Bancroft and His “Literary Industries”

Hubert H. Brancroft's Literary Industries (Reference Bancroft1890) is an autobiographical work that recounts the author's transformation from businessman to book collector and then to historian. It contains advice about how to accumulate books and manuscripts massively and quickly. The author's reflections about money, value, and books speak to the new relationship between knowledge production and capitalist accumulation. From the start, Bancroft's private book collection appears subordinated to a specific project of knowledge: writing the history of the western part of North America. His book can be read as a treatise on the relationship between library accumulation and the creation of regional knowledge.

It was published at the time of great changes in the United States: the closing of the western frontier, the culmination of a process of rapid industrialization, and the emergence of a mass reading public. Bancroft showed how a fortune amassed in the western frontier could be transformed into a great library. Literary Industries is not just the traditional book collector's narrative celebrating the pleasure of reading and the craftsmanship of bookmakers; it is a book about the “mechanics of knowledge,” and makes explicit how the physical assemblage of books relates to the formation of fields of study. Through the events narrated, Bancroft experiences a process of self-discovery, at the end of which he is transformed into a historian of the western side of the continent.

His library was one of the most impressive of his time. It was located in San Francisco, a city already developing into a center of commerce and industry in the Pacific. His reflections about book collecting, the ordering of a library, and the establishing of a “factory of history” are his book's most important contributions. His narrative anticipated conceptions of book accumulation and use later associated with the library movement and the research university. In a capitalist, democratic society, both the producer and the scholar had to be able to find in a public library all the materials they needed.

Basadre's “Memorias de un bibliotecario peruano”

Jorge Basadre is considered one of the most important Peruvian historians.Footnote ¹⁶ He is known for his contributions to the understanding of nineteenth-century Peru and for addressing the problems and mission of Peruvian History. He believed national history should contribute to the construction of nationhood.Footnote ¹⁷ He was committed to a “problem-guided history,” one capable of addressing the problem of the national question; that is, of discerning Peru's potentials and possibilities. In addition to being a historian Basadre was a trained librarian, who was appointed director of the National Library of Lima in 1943. The memoirs of his activities as a librarian, Recuerdos de un bibliotecario peruano (Reference Basadre1975a), can be read as a lamentation about Peru's underdevelopment and its effect on book accumulation and local intellectual culture. In Lima, the historian-librarian attempts to rebuild a basic institution of national culture—the national library—in a situation characterized by severe limitations of resources and a popular disregard for high culture.

Central to the book is a tragic event: the 1943 destruction by fire of the Lima National Library. Basadre's narration of this tragedy leads to a general reflection on the possibility of preserving cultural patrimony in a peripheral nation. The memoir also addresses questions of cultural plunder by foreigners, the role of universities in the development of local intellectuals, and contemporary inter-American cultural cooperation. Throughout the book there flows a sense of a collective frustration. Prior to 1943, Peru has been unable to build a modern library where colonial and post-independence documents would be preserved. Basadre was appointed director of the library reconstruction committee and led a collective effort to replace lost historical materials. He wanted to demonstrate that, even in the midst of a careless national state, it was still possible to build a decent library at the service of national culture and history.

The Origins of Bancroft's Library

In the early 1860s, after a successful business career, Hubert Bancroft decided to devote himself to book collecting. Bancroft was in the publishing business (ca. 1859–1860), and the origin of his library stemmed from the resolution of a business problem. In 1869, to help him decide whether to publish a proposed handbook on California, he gathered a collection of available publications about the state. In front of him, he realized, were not just books, but a potential field of study awaiting critical examination. After that, Bancroft expanded his interests from California to Mexico and later to the Pacific states. In three decades, he was able to amass the most impressive library on the west coast, containing over fifty thousand volumes (Caughey Reference Caughey1946: 67–68).

He made purchasing tours throughout Europe, bought valuable collections of Mexican documents, ordered his London agent to participate in book auctions, and toward the end he copied the entries of the British Library catalogue on Western Americana and tried to acquire most of the items on the list. Bancroft said he intended to buy everything he could that had been written about his chosen territory: the Pacific coast of North America.Footnote ¹⁸ Bancroft's “philosophy of collecting” can easily be summarized: collect all you can on a given subject, and assemble all the materials in a central location so as to be able to visualize the field open to investigation. Book collecting, he said, should serve a “practical purpose”: the construction of regional knowledge (Reference Bancroft1890: 189). A fortune amassed from business enterprise could be turned into valuable cultural capital placed at the service of the community.

The 1943 Fire and Its Lessons

Basadre's narrative about library accumulation deals with his activities as head of the Lima National Library. At its center lies the tragic destruction of the National Library by fire in 1943. The historian-librarian presented this event with the violence of an act of war:

The building collapsed, destroying the documents and furnishings of the Geographic Society of Lima, housed in the same building. This fire had a devastating impact on the colonial and post-independence materials. The small portion of the collection spared by the flames was ruined by the firefighters. According to Basadre, not a single important book or document pertaining to the colonial history of Peru survived.

The fire had destroyed a capital in books accumulated over six decades. In 1883 Ricardo Palma, another historian, had undertaken a similar rebuilding of the National Library after the invading Chilean army ransacked it during the War of the Pacific and reduced its collection from fifty-six to twenty-seven thousand volumes.Footnote ²⁰ The notion of a cyclical and recurrent loss of cultural assets dominates Basadre's narrative. The collection that disappeared in the flames in 1943 had nearly one hundred thousand volumes. The loss was catastrophic, and Basadre called the library's destruction “the most ominous and regrettable event that happened to Peru in the twentieth century” (Yepes del Castillo Reference Yepes del Castillo2003: 67).

The burned library was not a modern one: it had neither sophisticated catalogues nor an appropriate building. It had been accessible only to the illustrious elite. The catastrophe marked Basadre's thinking about the relationship between nation, history, and culture. He expected that the fire would make Peruvians rethink their own culture and history. From this moment on, he applied his expert knowledge in bibliotecology, acquired in the United States, to the service of national culture. He first directed his efforts at salvaging the remnants of the old library, then oversaw the building of a new one, and then turned to directing the rebuilding of the new library's collections.

The Importance of Visibility and Spatial Concentration

At a critical moment in Literary Industries, Brancroft tells the reader about the origins of his library. As just noted, an examination of published materials about California gave him the idea that the state could be the focus of a new field of study. His revelation was that by simply placing together books about the state he could visualize what had been written about it and the themes still in need of investigation (Reference Bancroft1890: 173–74). This discovery, that visibility and spatial concentration made it possible to imagine a research field, was crucial to the future development of his library. A researcher's possibilities of knowing depended upon circumscribing the field of study to a given territory, and also upon “seeing” all of the materials written about it deployed before his or her eyes. Bancroft believed, in other words, that comprehensive visibility, was a necessary precondition for knowledge. To attain such visibility, the collector required sufficient library space and the orderly arrangement of books. The field of study he chose, western North Americana, was already prefigured in the shelves of his library.

Like the “forty-niners,” scholars had to take possession of the field they intended to mine. A new field of study would emerge from the realization of two principles. One, as I have said, stated that researchers had to possess all possible materials relating to their given subject and, then, deploy them, in order, before their eyes. The other principle stated that the sources themselves—written byproducts of the expansion of Europe—would determine the areas where research remained to be done. Thus, the collector's quest for regional knowledge intersected with the embedded history of European expansionism.

When the State Abandons National Culture

Basadre's Recuerdos presents us with a detective-like investigation to determine who or what had caused the 1943 fire in the National Library. The national government appeared to be the principal suspect. Over decades, functionaries had done nothing to improve the facilities, and the institution lacked the resources, equipment, and organization a modern library required. The fire made evident a long-term problem of underdeveloped societies generally: state abandonment of national culture. Regarding Peru specifically, Basadre claimed that state desidia (indolence and neglect) was an “endemic illness”:

As the secretary of the Reconstruction Commission, Basadre had to oversee the cleanup, evaluate the damages, and investigate the fire's cause. A previous investigation had concluded that there was no evidence of arson, that an electrical failure had sparked the fire, and thus the blaze was “accidental.”

Not convinced, Basadre undertook his own investigation (ibid.: 33), which raised various other possibilities. One hypothesis was that President Prado's family had wanted to make inconvenient historical documents disappear, but Basadre rejected this hypothesis as an infamy. A second blamed library employees who supposedly tried to destroy evidence of their systematic thefts of documents and books, but Basadre discarded this idea, too. Finally, he came to accept the explanation of an accidental fire. During weekends, library employees had allowed their children into the library to practice typewriting, and they had produced the short circuit that sparked the conflagration. If this was indeed the case, Basadre reasoned, the former director's deficient administration was to blame.

When Basadre interviewed this former director, the now-elderly Carlos Romero, Romero started to criticize the work of the library's first director, historian Ricardo Palma. He said that Palma would hide old documents from sight, send them to provincial libraries, or give them away to individuals interested in the topics the documents addressed. At the end of the interview, however, Romero “confessed”—asked why he had opposed cataloguing the collection, the old man admitted his own inadequate preparation in librarianship. He also faulted the authorities for paying insufficient attention to the National Library, and at this point he broke down in tears (ibid.: 45).

Romero's tears expressed a profound sentiment of loss. The fire had destroyed unique issues of the first newspapers in Spanish America and sixteenth-century imprints that Romero had helped to collect. His “confession” led Basadre to reflect upon a more general phenomenon: the desidia of Peruvian cultural and political elites. The Leguía administration (1919–1930) had completely neglected national culture, and subsequent governments did likewise. State neglect extended to all aspects of the cultural patrimony: archaeological ruins, Spanish architecture, and historical collections (ibid.: 42). Basadre pointed to a chronic problem: government's disinterest allowed the pillaging of Peru's cultural assets. The disregard of Peruvian politicians and bureaucrats, and also the public, revealed a broad acceptance of illegality. The robbery of documents from repositories, though a common occurrence, was never prosecuted or punished. Peru's disregard for the nation's cultural patrimony was the reverse of the situation found in industrialized economies, where national libraries were modern, well organized, and well supported.

Bancroft's Method of Collecting

In time, Bancroft became a full-time book collector. His method of collecting differed from that of traditional book collectors. Though, like many of them, he searched for textual treasures of the sixteenth century, he concentrated his purchases on a specific geographical area. At first, he limited himself mostly to California. He visited bookstores in San Francisco and nearby cities in a quest for pamphlets about the state and the Pacific coast. On a subsequent trip to the east coast he extended his search to second-hand bookstores in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia (Caughey Reference Caughey1946: 69; Bancroft Reference Bancroft1890: 175). When his California collection had grown to five thousand volumes, he decided to “search all over Europe” in order to “complete” it.

Bancroft traveled across Mexico, the eastern U.S. coast, and various European cities seeking more books. Realizing that this method was slow, he contacted overseas book dealers and auction houses, which kept him informed of collections for sale. Eventually, his obsession with comprehensiveness led him to hire a bibliographer, Joseph Walden, who worked for him at the British Museum making “a transcript of the title of every book, manuscript, pamphlet, and magazine article touching” Western Americana (Caughey Reference Caughey1946: 72). Attaining complete visibility of the subject matter required a comprehensive bibliography, and the catalogue Walden compiled proved an invaluable guide to further acquisitions.

Bancroft spent much of his fortune gathering his library, and money gave him the power to shorten distances. For example, he bought the Andrade-Mexican collections at a Leipzig auction without leaving California—he simply wired $5,000 to his London agent and told him to buy at his own discretion.Footnote ²¹ He used the same method to purchase the Squier collection at a New York auction in 1867, and in 1880 to acquire the Ramirez de Durango collection in London (ibid.: 76–77). By the late 1880s, Bancroft had assembled fifty thousand books. This accumulation led him to buy a fireproof building on Valencia Street, where he organized a true library, dividing his books into sections. On the first floor were travel books, periodicals, legal codes, almanacs, and pamphlets. On the second were the working library, rare books, manuscripts, and a reference section. Books and shelves were numbered, and references were copied into a leather-bound catalog. Twelve librarians worked to keep the burgeoning collection in proper order (Bancroft Reference Bancroft1890: 205).

Reconstruction as a National Epic, 1943–1948

The reconstruction of the National Library of Peru from 1943–1947 proved arduous. The Reconstruction Commission began by “rescuing half-burned or wet papers, picking them up from the ground, cleaning them, and ordering them” (ibid.: 32). The library staff used a drying machine to save as many newspapers, manuscripts, pamphlets, and books as they could. Basadre moved the remainder of the collection and the furniture to the National School of Fine Arts. He ordered new steel stacks from France and started planning the new building's construction on the spot of the old one at the center of Lima, but this structure would be modern, more spacious, and fireproof.

Next, Basadre began rebuilding the lost collection through donations, purchase, and duplication. The task ahead was clear: “It was necessary to find in Lima, in the rest of our territory, or abroad … bibliographic material either from Peru or referring to Peru” (quoted in Yepes del Castillo Reference Yepes del Castillo2003: 69). He placed advertisements in local periodicals asking for donations. In the provinces, he promoted the creation of committees that would organize contributions of money, books, and magazines. In this way, the National Library eventually recovered much of the lost collection. When it reopened to the public in 1947, the collection held 134,000 volumes, thirty-four thousand more than before the fire. Considering his mission accomplished, in 1948 Basadre resigned his post at the National Library to become the director of the Division of Cultural Affairs of the Pan American Union.Footnote ²²

In Recuerdos, Basadre presented “the Peruvian people” as the main protagonists of the National Library's reconstruction. Whereas rich families and foreign business corporations had failed to respond to the request for donations, the Peruvian people had contributed generously. Chauffeurs, teachers, factory workers, and employees joined the effort, giving part of their salaries toward rebuilding the cultural capital of the nation.Footnote ²³ Cooperation between ordinary folks and intellectuals made all of this possible. A group of sensible Limeño intellectuals formed the association Friends of the National Library, and through their social connections these young notables found bibliographic treasures in the chests of aristocratic families and on the shelves of antique dealers (ibid.: 64–65). They organized bullfights to raise funds, cruised local bookshops in search of missing titles, and when possible purchased entire collections.Footnote ²⁴

Book Collecting and the Definition of a Field

On an 1866 trip to London, Bancroft observed that books and manuscripts about California usually stood near to those of Mexico on the shelves. This proximity persuaded him to expand his collecting to include materials about that country as well (Reference Bancroft1890: 179–80). At the end of that year he traveled to Paris, and then in early 1867 to Spain, to collect Mexicana. Though he found Spain poor and lacking in good libraries, he was nevertheless able to fill two large boxes with books. He continued his book-buying tour through southern France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Poland.Footnote ²⁵ Further purchases led to another significant expansion of his collecting field; having started with California, he ended up targeting “Western North America.” The very process of collecting defined the boundaries of this new field of study. “Gradually and almost imperceptibly had the area of my efforts enlarged. From Oregon it was but a step to British Columbia and Alaska; and as I was obliged for California to go to Mexico and Spain, it finally became settled to my mind to make the western half of North America as my field, including in it the whole of Mexico and Central America” (ibid.: 180–81).

Bancroft's field expanded because of connections that were embedded in the documents and books he had already gathered. For example, reading a travel narrative by Nuño de Guzmán led to questions about Mexico and Hernán Cortés. Diplomatic tensions between the United States and Britain over the Oregon Territory pointed to documents about Florida and the Gulf Coast. The books themselves held clues that guided the collector's path, prefiguring histories to be written in future. In time, his collecting and reading led him toward the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European colonization of America.

Mass-Produced Histories of Western America

Bancroft applied factory-style methods to both his library and his history writing. He employed from twenty to fifty men to organize the library, and hired copyists to search for Spanish materials in the archives of neighboring states. Other assistants he sent to interview settlers of the Pacific states and take down their recollections. He hired four men and a woman to help him write his multivolume history of the Pacific states, a massive undertaking that became The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft.Footnote ²⁶ Bancroft is credited with assembling the first known “factory of history,” which he called a “literary workshop.” Between 1872 and 1890, he managed to publish thirty-nine volumes of The Works.Footnote ²⁷

When Bancroft first contemplated writing a comprehensive history of the Pacific states (ca. 1871–1872), his collection had reached eighteen to twenty thousand volumes. He knew it would take him decades to read through it all and extract the most salient information (Caughey Reference Caughey1946: 91), so he decided to hire assistants to help him consult authorities, take notes, summarize contents, and compile references. Ideally, they would do the preparatory work while Bancroft would draft the actual volumes. In practice, however, his assistants ended up sharing an important part of the writing of The Works.Footnote ²⁸ Bancroft's failure to acknowledge their contributions generated scandals that undermined his prestige as a historian.Footnote ²⁹

The assistants were under constant pressure to produce more texts. Working ten hours a day, six days a week, they were expected to comply with Bancroft's demanding publication schedule, which usually meant one volume every four months. Assistants were classed into “indexers,” “compliers,” and “advanced writers.” Salary incentives, the assistants’ research and writing skills, and Bancroft's constant supervision facilitated high textual productivity: each of the thirty nine volumes exceeded eight hundred pages and was extensively footnoted in small print. As historians later acknowledged, The Works was an enormous storehouse of information.

Historians at the time, however, were reluctant to acknowledge Bancroft's contributions to western history.Footnote ³⁰ To some, his multivolume history seemed a gigantic gathering of historical data with little reflection or theory, an assembly line history that was problematic in terms of its methodology and purpose. Others criticized his business approach to writing and selling the books. But with time some commentators portrayed The Works as innovative and useful. Bancroft was among the first American historians to draw upon the recollections of immigrants and settlers, and perhaps the first to include indigenous populations within a history of Western North America (Clark Reference Clark1973: 159–60).

The grandiosity of Bancroft's historical undertaking would be difficult to exaggerate. The Works covered the entire history of the western half of the Continent, from Alaska to Panama, from the Pacific coast to the Continental Divide, and early colonization to the late nineteenth century. His plan included five volumes devoted to the history of “native races,” followed by three on Central America, six on Mexico, two on North Mexico and Texas, one on Arizona and New Mexico, and seven dedicated to the history of California. This was to be followed by nine volumes dealing with the history of eleven states—Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, the Northwest Coast, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, and Alaska (Caughey Reference Caughey1946: 157–58, 201–2).

The Historian-Librarian and the National Problem

In contrast to Bancroft, Basadre never envisioned or attempted an international or transnational history; he was concerned only with Peruvian history. He regarded the Peruvian nation as an unfinished project; conflicts among regions, classes, and races, he was convinced, had prevented the complete integration of the nation, and history could contribute to completing the process (Reference Basadre1931; Reference Basadre1947). He thought that Peruvian History had to deal with the construction of nationhood, a complex notion involving experience, thought, and spirituality. To contribute to nation-building, historians had to rescue from the archives all elements constitutive of “Peruvianidad,” from pre-Inca times to the contemporary period.Footnote ³¹ Basadre fought for a comprehensive and integral history of Peru, one that would overcome provincial postures, localisms, and the glorification of particular periods.Footnote ³² A synthesis of Peruvian History, he felt, should reflect the respective contributions of the Incanato, the Viceroyalty, and the Republic.

Basadre envisioned the nation as an entity of continuity through time (Thurner Reference Thurner2008). From the time of the Incas, through the formative period of the Republic, and into the twentieth century, Peru had remained a single nation despite wars, foreign invasions, economic crises, and ethnic and regional tensions (Yepes del Castillo Reference Yepes del Castillo2003: 198–200). Writing Peruvian History entailed selecting the “Peruvian” elements of each historical epoch in order to connect them in a composite image of the nation. Basadre gave the name promesa (promise) to the anxious, collective desire to fulfill the nation's destiny, the aggregation of the ideals sustained by Peru's distinct, constituent parts. From the Incas, the country had inherited ideals of state social provision, and Peru's independent leadership brought ideals of political autonomy, popular sovereignty, and social equality. Basadre favored a pedagogic, constructive nationalism, one that did not depend on resentment towards other nationalities.Footnote ³³

Colonial Libraries: Pillage and Purchase

Bancroft soon discovered that private libraries could be purchased in lots, as collections already assembled by historians and bibliophiles appeared on the market. Some of these came from former colonies or collapsing empires. In 1867 and 1879 Bancroft acquired important lots from two “imperial libraries.” One had been gathered by the Mexican bibliophile and book dealer José María Andrade.Footnote ³⁴ He had agreed to sell his library of Mexican history to Emperor Maximilian, but when the emperor fell in May of 1867, Andrade was forced to flee the country and took his library with him. When his collection was offered in auction at Leipzig (Reference Andrade1869), Bancroft purchased from it $5,000 worth of rare Mexican books (ibid.: 187–89). The second important collection he purchased was the library of José F. Ramírez, the head of Maximilian's first ministry and the director of Mexico's National Museum. It contained many colonial documents obtained from convents after the suppression of monastic orders (Bancroft Reference Bancroft1890: 195).Footnote ³⁵ Between these purchases, in 1876, Bancroft purchased chosen pieces of the Squier collection, which contained a wealth of materials on Central American archaeology and history (ibid.: 93–194).Footnote ³⁶

Bancroft increased his collection substantially by such means, buying books originally pillaged from convent libraries or bought in times of political turmoil. He made no apologies for this, and expressed pride at his success in “ransacking” rare books and documents. At his return from his book-buying trip to Europe, Bancroft wrote enthusiastically, “Now, I thought, my task is done. I have rifled America of its treasures; Europe have I ransacked; and after my success in Spain, Asia and Africa may as well be passed by. I have ten thousand volumes, and over fifty times more than ever I dreamed were in existence when the collecting began.” (ibid.: 185) The pleasure of possession compensated for any moral anxiety associated with his collection's colonial origins. Bancroft's amassing of books was a clear case of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—an expansion of capital achieved through the ravages of colonialism. Like many collectors of his day, Bancroft was proud to possess valuable sixteenth-century imprints of the colonial Spanish Empire.

Colonial Plunder and Intellectual Deficiency

Given his position, Basadre had a very different view of the ravages of foreign collectors. Even in the twentieth century, the pillaging of Peru's cultural assets continued unabated, assisted by state inaction and the apathy of the Peruvian people.Footnote ³⁷ This greatly contributed to the difficulties in building a true modern library. The national government paid little attention to preserving Peru's cultural patrimony in terms of not only books and documents, but also colonial architecture, national art, and archaeological sites. In Meditaciones sobre el destino histórico del Perú (Reference Basadre1947), Basadre presented this loss as an extended process stretching back to the colonial period.

By linking the Spaniards’ pillaging to that of creole caudillos, private entrepreneurs, and U.S. librarians, Basadre underscored the age-old persistence of colonial theft of Peruvian cultural assets.

The plundering of cultural assets placed Peruvian intellectuals in a peculiar position, since crucial primary sources for the study of Peru's colonial history were in Europe and the United States; libraries at San Marino, San Francisco, New Haven, New York, and Washington, D.C. had amassed the most important collections outside of Spain.Footnote ³⁹ To help compensate for this, the National Library held a small collection of post-independence documents that enabled a revisionist history of Republican Peru.Footnote ⁴⁰ But it was hard to imagine piecing together a totalizing vision of Peru from these mere fragments of the past. Among Peruvian intellectuals, the dearth of comprehensive library collections created a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis North Atlantic scholars. In La vida y la historia (1975b), Basadre reflected upon the deficiency of the country's universities. The University of San Marcos provided him with a knowledge of contemporary ideas that was incomplete at best. With outdated textbooks, and no funds to invite foreign professors, it was difficult to access European and U.S. currents of thought (ibid.: 207). Furthermore, San Marcos lacked the social science disciplines—economics, anthropology, and sociology—essential to understanding modern social problems (ibid.: 207–8).Footnote ⁴¹

Politics and social life in Lima provided Basadre a complementary education of a sort not found in local libraries or university classes. The university had taught him almost nothing about the condition of Peru's indigenous peoples and working classes, even though he attended during a period of great student agitation. These topics came up in discussions with fellow students, however, among them Carlos Mariátegui, Víctor R. Haya de la Torre, and Luis E. Valcárcel. Indeed, Basadre learned more from personal experience and his friends than from formal instruction.Footnote ⁴² In his recollection, he portrayed the education he received during his college years as peripheral and deficient. By comparison, his childhood in Tacna had afforded him a bounty of learning, since the “family library” was sufficient to cultivate his young mind (Basadre Reference Basadre1975a: 54–59; see also Reference Basadre1958). This private library held materials about the histories of Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, as well as encyclopedias, dictionaries, Spanish novels, and classic books on philosophy and politics. It was during these years that Basadre learned that a good library held the keys to knowledge.

A California Library as the Foundation of Empire

Bancroft wanted to locate the largest library on Western Americana in California. The history of the Pacific states, still in its infancy, required the resources of a great library. The new energies of the nation were to be found on the Western frontier, where the powers of capitalist technologies could foster a higher civilization (1917: 216). Bancroft believed California had to accumulate a textual capital to match its industrial and commercial prowess. The Western states were pursuing a great experiment in social and cultural interaction, which would gauge the possibilities of and obstacles to an expanding U.S. empire (ibid.: 217).

Bancroft's library offered comprehensive, concentrated knowledge of the settler experience in North America at a time when it would be particularly useful, as the United States entered into competition with other industrial nations and colonial powers. He was certain that the United States would become the most powerful nation on earth: “The commonwealths of the New World are becoming more and more united under the beneficent influences of peace and progress; and the Monroe doctrine, at first negative rather than positive in its assertions, is pointing the way toward world-wide domination by American brotherhood. The greatest of republics, surrounded and sustained in all that is elevating and progressive by lesser free governments, enters upon its second century of national existence under circumstances more favorable than has ever before been vouchsafed to man” (ibid.: 216).

During World War I, Bancroft became enthusiastic about a California-centered transnational empire.Footnote ⁴³ California had an abundance of most of the resources needed for industrial and commercial world supremacy: food, raw materials, shores, cheap energy, oil, metals, and financial capital. The San Francisco Bay would become the new center of trade and industry of an expanding American empire. Located at the crossroads of East and West, California could capture most of the commercial traffic coming from Asia. The decline of European trade and investment and the opening of the Panama Canal favored the state's rise as a world “commercial clearing house.” This prophetic view was based upon Bancroft's grand western-centric vision of global history. Throughout history, Bancroft argued, empires have gradually moved westward, following the sun. The U.S. east coast had its moment of glory with the acquisition of Caribbean colonies from Spain, but now was the hour for the west coast to rise to prominence.

The United States and the Peruvian Intellectual

The United States played an important role in Basadre's career, and two moments are particularly notable: a trip he took to Washington, D.C. in Reference Basadre1931–1932 to study and practice librarianship, and the support he obtained from the Library of Congress to reconstruct Peru's National Library in 1944–1947. Whereas the visit helped Basadre build his own capital in specialized knowledge, the Library of Congress assistance proved decisive to consolidating his links with leading scholars in the United States.

Basadre's trip to the United States was made possible by a Carnegie Foundation scholarship to study library organization.Footnote ⁴⁴ He remained there from September 1931 until June 1932 studying library science and doing internships in selected libraries of the northeast (Reference Basadre1975a: 21). The visit made a great impression on him, and made him an advocate of “the philosophy of the modern library.” A modern library was an efficient institution at the service of the reading public, and its organization and catalogues provided readers easy access to the collections.Footnote ⁴⁵ This early experience shaped Basadre's vision of an egalitarian library, a “house of knowledge” for all Peruvians.

After his return home, Basadre went to Germany for two years. Upon his return to San Marcos he worked as a librarian at San Marcos University. To improve this library, he contacted U.S. foundations in search of technical assistance.Footnote ⁴⁶ In February 1937, Basadre wrote to Henry Haskell of the Carnegie Endowment informing him of the overall condition of Peruvian libraries.Footnote ⁴⁷ Though his University of San Marcos library was slowly adopting the North American system, in the country's other libraries the situation was dismal. The National Library in Lima, for example, lacked both financial resources and trained personnel, and was disorganized. Lima's municipal library remained closed to the public and there were no children's libraries at all. He asked the Carnegie Foundation to send him a public speaker who could raise “library consciousness” in Peru.

During the years of reconstruction from 1944–1947, the National Library received an important contribution from the Comité de Ayuda Norteamericana.Footnote ⁴⁸ The United States, through the Library of Congress, organized a Committee of Aid to Peru. The Committee donated over twenty-two thousand books and journals, and other gifts came from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and a few European countries. In addition, The Committee of U.S. Aid assisted the new librarian school by paying half of its teachers’ salaries. Basadre also acknowledged the help of Lewis Hanke and the Library of Congress. Through Hanke's mediation, Director of the Library of Congress Luther Evans visited Peru's National Library in 1944, a display of Pan-American cultural cooperation (ibid.: 82).

Once reopened, the National Library initiated a project to photocopy Peruvian documents held in the United States, carried out by graduates of the new school of librarians. This work restored parts of the lost collection, particularly colonial and post-colonial materials. As Peruvian librarians discovered, the most important manuscripts and rare books about Peru's colonial history resided on the shelves of U.S. libraries. Copies of missing materials were located at the university libraries of Yale, Harvard, Duke, Brown, and Michigan.Footnote ⁴⁹ This illustrates a mode of cultural accumulation that conferred high value on library collections that could provide the foundation for the emerging field of Latin American Studies.Footnote ⁵⁰

U.S. cultural authority presented Basadre with a predicament; he had to answer to criticisms for having hired norteamericanos to fill professorial positions at the new librarian school. He responded that the profession was more advanced in the United States and that he could expect no technical assistant from Europe, which was then engulfed in war (Reference Basadre1975a: 87). To counter criticisms from nationalists, Basadre presented U.S. technical assistance as an act of national affirmation. He pointed out that at all times during the library's reconstruction Peruvians controlled the book-selection process,Footnote ⁵¹ but this nationalistic gesture could not obscure the important role the United States played in the process.

Moreover, Basadre could not deny that his model for a national library came from the United States. His conception of a library at the service of national culture was quite similar to that held by Herbert Putnam and the pioneers of the U.S. library movement.Footnote ⁵² Nonetheless, in a political context steeped in nationalism, it was hard for Basadre to acknowledge that for Peru's National Library he had replicated the “American” model. In addition to bringing in U.S. professors, the Lima Library adopted the Dewey classification system and the cataloguing rules devised by the American Library Association.Footnote ⁵³ In his book's discussion of underdevelopment and national culture, Basadre contrasted Peruvian desidia with the specialized efficiency and meritocratic practices in the United States. U.S. society valued expert knowledge and rewarded individual merit; obsessed with enhancing university education and research capacities, its leaders paid special attention to libraries and archives. Basadre considered this a good model of cultural accumulation, which Peru should replicate.

Proximity, Concentration, and Money—The Mechanics of Knowledge

Knowledge production possesses its own mechanics, and Bancroft had realized the importance of physical concentration and visibility, that books had to be near to researchers and available for their gaze. Before hypotheses could be proposed and tested, the evidence had to be centralized, with the sources visible and stored in an orderly fashion: “An investigator should have before him all that has been said upon his subject; he will then make such use of it as his judgment dictates. Nearly every work in existence, or which was referred to by the various authorities, I found on my shelves. And this was the result of my method of collecting, which was to buy everything I could obtain, with the view of winnowing the information at my leisure” (Reference Bancroft1890: 180). Instead of traveling to different parts of the world to gather the information that he needed, Bancroft brought the world into his library, next to his writing space. “One of the chief differences between my way and that of others in gathering and arranging facts for history, … was, in so far as possible, to have all my material together, within instant and constant reach, so that I could place before me on my table the information lodged in the British Museum beside that contained in the archives of Mexico, and compare both with what Spain and California could yield, and not be obliged in the midst of my investigations to go from one library to another note-taking” (ibid.: 470).

To Bancroft, the possibility of gaining historical knowledge depended upon the building of a centralized, comprehensive library. Book collecting in its early stages required much travel, but success in accumulation meant that later the researcher could stay put in his library. This was part of the “mechanics of knowledge”—wealth permitted a massive concentration of textual evidence about a region, which made that region visible. A great library contained paths to new knowledge.

The Exhibition of Treasures in a Private Library

Bancroft arranged his collection of sixteenth-century Mexican materials according to degree of civilization, and put it on display. Near the library entrance, he placed the “scattered picture-writings of the wilder northern tribes.” Following these were pre-Columbian records of the southern plateau. Next came painted records extracted from the Codex Mendoza, the tablets from Palenque, and hieroglyphs taken from Copán. To show visitors surviving records of the Maya language, Bancroft exhibited a copy of the Dresden Codex. Then visitors would come to various manuscripts dealing with Aztec and Texcoco cultures. Next in line were the Spaniards and their exploits: Columbus’ letters, papal bulls, voyage narratives, maps, and cosmographies documenting the early discoveries.Footnote ⁵⁴

Bancroft's years of collecting books had rendered a wealth of colonial textual treasures. He had an impressive selection of sixteenth-century prints: Cortés's letters and Martyr's 1532 De Insulis; the 1534 Chronica of Amandus; letters by Francisco Pizarro; and imprints of the 1540s and 1550s such as Cabeza de Vaca's Relaciones, Pedro Hernández's Comentarios, and Sepúlveda's Apología (Reference Bancroft1890: 206–7). He possessed also texts from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries, and records of the independence and republican periods, most of them relating to Mexico and Central America. The vastness of his archival collection was difficult to summarize, so he referred readers to his own bibliographic essays, printed separately in Essays and Miscellany (Bancroft Reference Bancroft1890: 211). He stressed his collection's unique nature: “First, as an historical library it stands apart from any other, being the largest collection in the world of books, maps, and manuscripts relating to a special territory, time, or subject” (ibid.: 212)…. It is made up exclusively of printed and manuscript matter pertaining to the Pacific States, from Alaska to Panama” (ibid.: 213).

Order and Accessibility

Bancroft understood the importance of organizing library materials before the “library movement” emerged. To have a comprehensive view of the contents of his collection, an “index system” was crucial. After trying several methods for summarizing his materials, his librarian Mr. Oaks recommended building a simplified index. This consisted of 3 × 5 inch slips containing the essential information for each book, pamphlet, archival document, or newspaper article.Footnote ⁵⁵ The index gave his library its ultimate order, the key for gaining ready access to relevant materials on any given topic. Here was knowledge at one's calling, a tool that reaffirmed Bancroft's conviction regarding the physicality of knowledge production. Seated at a table, researchers could summon every item related to their chosen subject:

The index enhanced the researcher's vision, putting at reach information that facilitated the writing of history. This device, which took about twenty years to complete, served to produce the most comprehensive history of the western part of North America.

Building a Modern Democratic Library

Basadre approached the post-fire reconstruction as an opportunity to build a modern library at the service of national development and culture. The new National Library included an institute of bibliographic research and a school for librarians. The latter, inaugurated in June 1944, was one of Basadre's greatest achievements. Four U.S. professors taught there, paid by the Peruvian state and the U.S. Committee of Assistance to the Peruvian Library. Graduates helped with technical reconstruction work.

Two conditions constituted the foundations of a “modern library”: democratic accessibility and practical use of knowledge. In the 1930s, the National Library had been an obscure institution whose collections were consulted by only a minority of educated Peruvians. The new one would be a democratic institution opened to people of all classes:

Limited budgets meant they had to establish clear boundaries for acquisitions. The collection, Basadre said, should include: “a) products printed in Peru, or written by Peruvians, or referring to Peru; b) a substantial collection of the representative works of American culture; and c) the fundamental works of Western culture in general, together with the basic works of Oriental cultures” (Reference Basadre1945: 645). He proposed important purchases of materials concerning Peru, so as to form a foundation for the study of national culture. Acquisitions of overseas materials were postponed into the future (ibid.: 656).

In 1947, Basadre visited the private collection of Lessing J. Rosenwald, a founder of Sears, Roebuck & Company, in a Philadelphia suburb. There he found a library devoted to illustrated books, some of them incunabula. There were thousands, in colorful pasted volumes. From this he drew an optimistic conclusion: with enough money, anybody could build a specialized library containing rare books, even incunabula (Reference Basadre1975b: 390). As Peru's National Library collection gained fame, private donations started to pour in, and the collection continued to grow. Yet Basadre knew that in Peru it was impossible to replicate Rosenwald's achievement, to acquire textual treasures of other cultures. His collection never extended far beyond the boundaries of the national state.