Education: Librarian’s Jubilee

With a German-born population of 11,366 and twice as many German-speaking homes, Chicago has long been one of the world’s first German cities. The pride of Chicago’s Germans is nourished not only by the statues of Goethe, Schiller and von Humboldt that gleam in the city parks but by their living countrymen prominent in the city’s affairs. Chicago last week honored one of these, blue-eyed, baldish Carl Bismarck Roden, for 50 years an employe of the great Chicago Public Library and for 18 years its Chief Librarian.

Gathered in the Red Lacquer Room of the Palmer House for a ceremonial banquet to Librarian Roden were the University of Chicago’s President Robert Maynard Hutchins, Northwestern’s President Walter Dill Scott, Episcopal Bishop George Craig Stewart, 250 other citizens. Librarian Roden bashfully received a volume of testimonial letters from 175 of his colleagues throughout the world. Said President Hutchins: “We have met tonight to honor one of the great educators of the Middle West. … The Chicago Public Library was one of the first to realize its educational as distinguished from its storage functions. … As we now face the problems of Mr. Roden’s next 50 years, we see that he will have to continue what he has done, and will have to do it more intensively.”

Carl Roden was brought from his father’s Kansas City grocery to Chicago in the ‘703, got his first job as a $5-a-week page in the Library in 1886, when it occupied the third floor of the old City Hall. Today, from his marble-walled office in the Library building on the gusty lake front, Librarian Roden watches over 45 branches, serves 12,000,000 readers a year. In 1931 he ran the biggest circulating municipal library in the U. S., with 16,000,000 issues, but with declining appro priations Chicago’s has yielded to Los Angeles’ and New York’s. Librarian Roden now has to throw away more books than he buys.

Still on the Library shelves, however, are a few of the 8,000 books whose plates read: “Presented to the City of Chicago towards the formation of a free library after the Great Fire of 1871, as a mark of English sympathy by Her Majesty the Queen, Victoria.” The Queen, helped by Tennyson, Carlyle, Disraeli and Gladstone, sent the books under the impression that the Fire had destroyed Chicago’s public library. Actually, in 1871 there was no city library to burn but the citizens were shamed into founding one, in an old water tank which had survived the flames. First book to circulate was Author Thomas Hughes’s presentation copy of Tom Brown’s School Days.

Librarian Roden is extremely shy, lives with his wife and daughter in suburban Norwood Park, drives to work at 9 a. m. in his Pontiac sedan, usually drives back to spend the evening at home. Although he has been abroad only once in his 65 years, he speaks Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish. The only time he was roused from his scholarly pursuits was when the Public Library was actually men aced by fire. In 1926 jovial Mayor William Hale (”Big Bill”) Thompson, at the height of his anti-British crusade, appointed a committee headed by his gambling crony, Urbine J. (“Sport”)Herrmann, to root “pro-British” books out of town. Librarian Roden caught Sport Herrmann snooping, thwarted him. Thwarted but loyal to his chief, Investigator Herrmann later bragged that he had bought a volume by Historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger and burnt it privately.