Agnes Inglis
never planned on a career as a librarian. At the age
of 52 in 1924, and following a period of intense work
on behalf of radical immigrants facing persecution
and deportation after World War I, Inglis visited the
University of Michigan library to consult the
collection of books, journals, papers, clippings, and
ephemera donated by her friend Joseph Labadie in
1911. "Jo" Labadie(1) was a labor leader,
social reformer and individualist anarchist who
accumulated a large number of materials documenting
the multitude of events and movements he had
participated in over a forty-year career. Inglis
found Labadie's original collection in the same
condition in which it had been donated: "in fine
shapethough still unbound." (Inglis 1924) She
decided to spend a short period of time volunteering
in the library unpacking and sorting materials. That
short time turned into 28 years of distinguished and
mostly unpaid service, during which she not only
organized the large collection, but increased it by
an estimated twenty times its original size, and
raised it to the status it enjoys today among
libraries documenting the history and philosophy of
anarchism and other radical social and political
movements. Inglis's life as an anarchist and a
librarian provides an excellent case of the
intersection between political ideals and
librarianship.
Born the youngest child of a
well-to-do Detroit family in 1872, Agnes spent most
of her first three decades in a sheltered,
conservative, religious family home. Her father, a
noted physician, died when she was four years old.
Other than a year at an exclusive girls' academy in
Massachusetts, Inglis spent her youth nursing a
sister ill with cancer, and subsequently her mother
who died before Agnes turned thirty. With no more
family obligations and a substantial income, Agnes
left home to travel and attend the University of
Michigan where she studied history and literature.
Inglis left school before attaining
a degree and spent several years as a social worker
at Chicago's Hull House, the Franklin Street
Settlement House in Detroit, and the Ann Arbor YWCA.
While working in these settings, she gained intimate
knowledge of the unfair working and living conditions
suffered by working class immigrant women and men.
She also grew skeptical of the effectiveness of
liberal policies and programs designed to transform
the lives of working people and subsequently began to
question the social, economic, and political
conditions in the United States.
At the same time, Inglis continued
her abbreviated education informally.
She read widely and was especially attracted to and
persuaded by revolutionary writers. She attended many
lectures in Ann Arbor and Detroit given by a variety
of social critics, many of them anarchists. She met
Emma Goldman in 1915 and became friends with the
famous anarchist through whom she also met Alexander
Berkman, Goldman's longtime comrade and lover. Inglis
organized anarchist lectures in southeastern
Michigan, began associations and friendships with
many local radicals, and joined the Detroit chapter
of the Industrial Workers of the World. In addition
to her activism, Inglis used her financial means to
generously support radical efforts ranging from
strike funds to bail money for those imprisoned for
expressing unpopular political viewpoints.
With the onset of the United States
involvement in World War I, Inglis stepped up her
radical activities by participating frequently in
demonstrations protesting conscription and the war.
When the government cracked down on radicals
demonstrating against the war in what became known as
the first Red Scare, Inglis found her resources to be
even more in demand. Along with tireless efforts in
support of those facing deportation, she also posted
bail for numerous individuals and contributed heavily
to their defense funds. Her longtime support of
radical causes eventually led her family to cut off
her unlimited access to funds and gave her only a
modest income on which to live.
When the turmoil following the Red
Scare died down, Inglis began her career in the
Labadie Collection. As curator, Agnes developed
idiosyncratic organizational techniques that
nonetheless provided a useful structure to the
collection. She began by dividing assorted materials
into broad subject categories that resulted in a
vertical file system still in use today. She had many
journals bound, including Mother Earth, Regeneration
, and Appeal to Reason , and compiled
clippings and other ephemera into scrapbooks dealing
with subjects on which there existed abundant
documentation, such as Emma Goldman, Haymarket, the
I.W.W., the Tom Mooney case, and Sacco and Vanzetti.
In addition, she constructed a detailed card catalog
(also still in use) that held item level cataloging
on most materials in the collection as well as
information lists of individuals and groups that
functioned as a low level name authority file.
Though her death left some
mysteries about the arrangement of the materials in
the collection, her organizational efforts restored
contextual information to the materials and made them
far more usable by researchers. There is no evidence
that she either had or sought the assistance of
trained librarians within the library system,
consequently all this work was done on her own.
Inglis succeeded in
greatly increasing and broadening the holdings of the
Labadie Collection. After a few years of organizing
it, Agnes and Jo sent a letter to 400 radicals asking
them to contribute their materials documenting events
and people they knew. Though the letter received only
a limited response, Inglis used it as a starting
point to aggressively seek out individuals to donate
materials. Among the most important collections she
added were papers relating to Voltairine de Cleyre, a
Michigan-born anarchist and friend of Emma Goldman's,
and socialist writer John Francis Bray. She used her
extensive connections and correspondence with
radicals of the period such as Goldman, Roger
Baldwin, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Ralph Chaplin,
among many others, to persuade them to contribute
relevant materials. Agnes also assisted many
individuals in their research and publications
including helping Goldman and Chaplin with their
autobiographies, Henry David with the seminal The
Haymarket Tragedy , and James J. Martin with Men
Against the State .
Inglis's career has historical
significance for librarians concerned with issues of
social justice for a number of reasons. Her story is
inspiring from a political standpoint because once
her political ideals were formed, she never betrayed
them and she saw them as central to her work as a
librarian. Her motivations came explicitly from her
devotion to the ideals of the philosophy and history
of anarchists and other leftist radicals with whom
she labored for a better and more just world. Her
political commitments often worked to the advantage
of the collection, seen most explicitly in the use of
her connections to acquire records from her comrades.
Even recently, the Labadie Collection received a
valuable set of papers from a woman who was still
grateful to Agnes for bailing her father out of jail
all the way back in 1917.
She also put use of the collection
as a top priority, even to the extreme of lending
materials from the collection. When one of her
borrowers damaged or did not return an item, her
genteel and generous nature would never allow her to
accuse them. She was pleased enough that people were
interested in the materials. One note she wrote
describing her loan of a book to an Italian anarchist
who lived in the Twentieth Ward in Detroit in 1934
says "the Twentieth Ward sure is hard on a rare
book!"
Finally, her knowledge of the
individuals and events of that history enabled her to
effectively collect, arrange, describe, and provide
access to the materials in the collection. Inglis
once wrote to Emma Goldman, "It's no joke to
take all that mass of material and fix it up so
students can really use it. It is not a work everyone
can do. One has to know the material. People don't
appreciate that." (Inglis 1925) Agnes devoted
the final third of her life to the Labadie
Collection, until her death in 1952. Generations of
scholars who have used the collection have
appreciated the knowledge, skill and dedication Agnes
Inglis brought to the cause of documenting the
history of radical political movements in the United
States and her contribution to that history is
immeasurable.
WORKS CITED
Inglis, Agnes (1924) Letter to
Joseph Labadie, February 11th , Joseph Labadie
Papers, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor.
Inglis, Agnes (1925) Letter to Emma
Goldman, March 19th , Emma Goldman Papers, Labadie
Collection,University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.