Librarian of Congress Emeritus Daniel J. Boorstin, a prize-winning historian and the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, died at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 28. The cause was pneumonia. Boorstin was 89 years old.
Daniel Boorstin
The Library will host a memorial service for Boorstin this spring. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in his name to the Center for the Book, which he established in 1977.
Boorstin was the author of more than 20 books, which were translated into at least 30 languages. His first trilogy, "The Americans," published between 1958 and 1973, won the Bancroft, Francis Parkman and Pulitzer (1975) prizes. His second trilogy addressed world intellectual history, particularly through works of scientific and geographic discovery ("The Discoverers," 1983), creative artists ("The Creators," 1992) and finally the ideas of great prophets and philosophers ("The Seekers," 1998).
His productivity as a scholar and as a writer for the general public was documented in "Daniel J. Boorstin: A Comprehensive and Selectively Annotated Bibliography" (Greenwood Press, 2001), edited and compiled by Angela Michele Leonard. The bibliography includes 1,304 entries. A Dec. 4, 2000, Center for the Book program marking the publication of the bibliography and featuring Boorstin's remarks was filmed by C-SPAN and rebroadcast on Sunday, Feb. 29, immediately following his death.
The 12th Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin was born in Atlanta on Oct. 1, 1914. His family soon moved to Tulsa, Okla., where he grew up and attended public schools. After graduating from Tulsa Central High School in 1930, he entered Harvard College, which awarded him the bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1934. As a Rhodes Scholar from Oklahoma, in 1934 he entered Balliol College, Oxford University, from which he received his bachelor's in jurisprudence (first class honors) in 1936 and his bachelor of civil law (first class honors) in 1937. Simultaneously, he was enrolled as a student at the Inner Temple, London, and passed the British bar examinations. He became a barrister-at-law in 1937.
He returned to the United States in 1937 as a Sterling Fellow at Yale University Law School, which awarded him a doctorate in judicial science in 1940. From 1938 to 1942, he was an instructor at Harvard University, where he taught English and American history and literature as well as legal history at the Harvard Law School.
While teaching at the law school in 1940, he met his future wife, Ruth Frankel, the sister of a legal assistant who worked for him. They were married in April 1941, and she became his most trusted editor and the mother of their three sons, Paul, Jonathan and David. All were present when Dr. Boorstin died peacefully in Washington. His survivors include six grandchildren.
In 1941 the Harvard University Press published Daniel Boorstin's first book, "The Mysterious Science of the Law." In 1942 he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, worked as a lawyer for the Lend Lease Administration and joined the faculty of Swarthmore College. The University of Chicago hired him in 1944, and he worked with its president, Robert M. Hutchins, to establish an interdisciplinary program in the social sciences. In 1948, Boorstin published "The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson," in which he tried "to discover the dominant spirit of the Jeffersonian view of the world." He soon (1956) became a full professor of history and a decade later was appointed as the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History, an endowed chair.
In 1969 Boorstin came to Washington as the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of History and Technology, today known as the National Museum of American History. Focusing on the Smithsonian's participation in the forthcoming U.S. bicentennial in 1976, he brought new intellectual energy to the institution, along with exhibitions such as "A Nation of Nations" that provided a broad social context for a new generation of Smithsonian exhibitions.
On June 30, 1975, President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin, then senior historian at the Smithsonian, to be the 12th Librarian of Congress. He was confirmed on Sept. 26, 1975, and took the oath of office on Nov. 12. The ceremony in the Library's Great Hall embodied what was to be a hallmark of the Boorstin administration: public recognition of the Library's dual role as both a legislative and a national institution. Participants included President Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Speaker of the House of Representatives Carl Albert, who administered the oath of office.
One of Boorstin's first official acts was to create in early 1976 a staff Task Force on Goals, Organization and Planning, which was charged with carrying out "a full-scale review of the Library and its activities," and making recommendations about how the institution could improve its services both internally and to its constituencies outside the Library. The results of the yearlong study by more than 200 staff members and eight outside advisory groups formed the basis for a major administrative reorganization in 1978.
Many early Boorstin initiatives focused on "opening up" the Library of Congress to the public and to new professional constituencies. As the result of these efforts, Congress approved creation of the American Folklife Center in 1976 and the Center for the Book in 1977. Through his leadership, the Library and the Kennedy Center together opened the Performing Arts Library at the Kennedy Center, in 1979. The next year, he established a Council of Scholars, a link between the Library and the world of scholarship. Both the Center for the Book and the Council of Scholars were to be supported primarily by private donations.
Creation of the Center for the Book was an important Boorstin priority. A lifelong lover and user of books, he was disturbed by how many educated people stopped reading once they left formal schooling behind. New motivation was needed, especially for the "aliterates," a term he coined to describe people who could read, but for various reasons did not. From its inception, the Center for the Book's many national and (later) state programs have focused on bringing "aliterates" back to the world of books and reading.
Boorstin also paid attention to the Library's Capitol Hill buildings. A highlight of his administration was the occupancy of the new James Madison Memorial Building, from 1980 to 82. The Mary Pickford Theater opened in 1983 in the Madison Building, helping to make the general public aware of the Library's unparalleled motion picture collections. In collaboration with Architect of the Capitol George M. White, Boorstin initiated legislation (approved in 1984) that led to a 12-year project to renovate and restore the Library's two older structures, the Jefferson and Adams buildings.
During the 12 years he served as Librarian of Congress, Boorstin fought hard and publicly for the Library's appropriation, even curtailing evening and Sunday opening hours in response to budget cuts. Never afraid of controversy, in 1986 Boorstin directly confronted Congress about its plans to drastically cut the Library's budget. His eloquent plea, which earned him the sobriquet of "an intellectual Paul Revere," resulted in the restoration of a substantial part of the sum that had been cut. During his administration, the Library's annual appropriation increased from $116 million to $250 million. As Librarian of Congress, he took a special interest in library preservation problems and in the development of the collections, which he dubbed "a multimedia encyclopedia."
Daniel Boorstin saw his principal task as Librarian of Congress to "help people learn" by serving as a catalyst, "an avenue between the world of ideas and what goes on at the Library." And indeed, he not only gave the Library new intellectual energy, but also a new physical look: picnic benches were installed almost overnight in front of the Jefferson and Madison buildings. New collaborative and educational projects frequently "sprung up"; some succeeded, others did not.
His success in that role of catalyst was widely acknowledged. For example, on Dec. 10, 1986, when he announced that he would leave his position as Librarian of Congress on June 15, 1987, primarily to spend more time writing and lecturing, The New York Times noted that the position of the Librarian of Congress had become "perhaps the leading public intellectual in the nation."
