‫ تذكرة‬Tadhkara ‫تذكرة‬
No. 139, April 27, 2016
Books for peace
I
HAD ALREADY HEARD OF ANDREW CARNEGIE (1835-
1919) when I was in primary school. His name was
mentioned to us as the major donor for the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague, which houses
the International Court of Justice. At the time I did
not give much thought to this, but the idea of powerful philanthropy stuck to my mind, and also the idea
that international conflicts could better be solved in a
court or a conference room, rather than on the battle
field. Money could make a difference other than by
funding the arms industry.
Completely unknown to me till recently was the fact
that Carnegie was a major benefactor of libraries. In
all, more than two thousand libraries in the UK and,
mostly, the US bear his name. Only the states of Alaska and Delaware have no Carnegie-funded library. On
a US post stamp of 1960 Andrew Carnegie is shown as
a reader of books, apparently sitting in his own study.
The politicians John Foster Dulles and Walter F.
George, who had their portrait in the same year on the
4¢ stamp, are shown without these paraphernalia.
The reading room in the Carnegie-funded Public Library of
Riverside. Undated photograph provided by the Local History
Office, Riverside Public Library/Riverside Municipal Museum.
In my collection of old postcards, I have a sub-section
devoted to libraries in the US. Quite a number of
Carnegie libraries are shown there, and while looking
at these it dawned upon me how far-sighted Carnegie’s philanthropy was. In California alone there were
142 Carnegie-funded libraries built between 1899-1917,
one of them being the Riverside Public Library of
which I give two images here.
They are exemplary of an unshackled optimism about
culture and literature. Education, reading and discussion should prevail over more physical forms of social
intercourse. That point of view still commands support, but it has become clear that libraries can be
many-headed monsters. A good library has both the
good books and the bad ones. Reading gives us empathy in other cultures, but empathy also provides the
means to more effectively conduct torture. It is not
the books, of course, but the readers of the books who
do such things. Strangely enough this is also the reasoning of the Rifle Association in the US when it defends the constitutional right of the American citizen
to bear arms. Arms in themselves are not bad, only
people do bad things with arms, they say. This line of
reasoning is usually rejected by peaceful people.
These same people hold that one never has enough
books, and that reading them is always a good act in
itself.
Whether the implicit optimism that reading creates
good people is valid is not evident. One can only hope
that reading books provides enough distraction to
keep people from more destructive undertakings.
Colophon:
‫ تذكرة‬Tadhkara ‫ تذكرة‬appears at irregular intervals. The
The Public Library in Riverside, California, a Carnegie-funded
institution, erected in Mission/Spanish Colonial Revival Style in
1902, demolished in 1964. Source of this image: a post card sent
in 1945. The sender of the post card wrote to her correspondent:
‘This is surely a nice place, we are enjoying it very much.’
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