“The New Deal for Scholarship”: The First Microfilm Publication Project (Part 3)

[W]ith the full application of microphotography to problems of research will come the new deal for scholarship.¹

All the time the film was being organized and the orders placed, a lawsuit was making its way through the New York courts. On April 8, 1935, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of convictions for violating the NRA codes in the poultry industry. The case was heard on May 2-3, and the decision was published on May 27, two days after Schellenberg’s announcement that he had refilmed the NRA hearings. The decision held that congress could not delegate legislative power to the president in the way it had done to enable him to create the NRA, and that in any case congress did not have the power to regulate interstate commerce as the NRA did. This brought the National Recovery Administration to an end. Binkley’s prediction that the history of American business would be divided into pre-code and post-code eras therefore collapsed. A few months later a similar case brought down the AAA (though it was reinstated in 1938). The hearings no longer represented an epochal change in American economic history; their potential value as a snapshot of conditions experienced by American businesses and farmers in the early years of the Depression, however, remained.

The project had little effect on research, its avowed purpose, and so it would be easy to dismiss it as a failure. Its secondary purpose, however, was as a demonstration that large-scale microfilming was possible, and that it could be done cheaply. In this it succeeded, and contributed to the development of microfilm as a mode of international exchange of printed matter. In this, perhaps, it shows that Binkley was wiser than Schellenberg in his priorities for the project. Let’s see if I can make the case.

Effects …

The films were diligently edited by Schellenberg, whose name stands on the flag page of each roll. Ultimately 10-12 sets were ordered and delivered.

The pricing was based on 2¾¢ per page, plus an additional charge to amortize the fixed costs over the number of copies sold, not to exceed $29.70 for the NRA films and $22.78 for the AAA set.

• advertising process - the 10 orders - funding process

• how many copies distributed? - 10 (Manual p.132)

• outcome: hadn’t been distributed before NRA ruled unconstitutional (TODO check this)

… on the Scholarly Record

Once he was working for the National Archives, and was gaining a broader experience of government records, Schellenberg became dubious of the project’s value to future historians. He wrote to Binkley in October, 1935:

After having seen the type of research materials which exist in various executive departments of the government, I have become skeptical of the worthwhileness of our reproduction of the transcripts of the NRA and the AAA Hearings. These transcripts hardly compare in their research value with many other records which will eventually be transferred to the Archives and will be made available for research purposes. The NRA Hearings were peculiarly lacking in definite statistical information, something like the hearings of a court trial, just a lot of verbiage.²

The hearings transcripts of the NRA are in the NARA catalog under 9.2.5 “Records maintained by the Library Unit”: “Transcripts of hearings relating to proposed codes, code modifications and violations, and labor disputes, 1933-35.” Large amounts of NRA and AAA documents are now available in good modern scans on Internet Archive, sourced from the collections of various university libraries (for the NRA) and from the Library of the Department of Agriculture (for the AAA). I haven’t been able to find any of the hearings as they appear in the microfilm, however. Nor do I find the hearings much cited in the historical literature. It appears that historians have shared Schellenberg’s opinion of their value as documentary sources.

… on the JCMR

For the JCMR the next technical step was to develop standards for microfilming practice and get them implemented by the manufacturers of equipment. This required rebuilding the Joint Committee’s relationship with Watson Davis’ Science Service, which (according to Schellenberg) saw the Joint Committee as interlopers.⁵ For JCMR projects, the advent of the WPA changed everything. There was money – “there is more money in WPA this year than there will be in the Foundations for the next twenty”, Binkley said⁶ – with the requirement that it be spent on relief labor. This pointed in various directions: the union catalog project which had been developed in Philadelphia (and would soon be followed by a similar one in Cleveland) used 16mm microfilm copies of catalog cards, made with Recordak sheet-feed cameras, like the AAA and NRA materials; in a couple of years big newspaper microfilming projects followed in Ohio and elsewhere, in the wake of the big WPA newspaper indexing projects that employed hundreds of white-collar workers; and some direct microfilming of research materials by the Historical Records Survey, including the courthouse papers that were destroyed in the Ohio River flood in 1938,⁷ pointing the way to rescue microfilming of European materials as the threat of war increased.

… on Libraries

… on Eugene Power

… on Ted Schellenberg

After Schellenberg returned to Cleveland, he had to wrap up his work for the JCMR and prepare for his new temporary position with the National Park Service in Washington. He moved with his family to Washington in mid-March, 1935. His responsibilities there would include historical research on national park sites, but he had also negotiated time to continue some of his JCMR work.¹³ But his eyes were now fixed on the new National Archives. “It has occurred to me that the training I have received in Joint Committee work could be used to good advantage in the new national archives.” As he came down from the stress of the JCMR work, he appears to have found it difficult to believe what he had been through. When asked about his JCMR experience by Donald Goodchild, he wrote:

I believe I would have more to say if I were drunk instead of sober. The quality of my talk, I am sure, would not suffer through the imbibing of liquor since I have formed a delightful habit in my Joint Committee work of indulging in the inane dribble characteristic of promoters.¹⁴

… on International Microfilming

The NRA and AAA microfilms embodied the hoped-for possibilities of large microfilm projects; and in doing so they had an important influence on the relations between American and European libraries over the next couple of years, when the conditions for large-scale sharing of library materials by means of microfilm were being worked out. This process went some way to vindicate Binkley’s approach to the project: his willingness to accept low quality reproduction as long as the costs were kept down, which so irked Schellenberg during the filming. If we accept Binkley’s later formulation of the goals of the project, we can see that he was playing a long game: he wanted to impress on European libraries the idea that large-scale microfilming was a very cheap process, and thereby keep the prices for microfilm services in European collections as low as possible when American libraries came calling.

The project that enabled this was the American demonstration of assembly-line copying of bound newspapers, modeled on the NRA and AAA process, demonstrated in the Paris Exposition in 1937. Binkley’s objective was to set a low price for microfilm services in European libraries, avoiding the expenses that been attached to the photostat services. He described the idea to David H. Stevens at the Rockefeller Foundation in June, 1936 as the planning for the Paris Exposition started:

[T]he most interesting exhibit of micro-copying would be an automatic newspaper copying and film processing machine in actual operation for the duration of the Exposition. … We will secure exactly the object that we desire in showing the people who attend the Exposition how low the cost levels can be in microphotography. But we will not frighten them with the prospect of our taking from their libraries their rare books. There would certainly be objections to the mass copying of rare books, but not to the mass copying of newspapers. … It would seem logical, of course, to try out the equipment first in the U.S. for a few months, so that when we go to Paris we can say that this is the way we do things in America.¹⁵

In reaching for a metaphor for what he hoped microfilm would do, he found himself at the intersection of his work as an historian, a technologist, and a librarian. He framed the effect of the development of microfilm on international scholarly communications as comparable to the effect of railways and steamships on international trade in the mid-19th century. He was a member of the American National Committee on International Intellectual Cooperation (ANCIC), chaired by James Shotwell and affiliated with the League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Cooperation; the JCMR itself was an advisory body to the ANCIC, having been invited by Shotwell to advise on matters concerning archives and documentation. As an historian he drew on the period in the mid-19th century when the European powers embraced free trade as the natural consequence, under the influence of Richard Cobden in Britain and Michel Chevalier in France. As a technologist he drew parallels between the new transportation technologies and the growth of free trade in goods in the 19th century, and the new information technologies of his own day and the hoped-for growth in free trade in ideas. As a librarian he framed this movement as spanning the cycle of collection, research and publication

When he and W.W. Bishop were invited to plan the American microfilm exhibit in Paris in 1937 he wrote to Shotwell:

That which we have before us is a prospect which, on the intellectual level, corresponds to railway and steamship at the commodity level – an opportunity to start free trade in ideas on a scale hitherto unapproached. We will encounter just such obstacles as Cobden encountered, but we will have with us, I firmly believe, the irresistible current of the times.¹⁸

The reference to Cobden draws on the period of European history which Binkley had just written up in his book Realism and Nationalism for Harper:

As the steam-engine led to the doctrine of thermodynamics, so railroad and steamship fostered the doctrine of free trade and made it seem for a time the self-evident basis of an enlightened economic policy.¹⁹

Richard Cobden’s success in promoting free trade in the 1840s was based partly on his collaboration with Michel Chevalier in France, which no doubt contributed to Binkley’s evident belief that this was a winning argument in discussions with European libraries. When Power asked him for a letter on American microfilm policy which he could show to British libraries, Binkley repeated the argument:

I sometimes think that we stand now where industry stood in the days of Cobden: We have a vision of the technical possibility of a kind of free trade in the written word.²⁰

In support of this approach, he tried to persuade Power not to perpetuate the earlier access rules which attended photostat copies made in European libraries:

I am sure that we both share the feeling that the main thing in the promotion of this enterprise is to break completely with the cost levels to which people have become habituated in the case of the Photostat. It is equally important to break away from the vested interests of the photographers who, in various European libraries, have established themselves to do photographic work.²¹

Power saw the trap here, and justified the modest profit which he expected to make as he founded University Microfilms and moved into the European market:

You raise the question that some might feel that it is undesirable and unjustified for an American business man to make a profit from the treasures in the English libraries. I know this is sometimes a common attitude in this country. On the other hand, you, as well as I, know that no one makes very much from this type of work, and further, if one is contributing a service which is of value, and out of that effort is able to make his own living, I can see little difference between that and the scholar who justifies his position in a university through study of this same material and thereby makes his living. The only difference is that one gets it as a salary from an institution and the other as a profit from his own organization. In the end it is the same thing.²²

The difference, of course, is that the entrepreneur’s profit raises the price and therefore diminishes the amount of material the scholar can access, while the scholar’s salary does not.

The demonstration of assembly-line microfilming at the Paris Exposition was, therefore, the key to Binkley’s strategy for free trade in scholarly materials. The opening of the exhibit space in the Trocadéro was delayed. This was fortunate for the American delegation, since the equipment was so new that there had been little testing before it was shipped to Paris. Draeger’s camera was still under construction, and was only operational for the last month of the Exposition, and the Photorecord camera was the third one off the Graflex assembly line. Once things were set up, though, the demonstration was a success, attracting great interest and producing 200,000 pages of microfilm, much of it bound newspapers or revolutionary journals. The sources were brought by taxi from the Bibliothèque Nationale every day or two. The World Congress of Universal Documentation met for a few days that summer, and the delegates were brought to the Trocadéro to see the demonstration, giving it high visibility within the small world community of microfilm practitioners.²³

Raney wanted to continue the battle at the next world documentation conference in Oxford the following year. He pushed to have Binkley replace Davis on the program:

You are to regain the prestige which America lost by Watson Davis’ unseemly behavior in Paris last summer. Sayce has written quite caustically that they hope Dr. Davis will not be on hand and he has played no part in the program. You have a good paper and your appearance upon the program combined with personal associations will repair the damage. … It will be grand to know that you will read your paper in person and show how a generous American with a head full of ideas can act on an international stage. Here’s looking to you. ²⁴

What did Davis do in Paris that was so offensive to the Europeans? Fussler found Davis’ speech at the opening ceremony inappropriate, but I’m not sure that that is enough to explain Raney’s anger:

Davis had been asked to speak on international cooperation in documentation, which seems to me to be a fine subject for a paper. Instead he delivered what in reality was a sales talk for Bibliofilm and the American Documentation Institute. I do not think the speech was any too well received although this is difficult to tell since I am an American. … His opinions are so obviously biased and selfish that, together with his method of approach, he is hardly the man to be chairman of an American Delegation to a scholarly meeting nor to wear the mantle of President of an American learned organization such as is conveyed in the title American Documentation Institute.²⁵

Binkley wrote a paper for the Oxford conference, but he could not get permission to abandon his Cleveland students for two weeks at the beginning of term, right after his year’s leave of absence at Columbia. It therefore turned out that Davis was there in Oxford and Binkley wasn’t; it’s not clear whether Binkley’s paper was read by someone else or circulated in typescript, or simply published in the proceedings. He dialed up his rhetoric about exploitation by publishers, though not as far as Schellenberg had:

There are indeed some property tenures vested at different points along these channels of communication. They are like the tolls along the river, some of them necessary to keep the channel open, some of them functionally piratical. (p.12)

Does the success of his European strategy vindicate Binkley in his disagreements with Schellenberg during the NRA/AAA project? It’s worth remembering how heavily subsidized the project was by Recordak: the company waived the equipment rental and film processing charges that they would normally have imposed, even when Schellenberg expanded the project by roughly 50% when he re-filmed the NRA materials. The low cost per page which Binkley wanted to use to impress the Europeans was therefore not counfounded by the actual project costs. Perhaps the situation at the end was that few scholars in America and none in Europe ever looked at the NRA/AAA materials after the Supreme Court cancelled their relevance to New Deal history, and the only influence of the project on the development of library microcopying was its low cost.

In any case, the relationship with European libraries worked out as Binkley wished, at least during the brief interval before the war. He summed up the results in a 1939 letter to Archibald MacLeish, the new Librarian of Congress:

We on this side of the water had been worried for a long time that the free movement of research materials in microfilm form might be stalled by a high monopolistic price level abroad or by custodial jealousy. To head off those developments we sent a micro-copying exhibit to the Paris Exposition two years ago to show large-scale copying of newspapers. We felt that quantity work ought to be demonstrated to the Europeans, but that they ought not to be frightened at the thought of what quantity work could do if we should undertake to capture on film great bodies of their rare materials. … Present results from France and England are extremely gratifying, and the sentiment is all in favor of free trade in materials for research. The price levels in the Bibliotheque Nationale are as low as those at the Library of Congress, or lower.²⁶

The Oxford conference met in September, 1938, during the Sudeten crisis and the leadup to Munich. At the beginning of the month, on a page of notes for his lecture “The World Net of Power: Political organization is a network from local to world”, Binkley wrote a reminder to tell his students to listen to Hitler’s speech from Nuremberg on Monday, Sept. 12: “may mean war – world war – business, our own participation affected”.²⁷ (The American ambassador in Paris had said the US would join France if Germany attacked, and for a few days the possibility of war was in the air, until Roosevelt walked it back). While German delegates were travelling to Oxford earlier in the month, Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to meet Hitler; and the session in which Binkley’s paper would have been read was on Sept. 26, two days before the Munich conference began.

Binkley tried to keep an optimistic perspective. On Sept. 8 (perhaps the same day as his lecture note) he wrote to Shotwell, echoing the topic of the lecture:

Could we say, perhaps, that the world organization of power and law is at present disintegrating, and carrying with it some of the world organization of market and credit; but the world organization of scholarship, art, and letters, much as it has suffered from the police measures of totalitarian states, is still more nearly intact than either of the others? Let us devote ourselves to its preservation, while learning more about its function.²⁸

This paragraph echoes the pedagogical categories in his unfinished textbook A Sense of History, as does the lecture on which he scribbled the note. They indicate his faith in a world that makes sense under analysis.

The territorial-political structure of the world is only one of three great world organizations. There are also the market — from the village market to the world market, and intellectual organization, from its smallest cell of conversation in shop and street to its world net of cabled news and printed book distribution.²⁹

From the meeting with the librarians at ALA in Montreal about the need to save the NRA and AAA hearings in libraries, to the planning for the microfilming project, to Schellenberg’s execution of the plan in Washington, to the editing of the films and refilming of the NRA hearings, to the reproduction of the films by Recordak and delivery to the libraries who had ordered them (under the shadow of the Supreme Court decisions that removed much of their historical value), to the planning of the demonstration at the Paris Exposition and the successful execution, to the establishment of automated microfilming as the basis of cheap reproduction of library materials and the free trade in words among a few countries at least, for a brief period before the beginning of the war, it is striking to follow Binkley’s characteristic optimism, even when he struggled to maintain it. I’ll close with another letter to Shotwell, a week after the invasion of Poland, as academic conferences were cancelled, and Binkley wondered what could be saved:

[A]re there not areas of intellectual cooperation which, like the Society of Friends, can set themselves up so completely outside of the power conflict that some kinds of ideas can have safe-conduct through a warring world[?] … realizing of course that the chances are all in the direction of failure …³⁰

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1. T.R. Schellenberg, “Library Applications of Micro-Copying,” Library Journal 60, no. 7 (1935): 289–92 at p.292.↩︎

2. Doc. 10203 (1935-10-04): T.R. Schellenberg to RCB (JCMR/36-gen-schellenberg)↩︎

3. “Unfortunately, the microfilm collection of the NRA Hearings on the Codes of Fair Competition lacks the transcript of the July 11, 1934 cement code hearing.” (p.310 n.279)↩︎

4. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p.32, quoting from the transcript of Hearing no. 159, “Electrical Manufacturing,” 19 July 1933.↩︎

5. “Regarding the matter of standardizing film equipment, I believe it will be impossible to accomplish much. Watson Davis, R.H. Draeger, Atherton Seidell and his crew regard the Joint Committee as ‘interlopers’ in the matter of initiating the use of micro-photography for documentation purposes.” Doc. 10207 (1935-09-17): T.R. Schellenberg to RCB (JCMR/36-gen-schellenberg)↩︎

6. Doc. 12393 (1936-04-23): RCB to M. Llewellyn Raney (JCMR/23-wpa-micro).↩︎

7. Binkley described it in an unpublished (as far as I know) paper: “In four of Indiana’s southern counties, the camera managed to cheat the flooding Ohio River of invaluable historical data. Throughout these counties and twelve more, some 200,000 pages of important old documents were filmed shortly before muddy waters ruined a goodly number of the originals. The latter, among the oldest records in the state, were stored in the public buildings of counties where the pioneers, beating their way long the river, first had settled.” Doc. 11512 ([1938]): RCB, “The Moving-Picture Camera Aids the Nation” (JCMR/27-archives-gen), pp.4-5. Cited in Clifton Dale Foster, “Microfilming Activities of the Historical Records Survey, 1935-42,” The American Archivist 48, no. 1 (1985): 45–55, at p.49.↩︎

8. Doc. 10255 (1935-01-28): T.R. Schellenberg to Kahn; Cuthbert Lee (JCMR/36-gen-schellenberg).↩︎

9. Eugene B. Power, Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power, Founder of University Microfilms (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1990), p.26. Here Power gives the date precisely as Wednesday, 19 Sept. 1934. This date is impossible: Schellenberg was in Washington, and wrote to McCarter two days later “I’ve been working like hell on the AAA hearings.” (Doc. 10293 (1934-09-21): [T.R. Schellenberg] to Jo McCarter (JCMR/36-gen-schellenberg)) The JCMR’s travel records show that Schellenberg made his trip to Ann Arbor from Cleveland by bus, Jan. 25-27, 1935 (Doc. 10543 ([1933]): “[Travel expense claims]” (JCMR/36-budget)). The discrepancy is partly explained by Power’s handwritten note of the meeting, used by Irene Farkas-Conn in her dissertation: it dated the meeting to 28 Jan. 1934, but was filed in the January 1935 folder in his papers. (Irene Farkas-Conn, “From Documentation to Information Science: The Origins and Early Development of the American Documentation Institute–American Society for Information Science,” Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 1984, p.40 n.1, as noted by Susan A. Cady, “Machine Tool of Management: A History of Microfilm Technology.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Lehigh University, 1994, p.92 n.37).↩︎

10. Gunderson arranged the loan of a Model 8 to Schellenberg in Cleveland in Nov. 1934 (Doc. 12832 (1934-11-27): Frank N. Gunderson to T.R. Schellenberg). Reminder to McCarter to retrieve it and return it: Doc. 10233 (1935-03-25): T.R. Schellenberg to Jo McCarter. Schellenberg noted “A corner strip of the projector (a metal piece) was left on the window-sill of the Joint Committee office. This should be returned also.”↩︎

11. Doc. 9845 (1935-05-17): RCB to Frank N. Gunderson.↩︎

12. The photograph is from John K. Boeing, “Recordak,” Journal of Documentary Reproduction 3, no. 3 (1940): 153–68, on p.165.↩︎

13. He wrote to Crane and to Chatelain to ask whether he should continue as Executive Secretary just before he left Cleveland: Doc. 10996 (1935-03-08): T.R. Schellenberg to Robert T. Crane; Doc. 10237 (1935-03-08): T.R. Schellenberg to Verne E. Chatelain.↩︎

14. Doc. 10248 (1935-02-16): T.R. Schellenberg to Donald Goodchild (JCMR/36-gen-schellenberg).↩︎

15. Doc. 13608 (1936-06-16): RCB to [David H. Stevens] (Rock/208-2476)↩︎

16. Peter Binkley, “‘If You Could Send over Your Documents to the Photostat Department…’: Paris Peace Conference Documentation and the Advent of Microfilm.” Paper presented at Open Ideas 2021, University of Alberta Library, December 16, 2021.↩︎

17. Doc. 10098 (1936-12-23): W.W. Bishop to RCB (JCMR/52-paris).↩︎

18. Doc. 10131 (1936-01-15): RCB to James T. Shotwell (JCMR/52-paris) (letter in which he accepts job of organizing Paris exhibition in 1937)↩︎

19. Realism and Nationalism, p.113; TODO cf. reference↩︎

20. Doc. 10652 (1939-02-21): RCB to Eugene B. Power (JCMR/34-gen-power). This letter was enclosed with Doc. 10653 (1939-02-21): RCB to Eugene B. Power (JCMR/34-gen-power), which begins: “The enclosed letter is to be used by you in England, and the second paragraph is the one in which I express appreciation for the cooperation of the English libraries.” It goes on to inform Power confidentially that Binkley has heard of a move in Britain “to set up a public authority to take over filming operations, and that this would involve establishing a high price level and retaining the negative in England.” He suggests that if this happens, Power would be better off operating as “a salaried manager of the ALA or the Library of Congress”, so that it would not appear that an American entrepreneur was making a profit off of British library collections.↩︎

21. Doc. 10660 (1938-01-07): RCB to Eugene B. Power (JCMR/34-gen-power)↩︎

22. Doc. 10650 (1939-03-02): Eugene B. Power to RCB (JCMR/34-gen-power)↩︎

23. W. Boyd Rayward, “The International Exposition and the World Documentation Congress, Paris 1937”, The Library Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1983): 254–68.↩︎

24. Doc. 8649 (1938-08-12): M. Llewellyn Raney to RCB (corr.1937-38/R) Note that this letter was filed in Binkley’s personal papers, possibly because it prompted the local business of requesting permission from WRU president Leutner to go to Oxford. I don’t know whether there is a copy in the JCMR papers, but I didn’t see one in the folders I looked at.↩︎

25. Doc. 13694 (1937-08-18): Herman H. Fussler to M. Llewellyn Raney (Rock/208-2477), pp.8, 10. Davis also monopolized H.G. Wells’ time when he visited the American exhibit, spending 15 minutes with him in the darkroom (ibid. p.12).↩︎

26. Doc. 10570 (1939-07-20): RCB to Archibald MacLeish (JCMR/34-gen-macleish)↩︎

27. Doc. 13883 ([1938]): RCB, “III The world net of power” (binder/21)↩︎

28. Doc. 10518 (1938-09-08): RCB to James T. Shotwell (JCMR/35-gen-shotwell)↩︎

29. A Sense of History, Chapter 1, “The World Network”.↩︎

30. Doc. 10480 (1939-09-08): RCB to James T. Shotwell (JCMR/35-gen-shotwell)↩︎