Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Library of Congress

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest library in the world is the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.  The Library of Congress was originally intended to be the library of the United States Congress, but over two centuries since its founding, it has evolved to something much grander, covering almost every subject and language imaginable.  Learn more about the Library of Congress, why it was established and how it works on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest library in the world is the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The Library of Congress was originally intended to be the Library of the United States Congress, but over two centuries since its founding, it has evolved into something much grander, covering almost every subject and language imaginable. Learn more about the Library of Congress, why it was established and how it works, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The Library of Congress is one of, if not perhaps, the largest library in the world. I'll address the size of the current library relative to others in just a bit. While it is certainly a library, it is unlike any other library that you are familiar with. It's not your community lending library, and it isn't like a college research library. However, it does have some elements of both.

The story of how the Library of Congress came to be, and how it became so big, starts in 1783, with the American founding father, James Madison. Madison was a member of the Congress of the Confederation, which was the legislature under the original Articles of Confederation after the American Revolution. Madison made what seemed like a rather simple proposal. He proposed a library that contained books relevant to Congress so that they could do their job. Madison's proposal was not adopted, but the idea stuck around. After the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, the first Congress sat in New York City. In 1790, the Residence Act was passed, which established a new national capital at an undeveloped

location along the banks of the Potomac River, including what was parts of Maryland and Virginia. Until the new capital was ready, Congress temporarily resided in Philadelphia. When Congress was in New York and Philadelphia, it simply used the libraries in those cities. The Philadelphia Library Company and the New York Society Library served as de facto libraries for Congress during that period. When Congress needed information, it just used the resources that were available to it, and there was no need in those early years for a dedicated library for Congress. And by the way, Benjamin Franklin established the Philadelphia Library Company in 1731, which was the first lending library in the United States. And the New York Society Library was established in 1754, and was an early

subscription library, which required fees to be a member. Both libraries still exist today, and are among the oldest cultural institutions in each city. In 1800, Congress was finally ready to move to its new capital, Washington. The problem was they couldn't use readily existing libraries like they did in New York and Philadelphia because there was nothing in Washington. Everything was being built from scratch. On April 24, 1800, President John Adams signed an act of Congress providing for the official transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. The act also allocated $5,000 for the purchase of books and the fitting up of a suitable apartment for their reception. $5,000 doesn't seem like a lot of money, but it was a lot of money back then.

However, by the same token, books also cost a lot of money back then. The initial collection of the library consisted of 740 books and three maps. All the books had to be ordered from London because there wasn't yet a publishing industry in the country to rival out of the United Kingdom. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson became president. Jefferson was an advocate of libraries and himself had a large personal book collection. In 1802, Jefferson signed into law a resolution which provided some organization and structure for the new congressional library. General oversight of the library was given to a joint congressional committee consisting of members of the House and the Senate, the first joint committee in congressional history. The day-to-day administration of the library was to be

assigned to a new position of the Librarian of Congress. Oddly enough, Congress didn't have the power to confirm the appointment of Librarian until 1897. The first librarian of Congress was John J. Beckley. Beckley was not a professional librarian. He was a political creature considered to be the first campaign manager in American history, and he played a fundamental role in the creation of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republican Party. Beckley was paid $2 per day, and he was paid $2 per day, and a big part of his job was actually just serving as a clerk for Congress. The position of Librarian of Congress was a lifetime appointment and remained so until 2015. The 1802 law also extended lending privileges to the president and the vice president.

The important thing was that this early library was literally just a library for Congress and then the executive branch. The next big event in the history of the Library of Congress took place in 1814. During the invasion of Washington by the British during the War of 1812, their commander, George Cockburn, ordered the burning of several government buildings, including the Library of Congress. During the subsequent fire, most of the 3,000 volumes held at the library were destroyed. One of the only titles that survived was titled, quote, an account of the receipts and expenditures of the United States for the year 1810.

Cockburn took that book as a trophy, and it was held in his family for almost 125. years until it was returned in 1940. With the library all but destroyed, it was Thomas Jefferson who came to the rescue. Jefferson offered to sell his large personal library of 6,487 books to restart the Congressional Library. Jefferson's personal library was both larger and qualitatively different than the pre-1814 Congressional Library. Jefferson was 71 years old at the time of the offer, and he had spent over 50 years collecting a very eclectic mix of books on a wide variety of subjects

from all over the world. His collection included things that would normally never be considered part of a legislative library. His libraries had copies of the Quran, cookbooks, books on technology, science, mathematics, ancient civilization, art, and many other subjects. Jefferson felt that all subjects should be part of any library of Congress. He said, quote, I do not know that it contains any branch of science of service. science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection. There is in fact no subject

to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer." End quote. In 1815, Congress agreed to buy the Jefferson Collection for $23,950. The library had now fundamentally changed. It was twice the size it was before the war and now became a general library, not a specialized library. The library kept growing over the years with occasional. request for funding and new material. The next major event in the library's history was another fire in 1851. This fire destroyed 35,000 of the 52,000 books held in the library at the time, including most of the originals purchased in the Jefferson Collection. The next year, Congress approved $168,000 to replace the books that were lost, but not to buy anything new. Over 170 years since the fire,

the library has managed to find replacements for all but 300 of Jefferson's original books. During the 1850s, there was much more debate about what the library should be. John Silva Meehan, the fourth librarian of Congress, advocated for a limited scope. The Smithsonian Institute also lobbied to become the National Library, but their board eventually opted to focus on scientific research. The library languished during the Civil War, but in 1864, President Abraham Lincoln and made the most significant appointment to the history of the library at that time. When he appointed, Ainsworth ran Spoford as the Librarian of Congress.

Spoford was the chief assistant librarian of Congress under his predecessor, John Gould Stevenson, who spent most of his time as a medic during the war. Spoford held the position for 33 years and saw a major expansion of the library during his tenure. He developed support from both sides of the aisle to turn the library into a true National Library. He began collecting extensive volumes of American literature. He was instrumental in advocating for and seeing the construction of the Thomas Jefferson Building, which opened in 1897. This building was the first structure designed specifically to house the Library of Congress and was designed to be fireproof. When the library moved there in 1897, it had a collection of

840,000 volumes. Spofford's successor, John Russell Young only held the job for two years, but in that short time, he introduced one of the biggest changes to the library, the Library of Congress classification system. Prior to this time, the library had been organized by Jefferson's original personal system, which he adopted from Francis Bacon's categorization of all knowledge. Young, a former diplomat, also greatly expanded the library's collection of foreign volumes. After young, the position went to Herbert Putnam, who held it for 40 years. Putnam expanded the library's rule beyond just a resource for Congress.

The Library of Congress became available for interlibrary loan to other major libraries. He also created the Legislative Research Service, which was a service members of Congress could use to get research on almost any issue they might have. And this was later renamed to the Congressional Research Service in 1970. The library's collection kept growing. It expanded beyond books to include things like musical instruments. The position of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress was established in 1937, and it's more commonly known as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Archibald McLeish as the librarian of Congress, who became the most famous person ever to hold the position. He was a strong supporter of democracy during the war, was later appointed to Assistant Secretary of State. The growth of the library's collection throughout the 20th century was astounding. It reached 1 million volumes in 1910, 5 million volumes in 1930, 10 million volumes in 1950, 20 million volumes in 1970, and then 90 million volumes in 1990. James Billington was appointed a librarian of Congress in 1987, and he held the position until 20,

During his tenure, the number of volumes in the collection grew from 87 million to 160 million. Under Billington's leadership, he also created the National Digital Library Program. The National Digital Library Program is an initiative by the Library of Congress aimed at making a significant portion of its vast collections accessible online to the public. Launched in the 1990s, the program focuses on digitizing and preserving a wide range of historical and cultural materials, including manuscripts, maps, photographs, sound recordings, and films. One of the functions of the Library of Congress is to run the United States Copyright Office. By law, every publisher must submit two copies of all published works to the Library of Congress. This results in 15,000 items being sent to the Library of Congress every day.

And of those, about 12,000 are added to the permanent collection. The library attempts to collect every significant work that has been published in the English language from anywhere in the world. Today, there are almost 175 million items in the collection, of which about 40 million are books. There are 838 miles, or 1,349 kilometers of shelving to hold everything. The best current estimate I could find is that if all of the printed text in the Library of Congress were converted to digital, data, it would take up about 15 terabytes. If that seems shocking, it's because of how little space text actually takes up. You can easily find 20 terabyte hard drives for sale for just a few hundred dollars on Amazon. As of 2022, the library managed 21 petabytes of digital content

comprising 914 million unique files. So if you think you're a digital pack rat, you have nothing on the Library of Congress. I want to end with something I mentioned at the start of the episode. What is the largest library in the world? There are only two contenders for the title, the Library of Congress and the British Library. The Guinness Book of World Records has declared that the Library of Congress is the largest. However, you will find some people who say the British Library is. The confusion comes from an incredibly wide range of estimates for the size of the British Library's collection. I've seen estimates that go from from 150 million all the way to 200 million.

That gap in estimates is larger than any other library in the world. The Library of Congress has changed considerably since its inception. Its collection has grown exponentially over the years, and the scope of its services and items in the collection has changed. Yet, officially, its mission has never changed in almost 225 years, serving as a resource for members of the United States Congress. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever.

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