top hat, and Kennedy’s “Ask not,” and the Obama era evoked in a paragraph from his first Inaugural Address (“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers . . .”). There were artifacts illustrating that we want our leaders to inspire us but to express personal humility, paying respect to the citizens and the office, and artifacts illustrating how we then glorify those ideals, with music, with ceremony, with architecture.
The library itself, like Hayden’s two formative childhood libraries, expresses similar contrasts. The tile-and-marble magnificence of the Jefferson Building honors knowledge and a society that supports it. But much of the rest of the Library of Congress is more plainspoken and municipal—massive mid-century buildings, long, hospital-style hallways—which underscore that substance and practicality matter, too. Greatness and humility—the interplay and tension between them, the importance of both—seemed to echo across each gleaming stairway and emanate from each carefully labelled acid-free folder.
Hayden met the Obamas when they all lived in Chicago. When I asked about her relationship with them, she was reticent—no anecdotes, no self-aggrandizement. (She also gently demurred from talking about Trump.) But if you watch footage of the Inauguration, you can see the affection there. Hayden, in a black coat and black gloves, is seated just to the right of the Capitol door. Michelle Obama, looking melancholy, smiles and waves in her direction. A minute later, someone yells, “MAGA!” Horns sound, and Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama emerge. Obama sees Hayden, waves, beams, approaches her, and leans in for a hug. “Sir!” she says, heartily, patting him on the back.
In her office, Hayden picked up the Jefferson candy bowl and offered me some butterscotch. “This is my secret sauce,” she said. I asked if there was anything in the library’s collections that people might love to explore but not know about. “Oh, yes! Oh, my goodness, yes!” she said. “Like the comic-book collection.” It’s the largest in the world. She described the depth of knowledge among the librarians: “You’ll say, ‘I’d like to see the original “Luke Cage,” ’ because of the TV show. And then they tell you, Luke Cage first appeared in this comic . . .’ And they just keep going.”
I later visited Georgia Higley, the head of the newspaper section of the serial division, who showed me an array of comics milestones (“All-Negro Comics” from 1947; Batman; Luke Cage), many so valuable they’re available only to scholars. I was struck that even “Archie” had notes of the country’s painful history and present: “The Mirth of a Nation,” the cover said, as ice-skating Archie flew over some barrels, toward a hole. “Wonder Woman,” Winter Issue No. 7, from 1943, was called “Wonder Woman FOR PRESIDENT.” There she was, with her boots and golden lasso, banging on a lectern covered in stars-and-stripes bunting. Below that, it said, “1000 YEARS in the future!”
I also explored the music archive, which has twenty-five million items, from thousand-year-old chant music to the first opera score ever published to sheet music for “Yankee Doodle” and Beyoncé. I was shown Leonard Bernstein’s notes from the “West Side Story” auditions (“Jerry Orbach: good loud baritone”). I saw the math that Jonathan Larson did when writing “Seasons of Love,” determining the numbers of minutes they’d be singing about in “Rent,” and the original, wincingly worse lyrics for “Do-Re-Mi”: “SOW is what you do with a grain . . . TI, a drink when cake you eat.” “We’re lots about process here,” Raymond White, a senior music specialist, told me. “We love the final result—but if we know how it got there, even better.”
I thought of the drafts of Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address that a curator in the Inaugurations exhibit had shown me. Lincoln had originally ended his speech with a challenge to the South: “Shall it be peace or sword?” William Henry Seward had suggested an edit that pushed Lincoln toward a more conciliatory tone, and the phrase “guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln turned that into the sublime “better angels of our nature,” an appeal to our common humanity. Our greatest President was also, possibly, our greatest reviser—a cutter and paster who questioned his imperfect ideas, accepted input, made them better, and kept all of his drafts, so that history could learn not just from his speeches but from the workings of his mind. The contents of the library, like Hayden herself, often directed my attention to the systems by which progress is made and recorded.
Hayden told me that she wants the Library of Congress “to get to the point where there’ll still be a specialness, but I don’t want it to be an exclusiveness. It should feel very special because it is very special. But it should be very familiar.” The week before, Hayden had created a joyful buzz on the Internet, with images that captured that exact balance. Daliyah Marie Arana, a four-year-old girl from Gainesville, Georgia, who had read more than a thousand books, had been named Librarian for a Day. Hayden, smiling, guided Arana around the Jefferson Building, as Hayden’s grandfather had once guided her around the Illinois State Library. Hayden brought Arana to the ceremonial librarian’s office, where kings, queens, and heads of state have viewed the library’s treasures. Arana sat at the librarian’s desk, in her pink dress, pink bow, and pink glasses. She looked dressed up, delighted, and a little bit as if she owned the place.
