Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

On the public relations front, the Council gave the go-ahead to Joseph Becker, 43 43a senior information specialist at the CIA, to develop a demonstration of (as Clapp wrote in the annual report) “some of the realities 44 44behind the talk of ‘push-button libraries’ ” for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. This exhibition, “with an emphasis on the ‘library of the future,’ ” was sponsored by the Council on Library Resources (via a pass-through grant from the American Library Association); other sponsors were the Air Force, Radio Corporation of America, and National Cash Register. In the council’s annual report, a photograph shows Secretary of State Dean Rusk (who incidentally was that same year trying to figure out whether the CIA should use Mafia hit men or poisons to assassinate Castro) looking mildly amused as someone hands him a printout from a Sperry Rand Univac computer. Two years later, a modified version of the library-of-the-future exhibition, this time using IBM computers but again supervised by Joseph Becker, was on display at the New York World’s Fair. As part of a demonstration of networked information, fair-goers were able to pick up a handset from a bank of telephones and listen in on taped reviews of young-adult books.

Faxing was another of Clapp’s preoccupations — if libraries could fax things easily here and there, then they wouldn’t need to keep as many physical books near to hand. But the hefty Xerox Magnavox Telecopier was too slow: “Transceiving time 45 45for an average 10-page request is about one hour.” There were all sorts of other possibilities, though. Clapp thought highly of the now legendary defense-worker J. C. R. (Lick) Licklider — who had spent his twenties studying what happens to white rats 46 46if you force them to stay awake for several days by putting them on slowly turning treadmills surrounded by water (they die), and who had developed time-sharing computer systems for the Air Force’s SAGE air-defense system. Clapp hired Lick to look into the elements of man-machine symbiosis as they might shape libraries in the twenty-first century; Licklider got to work in 1961, just before he went on to triumph as the creator of the ARPANET, the Pentagon’s precursor to the Internet — the Internet being itself a leading cause of sleep deprivation. The result, published in 1964, was a coolly abstruse book called Libraries of the Future, 47 47 written by Licklider and a team of missile-minded members of the artificial intelligentsia, without the aid of a single librarian, historian, or humanist; Verner Clapp proudly wrote the foreword.

Clapp well knew that some of the projects in which the Council was taking an interest were aimed at “special manifestations of library work 48 48such as the handling of in-house industrial research reports or of military intelligence.” But he had no doubt that “libraries generally will eventually benefit.” He was plainly impressed by the work in indexing and retrieval going forward at the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the CIA (in 1953 he had even applied for the job of Air Force Librarian 49 49): as a lifelong Republican and a patriot who had, while at the Library of Congress, fired or allowed to resign 50 50a number of employees when FBI checks found clear evidence of political disloyalty or homosexuality, Clapp wanted to do his part to win the Cold War (which was a war of secret science, demanding speedy but eyes-only informational flow) and to help civilian research libraries at the same time.

Not all the CIA contacts at the Council came through Clapp, however. Other members of the Council’s board of directors — Barnaby Keeney, Caryl Haskins, and Frederick Wagman, for example — had their own affiliations. Wagman, as we know from Clapp’s papers, worked on unspecified CIA-financed projects with Clapp at the Library of Congress; his career in intelligence began during the war, at the Office of Censorship, 51 51an agency responsible for intercepting, reading, and (if they proved interesting) microfilming private letters on their way to and from the United States. Barnaby Keeney, a medievalist and Rhodes scholar, worked for the CIA in the fifties and continued to consult for the agency while he was president of Brown University; he is now perhaps best remembered for his role as board chairman (beginning in 1962, while he was still on Clapp’s Council) of the Human Ecology Fund, 52 52a CIA front organization that paid for some of the experiments in which LSD and other drugs were given to unwitting Canadian subjects. (Intrigued by Russian psychiatric research and the possibility of “brainwashing”—a Korean War word — the CIA wanted to improve its interrogational techniques and perfect new methods of what its department heads called “mind-control.”)

After Barnaby Keeney left the Council’s board — he went on to become the chief of the newly chartered National Endowment for the Humanities — Caryl Haskins 53 53(wealthy entomologist, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington) joined Clapp’s team in 1965. Haskins was the founder of Haskins Laboratories and a student of radiation’s effects on living organisms; in 1949 he chaired the Secretary of Defense’s Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, producing a report that contained some startling talk about the possibility of “radiological weapons” and “weapons causing epidemics, glandular or hereditary changes, or other biological ‘chain reactions.’ ” In the fifties Haskins was a consultant for the CIA’s mind-control research: his name appears in a 1952 CIA memo on Project Artichoke, 54 54which is described as “a special agency program established for the development and application of special techniques in CIA interrogations and in other CIA covert activities where control of an individual is desired.” (The memo comments on the possible utility of sodium pentathol, barbiturates, hypnosis, neurosurgery, electric shock, heroin, alcohol, Benzedrine, and “lycergic acid” as interrogational aids, and reports that a scientific panel has been established, with Haskins at its head, “to evaluate possibilities and give direction in the field of research and experimentation.”) As a Project Artichoke emissary, Haskins traveled to Canada 55 55to discuss the brainwashing experiments with a psychologist at McGill University; and he agreed to remain available to the CIA as a consultant 56 56when his attempts to recruit other researchers met with little success.

Clapp’s library council had traditionalists on its board, too — the gruff and likeable 57 57Louis B. Wright was one, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Wright had first felt a need for such a council in the mid-fifties (he just wanted a better way to reproduce pages from rare books and manuscripts); and he had raised Ford Foundation money to fund it and chosen Clapp to run it. A few years into the enterprise, however, he became alarmed by Clapp’s unrelenting gizmology. Wright was overruled; by then Clapp had a physicist on staff and was in full futuristic swing; in 1960, the Ford Foundation board strongly endorsed Clapp, saying that “the most informed point of contact 58 58between the computer man, the optics man and the scientific linguist, on the one hand, and the world of bibliographic storage and access, on the other, is the president of the Council on Library Resources.” A number of Clapp’s old Library of Congress co-workers got contracts: CIA consultant Mortimer Taube (an ex-Library of Congress weapons-research abstractor and an Atomic Energy Commission information specialist, described by one of his contemporaries as being possibly “the first library millionaire”) 59 59was given the job of developing another hand-reader for microfilm and microfiche, after the Microcard Corporation’s attempts failed. This prototype didn’t work either. 60 60