The Library Book Read online

  Even by the standards of the time, Jones’s firing was baffling. Women had run the library in Los Angeles since 1880, dominating the institution before most libraries around the country had women in charge. Unlike Kelso, Jones was uncontroversial. The one rumor that followed her was that Dockweiler, who was a candidate for lieutenant governor and the father of thirteen children, had propositioned her, and that she had turned him down.

  The earliest figures in the American library movement were men, most of them from wealthy New England families, who took on librarianship as a form of missionary work, conveying wisdom to the ignorant masses. There were some female librarians, but they were an unempowered minority usually in subordinate roles. When the American Library Association formed in 1876, the founding members were ninety men and thirteen women. Eleven years later, the first library school was established by Melvil Dewey, the creator of the Dewey decimal system. The professionalizing of the field attracted more women, and they were accepted at a time when there were few careers available to women. In addition, many libraries were funded by women’s clubs, which made them even more receptive to female employees. But what really brought women into the field was the monumental growth of libraries at the end of the 1800s, primed by Carnegie’s example. Communities around the country began building libraries at a clip. The boom meant that there was an immediate need for more librarians. At the time, one of the few job paths open to women was teaching, and librarianship was a natural lateral move. Because the need for librarians was so great, the usual male resistance to opening ranks was overridden by the urgency for more staff. Moreover, as an 1876 article titled “How to Make Town Libraries Successful” suggested, even highly educated women could be offered lower pay than male librarians and still be willing to take the job.

  Charles Lummis had arrived in Los Angeles in 1885, when the Los Angeles Times offered him a position on its staff. At the time, Lummis was a newspaper reporter in Ohio. He accepted the offer and packed his belongings. Then he decided that he would walk from Ohio to California. The first outfit Lummis wore on his trip was a pair of knickers, a flannel shirt, tomato-red knee socks, low-cut street shoes, and a canvas coat with twenty-three pockets, which he filled with odds and ends picked up along the way, including gold nuggets, deer antlers, tobacco, pretty rocks, and rattlesnake skins. Midway through his walk to California, he swapped his knickers for a pair of buckskin leggings. After arriving in Los Angeles, Lummis continued to dress in a manner that was not typical for a Caucasian male of the 1880s. His favorite outfit was a three-button suit coat and trousers made of bright green wide-wale corduroy, which he wore with a red-and-black-patterned cummerbund. His second favorite outfit was a cropped bolero made of suede and a pair of bell-bottom pants that were so tight no one could figure out how he stuffed himself into them. He almost always accessorized with a wide-brimmed Stetson sombrero and a pair of moccasins. He wore these outfits for the rest of his life, including the five years he served as the city librarian of Los Angeles.

  Overall, Lummis’s appearance was arresting. He had a long, oval face, a fierce gaze, a beak of a nose, and a rosebud of a mouth. He was small and sinewy, with a prizefighter’s tight, taut muscles. He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1859. His father, a widower, was a stern, unyielding Methodist minister who wanted to raise stern, unyielding children. Lummis rebelled the moment he could ease out of his father’s grasp. He went to Harvard for college and socialized with Teddy Roosevelt. Lummis barely squeaked by academically, but he had a reputation as an excellent wrestler, boxer, and poker player. He was also famous for being the man with the longest hair on campus. Many students found the length of Lummis’s hair offensive. When he was a sophomore, members of the senior class posted a warning in the student newspaper saying that if Lummis didn’t cut his hair, they would get scissors and do it for him.

  Lummis didn’t have an appetite for a conventional education, but he read and wrote voraciously, especially poetry. In the summer of his junior year, he decided to publish his poems. He thought a book with paper pages would be too ordinary, so he came up with the idea of having the poems printed on birch bark. He got a supply of bark and shaved it into nearly translucent, paperlike sheets. He sewed the binding of each book himself. The book is beautiful, peculiar, light as dust, and tiny—about the size of a large pillbox. Many of the poems are Lummis’s ruminations on the natural splendor of New England, but the most popular was an ode to tobacco, one of Lummis’s great passions. Called “My Cigarette,” it begins:

  My Cigarette! Can I forget

  How Kate and I, in sunny weather,

  Sat in the shade the elm-tree made,

  And rolled the fragrant weed together . . .

  Lummis had talent for poetry, but his greater talent was for self-promotion. He sent copies of Birch Bark Poems to newspapers and magazines. He managed to get the book into the hands of Walt Whitman and Henry Longfellow, who both praised it. Lummis’s odd little book ended up selling thousands of copies, an astonishing number for poetry written by a college kid.

  After publishing Birch Bark Poems, Lummis lost all interest in college. He dropped out of Harvard and told friends he was going to become a newspaperman. Then, in an about-face, he married his girlfriend, a medical student named Dorothea Rhodes, and moved to her family’s farm in Ohio. According to Mark Thompson’s excellent book American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest, Lummis managed the Rhodes’s farm while looking for opportunities to write. Within a year, he was offered a column in the local paper. His column became so popular that it came to the attention of Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the newly launched Los Angeles Times, who persuaded Lummis to move to Los Angeles and write for his paper.

  Lummis liked to say that he walked to California because he sought “joy and information.” He was ashamed to know so little about America, and he believed that crossing it on foot was the remedy. Also, a long walk suited him; he was restless, curious, and keen for physical challenge. He was happy to flee the East Coast bourgeoisie. The West seemed raw and original, somewhere he could invent himself in the moment—the kind of place where no one would chase you with scissors if you grew your hair long. Lummis saw the walk to Los Angeles, which he called “my tramp,” as an essential journey. It was the first of many he would undertake in his life.

  His tramp was also a performance—a shrewd bit of packaging, like printing his poems on birch bark. He knew that if he arrived in California on foot, rather than in a more typical fashion, he would get attention. Before leaving Ohio, he convinced a local newspaper to publish his travel diary, which he would write in the form of a weekly letter. His first column was titled, extravagantly, “LUMMIS’ LEGS: How They Measure the Distance Between Cincinnati and Los Angeles. Sixty-three Miles Already Traversed and Only Three Thousand One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Yet to Walk.” The columns were funny and chatty and exclamatory. He described the simple challenge of walking thirty miles a day, and what he saw and experienced while he was walking—what he shot while hunting or caught while fishing, whom he met, his many aches and pains, his excitement at meeting his first real cowboys. As he crossed the middle of the country, he described his new fascination with the Southwest and with Native American culture.

  The trip was arduous. He was robbed by hoboes in Missouri and struggled through the snow on mountain passes in New Mexico. In Arizona, he fell off a rock outcropping and broke his arm, which he had to set himself using branches and strips of torn cloth. (He later said he was saved from outright calamity because he taught himself to roll cigarettes with one hand.) There were periods when he had very little to eat or drink. For most of the trip, he was completely alone. In Colorado, he adopted an abandoned greyhound puppy that he named Shadow. He loved having Shadow’s company, but after a few weeks, the dog developed rabies, and Lummis was forced to shoot him.

  Despite the challenges, it was the best time of his life. He was on his own, living by his wits,
surrounded by frontier, feeling or seeing something new every mile. He felt alive. He was convinced that the walk was good for his soul. It was definitely good for publicity. His column was carried in a score of newspapers across the country. Other papers covered his trip as a news event. Crowds gathered to watch him pass by. Sometimes when he walked into towns, several hundred people cheered him. By the time he got to California, he was a celebrity.

  13.

  Charles Lummis

  Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest (1906)

  By Lummis, Charles Fletcher

  987 L958-3

  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [sound resource] (2003)

  By Verne, Jules

  E-Audiobook

  Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (1968)

  By Flexner, Eleanor

  324.373 F619

  Encyclopedia of All Nations (1861)

  By Murray, Hugh

  910.3 M982

  Lummis didn’t seem particularly excited when he arrived in Los Angeles. He described it as “a dull little place of some 12,000 persons . . . [and] perhaps six buildings of three stories or better.” Los Angeles of 1885 wasn’t much compared to Boston, where Lummis had spent most of his life. It was barely a city. Even in California, Los Angeles was considered much less sophisticated and significant than San Francisco. The city disappointed him, but Lummis was excited about his job at the Los Angeles Times. The attention he’d drawn during his tramp followed him there, and circulation jumped the minute his byline appeared.

  But almost immediately, his restlessness resurfaced. He did not actually like having a job. He missed the drama of his tramp. To mollify him, the Times’s publisher encouraged Lummis to cover stories outside the city. The Apache Wars were ongoing in the Southwest, so Lummis began traveling there to write about them. His interest in the region and its people was abiding. He decided to learn Spanish and began speaking in a patchwork of English and Spanish whenever he could.

  On one of those trips, Lummis suffered an attack of paralysis. He recovered enough to be able to ride, shoot a rifle, and roll cigarettes, but he got worse when he returned to Los Angeles, and he could barely drag himself to work. Finally, he told the Times that he needed a leave of absence so he could recuperate. He moved to the village of San Mateo, New Mexico. He assumed his job would be waiting for him whenever he was ready for it. But the Times had grown impatient with Lummis’s wanderlust and unreliability, as had Lummis’s wife. The publisher fired him; Dorothea divorced him. Lummis had always spent whatever he’d earned on books and artifacts and travel. He’d never saved any money, and without a job, he struggled along. Once his health improved, he began freelancing as a writer and photographer. He wrote fearlessly about corruption in San Mateo. He had to leave town after one of his stories appeared because he was told that the crime bosses there planned to have him killed. (A hit man tracked him down and shot him in the leg a few months after he left San Mateo.)

  As soon as he and Dorothea divorced, he married a woman named Eve Douglas, whom he had met in New Mexico, and then traveled to Peru and Guatemala with the ethnographer Adolph Bandelier, who was studying indigenous people. He and Eve returned to Los Angeles in 1893. He was barely solvent. He worked furiously, taking any job he could find. Against his better instincts, he accepted a position as editor of a regional magazine called Land of Sunshine, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. Lummis ended up changing the magazine from a boosterish glossy into a serious publication. He renamed it Out West and persuaded writers such as Jack London and John Muir to contribute stories. He also began writing his own column. He called it “In the Lion’s Den” and wrote it in the voice of an opinionated English-speaking mountain lion.

  In addition to Out West, he wrote books and poetry and translated important Spanish documents into English. He treasured the scrappy ranch feel of old California, which was quickly disappearing as the region’s population grew. Devoting himself to preserving that history, he founded the Southwest Museum and the Landmarks Club of Southern California, which was dedicated to preserving the old Spanish missions. He also spent a lot of his time lobbying for Native American rights, to the annoyance of the federal government.

  Lummis scratched together enough money to buy a parcel of land in East Los Angeles, on the edge of Arroyo Seco, and began building a house there. It took him ten years to complete the whimsical stone structure, which he constructed with a frame of abandoned telephone poles and railroad ties. He called the house El Alisal. It was the Lummis family home, but it was also the site of constant gatherings of artists and writers. Lummis nicknamed his parties “noises.” Some of the noises were Spanish-themed, with troubadours and traditional food. Others were mock trials in which Lummis accused one of the guests of not knowing how to have fun. The defendant was then interrogated by the other guests, found not guilty, and released to join the festivities. Most of the parties at El Alisal included a lot of alcohol.

  Exterior of El Alisal

  The El Alisal living room

  Lummis’s life wasn’t on a course that would lead naturally to becoming a librarian. Most likely, he never imagined having the job until it was offered to him. He was an avid reader, and he did occasionally meet with the library board to encourage collecting books about California and the Southwest. Several members of the library board were regular attendees of the noises at El Alisal. But Lummis did not have any experience or training in the management of a library. When his appointment as city librarian of Los Angeles was announced in 1905, the Los Angeles Times editorial board argued he was unfit for the job because he had “never set foot in a library school, wore eccentric corduroy suits and was known to drink and swear on occasion.”

  At that point, Lummis’s personal life was in tatters. He had conducted dozens of extramarital affairs. His partners were rumored to include Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, one of the wealthiest women in California; Kate Wiggin, author of the novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; several of his secretaries; evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson; and the teenage daughter of Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who first summoned him to Los Angeles. Lummis had also just learned that he had an illegitimate daughter as the result of a brief romance during college. After they met, the girl moved to Los Angeles to live with him.

  Not surprisingly, Lummis was the focus of endless gossip. He was reckless, dramatic, quixotic, romantic, and perhaps a bit of a tall-tale teller. He drank a lot. He suffered from a series of mysterious illnesses that might have been psychosomatic. His flair for being noticed, which was once unerring and graceful, now struck some people as effortful and egotistical. Isidore Dockweiler was a good friend of Lummis’s and a regular guest at El Alisal. When he suggested that Lummis should take over the library, it must have seemed to Lummis like a chance for calm in his stormy life.

  Mary Jones did not agree that she should be removed from the library, and she particularly objected to the idea that she should yield her position simply because she was not a man. She ignored the library board’s request and came to work the next day. She told her staff that they should proceed as if it were an ordinary day, and that she didn’t wish to discuss the matter any further. That evening, the library board met with Lummis to work out the details of his new job. The salary he was offered was twice what Jones was being paid. The board invited Jones to join the meeting, with the hope that she would come bearing her letter of resignation. She did attend, but without either the letter or any intention of resigning. Instead, she read a statement saying she had no plans to leave her job “when such resignation is requested solely on the ground that the best interests of the department demand that its affairs no longer be administered by a woman.”

  Dockweiler responded that Jones didn’t need to resign because she was being fired. Lummis was sitting in the back of the room. After a moment of fraught silence, he stood up and said that he had accepted the job because he had been told that Jones
was leaving willingly. He added that he looked forward to “upbuilding the character of the library, which already has such a fine reputation.” Lummis, who was passionate about the rights of minorities, didn’t seem fazed by the circumstances of his hiring.

  The next day, the Friday Morning Club, which was the city’s most distinguished women’s organization, held a meeting at which Mary Jones spoke. She told the audience that she still considered herself the city librarian, and that she had the keys to her office and to the library’s safe and she intended to keep them. The women of the Friday Morning Club cheered. Jones then went to work. Lummis stewed at home and wrote a column for Out West sulkily justifying his decision to take the job, noting, “no other public business . . . in California is administered by a woman, nor is expected to be.”

  The next day, one thousand women signed a petition saying that the Great Library War of Los Angeles would end only if Jones was reconfirmed as head librarian and the commissioners behind the attempted ouster were kicked off the board. Neither the board nor the mayor, Owen McAleer, to whom the board reported, responded. A few days later, led by the Friday Morning Club, the women of Los Angeles marched in support of Mary Jones. The streets were filled. The crowds did not deter Lummis, who came to City Hall wearing his green corduroy suit and Stetson sombrero, and was sworn in as city librarian. He then left town to go trout fishing with his son. Jones continued to report to her office at the library, probably jangling her keys.

  News of the battle got around, and librarians around the country rallied in support of Mary Jones. Some traveled to Los Angeles to take part in the protests. Many visited Jones in her office; a number of them brought her flowers. Mayor McAleer hated the attention the controversy was bringing to the city and wanted to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, so he called for a general meeting. Thousands of women, including feminist activists Susan B. Anthony and Reverend Anna H. Shaw, attended. The resulting discussion was raucous and inconclusive. The members of the library board refused to speak when they were addressed. Mayor McAleer then announced that he was firing all of the members of the library board. They, however, refused to be fired. The stalemate continued for weeks. For the time being, the Los Angeles Public Library was run by a fired head librarian who refused to leave, and a fired board of commissioners who refused to yield.