This Day in American History

January 29, 1802 – Three days after Congress passed an act establishing a library within the U.S. Capitol, John James Beckley was appointed the first librarian of Congress, at a salary of $2 a day.

Faithful readers, you just knew I had to get to a post about a library or librarian sooner or later, didn’t you?

When I first read about this appointment, my reaction was, “Another underpaid librarian.”

My second thought was, “Typical—once again, the government stiffs just the person who can give it information and intelligence.” (Though, come to think of it, the idea of congressional “intelligence committees” is a misnomer—politicians on The Hill don’t know or don’t want to know what they should.)

The more I learned about John Beckley, however, the more I wondered if he were really underpaid. I’m still on the fence on the notion.

To start with, Beckley was no librarian.

At the time, this was no insuperable obstacle—the post would not take on its current mantle of professionalism until Melvil Dewey (yeah, the guy who invented that classification system we still use – but also an anti-Semite and someone who enrolled so many female students in Columbia’s library school that he was credibly accused of what might today be regarded as sexual harassment).

Nor was he a professional writer, the other profession common to individuals who have filled this post (notably including poet Archibald MacLeish and historians Daniel J. Boorstin and James H. Billington).

In fact, the most important association that Beckley had with books was bringing Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man to the attention of James Madison.

No, Beckley got his job for what is an all-too-familiar reason these days: he was a longtime supporter of the party in power.

In one way, the English-born Beckley epitomized the American Dream, rising from indentured servitude to become a three-term mayor of Richmond, Va., as well as the first clerk of the House of Representatives.

Yet old habits died hard, because though he had left his indentured status behind, Beckley’s rise through the political ranks was aided by the politics of deference in which government by an elite still held sway in Virginia (as, in fact, it did through many of the states, at least till the rise of Jacksonian Democracy). Specifically, he hitched his wagon to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

It was as clerk of the House of Representatives and loyal adherent to the new party that his Virginia patrons had founded, the Democratic-Republicans, that Beckley performed the service that might have endeared him to Jefferson as much as any other. For he had access to confidential papers, including the secret of Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds.

The outsized influence of Hamilton in the new government led Jefferson to strike out at him. “Hamilton is really a colossus…without numbers, he is a host unto himself,” he wrote Madison.

To take down the “colossus,” Jefferson worked behind the scenes, urging (and, some charged, bankrolling) the minor poet and State Department clerk Philip Freneau to edit the pro-Jeffersonian National Gazette.

An even more golden opportunity presented itself when scandalmonger James Callender—who also had Jefferson as his patron—exposed the Hamilton-Reynolds liaison.

Hamilton blamed Monroe’s protégé James Monroe for the leak. Happy to watch Hamilton embroiled in the republic’s first sex scandal, the Democratic-Republicans weren’t talking publicly, but Monroe himself believed that Beckley was the one responsible for exposing the affair.

Beckley continued to role up firsts, becoming a kind of combined James Carville and Daily Kos, attacking Federalists (often anonymously, behind the scenes, in numerous pamphlets), becoming what is often regarded as the first political campaign manager (in Pennsylvania) and writing the first campaign biography (of Jefferson, in 1800).

Beckley died five years after assuming his post. His tenure began a 60-year period when the head of the Library of Congress was little more than a political hack.

Thomas Jefferson played an enormous role in the rise of the Library of Congress—especially when he made available his own invaluable collection of books to the institution after the British had burned it during the War of 1812—but he did it no favors by making its first staffer a product of the politics of deference and the politics of personal destruction.