Abstract
Private libraries for the use of the working man were established throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, beginning in 1820 in large Eastern cities. These libraries were often part of institutes which included museums, schools, and exhibits of mechanical inventions, and were intended to ‘promote orderly and virtuous habits, diffuse knowledge and the desire for knowledge, improve the scientific skills of mechanics and manufacturers’. With the rise of organised labor movements in the 1870s, the purpose of such libraries shifted to serve as ‘antidotes of strikes and communism’. At this time, the work of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) with railroad and industrial workers began to focus on promoting loyalty to the corporation and rejection of unionisation and political unrest through the Railroad YMCA and Industrial YMCA divisions. Multiple railroads both partnered with the YMCA and opened their own libraries and reading rooms to achieve similar goals. One of these was the Santa Fe Railroad, which established reading rooms throughout the Southwestern United States in large part to serve as a ‘civilising’ influence on railroad employees and towns. Initially restricted to Santa Fe Railroad employees and their families, these reading rooms soon became the social and intellectual centres of the communities in which they were established. The vast majority of reading rooms closed between 1929 and 1940, owing in part to the Great Depression, but also as victims of their own success, as the communities in which they were located grew and expanded and provided alternatives such as churches, schools, and public libraries. Their history mirrors the history of the establishment of public libraries during the same period – they were even being called ‘quasi-universities’ – and reveals much about the greater social and cultural climate in which both institutions developed. Like those of public libraries, the users of these reading rooms utilised them for their own purposes, regardless of the intentions of the founders, and turned them into public places and spaces.
Between 1898 and 1925, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company (Santa Fe Railroad) built a system of thirty-six reading rooms and clubhouses for the use of its employees and their families along its route from Chicago through the Southwest into northern California. These facilities were the ideological descendants of the libraries founded by mechanics’ and apprentices’ benevolent associations in the early nineteenth century in that they were established to meet the immediate needs of the railroad for reliable employees at remote division points along the route. Ultimately, however, they became community centres and so filled a role similar to that of the public library in the small, isolated settlements where they were located. Like public libraries, while initially established by those in power for social control through self-education and self-improvement, they responded to the users’ desires for entertainment and recreation, as well as education and information.
The Apprentices’ Library of Boston, founded in 1820, was the first known library of its kind. It was soon followed by the libraries of the Portland Maine Charitable Mechanics’ Organization, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York, and the Apprentices’ Free Library of Philadelphia. In addition to providing support for mechanics in financial distress and their widows and orphans, the Portland Maine Charitable Mechanics’ Organization also aimed to ‘promote inventions and improvements in the mechanic arts’,1 which required access to a library of scientific and technological works.2 Ultimately, these libraries expanded their services and collections to include ‘schools, museum collections, and exhibits of models of mechanical invention’,3 and those founded beginning in the 1840s charged membership fees and were open to the entire working community. Their mission also shifted, in response to urban growth, to one of encouraging virtue and discouraging vice through the provision of morally uplifting literature which would ‘insure the security and blessedness of the home against the “temptations of idleness and vice” and draw the younger generation … away “from the haunts where they annoy others and injure themselves”’.4 Employers began creating mechanics’ and apprentices’ libraries as much for their own benefit as for the employees’ as they looked to the libraries to ‘promote orderly and virtuous habits, diffuse knowledge and the desire for knowledge, improve the scientific skills of mechanics and manufacturers’.5
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the mission of these libraries shifted once again, this time towards providing working men (and women to a smaller extent) with the technical knowledge to improve their skills and also with access to the philosophical, scientific, and cultural knowledge that had previously been the property of the privileged elite.6 In 1851, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was established in order to provide young men who had arrived in the city looking for work with a home-like environment which was pervaded by a Christian atmosphere. In addition to the libraries founded for the benefit of working men on land, the American Seamen’s Friend Society, spurred by the same religious zeal as the YMCA, was founded in 1859 to provide improving reading materials to men on ships through its portable library programme, which continued until 1967.7
Beginning in the 1870s with the rise of organised labour, those who supported these libraries financially looked for them to serve as ‘antidotes of strikes and Communism’.8 They restricted their contents to works that promoted loyalty to the United States and to one’s employer, and argued against unions, strikes, and the political ideologies of communism, anarchism, and populism.8
The demise of mechanics’ and apprentices’ libraries was due, in large part, to the growth of public libraries and to the establishment of public elementary and secondary education during the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the private library collections were absorbed by the local tax-supported public library, which styled itself ‘the university of the people’ and was promoted as an institution of individual and social improvement and reform.9 The public library provided access to a wider range of materials, did not charge a membership fee, and offered many of the same services as the private libraries it replaced. Those services, in most cases, were provided by a professionally trained librarian. Ironically, one of the most potent forces in the establishment of the public library in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Andrew Carnegie, ascribed his support for public libraries to his access to his employer’s private library while he was a young apprentice.
The YMCA would establish the largest system of private social libraries designed for the working man. Members were required to attend prayer meetings and Bible study, and full voting membership was restricted to members of evangelical Christian churches, while others could join as associate members. With its carefully selected collection, the hope was that the library ‘might be the bait by which not a few will be won to Christ’,10 while it would also meet the spiritual needs of the already converted. As with the mechanics’ libraries and, later, the public libraries, the works were intended to ‘uplift moral character by providing good reading and lessening the temptation to read harmful books’, such as dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and other sensational literature.11
By 1859, there were 145 YMCAs with libraries in twenty-nine states.12 The number of libraries reached its peak in 1891, when 734 of the 1,373 associations each maintained a library of at least fifty volumes. By 1900, libraries were located in associations in thirty-nine states, Alaska Territory, and eight provinces of Canada.13
New programmes, services, and activities were added to the prayer meetings and Bible study in the post-Civil War period in order to counteract the increasing temptations of the saloon and brothel. These included employment agencies, educational lectures and courses, and, in keeping with its promotion of the philosophy of ‘Muscular Christianity’,14 athletic equipment and facilities.15 To support these programmes, the new buildings erected after the war each featured a library or reading room, at least one auditorium for general lectures and programmes, additional meeting rooms for local literary societies, classrooms for specialised lectures and courses, gymnasiums with swimming pools and other facilities for athletics, dormitories and hotels, workshops for manual training, and storerooms and offices.16
A forgotten chapter in the history of the YMCA is that of the Railroad YMCA, a branch of the YMCA that established libraries and reading rooms in partnership with one or the other of the railroad companies.17 The first Railroad YMCA was opened in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1872.18 The effort proved so successful that by 1833 seventy railroads had partnered with the YMCA, with railroads contributing $50,000 of the $75,000 annual budget. The facilities included sleeping rooms or dormitories, a restaurant or lunch room, baths and a barbershop, and a first aid station, as well as a library and rooms for evening classes, lectures, and workshops. In order to appeal to a wider range of railroad employees than evangelical Christians, activities gradually expanded to include social as well as religious and educational offerings, including billiards, bowling, and dances.19 By 1930, there were more than 200 branches.20
Railroad YMCAs were a response to the need for lodging, meals, entertainment, and other services for railroad crews who were stopping over at isolated stops along lines in the sparsely populated areas of the Midwest and Southwest. In the 1870s and later, train crews’ shifts covered distances of 100 miles, called ‘railroad divisions’, at the end of which they would stop over at a ‘division point’ to wait for their next shift on a train going in the opposite direction back to their point of origin, which was often their permanent home. Few employees other than the station master resided at the division points. Stopovers varied from a few hours to twenty-four, and often the men did not know exactly when their train would arrive. Most division points were in remote areas where, except in saloons and brothels, provision of lodgings and meals was scarce: ‘For example, bars outnumbered grocery stores six to one in San Marcial, a Santa Fe division point in New Mexico’.21 Socially approved entertainment and recreational opportunities, likewise, were lacking. Men who had recourse to the saloon for their recreation presented a particular danger to themselves and others, as railroad work required men who were sober and alert in order to avoid industrial accidents and deaths.22 The railroad also had to pay off the gambling debts of men who were arrested for non-payment or else lose their services. Although the men’s wages were garnished to repay their debts, the railroad carried the cost. At the same time, larger municipalities in the West that might provide alternative accommodation were reluctant to allow a railroad terminal or exchange point within their boundaries because it would attract an ‘undesirable’ or ‘tough element’, just at a time when these fledgling communities were attempting to attract families and businesses that would bring stability and economic prosperity. The Railroad YMCAs provided the men with an alternative to ‘the saloon, the brothel, and the gambling resort’,23 including affordable meals and lodgings, social activities, practical lectures and classes ‘on subjects of value to railroad men’, and reading rooms and libraries with ‘current literature and the best books’, as well as the expected religious meetings and Bible study.24
The Railroad YMCAs were also designed for the purpose of providing a potent challenge to the labour unions which were forming at this time by preaching loyalty to the employer as a religious duty. Railroads had been hit by strikes by various unions and types of workers in 1877, 1886, 1887, 1888, 1890, 1892, 1893, and 1894.25 Each strike represented losses of profit, owing not only to the concessions won by the workers but also to the custom that was lost during the work stoppages. The railroads promoted their partnership with the Railroad YMCA as a demonstration of their concern for the needs of the working man and utilised it as a means of building employee loyalty through the provision of such services and resources. In 1897, Samuel H. Ranck, librarian of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore (Maryland), praised the Railroad YMCA and other railroad libraries of the day for raising ‘men to a higher physical, intellectual, and moral plane of life – the very fundamentals of faithful service. In other words, it pays to have some regard for the men outside of working hours’.26 These words echo those of the earlier mechanics’ and apprentices’ library founders and also the founders of many public libraries throughout the United States.
Although the Santa Fe Railroad began by supporting Railroad YMCAs, including one in its namesake Topeka (Kansas), in 1898 it instituted its own programme of libraries, reading rooms, and clubhouses, which followed the model created by the YMCA. These were to serve the same purposes of providing the men with alternative lodging, food, and entertainment and of developing loyalty to the corporation and so discouraging unionisation. By establishing its own programme, the railroad ensured that ‘the source and center of authority rested in the Company itself, and not in any foreign institution’, resulting in exclusive loyalty to the Santa Fe Railroad.27
Originally chartered in 1859 to provide freight and passenger service from Atchison, Kansas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, via Topeka, by 1895 the Santa Fe Railroad had extended westwards through Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Los Angeles in California and eastwards through Illinois to Chicago. The railroad had both laid and purchased 6,345 miles of new and existing track and operated 32,293 units (engines, freight cars, passenger cars, etc.). By 1900, it had extended as far north in California as the San Francisco Bay area. By 1915, it operated 11,000 miles of track, grossed $111,109,770 with a net gain of $20,183,965, and employed many thousands of individuals in a variety of positions.28 It operated as a passenger and freight line until 1971, when all passenger railroads were consolidated into Amtrak, then as a freight line only until 1996, when it merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad to form the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, or BNSF.29
While not all railroad employees at that time were white and native-born, membership of the railroad labour unions was restricted to white men who could read and write English,30 as were all supervisory positions, including that of station master.31 By 1895, nearly all Black people who worked for the railroads did so as service workers, ‘the Pullman porter and maid, the dining car cook and waiter, and the railroad station red cap’,32 and so worked for either the Pullman Company or the Fred Harvey Corporation.33 Although the original track-laying teams had been composed primarily of Irish immigrants, by the turn of the century in the Southwest ‘Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans dominated track crews … Mexican men … found more work on railroads than in any other industry. Railroads … competed sharply with local farmers and mine owners to retain them’.34 By 1914, the number of Mexican and Mexican-American employees had grown to the extent that the railroad provided Spanish–English dictionaries to the foremen.35 It is also known that men of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico found work laying track for the Santa Fe Railroad as early as 1880 and later accepted positions at Albuquerque, Gallup, and other stations on the line.36 Mexicans and Native Americans were recruited in part because they were believed to be less likely than white employees to join unions, although foremen complained that they ‘performed railroad work exceptionally well at first, but became less motivated as they became “Americanized”’.37 However, there is no evidence that the libraries of the reading rooms contained materials in any language except English, and the extant photographs show only white people using the facilities.38
The Santa Fe Railroad President William B. Strong instituted a programme of reading rooms and libraries in the early 1880s, which had resulted in the establishment twenty-one reading rooms by 1888. The impetus was the expansion of the Santa Fe Railroad into the desert Southwest in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Unlike the flat lands and smooth slopes of the Midwestern prairies, the Southwest was and is a country of ‘mountains and dangerous grades where cloud-bursts and sand-storms were common, and where the elements suddenly and not infrequently played sad havoc’.39 Because of the geography, the railroad needed its most qualified and experienced employees to serve as engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors in this area, but ‘the company found it difficult to persuade this class to locate in the territory’,40 particularly those with families, given the isolation and lack of appropriate and adequate services and amenities for wives and children at most division points.41 However, the financial crisis of 1889 led to the closure of most of the reading rooms, although the employees at La Junta (Colorado) ‘unanimously [and successfully] petitioned that surplus hospital funds be used to keep their facility open’.42
The Santa Fe Reading Rooms and Clubhouses established ten years later were the brainchild of Edward P. Ripley, who became President of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1895. Ripley recognised that the railroad would have to ‘provide a sort of home and a congenial social atmosphere’ in order to attract the quality of employee it desired by persuading employees’ wives to accompany them with their children. Stations on the line west of Albuquerque were especially difficult to staff with men who had families, even with the offer of increased wages, as the stations were isolated and living conditions were harsh. There was constant turnover as the men requested transfers back to the cities where their families lived. Because of this, ‘Very often, it became necessary to employ men not of the highest character or ability’43 leading to increased accidents to employees and damage to and loss of equipment and freight. In order to attract a better quality of employee to these stations and reduce turnover, the needs of wives and children were ‘one of the ultimate objects of the influence of the reading-rooms’, and accommodating the educational and recreational needs of families was a practical business decision, as ‘women and the home were … the most important factors in the success of the man and the husband’.44 In keeping with his belief in the stabilising force of a wife and family, Ripley encouraged Mexican employees to bring their wives and children with them when they immigrated, even providing basic company housing for them.45
Ripley appointed Samuel E. Busser as Superintendent of Reading Rooms for the Santa Fe Railroad on 28 September 1898. Busser was a graduate of Yale Divinity School who had served as the pastor of various Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches in the Midwestern United States.46 His charge was to attract the men to the reading rooms and to books, to teach them ‘what to read, and how to read them; to become personally acquainted with the men themselves, and generally keep watch on the way the reading rooms are conducted, the class of literature furnished; the attendance, the kind of reading that is most popular’.47 He was to engage the men in ‘discussions with each other and with [the librarians] … on moral, social, economic or ethical questions’, but was not ‘expected to preach, nor to talk to unwilling listeners’. Ripley specifically instructed Busser to ‘Read up on the relations of the railroad to the public’, and promised that, when the men asked questions that he found difficult to answer, Ripley would ‘send you anything of this kind that you want’,48 which would, of course, present the railroad’s perspective on the issue. Busser was to report monthly to the Santa Fe Railroad managers (assistant directors) on the librarians and the reading rooms, in particular on ‘the way they perform their duties’, and to make ‘such recommendations as he may think proper’ in regard to the collections and the entertainments, but was not to usurp the librarians’ ‘responsibility in the care of the rooms’.49 He was designated ‘the agent of the company’ to the Railroad YMCA, and was instructed to cooperate ‘as far as may be mutually satisfactory’ and report to the railroad managers on ‘the conduct of the institutions … to which we contribute’.50 With this charge, Ripley implied that he (and by extension, the Santa Fe Railroad) would not hesitate to exert control over those reading rooms, while eschewing any control over the Santa Fe Reading Rooms by the Railroad YMCA.
Busser’s office was located in the station in Albuquerque, from where he could travel along the line in both directions. His wife was ‘placed in charge of the matrons and sleeping apartments’. She was responsible for supervising the mending of the bed linens and the arrangements of the rooms. It is unlikely that she was paid for these services.51
In addition to ensuring that the railroad replaced the YMCA as the ‘source and center’, Busser was to employ secular, not religious, means, of appealing to all railroad employees, including non-Christians and atheists. In this, Ripley and Busser reflected the new secular values of the Progressive Era, including William James’s and John Dewey’s pragmatism, which held that ‘the attitude of open-minded empiricism provided a better orientation to life than any rigid set of preordained values’.52 Unlike the libraries of the Railroad YMCA, the reading rooms were ‘not in any sense charitable or religious enterprises’,53 and Busser was to ‘act as a man, rather than a clergyman’.54 He agreed not to use his title of Reverend and to avoid taking a ‘religious standpoint, except so far as religion means correct living and good morals’.55 Although not specifically religious or Christian, ‘correct living and good morals’ were defined in white, Western masculine cultural terms such as sobriety, loyalty to one’s employer, and deference to corporate and political authority.
This difference between the philosophy behind the Santa Fe Reading Rooms and those operated by the Railroad YMCA would be alluded to in numerous promotional materials. As early as 1902, Busser wrote that ‘the laboring men of this period … have had enough of that pious twaddle which is spent in praying for them and doing nothing for them’.56 Speaking to the Santa Fe employees via the house magazine, he explicitly contrasted the Santa Fe system with that of the Railroad YMCA and its requirement that members be affiliated with an evangelical Christian church, saying, ‘recognizing that we all have shades of religious belief on a great railroad system … we did not want to coerce anyone on these matters and deemed it unwise to repel any employe [sic] from the privileges of the buildings’.57 Speaking as a pragmatist, Ripley appealed to believers of all religions and creeds, as well as non-believers, when he said that ‘the man who walks with truthfulness, sobriety and morality … will be infinitely happier in this world than the man who does not; and if there is another world he need not fear it’.58 And, of course, that man would also be a much more valuable employee of the railroad.
Busser echoed the doctrines of Muscular Christianity when he argued that if ‘all the superstition [is taken] out of religion’, what is left is ‘only bare manhood, and after all, manhood is the salvation of the world … The Santa Fe solution [to a happy and successful life] is to get all you can out of this existence, and not worry about some other’.59 While this may appear to be an unexpected position for an ordained Christian minister to promote, ‘manhood’ was understood in the Muscular Christianity terms of walking in ‘truthfulness, sobriety and morality’ and demonstrating loyalty to one’s country and one’s employer.
Busser further implied that the Railroad YMCA infantilised its members with its prayer meetings and Bible study, explaining that ‘when it comes to operating Sunday schools and kindergartens on the line and taking sides in religious controversies, the Company has preferred to be counted out’,60 thus making a virtue of neutrality. He further encouraged the employees to be responsible for each other’s care and safety, instructing them, ‘instead of directing your eyes on God, who is far off, better turn them to the man who is alongside you. Instead of getting ready to go to heaven when you die, get ready to live properly on the earth’.61 And, if they were looking towards each other, their eyes would also be directed towards their supervisors, managers, and ultimately President Ripley, and they would be getting ready to live properly as employees of the Santa Fe Railroad.
While the desire that ‘the source and center of authority rested in the Company itself, and not in any foreign institution’ referred specifically to the Railroad YMCA as the ‘foreign institution’, by extension it applied equally to labour unions. Ripley wrote to Busser, ‘We want them to see what is right as between themselves and the company, to the end that we may all pull together, and the more they read and study the better it will be for us and for them’.62 He called the railroad’s perspective one of ‘enlightened selfishness’ (this would be called ‘enlightened self-interest’ today) in that it was willing to spend the money necessary to construct and maintain reading rooms and clubhouses ‘because [the men] will do their work more intelligently and more conscientiously; besides being much happier themselves’.63
Ripley declared, ‘I wish the brotherhood idea to prevail – that we are all one family’: he saw the employee in the position of dependant, and himself and the other white, male members of the management in the paternal role, responsible for the intellectual, educational, and moral development and edification of the employees, as parents were for that of children.64 Busser called the reading rooms ‘an attempt to solve some of the darkest and most difficult sociological problems of the age’, by which he meant closing ‘the chasm between the employer and the employed’.65 The desired solution, however, would necessarily be one that preserved the capitalist hierarchy, not one that empowered the worker as an equal.
The reading rooms and clubhouses were to be ‘free and easy resorts for the men and their families … centers of amusement … intellectual and social centers … club rooms, lecture halls, music centers, and where everyone should have the largest liberty in the expression of his views on all subjects that might not be construed as an assault on individuals or the Company’.66 In all of this, Ripley and Busser echoed the language of pragmatism, Muscular Christianity, and the union organisers in the service of the railroad, focusing on the concepts of self-improvement, brotherhood, mutual responsibility, collegiality, and loyalty. The men were encouraged to do what was good for the railroad because that would be good for them as employees and as individuals, and, in turn, the railroad would do what was good for the employees without the intervention of the YMCA or labour unions.
Implicit it all of this and further setting the Santa Fe system apart from that of the Railroad YMCA was that it was ‘conducted as a business proposition’,67 rather than as a philanthropy or a charity. A nominal sum was charged for the use of the sleeping rooms, bathing facilities, and meals, as well as for pool and billiards, giving the employees a sense of ownership alongside the railroad and making some of the locations self-supporting.68 Also, refusing to accept donations from philanthropic organisations and individuals permitted the railroad to maintain complete control over the programme and to make decisions based on what was best for the Santa Fe Railroad, rather than on the desires or values of donors.
Busser called the reading rooms that had been built under President Strong ‘old shacks’ that were ‘badly situated, lighted and furnished’ with ‘no method of reporting or replenishing books or of circulating them’.69 He proposed expanding the system not merely in numerical terms but also in materials provided and services rendered. New buildings were constructed, and porticoes and extensions were added to the surviving ‘old shacks’ in Dodge City (Kansas), Purcell (Oklahoma), La Junta (Colorado), Raton, San Marcial, and Albuquerque (New Mexico), Winslow (Arizona), and Needles (California). These buildings were painted, and new furniture and books installed, in order to make them ‘attractive club resorts for the men’.70 In Raton, a former Harvey House was converted into a reading room, complete with bowling alley and billiard room, and the hotel rooms were used as sleeping rooms for the railroad employees. A swimming pool and gymnasium were added to the Needles reading room at a cost of $60,000.71
The new facilities were called variously reading rooms and clubhouses, although ‘reading room’ was the most commonly used term. Busser explained that the difference between a reading room and a clubhouse was that the clubhouse provided sleeping rooms. A few also had Harvey House restaurants attached.72 However, he often used ‘reading room’ to include both clubhouses and reading rooms, making it difficult to know with any accuracy how many of each were operating at any given time.
The new reading rooms were generally two-storey structures which included a library and reading room, a billiards room, sleeping rooms and bathrooms, auditoriums and conference rooms, gymnasiums and bowling alleys. Most were constructed of wood, although a few were brick and six were constructed of adobe in the Spanish mission style.73 Later, they would be constructed of concrete pebble-dash, in two storeys with a basement and mission-style portico.74 By 1909 the railroad had spent $250,000 on facilities and they cost $75,000 a year to operate, including the salaries for the forty-six staff members.75 By 1912, at least twenty-five clubhouses and reading rooms were in operation, and the railroad also continued to provide monetary support for the Railroad YMCAs in Argentine and Topeka (Kansas), Cleburne and Temple (Texas), and Las Vegas (New Mexico). Ten more clubhouses would be built by 1925, bringing the total to thirty-five (later thirty-six) located between Chicago and Richmond.76 Financial support for the five Railroad YMCAs continued throughout the period, and for a sixth in Albuquerque, built in 1916.77 While it appears that there was a reading room at the station where the Superintendent of Reading Rooms had his offices, the railroad left it to the Railroad YMCA to construct a clubhouse,78 probably because the railroad considered that the city of Albuquerque provided adequate restaurants, hotels, and enticements for the men and their families. The railroad also maintained a reading room and library at the Los Angeles Hospital and sent newspapers to the hospital at Albuquerque, and ‘first-class periodical literature and other materials’ to the fire department’s headquarters in Needles and Richmond, ‘to make them more attractive places’.79
Although use of the facilities and services was generally restricted to Santa Fe Railroad employees and their immediate families, ‘some exceptions to this rule were made in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, where, for the sake of the family, a true and bright social life seemed to be needed’.80 In those sparsely settled areas the reading room’s facilities and services were available to the community at large, so that it became a public space as well as a community centre.
Finally, a few reading rooms were located in ‘open towns’, that is, towns with relatively substantial populations but few or no laws or law enforcement, where it was hoped that they would ‘bring to bear some influence for good on cities and communities, on the theory that, the better the people in any Santa Fe town, the safer was our property, and more business would be developed’.81 And the more that local business was developed, the greater the need for freight to be carried both into and out of the town and for business passengers to travel to and from that location.
This need for social stability and control was also central to the establishment of public libraries in Western mining and railroad towns, where they were promoted as institutions which would attract families and businesses, provide moral instruction and guidance to adults and children, and transmit culture to children and to immigrants.82 Chambers of commerce and other such organisations used images of the local public library on their promotional material to attract new business, and even implied that a Carnegie library grant was Carnegie’s imprimatur on the community as a sound business investment. The directors of the Copper Queen mine in Bisbee (Arizona) founded a joint church and library in 1882 in order to provide ‘a Christian and an educational influence’ after a murder and lynching at the camp,83 while the city of Tucson established a public library in 1885 in order to provide Southern Pacific Railroad men with a place to go during the ‘long winter evenings … and thus keep out of more pernicious society’.84 The short-lived Library-Gymnasium movement in Utah from 1907 to 1911 was a similar response to these same social and economic issues.85
The collections of the libraries were carefully selected to appeal to the railroad employees first and foremost. Although Busser chose most of the materials himself, he solicited suggestions and requests from employees in order to stimulate their interest and because ‘In this way, it is known just what lines of thought the employees are following, and correct provision can be made for their wants’.86 It is likely that this meant provision for allowing them to continue in their acceptable lines of thought, as well as for correcting unacceptable lines of thought and bringing them more into line with the railroad’s policy. The majority of the collections, which included books, newspapers, and magazines as well as reference works, consisted of non-fiction; about 40 per cent was scientific and technical and 20 per cent biography, history, and travel, and the remaining 40 per cent was ‘good novels’.87
The ‘librarians’ of the reading rooms were primarily veteran railroad employees, for whom the position was a form of old-age or disability pension. Compensation included a salary and a suite of rooms in the reading room for the librarian and his family.88 The railroad also occasionally appointed widows of Santa Fe employees and possibly unmarried adult daughters to these positions, which they treated as a form of financial support for survivors,89 in much the same way as such women were appointed as public librarians by library boards in other communities. The librarian of the reading room in Richmond, California, was a woman on at least three occasions; the Richmond reading room was referred to as ‘the matrimonial bureau’ because by 1912, ‘three lady librarians have been courted and won while holding that position’.90
In addition to maintaining the collections and providing circulation services to the employees, librarians also served as custodians of the buildings and grounds, maintaining the equipment and providing landscaping services. When the railroad’s Entertainment Circuit began, they were responsible for ensuring the success of the entertainments and providing services to the entertainers.91 Other library staff included the matron (usually the wife of the librarian), a porter, and a night man. These were all paid positions, including that of the matron.92
The motto of the Santa Fe Reading Rooms system was ‘Give a man a bath, a book, and an entertainment that appeals to his mind and hopes by music and knowledge, and you have enlarged, extended and adorned his life; and, as he becomes more faithful to himself, he is more valuable to the Company’,93 and the railroad’s Entertainment Circuit was instituted to provide the third factor. In appealing to ‘his mind and his hopes by music and knowledge’, the entertainment was to be educational rather than solely amusing or distracting, emulating the popular lyceum movement of the day.94 The circuit began in 1900, when the popular lecturer Professor Thomas H. Dinsmore accompanied Busser on a trip through the Southwest. He lectured on anatomy and physiology at the reading rooms in La Junta, Raton and Albuquerque, Winslow, and Seligman (Arizona). Such lectures were sporadic during the early years, but soon were organised to become more frequent and more regular. At its height, the Bureau of Entertainments provided as many as 500 entertainments throughout the system in a single six-month period. Busser selected the entertainers himself, thus ensuring that the railroad remained the ‘source and center of authority’ and maintained control over what was presented. Entertainments were scheduled during the winter season, when it was cooler in the Southwest than at other times of year and there were fewer paying passengers travelling on the trains. Entertainers were not paid a salary, but did receive free transport, a room, and board for the entire journey. Local employees were encouraged to treat the entertainers as ‘guests of the company’ and ‘show [them] around the various points of interest and make them feel at home’.95 Miss Etta M. Elliott, who presented ‘An Evening with Tennyson’, wrote to praise the ‘polite, solicitous body of Santa Fe employes [sic] who did all they could to make us both comfortable and happy’. She called the Entertainment Circuit ‘a most splendid’ plan and ‘a magnanimous thing to do. It will make better men and women’.96
Entertainments included lectures on medical, scientific, and literary topics, literary readings, theatrical and musical performances, concerts, vaudeville performances, and comedy performances, as well as ‘Books, and How to Read Them’ presented by Busser.97 Glee clubs were particularly popular. Entertainments always ended with a social hour and, often, a dance. The railroad contracted with about thirty individual and group acts, with each act giving an average of ten performances, one each in each of ten different cities. Reading rooms could look forward to an average of ten entertainments during the six-month period during which the circuit operated each year.98 Those reading rooms located in the more remote areas would be visited by as many as sixteen acts, while those in larger communities with other appropriate options for entertainment and recreation would see fewer.99
Performances were offered free of charge to Santa Fe employees and their families, and any remaining seats were offered to members of the community, also at no charge.100 All obstacles to employees’ attendance were minimised. Not only were employees seated first, but they were told explicitly that ‘you will be just as welcome in your work clothes as in your dress suits’.101 Performances scheduled for the smaller reading rooms were often held at a local auditorium or opera house which could accommodate the performers and the audience.102 The circuit began to decline in 1925, with Busser’s death, and was eliminated entirely in 1938,103 owing in part to the loss of its leading promoter and also to the effects of the Great Depression. Railroad passenger and freight traffic had dropped sharply, leading to an equally sharp drop in the number of employees utilising any of the reading rooms or their services. By 1940, the vast majority of reading rooms had been closed and some demolished, owing also to the growth of many of the communities in which they were located. The services provided became unnecessary when employees had the choice of multiple hotels and restaurants and local entertainment venues, including cinemas, public swimming pools and gymnasiums, bowling alleys, and public libraries.104
The initial reaction of the Santa Fe Railroad employees to the reading rooms and clubhouses was largely one of ‘suspicion and doubt. They thought it was a trick to get them at a disadvantage’.105 Rumour had it that the ‘funds being used for reading-rooms were being taken from the hospital money’,106 possibly in reference to the previous use of such funds in La Junta. According to Busser, ‘it took considerable time to win them to the larger conception of human life and the destiny of the human race’ that was presented by the reading rooms and clubhouses, but ultimately, the reading rooms became the ‘pride of the employees as well as the company’.107 In 1902, on the basis of usage reports from the librarians, he estimated that ‘half the men are regular attendants, one-fourth, occasional, [and] one-eight semi-occasional’ users of the reading rooms. ‘This means that at some time during the day of twelve hours when the reading room is open, these employees use its privileges in some way’.108
The firmest evidence that the reading room system had the desired effect, or a desired effect, was the fact that the railroad supported it for more than forty years as a business proposition. The system succeeded in attracting well-qualified men and their families to remote stations and in reducing industrial accidents and damage to railroad property and freight. Busser reported as early as 1912 that, once a reading room or clubhouse was established, ‘the men [were] willing to live and work anywhere, and [did] not ache all the time for a change’,109 as their families had relocated with them. He stated that the ‘callers’ (who called men to their shifts) looked for the men in the reading rooms first, that ‘garnishment for gambling debts is a thing of the past’, and that ‘the reading-rooms constitute the best prohibitory system of temperance in the world’.110 Furthermore, he stated, ‘wrecks from carelessness or the violation of rules have been practically eliminated’, property damage minimised, and industrial accidents greatly reduced.111 He also claimed that Santa Fe employees never cursed the railroad officials, and that scandals were practically unknown.
According to Busser, the reading rooms also achieved their goal of teaching the men what books to read, and how to read them. He wrote that ‘There has been a decided improvement in the choice of the men for books’ and that every book requested for purchase passed his inspection. However, he also admitted that the men ‘with the short time at their disposal … take to magazines rather than books’ and that the books were read more by the members of the men’s families than by the men themselves.112
Finally, it was reported that, as a result of the entertainments, ‘the men are more courteous, more loyal to the best interests of the corporation, more intelligent in the performance of their duties, more solicitous about the prosperity and financial success of the reading-rooms’.113 In a letter accompanying his 1914 annual report, Busser reported to Ripley that he had ‘received a good many letters from employes [sic] and their families thanking the Santa Fe for these entertainments’. He gave it as his opinion that they had a ‘unifying and elevating effect’, that the ‘influence … has been upward and decidedly broadening’, and that they had ‘the decided advantage of increasing the requests for certain books and of opening new lines of thought for our employes [sic] who are inclined to be students’.114 He also claimed that, because of the entertainments, ‘all the best books, all the grandest productions of the masters, all the highest grade dramas are quite familiar to Santa Fe employees … and with the aid of frequent lectures on literary, scientific and historical subjects, enable our employes [sic] to correct the defects of their earlier life’.115
In accordance with the socially recognised gender roles of the time, allowing the wives and daughters of employees to use the reading room was felt to have had ‘a refining effect and the men dress better, act better, and use better language because she is there’.116 Busser credited the Santa Fe Railroad’s reputation for courteous treatment of passengers ‘to the entertainments given on the line, to the presence of woman in the reading-rooms, and to the high ideals set by bringing employes [sic] in touch with eminent literary and musical people from all parts of the world’.117 The employees themselves gave credit to the reading rooms for their ‘mighty fine reputation’ and felt themselves bound to ‘live up to it’.118 They also expressed gratitude to the railroad for ‘the kindly interest it has taken in making life more pleasant for us … we cannot help feeling we are working for the greatest railroad in the country’.119 A ‘prominent general agent in an eastern city’ reported that a ‘New England man, figuring on a trip to California’, decided to travel on the Santa Fe Railroad because ‘with employees who read books and hear good music, he could trust his family’ with the Santa Fe.120 In a time when middle-class ladies were beginning to travel in public unaccompanied, either alone or with their children, a reputation for ‘gentility’ and ‘refinement’ among the employees of a railroad ‘was good for business’.121
The reading room system did not prevent workers from joining unions, however, and union membership continued to grow throughout that period.122 Employees felt no pressure to keep such membership secret, announcing union social events in the railroad employees’ magazine. No less a figure than Busser’s assistant, Peter Farrell, was Secretary of the Order of Railway Conductors in Chanute for twenty-five years.123 It is tempting to suggest that it was the success of the reading rooms in bridging the chasm between employer and employed, in providing the employees with the largest liberty in the expression of their views, and in creating a sense of brotherhood among the employees that led to the men’s active involvement with organised labour. The reading rooms gave them a venue for discussion as well as a sense of ownership and of equality with management. And just as the callers knew where to find the men when they wanted them, so did the union organisers.
According to Busser’s account, the use of the reading rooms to ‘tame’ open towns and make them better business propositions was successful. He wrote, ‘I have letters from Gallup … which say that the reading-room … has changed the social and moral tone of the town and that the entertainments have exerted a decided influence for a quiet and refined life’.124 A ‘leading banker’ also wrote that the citizens of Gallup were ‘taking more pride in themselves and in the town … the Santa Fe has put Gallup on the map’.125
Busser also reported that the wives of the employees formed literary clubs ‘for which the Railroad buys the literature’126 and held social events,127 and that the reading room became the social centre of Gallup.128 He went so far as to claim that the railroad should be a member of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, ‘for it has one of the best club systems in the country’ (although he presented no evidence) and was ‘doing more for the elevation and development of woman … than any hundred leading organizations in the land’.129 Whether or not it was achieving quite such a lofty goal, it is certain that the railroad reached out to the wives of employees. From 1911 to some time in 1915, the Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine included a women’s column written by its associate editor Esther L. Mugan.130 The first column was called ‘In Santa Fe Homes’, but it was retitled ‘In Woman’s Sphere’ thereafter.131 It included recipes (‘To the Tune of the Frying Pan’), household hints, money-saving tips, and ‘simple methods of beautifying the home’ (‘Practical Suggestions’), fashion (‘In the Shops’), hairstyles, and ‘all the frills and fancies dear to the feminine heart’,132 which were sent in by readers, as well as written by Mugan herself. Mugan even anticipated Art Linkletter’s ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things’ by more than fifty years with ‘What the Kiddies Say’.
Nearly every issue of the Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine included announcements of balls, suppers, luncheons, and other entertainments of the ladies’ auxiliaries of the various railroad unions, including the ‘Big Four’ of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the Order of Railway Conductors, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, as well as the Switchman’s Union of North America. The wives of the men in Waynoka organised a weekly club for studying current topics, which they named ‘“The S.E.B. Club” in honor of the Superintendent of Reading-Rooms’.133 More than 150 ladies attended an SEB Club entertainment given on 26 January 1914.134 In Cleburne women formed a Fellowship Club,135 while those in Marceline (Missouri) formed a Ladies’ Santa Fe Whist Club.136 The librarian of the reading room in Clovis (New Mexico), F. H. Pike, extended an ‘invitation to the wives, mothers, and daughters of railroad men to meet Mrs. Pike and daughters’ at the reading room for a ‘social evening of acquaintance, amusement, and entertainment’.137
The women’s activities were not restricted to those which could be held in the reading rooms themselves. A trap shooting club was established by the ladies in Topeka,138 Winslow women joined the local golf club,139 and in Needles the ‘young ladies’ hosted a bowling contest.140 The teenaged daughters of Santa Fe Railway employees in Wellington (Kansas) formed a ladies’ band, which would become popular on the Entertainment Circuit as the ‘Santa Fe Girls’ Band’.141 In addition to utilising the libraries and attending the lectures and performances, women throughout the reading room system requested ‘special teachers in every department of study’ in this ‘quasi-university’.142 With this term, Busser echoes the then-popular characterisation of the public library as the ‘university of the people’ which would provide opportunities for self-education to all.
In Barstow (California), a ‘club for the general purpose of furthering social relations and for the specific purpose of studying and promoting the art of hammered brass work’ was organised.143 In La Junta in 1917, a course in telegraphy and Morse code was offered to young women so that they could replace the male telegraphers who were joining the military during World War I.144
The Bureau of Entertainments also paid for women advisers to visit employees’ wives in their homes, ‘teaching them how to adorn the home, the best sanitary laws and methods, and to give them the purest ideal of domestic and social life’,145 following in the footsteps of the Settlement House and Americanisation movements of the Progressive Era and providing these women with the equivalent of the university extension services offered elsewhere by land grant colleges under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. Dances were justified as opportunities for all of the women of the town not merely to socialise, but to become more educated about what constituted ‘the best music’ at the railroad’s expense.146 Such events were not restricted to women or to the families of employees. The division superintendent at Needles ‘invited all the children of the town to the Reading Room and gave them a good time with ice-cream, cakes, and games of all kinds’.147
Both the Santa Fe Reading Rooms and the American public libraries were Progressive Era responses to many of the country’s social and economic problems of the late nineteenth century. The reading rooms were established to meet the specific needs of a specific business, while the mission of public libraries was to serve the varied needs of their various white English-speaking constituencies, but there were certain parallels between them. As the reading rooms extended their services beyond the railroad employees, they came to fill the role of the public library for the white English-speakers within their communities which lacked such a public institution. The organisers and managers of both public libraries and the reading rooms embraced Progressive Era arguments about the value of ‘good literature’ in instilling appropriate Western moral and ethical values which would lead to desired civic, social, and individual reform and improvement.148 Both were constructed as secular institutions which promoted ethical and moral values without reference to the doctrines of any specific religion or denomination. Library reformers such as the highly influential Newark (New Jersey) public library director John Cotton Dana embraced the secular philosophical principles of pragmatism and instrumentalism,149 as did Ripley and Busser.
In addition to providing access to collections of carefully selected ‘good literature’, both institutions were responsive to the needs and demands of their communities. They provided meeting spaces for civic and social organisations and hosted ‘improving’ concerts, lectures, and other popular cultural events. Both were styled as ‘universities of the people’, which would provide access to scientific and technical as well as humanistic and cultural knowledge. Use of the collections would both improve society and provide men and boys with access to technical information for self-education and self-improvement. The Santa Fe Railroad looked to these materials to provide them with more informed and skilled employees, while supporters of public libraries argued that they would expand men’s career and vocational prospects in a time when a college degree was not a requirement for advancement.
Finally, the Santa Fe Reading Rooms and the public libraries both served as focal points around which the women in the community could gather socially and politically. It is likely that in all such towns, one of the activities which these women engaged in was the establishment of a public library. Women and women’s literary clubs were vital to the founding of public libraries throughout the United States, and nowhere more than in the American Southwest and West, where wealthy male philanthropists such as those who funded them in the East and Midwest were few and far between.150 All of the communities which had reading rooms now have public libraries, except San Marcial, which was destroyed by floods in 1929, and Somerville, Texas. Of the twenty public libraries which include a brief history on their websites, ten credit women’s clubs with establishing the first library.151 Fifteen of the communities received Carnegie library grants between 1902 and 1917;152 four of these are among those which credit women’s clubs. The city of Gallup established a public library without Carnegie funding, but with the active involvement of the local women’s club.
The legacy of the Santa Fe Reading Rooms lives on in at least some of the communities through the public library. In Las Vegas, the application for a Carnegie grant in 1901 called the city a ‘business center … on the main line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which employs [a] large number of resident workmen who own homes here’ as evidence of qualifications for the grant.153 When the library was built in 1905, the Railroad YMCA donated its library collection and Busser loaned 400 volumes to the library for circulation, although the Santa Fe Railroad retained ownership.154 In 1910, in Belen (New Mexico), the railroad built a reading room and a Harvey House, both of which were closed in 1939. Two years later, the Harvey House reopened as the new reading room, providing services to railroad employees manning the troop trains of World War II. It included sleeping quarters and bathrooms, as well as a library and restaurant. It was scheduled for demolition in 1980, but a local ‘Save the Harvey House’ campaign convinced the railroad to sign it over to the city. In 1985 it became a community centre and local history museum, which closed in 1996 because of a lack of funds. A local group again intervened, and it continues to serve the community as a local history museum and the special collections branch of the public library. Among the exhibits in the museum is ‘Mr. Martin’s old roll-top desk … from the building’s Reading Room days’.155 In Chanute, the reading room served as the public library until a Carnegie grant was obtained in 1904, and the bowling alley and baths were available to the public at large.156 It continues to serve as a public library and local history museum. Waynoka and Cleburne have likewise transformed their reading rooms into local history museums which, while not public libraries, are public and community spaces.
Listed by state, east to west
Chillicothe, IL
Shopton, IA
Marceline, MO
Argentine, KS (YMCA)
Topeka, KS (YMCA)
Emporia, KS
Newton, KS
Nickerson, KS
Dodge City, KS
Coolidge, KS
La Junta, CO
Raton, NM
Las Vegas, NM (YMCA)
Albuquerque, NM (YMCA)
Belen, NM
Gallup, NM
Winslow, AZ
Williams, AZ
Ash Fork, AZ
Needles, CA
Barstow, CA
Calwa, CA
Riverbank, CA
Richmond, CA
Chanute, KS
Wellington, KS
Purcell, OK
South Shawnee, OK
Cleburne, TX (YMCA)
Somerville, TX
Temple, TX (YMCA)
Silsbee, TX
Waynoka, OK
Canadian, TX
Slaton, TX
Clovis, NM
Vaughn, NM
San Marcial, NM
Deming, NM
Grand Canyon, AZ
Phoenix, AZ
Seligman, AZ
Suzanne M. Stauffer is a professor of Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University, where she has been since 2006. She earned an MLS from Brigham Young University in 1986 and a PhD in Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2004. She teaches courses in youth services librarianship and the history and theory of cultural heritage institutions. Her areas of research are print culture in America, including the history of the American public library as a social and cultural institution, the history of children’s services in public libraries, the history of the professionalization of librarianship, and the history of women in librarianship.
1. William J. Rhees, Manual of Public Libraries, Institutions, and Societies in the United States and British Provinces of North America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1859), 73, quoted in Sydney Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 10, no. 2 (1940), 198.
2. Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, 199–200.
3. Ibid., 201.
4. John Sergeant, An Address Delivered at the Request of the Managers of the Apprentices’ Library Company of Philadelphia, November 23, 1832 (Philadelphia: James Kaey, 1832), 34; Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, 202.
5. John F. Lewis, History of the Apprentices’ Library of Philadelphia, 1820–1920 (Philadelphia, 1924), 4, quoted in Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, 200.
6. Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, 205.
7. David M. Hovde, ‘Sea Colportage: The Loan Library System of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, 1859–1967’, Libraries & Culture 29, no. 4 (Fall 1994), 389–414.
8. Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, 207.
9. Alexis McCrossen, ‘“One Cathedral More” or “Mere Lounging Places for Bummers”? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America’, Libraries & Culture 41, no. 2 (Spring 2006), 169–88; Natasha Gerolami, ‘Taming the Mob: The Early Public Library and the Creation of Good Citizens’, Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library & Information Practice & Research 13, no. 1 (January 2018), 1–15, doi: 10.21083/partnership.v13i1.3985; Charles Johanningsmeier, ‘Welcome Guests or Representatives of the “Mal-Odorous Class”? Periodicals and their Readers in American Public Libraries, 1876–1914’, Libraries & Culture 39, no. 3 (Summer 2004), 260–92; Suzanne M. Stauffer, ‘Supplanting the Saloon Evil and Other Loafing Habits: Utah’s Library-Gymnasium Movement, 1907–1912’, Library Quarterly 86, no. 4 (October 2016), 434–48, doi: 10.1086/688032.
10. R. B. Pool, ‘Young Men’s Christian Association Libraries’, Watchman 3 (1 June 1877), 6, quoted in Joe W. Kraus, ‘Libraries of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Library History (1974–1987) 10, no. 1 (1975), 12.
11. Kraus, ‘Libraries of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century’, 12.
12. Ibid., 4.
13. Ibid., 7–9.
14. A nineteenth-century religious and cultural movement built on the Victorian construction of ‘masculinity’ that taught that athleticism and team sports were a necessary adjunct to moral and spiritual development. Patriotism, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice were promoted as religious and moral duties, and white men who assimilated these ideals as the apotheosis of masculinity. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most well-known adherents. Nick J. Watson, ‘Muscular Christianity in the Modern Age’, in Sport and Spirituality, ed. Jim Parry, Simon Robinson, Nick J. Watson, and Mark Nesti (London: Routledge, 2007), 80–82; Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 205–06.
15. Kraus, ‘Libraries of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century’, 10.
16. Ibid., 11.
17. Ibid., 18; John F. Moore, The Story of the Railroad ‘Y’ (New York: Young Men’s Christian Association Press, 1930), 265; Ann G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 118.
18. Kraus, ‘Libraries of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century’, 18; Moore, The Story of the Railroad ‘Y’, 204.
19. Moore, The Story of the Railroad ‘Y’, 148–63.
20. Kraus, ‘Libraries of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century’, 19; Moore, The Story of the Railroad ‘Y’, 209, 224.
21. Carl R. Graves and Kathryn A. Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”: The Santa Fe Railway and its Reading Rooms’, Railroad History 169 (Autumn 1993), 7–8.
22. G. A. Warburton, ‘The Railroad Branch of the YMCA’, Chautauquan Magazine 39 (1904), 353.
23. Ibid., 353–54; Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 8.
24. Warburton, ‘The Railroad Branch of the YMCA’, 353, 357.
25. Moore, The Story of the Railroad ‘Y’, 165; Warburton, ‘The Railroad Branch of the YMCA’, 352; Thomas Winter, ‘Personality, Character, and Self-Expression: The YMCA and the Construction of Manhood and Class, 1877–1920’, Men and Masculinities 2, no. 3 (2000), 272–85.
26. Samuel H. Ranck, ‘Railroad Traveling Libraries’, Library Journal 22 (January 1897), 13.
27. Samuel E. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System ([Chicago?]: [Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway?], c. 1915), 9; Keith L. Bryant, Jr, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 238.
28. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 145, 182.
29. Ibid., 358–59.
30. Eric Arensen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 28.
31. Ibid., 26–27.
32. Ibid., 13.
33. In 1876, Fred Harvey contracted with the Santa Fe Railroad to build and manage Harvey House hotels and restaurants at its depots and also to run the dining cars on its trains. The restaurants were renowned for the quality of their food and their service. Among the hotels still operating are the El Tovar Hotel and the Bright Angel Lodge on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. See Stephen Fried, Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire that Civilized the Wild West (New York: Bantam Books, 2010); Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls, Women who Opened the West (New York: Paragon House, 1989); and Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 106–22 for further information.
34. Arensen, Brotherhoods of Color, 7; Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo, Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870 to 1930 (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012), 35–46.
35. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 238.
36. Kurt M. Peters, ‘Continuing Identity: Laguna Pueblo Railroaders in Richmond, California’, American Indian Culture & Research Journal 22, no. 4 (December 1998), 187–88. doi: 10.17953/aicr.22.4.b82163468j162654; Garcilazo, Traqueros, 39.
37. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 238.
38. Note on sources: The sources available in regard to the Santa Fe reading rooms are restricted primarily to the published articles of S. E. Busser. He promoted the reading rooms and the ‘reading room idea’ tirelessly in newspapers and magazines, including the Santa Fe Employes’ [sic] Magazine. However, the records of the office of the Superintendent of Reading Rooms cannot be located, nor can any collection of Busser’s personal papers. They are not among the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company Papers in the State Archives of the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka, Kansas, in the New Mexico State Archives, the New Mexico History Museum’s Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, the University of New Mexico Center for the Southwest, the National Archives, the Library of Congress catalogue, OCLC WorldCat, or on the Internet.
39. George La Mont Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, The Lyceumite and Talent 4 (December 1910), 18; Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 7–8.
40. Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, 18.
41. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 7–8.
42. Ibid., 9.
43. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 8.
44. Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, 18.
45. Garcilazo, Traqueros, 44.
46. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 10.
47. Edward P. Ripley to J. J. Frey, W. G. Nevin, and L. J. Polk, 28 September 1898, Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company Papers, State Archives, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka, KS.
48. Edward P. Ripley to Samuel E. Busser, 28 September 1898, Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company Papers.
49. Ripley to Frey, Nevin, and Polk, 28 September 1898.
50. Ibid.
51. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 5.
52. Kevin Mattson, ‘The Librarian as Secular Minister to Democracy: The Life and Ideas of John Cotton Dana’, Libraries & Culture 35, no. 4 (Fall 2000), 515.
53. Samuel E. Busser [?], ‘A Great Moral, Social and Intellectual Movement on the Santa Fe System’, International Railway Journal 9, no. 6 (March 1902), 30.
54. Ripley to Busser, 28 September 1898.
55. Ripley to Frey, Nevin, and Polk, 28 September 1898.
56. Busser [?], ‘A Great Moral, Social and Intellectual Movement on the Santa Fe System’, 30.
57. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 9.
58. Ripley to Busser, 28 September 1898.
59. Samuel E. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, Out West Magazine 25, no. 2 (August 1906), 131.
60. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 9.
61. Ibid., 10.
62. Ripley to Busser, 28 September 1898.
63. Ibid.
64. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 131; Tom D. Kilton, ‘The American Railroad as Publisher, Bookseller, and Librarian’, Journal of Library History (1974–1987) 17, no. 1 (1982), 56.
65. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 131.
66. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 10.
67. Ibid., 7.
68. Charles E. Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, Railway Age 65 (26 July 1918), 181.
69. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 4–5.
70. Ibid., 5.
71. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 237.
72. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 12; Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 180.
73. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 12.
74. Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 180.
75. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 237.
76. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 25.
77. Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 180.
78. In 1911, Busser refers to the Albuquerque reading room under the direction of Miss Powers, and states that ‘a clubhouse to cost more than $50,000 is on the budget’ (Samuel E. Busser, ‘Making Men Contented: The Santa Fe Clubhouse Idea’, Railway Employees’ Magazine and Journal 6, no. 3 (December 1911), 21). This had apparently been ‘on the budget’ for more than six years (Albuquerque Morning Journal (2 November 1905)). Finally, in 1913, the employees in Albuquerque petitioned the company to allow the Railroad YMCA to build on that land (Las Vegas Daily Optic (30 November 1913)). Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 180, states that ‘it is only within the past two years that sufficient funds were collected to enable Albuquerque to boast a suitable building for the Railroad Y.M.C.A.’
79. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 16.
80. Ibid., 9.
81. Ibid.
82. Suzanne M. Stauffer, ‘Polygamy and the Public Library: The Establishment of Public Libraries in Utah before 1910.’ Library Quarterly 75, no. 3 (July 2005), 346–70, doi: 10.1086/497312; Suzanne M. Stauffer, ‘In their Own Image: The Public Library Collection as a Reflection of its Donors’, Libraries & the Cultural Record 42, no. 4 (November 2007), 387–408, doi: 10.1353/lac.2007.0067.
83. Ruth Toles, ‘Bisbee’, Arizona Librarian 7 (Summer 1950), 4.
84. Gertrude Burt, ‘Tucson’, Arizona Librarian 7 (Summer 1950), 12–13.
85. Stauffer, ‘Supplanting the Saloon Evil and Other Loafing Habits’.
86. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 127–28.
87. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 17–18; Ripley to Busser, 28 September 1898.
88. Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 180.
89. Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, 19.
90. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 16.
91. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 19.
92. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 11.
93. Ibid., 4.
94. Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (E. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob, eds., Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018).
95. Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 182.
96. Etta M. Elliott, ‘A Pleased Entertainer’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine 2, no. 7 (June 1908), 497.
97. Busser [?], ‘A Great Moral, Social and Intellectual Movement on the Santa Fe System’, 29.
98. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 20; Bureau of Railway Economics, ‘Railroad Libraries’, Special Libraries 6, no. 1 (January 1915), 10.
99. Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 181.
100. Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, 18.
101. Belen News (16 January 1913).
102. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 20.
103. Ibid., 25–26.
104. Ibid., 26.
105. Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, 19.
106. Busser, ‘Making Men Contented’, 17.
107. Busser, in Cole, ‘How the Lyceum Helps a Railroad System’, 19.
108. Busser [?], ‘A Great Moral, Social and Intellectual Movement on the Santa Fe System’, 32.
109. Ibid.
110. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 17.
111. Ibid., 18.
112. Busser [?], ‘A Great Moral, Social and Intellectual Movement on the Santa Fe System’, 32.
113. Bureau of Railroad Economics, ‘Railroad Libraries’, 10.
114. Samuel E. Busser to Edward P. Ripley, 27 May 1914, Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company Papers. The disposition of the letters themselves is unknown.
115. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 11.
116. Bureau of Railway Economics, ‘Railroad Libraries’, 10.
117. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 11–12.
118. Ibid., 17.
119. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 28.
120. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 17–18.
121. Richter, Home on the Rails, 115.
122. Bryant, History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, 238.
123. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 29–30.
124. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 15. As noted above, the letters themselves cannot be located.
125. Ibid., 17.
126. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 130.
127. Busser [?], ‘A Great Moral, Social and Intellectual Movement on the Santa Fe System’, 31.
128. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 29.
129. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 130.
130. Esther L. Mugan, ‘Attention Ladies!’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine 5, no. 8 (July 1911), 91. Mugan, later Esther Mugan Bush, was the composer of the popular Silver Strand Waltz, among other pieces. She continued to serve as associate editor of the magazine for many years, writing primarily travel pieces.
131. Esther L. Mugan, ‘In Santa Fe Homes’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine 5, no. 12 (November 1911), 139; Esther L. Mugan, ‘In Woman’s Sphere’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine. 6, no. 1 (December 1911), 123.
132. Mugan, ‘In Santa Fe Homes’.
133. Busser, The Santa Fe Reading-Room System, 14.
134. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Magazine 8, no. 3 (February 1914), 108.
135. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine 3, no. 3 (February 1909), 284.
136. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine 3, no. 12 (November 1909), 1454.
137. The Clovis News (18 September 1914).
138. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Magazine 10, no. 6 (May 1916), 109.
139. Ibid., 111.
140. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Magazine 9, no. 5 (April 1915), 88.
141. ‘Ladies’ Band of Wellington, Kan.’, Santa Fe Magazine 7, no. 3 (February 1913), 36; ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Magazine 7, no. 3 (February 1913), 126; ‘Along the Trail’, Santa Fe Magazine 7, no. 6 (May 1913), 91; ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Magazine 7, no. 11 (October 1913), 109; Belen News (26 February 1914).
142. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 130.
143. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine 4, no. 6 (May 1910), 79.
144. ‘Among Ourselves’, Santa Fe Magazine 11, no. 9 (August 1917), 83.
145. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 130–31; Parks, ‘Development of the Santa Fe Reading Room System’, 182.
146. Busser, ‘Santa Fe Reading Rooms’, 131.
147. Ibid.
148. Stauffer, ‘Supplanting the Saloon Evil and Other Loafing Habits’, 435–36.
149. Mattson, ‘The Librarian as Secular Minister to Democracy’, 514.
150. Suzanne M. Stauffer, ‘A Good Social Work: Women’s Clubs, Libraries, and the Construction of a Secular Society in Utah, 1890–1920’, Libraries & the Cultural Record 46, no. 2 (May 2011), 137–38.
151. Cleburne, Deming, Fort Madison, Gallup, Las Vegas, Marceline, Richmond, Topeka, Wellington, Winslow.
152. Argentine, Chanute, Chillicothe, Cleburne, Dodge City, Emporia, Las Vegas, Marceline, Newton, Phoenix, Raton, Richmond, Riverbank, Shawnee, Temple.
153. H. G. Coors et al. to Andrew Carnegie, 19 March 1901, in Mary T. Sacoman, ‘The Acquisition of a Carnegie Library Building by a Small Territorial City – Las Vegas, New Mexico, 1901–1905’ (master’s thesis, University of Denver, 1979), 32.
154. ‘Carnegie Library Annual Report’, Las Vegas Daily Optic (21 May 1906); George P. Money to Andrew Carnegie, 10 December 1901, in Sacoman, ‘The Acquisition of a Carnegie Library Building by a Small Territorial City’, 35.
155. Richard Melzer, ‘The Belen Harvey House and its Several Reincarnations, 1910–2010’, Southern New Mexico Historical Review 18 (2011), 23.
156. Graves and Graves, ‘“A Bath, a Book, and an Entertainment”’, 29.
