BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — In the past, the “Did You Know” series has covered military leaders, aviators journalists, Emmy winners, physicians, scientists and a number of other fields. In the latest edition, the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) recalls 1969 National Football Foundation (NFF) Distinguished American Award recipient, Librarian of Congress and Pulitzer Prize/Academy Award/Tony-winning poet/playwright Archibald MacLeish.
A former Yale University football and water polo athlete, MacLeish was an American poet and writer who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. He studied English at Yale and law at Harvard University. In addition, he enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce’s magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years MacLeish was Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, an Oscar and a Tony for his work.
A Glencoe, Ill., native, MacLeish’s father, Scottish-born Andrew MacLeish, worked as a dry goods merchant and was a founder of the Chicago department store Carson Pirie Scott, while His mother, Martha was a college professor and had served as president of Rockford University in Rockford, Ill.
A 1911 graduate of the Hotchkiss School, MacLeish went to Yale, where he majored in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was selected for the Skull and Bones society. During his time at Yale, he lettered in football during the 1913 season and captained the water polo team.
He then enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. However, his studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served first as an ambulance driver and later as an artillery officer. He saw action at the Second Battle of the Marne and his brother, Kenneth MacLeish, was killed in action during the war. He returned to Cambridge and graduated from law school in 1919, taught law for a semester for the government department at Harvard, then worked briefly as an editor for The New Republic. He next spent three years practicing law with the Boston firm Choate, Hall & Stewart.
In 1923 MacLeish left his law firm and moved with his wife to Paris, France, where they joined the community of literary expatriates that included such members as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Friends with Hemingway, Zelda and Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald, artist Pablo Picasso and composer Cole Porter, among others, during his time in Paris, MacLeish returned to America in 1928. From 1930 to 1938 he worked as a writer and editor for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine, during which he also became increasingly politically active, especially with anti-fascist causes.
While in Paris, Harry Crosby, publisher of the Black Sun Press, offered to publish MacLeish’s poetry. Both MacLeish and Crosby had overturned the normal expectations of society, rejecting conventional careers in the legal and banking fields. Crosby published MacLeish’s long poem Einstein in a deluxe edition of 150 copies that sold quickly. MacLeish was paid $200 for his work. In 1932, MacLeish published his long poem Conquistador which presents Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs as symbolic of the American experience. In 1933, Conquistador was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the first of three awarded to MacLeish.
In 1938 MacLeish published as a book a long poem “Land of the Free”, built around a series of 88 photographs of the rural depression by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn and the Farm Security Administration and other agencies. The book was influential on John Steinbeck in writing The Grapes of Wrath.
Considered “one of the hundred most influential figures in librarianship during the 20th century” in the United States, MacLeish began a career in libraries and public service began, not with an internal desire, but from a combination of the urging of a close friend/United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. MacLeish noted, “The President decided I wanted to be Librarian of Congress.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nomination of MacLeish to serve as the head of the Library of Congress was a controversial and highly political maneuver fraught with several challenges.
With President Roosevelt’s support and some skillful defense in the United States Senate, MacLeish was sworn in as Librarian of Congress on July 10, 1939, by the local postmaster at Conway, Massachusetts.
MacLeish created his own job description and set out to learn about how the library was currently organized. In October 1944, MacLeish described that he did not set out to reorganize the library, rather “…one problem or another demanded action, and each problem solved led on to another that needed attention.”
MacLeish’s chief accomplishments had their start in instituting daily staff meetings with division chiefs, the chief assistant librarian, and other administrators. He then set about setting up various committees on various projects including: acquisitions policy, fiscal operations, cataloging, and outreach. The committees alerted MacLeish to various problems throughout the library.
First and foremost, under Putnam, the library was acquiring more books than it could catalog. A report in December 1939, found that over one quarter of the library’s collection had not yet been cataloged. MacLeish solved the problem of acquisitions and cataloging through establishing another committee instructed to seek advice from specialists outside of the Library of Congress. The committee found many subject areas of the library to be adequate and many other areas to be, surprisingly, inadequately provided for. A set of general principles on acquisitions was then developed to ensure that, though it was impossible to collect everything, the Library of Congress would acquire the bare minimum of canons to meet its mission. These principles included acquiring all materials necessary to members of Congress and government officers, all materials expressing and recording the life and achievements of the people of the United States, and materials of other societies past and present which are of the most immediate concern to the peoples of the United States.
Secondly, MacLeish set about reorganizing the operational structure. Leading scholars in library science were assigned a committee to analyze the library’s managerial structure. The committee issued a report a mere two months after it was formed, in April 1940, stating that a major restructuring was necessary. This was no surprise to MacLeish, who had thirty-five divisions under him. He divided the library’s functions into three departments: administration, processing, and reference. All existing divisions were then assigned as appropriate. By including library scientists from inside and outside the Library of Congress, MacLeish was able to gain faith from the library community that he was on the right track. Within a year, MacLeish had completely restructured the Library of Congress, making it work more efficiently and aligning the library to “report on the mystery of things.”
MacLeish promoted the Library of Congress through various forms of public advocacy. Perhaps his greatest display of public advocacy was requesting a budget increase of over a million dollars in his March 1940 budget proposal to the United States Congress. While the library did not receive the full increase, it received an increase of $367,591, the largest one-year increase to date. Much of the increase went toward improved pay levels, increased acquisitions in underserved subject areas, and new positions. MacLeish resigned as Librarian of Congress on December 19, 1944, to take up the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.
Archibald MacLeish also assisted with the development of the new “Research and Analysis Branch” of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. “These operations were overseen by the distinguished Harvard University historian William L. Langer, who, with the assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, set out immediately to recruit a professional staff drawn from across the social sciences. Over the next twelve months academic specialists from fields ranging from geography to classical philology descended upon Washington, bringing with them their most promising graduate students, and set up shop in the headquarters of the Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch at Twenty-third and E Streets, and in the new annex to the Library of Congress.”
During World War II MacLeish also served as director of the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures and as the assistant director of the Office of War Information. These jobs were heavily involved with propaganda, which was well-suited to MacLeish’s talents; he had written quite a bit of politically motivated work in the previous decade. He spent a year as the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and a further year representing the U.S. at the creation of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). After this, he retired from public service and returned to academia.
In 1949 MacLeish became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. He held this position until his retirement in 1962. In 1959 his play J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. From 1963 to 1967 he was the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College. In 1969, MacLeish met Bob Dylan, and asked him to contribute songs to Scratch a musical MacLeish was writing, based on the story The Devil and Daniel Webster.
In 1969, MacLeish was commissioned by the New York Times to write a poem to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing, which he entitled “Voyage to the Moon” and appeared on the front page of the July 21, 1969 edition of the Times. A. M. Rosenthal, then-editor of the Times, later recounted: “We decided what the front page of The Times would need when the men landed was a poem. What the poet wrote would count most, but we also wanted to say to our readers, look, this paper does not know how to express how it feels this day and perhaps you don’t either, so here is a fellow, a poet, who will try for all of us. We called one poet who just did not think much of moons or us, and then decided to reach higher for somebody with more zest in his soul – for Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes. He turned in his poem on time and entitled it ‘Voyage to the Moon.'”
During his tenure, MacLeish received several major awards for writing/poetry. In 1959, MacLeish won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes when his play J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. J.B. also won a Tony Award in that year. MacLeish won two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in 1933 and 1953. He also took home an Academy Award (Oscar) in 1965 for his documentary on Eleanor Roosevelt and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
MacLeish passed away April 20, 1982, at the age of 89.
