‘Return to Normalcy’: American Librarians and Bibliotherapy in the Aftermath of the First World War

A belief in the healing power of books was a logical extension of a belief in the multiple benefits of reading as promoted by American schools, libraries, and cultural guardians in the Progressive Age. Branch librarians of the 1910s and 1920s set out to imbue specific groups of inexperienced library users (children, immigrants, African Americans) with a love of books and reading, while instructing them in democratic ideals and middle-class behavioral norms. For hospital patients, however, library use was to serve a different goal: return to a former condition. Bibliotherapists often assumed that patients had been suddenly, even violently, divorced from normative social habits that they could relearn. The aim of returning to ‘normalcy’ – Warren G. Harding’s presidential campaign slogan of 1920 – was integral to the nascent field of bibliotherapy. Early advocates of bibliotherapy agreed it would be dangerous for hospital patients to read anything relevant to their own physical or emotional state. Examining archival documents along with published accounts of therapeutic practice, this chapter argues that hospital librarians and medical practitioners, in both general and mental hospitals, strictly controlled book selection to advance patients’ ‘normalization.’ Yet a few noteworthy exceptions anticipate the future of bibliotherapy.