Robert C. Binkley

Congress logo from L’Italia che Scrive
12:5 (May 1929) p.137.

This part will cover the Binkleys’ voyage across the Atlantic and through France and Italy to Rome, where the Bibliographic Congress opened in mid-June, and then follow Bob’s participation in the Congress during its sessions in Rome. Part three will complete the description of the Congress until it closed in Venice at the end of the month, and part four will pick up some threads in Bob and Frances’s personal lives and follow them through to their return to the US.

A major source for this posting is the conference proceedings: Il Ministero della Educazione Nazionale (Direzione Generale delle Accademie e Biblioteche), ed., Primo Congresso mondiale delle biblioteche e di bibliografia, Roma-Venezia 15-30 giugno MCMXXIX – a. VII: atti, 6 vols. (Roma: La Libreria dello Stato, 1931-33), cited as Proc. with volume and page number. Copies are rare; WorldCat knows of only one in a Canadian library. (I was lucky enough to find a set for sale at a decent price.) The other main sources, apart from Bob and Frances’s correspondence, are the jocular “Expedition Reports” they sent to friends and family in July, 1929. The first was Bob’s work and is cited as “Report”; the other two were written by Frances, who entitled them “Minority Reports” 1 and 2. Since these were written to amuse their friends and family, who had no professional interest in the Congress, they can’t necessarily be taken as a fair-minded description, but they do provide details not available elsewhere.

The Crossing and the Road to Rome

Bob’s two previous Atlantic crossings had both taken place in December (1917 and 1919), so this one was a good deal more pleasant. He wrote to Sidney Robertson:

The crossing has been so perfectly smooth that no single case of seasickness has been reported; in fact, the ship has not at any time been as unsteady as our apartment at 49 Morton St. was whenever the milk truck would go past in the street.¹

The S.S. Minnekahda was a tourist class ship (no first class), with 275 staterooms and a dining lounge seating 400. Bathrooms and showers were shared. She boasted a “famous jazz orchestra” and had a large dance floor. The Atlantic Transport Line promoted the Minnekahda as the “ship of distinction but ‘without distinctions’”. ²

During the voyage Bob befriended a young French silk technician, and together they started a fad among the passengers: they bought dungarees and worked a shift stoking coal in the engine room. (It was probably just like this.) Frances reports that Bob found it “very interesting”. Others picked up the idea, and every day Bob and the Frenchmen had to lend out the dungarees to new stokers.³ Both Bob and Frances spent much of the voyage trying to work, Bob on his review for the Journal of Modern History and Frances on the index to What is Right with Marriage, and both corrected page proofs. They made a useful social contact: Henry Canby, the editor of the Saturday Review, who had long conversations with Bob (as well as bumming cigarettes off him).⁴

On board the Minnekahda (click for larger image)
(Photo source: S.S. Minnekahda (II), used by permission of Jonathan Kinghorn)

They touched at Portsmouth on June 10, where they mailed some letters, then crossed to Boulogne and took the train to Paris. They neglected to check their trunk through to Paris and were surprised at how easy it was to retrieve it — “Imagine getting by with that at the Grand Central Station”, Frances remarked.⁵ They remained in Paris for three days, and then left for Lyon. There Bob introduced Frances to the Alliod family, with whom he had roomed in 1919.

After a day in Lyon they took the night train south. Approaching the Italian border early in the morning, they looked forward to their first sight of real Fascists; but though the station at Ventimiglia was crowded with soldiers and Fascist militia, the only real difference they noticed was that the station staff were more serious than their French counterparts. From here their Congress card entitled them to half-price tickets and accommodation. On the train to Genoa the Fascist militia busied themselves checking tickets and passports repeatedly. The Binkleys stayed overnight in Genoa, where Frances bought shoes and Bob left their money and papers in the hotel safe. The hotel sent a runner to the station who caught up with Bob and Frances in their compartment on the Rome train.⁶

When they reached Rome on Sunday, June 16, they checked into the Albergo del Sole (selected from the tourist agency list) opposite the Pantheon, paying 25 lire or $1.30 per night for a “dim, vast room with baroque furniture and windows opening on the Piazza”, that had once been occupied by Ariosto.⁷ No doubt worn out with traveling, they began to reconsider their plan to spend only the period of the conference in Rome and then move on to Florence, Bologna or Milan. Rome seemed worth a longer stay.

Mussolini addresses the Congress.
(Proc. 1, facing p.88)

The next day, Bob went to register for the Congress. Both Bob and Frances appear on the list of registrants, but Frances did not attend any of the sessions.⁸ They had missed the official opening of the Congress the day before their arrival in Rome, where the delegates had been welcomed by Mussolini in person. They would, said il Duce, take home from the Congress “a clear and exact vision of what Italy has been, what it is, and what it wishes to become”.⁹ But the Binkleys had not missed all the festivities; Bob returned to the hotel with the news that as congressisti they were invited to a audience with Pope Pius XI (a former librarian) in the Vatican Library later in the day. Frances wrote:

The card said that signore should wear a vestito di nero and velo, signori should wear frak. We were a little in doubt as to the respective genders of signore and signori, but the padrone’s young man who spoke English told us that Bob must wear a frock coat and I must wear a veil and a thick black dress. So we didn’t go to the reception that afternoon.¹⁰

The Congress sessions were held in the Palazzo Corsini (A). The exhibitions were scattered around the city: Roman bibliography in the Palazzo Margherita (B, now the US embassy), the modern Italian book in the Palazzo della Minerva (C), and “biblioteconomia” in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna at Valle Giulia (D). The Congress offices were in the new home of the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione in the Viale del Re (now the Viale di Trastevere) (E).¹¹ The Binkleys stayed at the Albergo del Sole (F) throughout the Rome sessions.

Though the Congress was now open, its organization was in complete disarray. Bob wrote:

It was characteristic of the Congress that no one knew when anything was going to happen. Esdaill [sic: Arundell Esdaile] of the British Museum never did get a chance to have his section meet, and Koch and Uhlendahl finally got their sections in only by calling them at a time which conflicted with something on the official program.¹²

The local organizing committee had not printed a program or scheduled sessions; the program had to be improvised by the president of the International Committee Isak Collijn and others.¹³ The confusion seems to have been the result of conflicting expectations between the International Committee and the local organizers. Bob, perhaps unfairly, laid the blame mostly on the “small calibre” of the Secretary-General of the Congress, Vincenzo Fago.

Fago has since lost his job at the Ministry of Public Instruction because of the way he didn’t handle the Congress. The Touring Company was mostly interested in getting the people to spend money, Fago was mostly interested in advertising the Italian book trade, the Government was getting what prestige it could out of having an International Congress meet in Rome. Fago had not been able, however, to get the Government to pay all the bills of the official delegates, as he had promised when bringing the Congress to Rome, nor had he been able to smooth out the politics of the organization. Previous to the Congress he had been sending out retractions and amendments and circulars one after the other. And now the Congress met without a program.¹⁴

In mitigation, The Library Journal noted that Fago was coping with the critical illnesses of his wife and son during the Congress.¹⁵

Including the exhibitions in other cities after the initial sessions in Rome, the program ended up like this (based on the dates and times reported in the Proceedings; green sessions are the ones Bob is known to have attended):

Click and drag to left or right to see more of the congress timeline.

On the 18th the Binkleys registered with the police for their summer stay.¹⁶ In the afternoon Bob attended a session where a speaker from the Huntington read a paper about the first bibliography of bibliographies.¹⁷ Bob was amazed at presenters who insisted on reading their papers in full, despite the crowded and unstructured schedule. The same speaker read a meandering history of the Huntington in Koch’s section, in which, to the disgust of the Northern Californian, “[he] ended, believe it or not, but it’s true, with a few words in praise of Los Angeles”.¹⁸

Bob’s real work came on the morning of the 19th. Heinrich Uhlendahl‘s¹⁹ Section 3 on the bibliography of periodicals met back-to-back with Theodore Koch’s Section 6 on the book industry, in which Bob was to speak and to introduce his resolution on perishable paper. Together the two rogue sessions made a long sitting: Section 3 ran from 9:30 to 11:30, followed without a break by Section 6, which ended at 1:45.

As Section 3 opened, Koch was present on the dais with Uhlendahl and Auguste Vincent of the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels.²⁰ Uhlendahl began by describing a questionnaire he had sent to 25 European countries. There was insufficient time to present the results in detail, but he summarized the findings: practices around the compilation of bibliographic data on the literary production of the nations were diverse and generally inadequate. He therefore proposed a resolution in favor of national bibliographies of monographs, well edited and promptly published; and the desirability of lists of all or at least the noteworthy articles in journals. There followed a brief discussion, in which Bob, Koch and Dr. Wieruszowski (who does not appear among the registrants, but was perhaps Helene Wieruszowski, librarian at the University of Bonn) took part. Bob spoke up to promote Social Science Abstracts, and he was elected to the drafting committee for the resolutions of both Sections, along with Uhlendahl and Wieruszowski.²¹ He reported to M. Blander at Social Science Abstracts:

I made an attempt to get the abstracts mentioned in the resolution which the Committee drew up for presentation to the Congress, but without success. The Germans were in complete control, both in the Section and in the Drafting Committee, of which I was also a member. The Germans were chiefly interested in forcing through a resolution calling upon each country to make a bibliography of its own periodical literature, like our readers’ Guide and the one that the Germans have. The French have none,—hence the German eagerness to put their resolution through in that form. ²²

Uhlendahl then gave brief summaries of seven papers whose authors were not present; Paul Gsell reported on the handling of the bibliography of periodicals in Paris libraries; and Uhlendahl discussed the problem of translations, which were frequently indistinguishable in catalogues from original works. Uhlendahl then embodied his arguments in a three-part resolution, calling on each nation to publish a complete and current national bibliography, including a list of journal articles; that translations should be recognizable as such; and that each nation should publish a separate bibliography of translations from foreign languages. Interestingly, the Italian text of the resolution (which is the form adopted by the Section) omits the reference to the periodical literature, which Bob identified as the principal goal of the German delegation. Perhaps that clause was struck by an amendment in the session, and the “forcing through” that Bob mentions was an attempt to reintroduce it in the Drafting Committee.

Koch then took the chair for the session of Section 6. Bob had prepared a paper²³ on the problem of perishable paper as it related to libraries. He used First World War newspapers as his primary example to illustrate how library collection policies were affected. He proposed solutions on two fronts: library editions of items intended as a permanent record should be printed on durable paper, and decaying items should be rescued or copied. The latter required research into the chemistry of paper; he noted the work of the US Bureau of Standards. The former depended on librarians to persuade the publishing industry to change its practices. He proposed starting by persuading governments to print their publications on durable paper (at least in limited library editions), and then for libraries to use their purchasing power to get publishers to do the same. As a last resort, he suggested using copyright registration laws to force publishers to use good paper. The first requirement for the rescue of perishing materials was to solve the chemistry problems. Finally, for copying, full-sized photostatic copies are too expensive: Bob advocated exploiting the new opportunities for microphotography. He mentions the Library of Congress’s Project A²⁴ and Admiral Fiske’s binocular reading glass. These are experimental; but once best practices have emerged, a vast effort will have to be organized to apply the techniques of preservation without duplicating effort. The paper closes by introducing his resolution.²⁵

In the event, Bob did not get to read his paper. Section 6 had twelve speakers scheduled during its two-and-a-quarter hour timeslot.²⁶ Koch, the chairman, who was to speak first, gave up his time, and the following four speakers read their papers. Next was Bob’s turn:

When I saw the way things were going I cut mine down to a two page abstract, handed the paper itself over to the secretary and read part of the abstract, after asking permission. Never was permission more cheerfully given. Then I moved the resolutions, and Cole, the dear old gentleman who had praised Los Angeles, moved the drafting Committee resolution, and everything was set.²⁷

The next two speakers, Leslie E. Bliss of the Huntington and H.W. Wilson, followed Bob’s example. Three of the four remaining speakers managed to read their papers in other sections, and one was not present. Bob’s resolution (reproduced below) was therefore the final business of the session.

It remained for the drafting committee to put the resolution into its final form. Bob described the process:

The drafting Committee met in a hotel room that night, and translated my resolution out of English while I translated others into English. I felt a distinct thrill of triumph in the fact that my resolution had a sentence so long that the German had to break it up in order to translate. I told him that I had been waiting for years for that revenge upon the German language. The way it came about that the English sentence was so long was that a last minute change was made, cutting out something, and linking together the two paragraphs surrounding it. This made into one sentence what had previously been two articles of the resolution.²⁸

The changes that Bob refers to appear to be those reflected in a different version of the resolution, found in 1987 among the IFLA archives in the United Nations Library in Geneva, and now in IFLA headquarters in The Hague.²⁹ The document has Bob’s name written in the margin, and a note: “Can you put this on agenda with Section 6 tomorrow?”. This appears to refer to the final session of the Congress, where resolutions were adopted by the Congress as a whole, as will be covered in the next posting in this series. The text of the resolution differs substantially from the version in the Proceedings. It summarizes the various points of the original resolution more succinctly (producing some long combined sentences, one of which must be the one that stumped Bob’s German colleague). It then ties the resolution to the previous year’s resolution of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an organ of the League of Nations:

The World Library and Bibliographical Congress expresses hereby its emphatic approval of the resolutions and recommendations of the Committee of Experts, approved by the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation at Geneva, August, 1928, namely:

“That the attention of the Governments should be drawn to the necessity of using for documents of permanent value, and especially for those of an official character, only papers manufactured according to given specifications.”

It concludes by urging that a committee of IFLA should be formed to coordinate research, and that a Section at the next IFLA Congress should follow up on the progress made in the interim. The relations of IFLA to the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation had been proposed for discussion at the Congress by the International Committee.³⁰ The changes therefore made the resolution more the work of an IFLA insider than Bob’s original was, presumably due to Uhlendahl’s influence.³¹

Bob left the final text of the resolution with Marco Liberma, an antiquarian book dealer in Rome (who also does not appear in the list of registrants), to copy and forward to Koch. Although there was one more day of sessions in Rome, there is no evidence that Bob attended; he may have used this day to visit the exhibition of “biblioteconomia”, which opened that morning.³² On June 22nd the Congress officially transferred to Naples, and Bob and Frances followed a day later; but not on Congress business, as we shall see in a future posting.

Appendix: Resolution adopted by Section 6

(Printed in Italian and English in the Proceedings, 1.157-60. This is the form in which Bob proposed the resolution, not the final form produced by the Drafting Committee, which, since it it available online, I haven’t reproduced here.)

Deeply concerned with the problem created in the past fifty years by the use of highly perishable paper in the publishing of books, magazines, newspapers, and public documents, and with the consequent impossibility of preserving properly the records of out rime, and recognizing the responsibility which rests upon librarians to preserve for the future the records of the present and the past, the First World Library and Bibliographical Congress urgently endorses all measures:

The Section also passed a resolution introduced by Dr. Hoffman of Leipzig calling on all nations to produce inventories of fine bookbindings on the German and Austrian model.³³

Footnotes

1. Doc. 303: 1929-06-09. [↩]
2. Jonathan Kinghorn, S.S. Minnekahda (II). [↩]
3. Doc. 303; Doc. 154 (FWB to her mother, 1929-06-09). [↩]
4. Doc. 303. [↩]
5. “Report”, p.1. [↩]
6. “Minority Report 1″, p.5. [↩]
7. “Report”, p.2; “Minority Report 1″, p.6. The Albergo del Sole is now a four-star hotel. [↩]
8. Proc. 1.79. Bob gave his affiliation as Smith College and their residence as Northampton, MA. [↩]
9. Mussolini’s speech: Proc. 1.94-95: “una visione chiara ed esatta di quello che l’Italia è stata e di quello che è e di quello che vuole essere”. [↩]
10. “Minority Report 1″, pp. 6-7. Gentlemen did indeed wear frock coats, as this photo shows. In the picture of the papal reception in the Proceedings (vol. 1, facing p.88), no ladies are visible. [↩]
11. Proc. 1.181. [↩]
12. “Report”, p.3. [↩]
13. Serpil de Costa, “Foundation and Development of IFLA, 1926-1939,” The Library Quarterly 52, no. 1 (January 1982): 41-58, at p.47. William Warner Bishop, head of the University of Michigan library, had planned to devote his time before the Congress to his work with the Vatican Library, but found Collijn and Fago “much perturbed over the arrangements and the program”, and so devoted all his time to helping with the Congress. Nicoletta Mattioli Hary, “The Vatican Library and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: The history, impact, and the influence of their collaboration 1927-1947” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1991), v.2 pp.638-39. [↩]
14. “Report”, p.3. [↩]
15. “Editorial Forum”, The Library Journal, Sept. 1 1929, p.714. [↩]
16. Doc. 2369. [↩]
17. “Report”, p.3. Bob says it was in Pierre Roland-Marcel’s section, which was Section 10 on bursaries for library school training, and met June 17 at 10:30: Proc. 1.171; but the speaker (later identified by Bob as Watson G. Cole) actually read the paper “Bibliographical Method” (Proc. 2.18208) in Section 4 under Fago, which met June 18, 3:00 to 5:00: Proc. 1.135-40. Roland-Marcel was present and introduced a resolution (Proc. 1.136), which perhaps explains Bob’s lapse of memory. [↩]
18. “Report”, p.3. [↩]
19. Uhlendahl was director of the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig (Proc. 1.73), essentially the German national library at this time. [↩]
20. The report of the Section is at Proc. 1.130-34. [↩]
21. Proc. 1.131. [↩]
22. Doc. 1879, 1929-07-03. [↩]
23. Proc. 3.77-85; also in Collected Papers [↩]
24. The first large-scale use of microfilm; a five-year project that started in 1927, funded by John D. Rockefeller, to acquire copies of materials relevant to the history of the US in European collections. [↩]
25. The last paragraph in the paper as published in the Proceedings, omitted in the Collected Papers, is: “In order to give definition to our purpose in this effort, both as regards the publishing practices of today and the rescue of our legacy of decaying paper, I present the following resolution for discussion.” [↩]
26. The report of the Section is at Proc. 1.156-60. [↩]
27. “Report”, p.3. [↩]
28. “Report”, p.3. [↩]
29. “A Resolution from the Distant Past“, Abbey Newsletter 15:7 (Nov. 1991). [↩]
30. Proc. 1.190. [↩]
31. Uhlendahl had represented Germany and served as secretary at the first plenary meeting of the International Committee in March, 1928 (Proc. 1.182), and spent a week in Stockholm with Collijn and Fago in January, 1929 planning the program of the Congress (ibid. 1.185-86). [↩]
32. Proc. 1.251. [↩]
33. Proc. 6.160. [↩]

Extracurricular Activities

Birth Announcement

During the Congress sessions in the first half of June, Frances took advantage of the opportunity to see Rome.

While Bob attended the Library Congress, I wandered about the town, finding the way to various monuments. The city is not appealing at first. It is much too warm for comfortable walking in the day time. The streets are narrow and crowded; the buildings are all painted with the same yellow wash. The oppressive number of ancient walls, churches and so forth deadens one’s appreciation. First impressions need to be corrected later.

Women do not go about very much alone here, which adds to the discomfort of the solitary female tourist. In the big park, nice girls are always accompanied by an elderly companion, and those who walk unaccompanied apparently do so for the purpose of picking up a man. (Note: Further study will be made of methods, social status of girls, etc.) This situation makes it very difficult to get rid of the men who follow one about. Even I, in my middle-aged and portly condition, found myself followed through the park for several hours by a puzzled young man, and on another occasion was followed to my very door by a swagger thing with a mustache and a walking stick.¹

She was entering her third trimester about the time they arrived in Rome, but was still, to her surprise, pinched in public.² The heat and her advancing pregnancy made it hard to enjoy moving around the city. She wrote in October:

The distances that seemed so difficult to negotiate this summer are nothing at all now — so that whenever I go over any of our walks of this summer I have a curious feeling of fantasy, like floating in a dream.³

Once the Congress was finished, Bob and Frances started taking classes in Italian language and culture together at the Anglo-American Association.⁴ The lectures were in Italian and filled two hours each morning. There were also excursions to historical or archaeological sites in Rome and beyond.⁵ This gave them an opportunity to socialize with other English speakers. One of their friends from the class wrote later:

I often think of the fun we had together in Rome, and on the trips. Remember the evening we boldly sat on a bench in the Pincio eating the remains of our Viterbo lunch? Wasn’t it fun? And then the Ostia trip and the swimming. What good times we had!”⁶

Their education in Italian culture included a survey of the local wines. Though alcohol was far from unavailable in the West Village under Prohibition (a crackdown in April had led to nothing more serious than a request from the waiter at Ticino’s to keep their bottle under the table),⁷ the variety and quality of the wines of Rome were a delight. Bob wrote to his former department chair at NYU:

Having just returned from a long cool afternoon spent under an arbor near the Milvian Bridge, drinking this glowing yellow Frascati, I am impressed with the thought that this would be just the life for you as well as for me. I am studying the wines, thus accumulating knowledge that will be as useless to me as the European History course is to the dry goods merchants. They still make Falernian wine, and sell it at about 10 or 12 lira the litre. We took some with us when we went down to examine the ruins of Ostia. I found that it gave me quite an archeological feeling, if you know what that means.⁸

Frances regretted that her condition prevented her from enjoying the opportunity as much as she would have liked.⁹

Though they corresponded with various people they had met for a few months after their return to the US, they seem not to have made any long-term friendships such as Bob had with the Alliod and Cheney families in Lyon. The longest was with the historian Alberto Maria Ghisalberti, who taught the Italian history course which Bob and Frances followed and with whom Bob shared an interest in the history of the Italian Risorgimento.¹⁰

Bob and Frances made a few excursions from Rome. The longest came during the intermission in the Congress in June, after the Rome sessions and before the final sessions in Venice, when they spent a few days in Naples. There was an exhibition there in connection with the Congress, but that was not the purpose of their trip. A Stanford friend and former roommate of Bob’s, K.G. Robertson, had written in April that the passenger ship on which he was serving as a seaman, the S.S. President Hayes, would call at Naples on June 22-23.¹¹ K.G. had studied psychology, and he and his wife Sidney (the future Sidney Cowell, musicologist and wife of the composer Henry Cowell) had travelled to Europe in 1924, and spent some time in Zürich where K.G. studied with Jung. After their return to Stanford K.G. seems to have lost his sense of purpose, drifted away from psychology into a bank job, and then in Nov. 1928 thrown it all over and joined the Dollar Steamship Line, as a first step towards settling on a South Sea island. In 1929 Sidney was planning to divorce him.¹² It was during their separation that Bob walked onto the deck of the President Hayes at Naples and surprised K.G. The trio spent the evening together in town, drank “the right amount of wine”, and ended up at an albergo on the hill with a view of the sea and of Vesuvius. The following morning they discussed K.G.’s marriage briefly: by way of marriage counseling Bob expounded his theory of the “completed incident” as the key to healthy resolution of domestic arguments.¹³

After K.G. sailed away, Bob and Frances stayed on in Naples for a couple of days. They visited the antiquities museum and spent a day at Pompeii, where Bob finally succeeded in throwing off the persistently intrusive guides by pretending to speak only Russian.¹⁴

On their return to Rome they moved into new lodgings. They rented a room from an Italian family, the Nannis, who lived in an apartment on an upper floor at 10 Via dei Cappuccini, near the Pincio. The rent was about $17/month,¹⁵ ant the arrangement seems to have included the service of the maid Cesarina both for cooking and housework and to help care for the baby when it came. They worked to bridge the language gap: Frances commented to her parents, “Our maid is a genius at understanding. For example one has but to draw a picture of an apple and mention the color purple, and she gives us fried eggplant for dinner.”¹⁶ The Binkleys observed the Nanni family as examples of Italian middle class life, something I’ll return to in the next installment.

Writing and Research

Bob had brought one major unfinished piece of work to Rome: his review article on the historiography of the Peace Conference for the new Journal of Modern History. It had expanded from a review of some recently published memoirs into a survey of the state of documentation on the Conference and a revisionist critique of the work of its interpreters over the decade since it ended. Bob aimed to wrest the Conference from the hands of journalists and claim it for historians. Comparing the state of Peace Conference studies to that of the War Guilt question a few years earlier, he wrote:

[J]ust as there were writers who treated the international situation of 1914 as if it had been the stage of a conflict between such entities as “civilization” and “barbarism,” so there have been historians of the Peace Conference who have painted the world-scene of 1919 as if it had been a clearly drawn struggle between such things as Crime and Justice, or New and Old. … The study of the war-guilt question was admirable in the persistence with which all possible sources of information were explored, and deplorable in the naïveté with which the issues of the discussion were formulated. A review of the literature upon the Peace Conference indicates that it is tending to develop in a comparable way.¹⁷

The article lists the principal published sources on the Peace Conference and exposes the various nationalistic and other agendas that shaped them. The footnotes contain a comprehensive list of the published sources. Bob must have written from extensive bibliographic notes made in the Hoover War Library at Stanford and in the New York Public Library; no particular prominence is given to Italian sources he might have seen for the first time in Rome. He mentions in passing Prof. Adams’ work at the Conference collecting propaganda and memoranda from the various national delegations for the Hoover collection, without mentioning his own role in that work in the summer of 1919.¹⁸ He notes the location and prospects for access to some unpublished collections, for example the papers of Col. House, which were due to be opened when the new library at Yale was completed in 1930 or 1931.¹⁹

Bob had struggled to finish the article before leaving New York in May, and it would probably have been a very different and less ambitious work if he had. When he finally sent it off in mid-August, he wrote to the editor, Bernadotte Schmidt:

I take great pleasure in enclosing the book review, which has grown to be a review article rather than a review of the most recent books alone. In order to give unity to the whole treatment it seemed worthwhile to cover the ground completely. And it is my hope that this article will be something of a starter’s gun for Peace conference study — especially as regards the beginning of research by Ph.D. candidates. I hope you do not find it too preachy or too long. … Possibly the title is too vague. The title “Accessible Source Materials on the Peace Conference of Paris” is one I had thought of, but it is too narrow; the title “Present Prospects in the History of the Paris Peace Conference” emphasises another point. Please make any changes you think worth while in the title.”²⁰

As it turned out the article, which appeared as “Ten Years of Peace Conference History”²¹ in the Dec. 1929 issue, made Bob a “marked man”²² at the American Historical Association conference that Christmas, and led to his being headhunted away from Smith College to Western Reserve University in Cleveland the following spring.

During the summer Bob and Frances also collaborated on a debate on romance in marriage, which was published in Forum as “Should We Leave Romance Out of Marriage? A Debate between Husband and Wife”.²³ They had proposed the debate to the editor the previous February.²⁴ Although it is presented as a debate (in the format used by Forum in every issue), the two sections do not really engage each other. Bob goes first with a conventional criticism of popular romantic notions of true love; Frances follows with a description of the New Innocents, who know all about sex and nothing about romance. The thinking was probably developed in the conversations that shaped What is Right with Marriage, but may have been influenced by their observation of Italian customs as outsiders. Frances questioned Cesarina closely about Italian wedding customs:

… Frequently when the priest asks if everyone is content with the marriage a former fidanzato, victim of broken engagement, cries “No.” After the ceremony there is a pranza, & then the viaggia di nozze. The Nannis went to Florence. Food is very cheap there, they say.

At some point in the festivities the sposi go from house to house, among their friends, and drink at each place, and sometimes become ubriacco.

How shocking a wedding like ours must seem to people who feel so strongly that it is a family affair.²⁵

RCB's reader's ticket for the library of the Camera dei Deputati

With the end of the Congress, Bob plunged into the research opportunities presented by the libraries of Rome.

Across the street [from the Anglo American Association] is the National Library, with unlimited newspaper files. A block away is the Library of the Risorgimento with a special collection on the war, including some very good material. And three blocks down the street is the library of the Chamber of Deputies, to which I expect to obtain access, with the best collection on Fascism in Italy. I find no difficulty in getting hold of Socialist newspapers in the National Library. For working, things couldn’t be more conveniently arranged.²⁶

Those collections represent the areas of his research that summer:

• listing newspapers, periodicals and government documents for the Hoover War Library’s acquisition policy
• research on the Peace Conference and the European response to Wilson’s diplomacy, to fill out the Italian chapter of his dissertation, which he still hoped to publish
• contemporary Fascism, which he intended to write about for places like the New Republic
• nineteenth-century history, in connection with his teaching specialization in Europe after 1815; this research eventually found its outlet in the Italian chapter in Realism and Nationalism²⁷

Of the three libraries mentioned he preferred the library of the Chamber of Deputies, where he found interesting company as well as the materials he needed:

The library of the Chamber of Deputies is by far the best one in Rome for contemporary history, and the comfort and convenience of the place is increased by the liberty which the very few persons who are using it assume in talking freely with each other and discussing together whatever they are reading.²⁸

He also used the Library of American Studies as a base, or so he said when he wrote a letter of support for the library to the American University Union, which was considering cutting its funding.²⁹

Doc. 2414: RCB's letter of introduction from the Hoover War Library

Bob did not neglect his obligations to the Hoover War Library. In the spring he had written to the director, his old friend Ralph Lutz, about his plans for an Italian trip. As a result he had been appointed the Library’s special representative at the Congress, and also authorized to collect materials in Italy. Unfortunately the Library had already spent its book fund appropriation for the period to Sept. 1, so it was only able to appropriate $100 for Bob’s purchasing.³⁰ The major wants were to fill the Library’s run of the Parliamentary Debates and Documents, to acquire a run of the periodical Avanti, and to collect materials on the origins of Fascism. The librarian Nina Almond sent more detailed want lists in particular areas, and letters of reference to the Hoover’s existing agents in Rome were also prepared.

While in Rome Bob compiled extensive lists of Italian periodicals, government publications and war materials in the various libraries, and drafted an acquisition policy for the Italian collection.³¹ In it he evaluated the effectiveness of the three agents: one was too involved with his own library to do anything for the Hoover collection, another was good but his prices were too high, the third was completely ineffectual. Bob visited bookstores and purchased some serials, and arranged for exchanges of duplicates between the Hoover collection and some Roman collections.

At five went to tea with Count Michalowski at his Polish Library in Rome; he showed me his list of duplicates, which was about half suitable for Hoover War Library. I made the selections, showed him my commission, and arranged for purchase by the Hoover War Library after a check of the list.³²

The deal Bob worked out was that the Hoover would evaluate the list of Michalowski’s duplicates, and pay for them by acquiring and sending American books on Michalowski’s want list.³³

Though socialist newspapers were available in the National Library, there were no backruns to be bought. He wrote to Nina Almond at the Hoover:

As to Socialist materials, no one in Rome will touch them. But I happened upon a man in Florence who may. If circumstances should arise in which it will be possible to secure a collection of real value, I would like to have some money available in Italy. Could you send some sixty dollars of the hundred voted for the purchases? If circumstances should require it, I should like to be authorized to spend not more than ten dollars of this sixty to go to Florence. You will understand, of course, that materials of this kind require careful handling. I may have to bring them down myself and transmit them to you by way of the Commercial Attache’s office.³⁴

This Florentine contact was a language teacher who engaged in bookdealing on the side; Bob met him while apartment-hunting during a day he spent in Florence on his way back to Rome from Venice. Here, as on many other occasions, Bob’s easily-overwhelmed memory got him into trouble. He described the situation to the Norwegian librarian Kristine Lomsdal, whom he had met in Venice:

I raised the question of finding Socialist books, and he thought it might possibly be done. But it is very dangerous. He is the only person I have found who would be willing to touch it with a ten foot pole. I do not even dare to write to him about it, for fear of scaring him off with the fear that the police may have opened his mail. I nevertheless worked out a plan, and then found that I had lost his address.

Now here is where you come in. I want you to find out his name, but to do so without in any way giving him to think that you are connected with me. Go to 108 viale del Mille, say that you are looking for a Dottore Salucci or something like that, you have not remembered the name, and then if you find you have struck the right place, pretend that you are interested in taking lessons for yourself, or in arranging for your grandmother or sister to take them, but get his name, that is all I want. If he asks you who recommended him, give him the name of a Columbia University Professor. He thinks everyone in America knows him.³⁵

Lomsdal accepted the assignment and soon wrote back:

I must say I rather enjoyed my job as Sherlock Holmes. Having suspected two perfectly innocent creatures, smelling muggy socialist books over the whole block, I dashed on this man who cannot help but be the right one. … We had a very nice chat, and I was all in tears over his going away so soon, so that my sister would loose his valuable help. (I used your hint.) He is perfectly ignorant about my knowing you.³⁶

She enclosed two of the dealer’s cards. He was Dr. Gabriele Scarafia, and he corresponded with Bob later in the summer from 78 Viale delle Mille in Florence.³⁷ Although he identified some materials for the Hoover, I don’t know whether anything came of the connection. Bob could not visit Florence again before his departure, so he wrote to Scarafia in early September, explaining the Hoover’s needs. He included pointed hints about the sort of thing they were after: “In the period 1922-1925 any political books are of interest to us.”³⁸ He asked for collections of papers of wartime figures. He included a wishlist not of socialist but of Florentine periodicals:

The list includes at least one dangerous title: the syndicalist paper Guerra di Classe,³⁹ which was prominent enough to be declared a prohibited publication in Australia in 1918.⁴⁰ Any follow-up would have gone directly to the Hoover War Library rather than through Bob; the Hoover collection does not now include the Florence Guerra di Classe.

Preparations for the Baby

When Bob and Frances first arrived in Rome they were considering having the baby in Bologna, where their doctor in New York had referred them to people he knew, or even at the American hospital at Neuilly.⁴¹ An English-speaking doctor recommended by a New York friend, however, told them they could do no better than the Anglo-American Nursing Home in Rome.⁴² At this point, in June, they had still not decided where to spend the summer once the Congress ended. On his way back to Rome from Venice at the end of June Bob stopped for a day in Florence to explore the possibilities.

So I went to look into the possibility of getting hospital accommodations for the Binkley heir. I found that they have a fine hospital, but the doctor told me that they never use the anaesthetic technique. Nevertheless he thought it could be arranged. They have three kinds of confinement in the hospital, first class, second class and third class. The first class confinement costs 1000 lira. What an idea! The children of the poor must come into the world third class, ride third class all their lives, and go to their graves in a third class funeral. It was strange, also, that I had such difficulty in explaining to him why I wanted the anaesthetic technique used. He had told me that when an operation was necessary, they always used it, but otherwise they had only “accouchement naturelle”. At last the idea dawned on him. The anaesthetic technique was desired “so that she may not suffer so much”. A new idea indeed to him.⁴³

Once they had decided to stay in Rome, Bob visited the Anglo-American Nursing Home at 311 Via Nomentana (now the Casa di Cura “Assunzione di Maria Santissima”)) in early July to arrange for the baby to be born there. Frances followed up with a letter asking advice on the choice of baby clothes and information on how the Italian style worked — what they referred to as “swaddling clothes”. At this point Frances expected the baby to arrive after Bob’s departure: “I am particularly anxious to see that everything is properly provided for because I am to be alone in Rome when the baby is born, since my husband must return to America.”⁴⁴ G.O. Pine, the nurse who had been assigned to her, advised her to use the Italian clothes and clarified their usage.⁴⁵ For Bob and Frances the great advantage of the Italian clothes was that they would enable the maid Cesarina to help with the baby. They tried to shop for them by putting Frances’ handbag on the counter and saying “Now this is a baby; how do you dress it?”⁴⁶ Eventually signora Nanni took Frances in hand and helped her buy what was necessary.

My landlady went out with me to buy things for the baby — she is brava for bargains, and very pratica. Some of the things I bought I cannot imagine how they will be used, but since she assures me that I have a complete layette, there is nothing to do but wait and see how it works. Imagine having a baby without diapers!⁴⁷

While Frances seems to avoid the subject in letters to her parents, Bob wrote jaunty reassurances about the care Frances was receiving:

… Frances is having a good time, is in perfect health, and in the care of better doctors than we could afford to have in America. … If too many people find out about these advantages of having a child born abroad, it will be just like the Republican Congress to put a tariff on them.⁴⁸

Mysteriously, for a few days in early August Bob’s letters say that they are expecting twins: “We shall call them Romulus and Remus: Romulus after Rome, and Remus after Uncle Remus of the brer rabbit epic, a great favorite of ours.”⁴⁹ Up to this time they had referred to one baby. In two letters of Aug. 15 to two of his mentors at Stanford, Bob mentions “twins” in one and “an heir” in the other.⁵⁰ There are no more reference to the number of expected babies between this time and the birth.

Frances and the baby, in his Roman infant clothes.

On Aug. 20, the night of the full moon, thinking the birth was still at least a couple of weeks away, Bob and Frances walked the Appian Way for the second time with the professors (including Ghisalberti) and students from their courses at the Interuniversity Union. It was a very vigorous outing, by Bob’s description:

[T]he company was of the best. We climbed over and into everything, and when we could not climb, we ran and danced along the road and sang. Ghisalberti had a way of skipping down the road like a great giraffe running in the moonlight.⁵¹

They seem to have been determined to enjoy their last period of freedom. A couple of days later Frances’ worry that the baby would not arrive until after Bob’s departure in early September proved unnecessary. She wrote to her mother later:

[W]e had dinner at the home of an American, Osborne, who is one of the Embassy officials — we stayed until a little after twelve — and I was awakened at six in the morning by a pain. I hadn’t expected the baby for two weeks yet — so was slow to believe it was on the way — but by nine o’clock there it was. The Osbornes had lots of very good cocktails and wine, and if I had been willing to drink all that was offered me, your grandson would have been born intoxicated probably. … He came very easily — only three hours after the first pain. He was almost born in the taxi, but I got to the hospital in time, altho’ the doctor didn’t arrive until after he was all born and washed and dressed.⁵²

What with celebrations put on by the Osbornes and the Nannis, accompanied by many brindisi, the high life did not stop for Bob for a couple of days after the birth, at least in Frances’ jealous account (“After dinner the men went off together in search of more wine, and drank all evening — they had all the best wines: lacrimae Christi, frascati, moscata, aleatico, and so on. … It seemed scarcely fair that I, who had had all the trouble of producing him, should have no share in these festivities.”)⁵³ This situation perhaps influenced the style of the description of the birth that Bob wrote to a friend in New York the following day:

and soon there appeared comma floating upon a tiny white cloud comma a small male child comma having a nose like kid mccoy and a chin like herbert hoover period and an angel of the lord appeared comma saying comma this is thy child comma take it and cherish it and be glad you got it comma for they are no small matter period and thereupon i did examine the child first as to its body and then as to its principles period its body i found to be in true and just proportions and its principles i also found to be true and just period upon most of the problems of the moment an inquiry revealed that it was republican in sentiment for it had no ideas at all and yet its behaviour was very much like a democrat for it was wont to lift up its voice loudly over nothing period⁵⁴

Footnotes

1. Minority Report 1, p.7. [↩]
2. Doc. 745: Sidney Cowell to John Binkley, 1982-03-16, p.6. [↩]
3. Doc. 810: FWB to RCB, 1929-10-12. [↩]
4. Report, p.8. [↩]
5. Doc. 148: FWB to her parents, 1929-07-25. [↩]
6. Doc. 1281: Marie Davis to FWB and RCB, 1929-11-26. [↩]
7. Doc. 102: FWB to her mother, [1929-04-08]. [↩]
8. Doc. 1624: RCB to John Musser, 1929-08-11. [↩]
9. Doc. 10: FWB to HGWW, 1929-09-27. [↩]
10. Fisch, “Robert Cedric Binkley”, p.17. [↩]
11. Doc. 1172: 1929-04-25. [↩]
12. Doc. 1823: Sidney Robertson Cowell to RCB and FWB, 1929-05-29. [↩]
13. Doc. 1825: RCB to Sidney Robertson Cowell, 1929-07-03. [↩]
14. Report, p.4. [↩]
15. Doc. 1381: RCB to Ross (a colleague at NYU), 1929-07-07. [↩]
16. Minority Report 1, p.7. [↩]
17. “Ten Years of Peace Conference History,” The Journal of Modern History 1, no. 4 (December 1929), p.607. [↩]
18. “Ten Years”, p.627 [↩]
19. “Ten Years”, p.627. [↩]
20. Doc. 1885: RCB to Bernadotte E. Schmidt, 1929-08-18. [↩]
21. Whether the final title was Bob’s choice or Schmidt’s I do not know. [↩]
22. Fisch, “Robert Cedric Binkley”, p.18. [↩]
23. Forum 83 (Feb. 1930) 72-79. [↩]
24. Doc. 1335: RCB to Forum, 1929-02-22. In a letter to his parents at Christmas Bob refers to it as “the article we wrote in Rome”: Doc. 768: RCB to CKB and MBB, 1929-12-23. [↩]
25. Doc. 820: FWB to RCB, 1929-10-01. [↩]
26. Report, p.8. [↩]
27. Fisch, “Robert Cedric Binkley”, p.17. [↩]
28. Doc. 772: RCB to Sarah Brindley, 1929-08-13. [↩]
29. Doc. 1277: RCB to American University Union, 1929-07-22. [↩]
30. Doc. 2438: Ralph Lutz to RCB, 1929-05-16. [↩]
31. Doc. 2417: RCB, “Memorandum on the Italian Collection for the Hoover War Library, with Suggestions for an Italian Policy”, Sept. 1929. [↩]
32. Doc. 2563: RCB diary entry, 1929-08-04 [↩]
33. Doc. 2431: RCB to Nina Almond, 1929-08-04. [↩]
34. Doc. 2434: RCB to Nina Almond, 1929-07-12. [↩]
35. Doc. 1519: RCB to Kristine Lomsdal, 1929-07-11. [↩]
36. Doc. 1521: Kristine Lomsdal to RCB, 1929-07-16. [↩]
37. Doc. 1874: Scarafia to RCB, 1929-09-01. [↩]
38. Doc. 2421: RCB to Scarafia, 1929-09-05. [↩]
39. Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the transition to communism: an international comparative analysis (Ashgate, 2008), p.101. [↩]
40. “Federal Gazette Notices”, Sunday Times (Perth), 31 March 1918, p.1. Not to be confused with the anarchist paper of the same name published in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Today the Hoover collection includes some holdings of the latter, but not of the Florentine paper. [↩]
41. Doc. 2405: RCB to A.G. Welsford, 1929-06-18. [↩]
42. Doc. 2404: A.G. Welsford, 1929-06-19. [↩]
43. Report, p. 7. [↩]
44. Doc. 296: FWB to Anglo American Nursing Home, 1929-07-10. [↩]
45. Doc. 361: G.O. Pine to FWB, 1929-07-12. [↩]
46. Report, p.8. [↩]
47. Doc. 148: FWB to her parents, 1929-07-25. [↩]
48. Doc. 11: RCB to William Irvin Williams, 1929-07-15. [↩]
49. Doc. 1191: RCB to Bill Adams, undated but must be early August. [↩]
50. Doc. 1522: RCB to Ralph Lutz, and Doc. 1039: RCB to Robert T. Crane. [↩]
51. Doc. 2654: RCB’s diary notes, 1929-08-20. [↩]
52. Doc. 10: FWB to HGWW, 1929-09-27 (I’ve rearranged the order of the extracts). [↩]
53. Doc. 10. [↩]
54. Doc. 1500: RCB to Fran Klein, 1929-08-26. The saccharine style was prompted by a comment in Kate Beswick’s recent letter that “the slightly Rabelaisian tone of your epistles has been a little hard on Fran — but that she’s taking it like a lady. It will tonic her up a bit.” (Doc. 757, Kate Beswick to RCB and FWB, 1929-08-15; no doubt referring to the Kotex incident), Bob protested that “nothing has been further from my thought than to bring the blush of shame to a maiden cheek” and promised to avoid further offense in this letter. [↩]