Making Americans in the New York Public Library: Fantasy and Realities

For marginalized readers in the United States, the public library has often been an icon of integration, assimilation, and self-making. At the New York Public Library (NYPL) of the 1920s, children’s librarians, mostly white and native born, assiduously drilled immigrant and African American children in acceptable modes of behavior and belief. To that end, they framed library protocols as indispensable American norms and carefully selected highlights of US history as a proudly shared legacy. But a neglected Children’s Services archive shows that some librarians were at odds with this mission, and some children found it difficult to embrace either the behavioral norms or the history they were offered as their own. Contextualizing archival scraps and complementing them with other evidence, this article argues that NYPL Children’s Rooms were vibrant, frequently chaotic, physical spaces that presented challenges and opportunities for both children and librarians. Today, Children’s Rooms are more diverse, less authoritarian, and offer a more inclusive national history. However, increasingly polarized visions of education threaten these gains. Tensions between the theory and practice of Americanization at NYPL in the 1920s disclose the complexity of belonging while anticipating ongoing debates about how to present the American past to twenty-first-century children.