Struggle in the Stacks! Researching NYPL's Labor History

Browsing The New York Public Library’s research catalog during a shift at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, we came across a tantalizing entry for a publication called The Class Mark. The title was intriguing on its own, but the author was even more so: New York Public Library units of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. and the Young Communist League, [1935-1939]. 

Who was the NYPL unit of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA)? What was The Class Mark? And how did it become a part of NYPL’s research collections? Eager to know more, we requested the microfilm from the Library’s stacks....

The publication takes aim at the hierarchies and disparities among library workers, particularly in the regular feature “A Page for Pages”: “Most of us began when we were fourteen years old,” writes an anonymous page from the 42nd Street Library. “We all had ambitions for our future, either to graduate college into some profession or to get some job with a chance of advancement. But it became increasingly difficult to get anything” [Vol. 1, No. 2]. Teen workers describe walking between five and eight miles a day to deliver books to the reading rooms and voice their concerns about the lack of ventilation and tuberculosis cases amongst pages in the flagship Library's stacks....

 Led by suffragist and public librarian Maud Malone, this tiny cohort was the first of five American Federation of Labor affiliates to emerge at large east coast libraries. Though they disbanded by the end of the 1920s, the LEU instigated spirited debates about unionization across the field of American librarianship. Much of this discourse can be found in their newsletter, Bulletin, still available at the Library today.

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Struggle in the Stacks! Researching NYPL's Labor History | The New York Public Library