Research Libraries, Reading Rooms, Radical Bookstores and Infoshops

RESEARCH LIBRARIES, READING ROOMS, RADICAL BOOKSTORES AND INFOSHOPS. With the rise in literacy in the United States during the late nineteenth century, the printed word became an increasingly important factor in class struggles. New printing technology and transportation links enabled the wide distribution of reading material. As union organizing and militancy increased in the 1870s and 1880s, organizations such as the Knights of Labor set up reading rooms for workers. In the mid-1880s, Atlanta’s Union Hall and Library Association served 800 people, subscribing to 400 daily newspapers. Many craft unions, following a guild tradition, maintained libraries of technical works for the use of members.

Some Left/labor libraries originated as the collections of individuals, then grew into large and important research libraries. Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie (1850–1933), a Michigan printer, member of the Typographical Union, Knights of Labor organizer, and noted anarchist, donated his extensive library and archive to the University of Michigan in 1911. His friend and fellow anarchist Agnes Inglis (1870–1952) made the care and development of the Labadie Collection her life’s work when in 1924 she found his gift still resting in its shipping boxes in the university library stacks. The collection became known for its in-depth documentation of the anarchist movement dating back to the nineteenth century. The Joseph A. Labadie Collection is the oldest publicly accessible archive of its kind in the world. Since its inception, its holdings have been expanded to include international social protest movements from the nineteenth century to the present, although anarchism remains its foundation. Its longevity is attributed to the efforts of Inglis to preserve and add to it during her twenty-eight-year tenure. She used her networks of activists throughout the world to increase the holdings of rare and unique materials. Due to high demand and commitment on the part of the University of Michigan Library, the Labadie remains one of the most popular and fastest growing parts of the library.

Several Left organizations also maintained reading rooms or resource centers. The Tamiment Institute began in 1906 as the library of the socialist Rand School of Social Science. The library’s primary audience was the Rand School student body, composed of Socialist Party members and working people. A police raid in 1919 resulted in the seizure of inventory, but charges of sedition against the bookstore’s employees were eventually dropped. In 1963 the Tamiment Institute gave the library to New York University, where it has expanded its holdings to include the papers of many prominent radicals and organizations spanning the entire spectrum of the Left. In 1977, in cooperation with the New York City Central Labor Council, New York University established the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives to preserve the history of labor unions in New York City.

The Social Action Archives began at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 1964, when graduate students who had worked in the southern freedom movement and were convinced of the importance of preserving its history began to collect civil rights materials. The collection has since expanded to include other 1960s activism and in 1974 dropped “contemporary” from its formal title to include older collections such as Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party papers and the Highlander Folk School archives.

Labor archives have proliferated since World War II in academic institutions, many as research facilities serving labor and industrial relations programs. The Labor-Management Documentation Center of the Martin P. Catherwood Library at Cornell’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, renamed in the 1990s for prominent labor arbitrator Theodore Kheel, was founded in 1949.

The Walter P. Reuther Library Archive and Library of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University, established in 1960, holds the official records of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World, international unions including the United Auto Workers and United Farm Workers, as well as numerous labor insurgent movements such as the Dodge Revolutionary Movement, Miners for Democracy, and Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Also housed in the Reuther Library are many personal papers of labor activists.

Because first-wave immigrants to America have often been attracted to movements, ethnic collections usually contain materials that are of considerable value to researchers of the American Left. A good example of such a resource is the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. The center has strong holdings regarding Finnish immigrants, a group that was among the most militant of those involved in the Industrial Workers of the World and the early Communist Party.

Communist Party bookstores were among the early twentieth-century radical spaces, not only focused on selling literature, but also offering space for avant-garde art, lectures and literary events. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) opened several book stores in major cities in the 1990s. Two of them survived into the twenty-first century (Berkeley, CA and New York).

Besides academic institutions, individual efforts to preserve a radical past play an important role. A prominent example is the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in Los Angeles was founded in 1963 by Emil Freed to house material he collected during a lifetime on the Left. An active member of the Communist Party, Freed, the son of anarchists, amassed pamphlets, periodicals, and other documents from the various struggles in which he participated: Unemployed Councils of the 1930s, Hollywood studio strikes of the 1940s, and Civil Rights congress of the late 1940s and 1950s. In the 1950s, Freed rescued the personal libraries of friends who, vulnerable to the repression of the McCarthy era, were on the verge of destroying their political books and pamphlets. The Southern California Library remains an independent archive.

Some individuals have turned their own collections into private libraries, sharing duplicate materials with each other and even with institutions, preserving and caring for historic materials as a labor of love. The Beni Memorial Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Anarchist Archives Project in Cambridge, MA and the Kate Sharpley Library in California are three examples. These libraries are not generally open to the public, although some may offer research by appointment. Their curators maintained large networks and usually responded to inquiries.

In the 1990s, many activists on the Left established their own community libraries. Rents were cheap, so punks, anarchists, and DIY activists were able to set up radical libraries and “infoshops,” in storefronts, and sometimes as part of larger spaces. These “autonomous zones” serve radical communities, providing meeting and workshop space, free lectures and classes, art making and exhibiting, and even concerts and dance parties. They are also major distribution points for the proliferation of zines that began appearing in the 1990s. Zines are self-published and printed magazines on every topic from dumpster diving to women’s self-defense, to vegan cooking to transgender youth experiences. Infoshops are run by volunteers, rules are loose and budgets limited, so the sale of radical literature, t-shirts, buttons, along with donations and fundraisers help with expenses. Decisions regarding operation of the spaces and policies are made by consensus, rather than by a director or a board.

Many infoshops are fleeting and temporary, but several have continued to operate for many years. Some of the more well-known infoshops are Crescent Wrench/Iron Rail/Above Ground Zine Library in New Orleans, Long Haul in Berkeley, CA, Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Lucy Parsons Center in Boston, Bellingham (Wash.) Alternative Library, Anarres Infoshop and Community Space in Portland, Blacklidge Community Collective in Tucson, and ABC NO RIO in New York City. Slingshot, an anarchist collective in Berkeley, CA (located inside the Long Haul) publishes a quarterly newspaper by the same name, with a current listing of infoshops around the world.

Dramatic rent increased and and gentrification has occurred in most cities, causing a shortage in affordable brick and mortar spaces. The internet has changed the way people access information, including radical literature. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closing of every academic, public and independent library, at least temporarily. The pandemic limited the gathering of people in physical spaces further eroding the in-person model. Although not a substitute for direct interaction, platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook make it possible to publish and distribute literature and ideas around the world at almost no cost.

Alternative spaces for gathering, meeting, discussing ideas, and learning arise and continue to do so as direct challenges to the ruling ideas of a society. As movements of resistance, reform, and revolution arose historically, they created parallel institutions and their own sources of news, ideas, and information. Their importance in any period is critical in mobilizing radical movements. Academic facilities maintain the histories of past struggles and what they produced, so new rebels don't have to begin afresh each time. The models are there in the stacks.

Davis, Joshua Clark. The Forgotten World of Communist Bookstores. Jacobin Magazine. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/communist-party-cpusa-bookstore-fbi

Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Leab, Daniel J., and Philip P. Mason, eds. Labor History Archives in the United States. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

Munson, Chuck. "Your Friendly Neighborhood Infoshop." Maximum Rock and Roll, January, 1998. http://practicalanarchy.org/infoshops.html