XIII

The Library During World War I

L

CHAMPE CARTER MCCULLOCH, LIBRARIAN 1913-1919

IEUTENANT Colonel Champe Carter McCulloch* was born in Texas, September 10, 1869. He earned an A.B. degree from Baylor University, a civil engineer degree from Texas A & M, an M.D. degree from Virginia in 1891 and another M.D. from Columbia in 1892. Later he acquired an M.S. degree from Columbia. With these five degrees he was looked upon as somewhat of a student by his fellow officers after he entered the Army Medical Department in 1892.

McCulloch's career for the next two decades was typical of that of the medical officers of his time. He was stationed at a succession of posts, served with the Army in the Philippines during the insurrection and spent 2 years in the Panama Canal Zone. On July 3, 1913, he was assigned to the Library. While he was Librarian he was on the faculty of the Army Medical School as professor of military and tropical medicine and later professor of military hygiene, and from August 1915 to June 1916 he was also curator of the museum.

McCulloch revived the old practice of collecting photographs of prominent physicians, a custom that had declined since Billings departed a generation earlier. He went about it systematically, writing many letters requesting photos each year. He had the photos mounted and placed in portfolios, perhaps the first time this was done. 2 He also began to purchase photographs from commercial studios. 3

McCulloch seems not to have a uniform policy in lending. He declined to send out pamphlets by Jenner because they were "very old and rare and can never be taken from the Library," and a book by Purkyne because it was in the Exhibition & Historical Collection and "we don't lend it outside the Library." On the other hand he loaned incunabula and rare books of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

During the first half of his term the institution moved along normally, McCulloch overseeing administration, Garrison editing the Index-Catalogue and directing Library operations. McCulloch had more than a passing interest

*His name was Champe Carter McCulloch, Jr., but he seldom appended Jr. to his signature.

in the organization he headed; he joined the Medical Library Association and presided over it from 1914 to 1916. Then ripples from the World War grew into waves, and the Library became a busy, crowded establishment. McCulloch and Garrison acquired additional duties, one of which was laying the foundation for the official history of the Medical Department's activities during the conflict. McCulloch, who had wanted to go to Cuba with the Army in 1898 and had to remain in Florida, who had wanted to go to France with the AEF and had to remain in Washington, finally went to France in July 1918 as a planner of the history. Soon after he returned from Europe in December 1918 he was transferred from the Library. Garrison, with whom he remained on friendly terms all his life, remembered him as "a kindly, yet a very strange man, with the sombre contrariness of the Scotch, crossed by some ply that yearned to function as a play-boy, yet not really jolly in the English sense but rather saturnine and sardonic." McCulloch retired from the Army on November 30, 1922. Thereafter he was deputy state health officer of Maryland until he died at Walter Reed on October 14, 1928.7

INFLUENCE OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

McCulloch, like other officers during the period of the Army trusteeship of the Library, did not know anything about, or presumably have any thoughts about, running a library before he was sent there by the Surgeon General. But after he arrived he set about to learn the fundamentals of library science and

to try to improve the organization's way of doing things. He was impressed by some of the practices followed by the Library of Congress and decided to adopt them.

One of McCulloch's innovations was a card catalog for the use of the public. Earlier, when Billings had begun cataloging, printed catalogs had been the usual form. Billings had published catalogs in 1868, 1872, 1873-74, and finally the Index-Catalogue from. 1880 onward. But the lower cost and other advantages of card catalogs had caused many libraries to swing from printed to card, and McCulloch decided that it was time for his organization to do so.

In 1916 McCulloch made arrangements to receive from the Library of Congress printed author cards for books." These cards began to arrive July 1, 1916. The Library also purchased a quantity of lined index cards, identical in size and quality to the Library of Congress printed cards, with the intention of preparing author cards for volumes in the Library, for which LC cards would not be available. The preparation of cards was not carried very far at the time because clerks were too busy with other tasks, and the war soon disrupted normal operations. After the armistice the Surgeon General assigned six hospital corpsmen temporarily to the organization. One of the jobs given these men was to cut author entries from pages of the Index-Catalogue and paste them on blank filing cards. 10 These were interspersed among the LC printed cards and handwritten cards in the filing cabinet. Thus came into existence the motley array of typed, handwritten, pasted, and LC printed filing cards that constituted the main public card catalog of the Library for a third of a century, from the 1920's through the 1950's.

McCulloch was impressed by other things at the Library of Congress. He pointed out to Surgeon General Gorgas that the salaries at LC and elsewhere in the government were higher than those in the medical library and that "this was due, perhaps, principally to the fact that the employees here have been designated as clerks, although doing the same class of work as men with professional titles elsewhere."" His reasoning may have been logical, but it did not lead to an increase in salaries or a change in titles.

McCulloch also requested that the Library be permitted to remain open until 10 o'clock at night, instead of 4:30 in the afternoon, and on Sundays and legal holidays from 2 to 10, like the Library of Congress. Earlier librarians had considered the advantages to the public of the institution's remaining open in the evening, but they had been stopped by lack of funds to pay additional employees. McCulloch asked the Surgeon General to request an additional $5,000 in the next appropriation to allow the Library to remain open longer, but $5,000 was a large sum compared with the $10,000 appropriation for books and the approximately $28,000 for salaries, and McCulloch did not receive it. WORLD WAR I DISRUPTS PROCUREMENT OF EUROPEAN PUBLICATIONS Soon after World War I began in Europe during the summer of 1914 its effects were felt in the Library. Before the year was over all Belgian medical

12

periodicals, most of the French, and many of the Italian had suspended publication. By 1915 the supply of Russian, Russian-Polish, German, and Austrian journals was cut, and the flow from other countries was impeded. 13 Turmoil within belligerent countries was partially the cause of the stoppage, but the Library's system of payment was also responsible.

The Librarian, by government regulation, could not pay dealers for journals, books, and other publications until they reached the institution; in other words, the Librarian could not pay in advance. 14 If a European bookseller sent a bundle of journals to the Library and the journals went down with a torpedoed freighter, the seller bore the loss. Therefore sellers accumulated journals for the Library but would not ship them.

The absence of European journals delayed the preparation of many citations for the Index-Catalogue and Index Medicus. McCulloch endeavored in vain to restore the flow of Russian journals by asking the U.S. Embassy in Petrograd to help him locate a bookseller (Russian periodicals had been coming through a dealer in Leipzig, Germany). 15 He borrowed some German and Austrian journals from the Boston Medical Library and New York Academy of Medicine and from the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, who were still managing to procure the periodicals from Europe. 16 With these borrowed copies the Library kept somewhat up-to-date with its indexing of German and Austrian periodicals.

In Europe hundreds and finally thousands of dollars of the bookseller's capital was tied up in bundles of journals that gathered dust. It became apparent that after the war a large quantity of journals from Germany and Austria, and a lesser quantity from France, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and other countries would reach the Library. The Library could not put aside money to pay the sellers because, by law, an appropriation that was not spent within a certain time reverted to the Treasury. Congress rescued the Library from its dilemma by doubling the usual appropriation to $20,000 for the fiscal year ending June 1919 and again for 1920. The larger appropriation would also permit the purchase of rare works that might be offered for sale at comparatively low prices after the war, plus publications of the 1914-1918 period that were expected to be higher in price because of inflation.

After the fighting ceased the channels of communication opened rapidly, and during 1919 practically all of the missing periodicals from Germany, Austria, and a few other countries arrived. The Library was still unable to locate a bookseller in Russia, and gaps remained in the serials of that country.17

With European books and pamphlets the situation was different. Routine ordering procedures had been disrupted. The Library had not ordered books published in enemy countries. Dealers had not accumulated books for the institution, as they had journals. In 1919 the Library had begun purchasing from Europe, but many of the volumes had been printed in small editions because of wartime conditions and were no longer available. The Library was unable to acquire as many works published between 1914 and 1918 as it desired.