Ralph J. Bunche Library Informations

The Ralph J. Bunche Library, formerly the State Department Library, is the oldest federal government library in the United States. The library is currently located in room 3239 of the Harry S Truman Building.

The library is a Federal depository library with a stated mission "to support the research needs of personnel of the Department of State." Among its resources, the library contains a large collection pertaining to foreign relations. This category includes books about other nations and their governments; about world history; international organizations; wars and international conflicts, especially those involving the U.S.; espionage; world trade relations; foreign assistance and development; treaties and contracts between nations; and American history, particularly as it pertains to the Department of State. The library is not public, but will sometimes lend books to other libraries for public use through interlibrary loan.

Source: Ralph J. Bunche Library History by Dan Clemmer accessed on Bunche Library I-net site, December 7, 2007

The first executive department to be established under the new Constitution of the United States was the United States Department of State. On a motion by James Madison, and after extensive debate, the act setting up the Department of Foreign Affairs was passed and became law when it was signed by President George Washington on July 27, 1789. On September 15, 1789, a bill was passed and approved by the President which changed the name to the Department of State and significantly expanded its responsibilities.:27

The library of the Department of State was provided for in the acts of July 27 and September 15, 1789, thus becoming the first federal library. Section Four of the law that created the Department declares that the United States Secretary of State will have custody and charge of all records, books, and papers collected in the past years under the Continental Congress and the government under the Articles of Confederation. This collection of books, official gazettes, and newspapers was the nucleus of the newly founded Department of State Library.

As the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, developed and expanded the library collection to include statutes of the States and territories of the United States; laws of foreign states; works in history, biography, geography, political science, economics, language, statistics, as well as reference works and periodicals. In 1790 Jefferson estimated Library expenses for the year to be $4 each for 15 American newspapers, $200 to begin a collection of laws of the states, and $25 for the purchase of foreign gazettes and subscriptions to American newspapers that would be sent to American representatives overseas. In that same year, the Library also became, by law, the office of record to receive laws, public documents, and copyrights.

During the War of 1812, the invading British burned the Capital, the White House, and other government buildings including that which housed the State Department and its library on August 24, 1814. While Dolley Madison famously saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington hanging in the White House, Secretary of State James Monroe can be credited with saving the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, housed at that time in the State Department's Library.

As the British entered the Chesapeake, Secretary Monroe ordered Chief Clerk John Graham and Stephen Pleasonton to "take the best care of the books and papers of the office which might be in [their] power." In addition to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, official records of the Continental Congress and original laws and statutes were hid in hastily made linen bags, loaded onto carts and taken across the Chain Bridge into Virginia. The rescued documents were first hidden in an unoccupied gristmill two miles (3 km) upriver from Georgetown. Fearing the documents were still unsafe, Pleasonton hired horses and wagons from local farmhouses and transported them to Leesburg, Virginia, where they were stored in an empty house, locked and in the safekeeping of Rev. Mr. Littlejohn, until the British retreated from Washington. Reporting to the Congress on November 14, 1814, Secretary Monroe said that "Every exertion was made, and every means employed, for the removal of the books and papers of this office, to a place of safety; and notwithstanding the extreme difficulty of obtaining the means of conveyance, it is believed that every paper and manuscript book of the office, of any importance ... were placed in a state of security. ... Many of the books belonging to the Library of the Department, as well as some letters on file of minor importance ... were unavoidably left, and shared the fate, it is presumed, of the building in which they were deposited."

Although saved from fire, the Declaration of Independence did suffer in years to come from the unanticipated ill effects of exposure and handling. Perhaps the most destructive action occurred in 1823 when the document was used to make a press copy as a master for making facsimile copies to distribute to members of Congress, governors, the Supreme Court and others including the three surviving signers—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Carroll. As a result of pressing, a large portion of the ink was lifted from the document. Over the years, rolling and folding of the document creased and broke the parchment, and constant exposure to strong sunlight led to fading of the signatures to the extent that some could not be read.

In 1876 the Declaration of Independence was displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. On March 3, 1877, it was returned to the library where it was kept on view until 1894 when it was hermetically sealed in a locked steel cabinet in the library along with the original signed copy of the Constitution. The documents were not shown to anyone without the approval of the Secretary of State.

On September 29, 1921, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were transferred to the Library of Congress. Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam, eager to receive the documents, came personally to the State Department and carried off both documents in the Library's mail wagon, cushioned by a pile of leather U.S. mail sacks. The documents were displayed in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress from February 1924 until December 1952, when they were transferred to the National Archives.

Although many of the library's books perished in the flames of 1814, the library expanded to over 5,000 volumes by 1830, largely through its role as preserver of all copyrighted material. Because of this, the collections of the Department Library grew faster than those of the Library of Congress, which had been established in 1800, although many of the books received for copyright preservation were not within the scope of the Department of State Library's interests.

In 1820 a handwritten catalog of 3,168 titles was published and is now in the library's Rare Book Room. The catalog was organized into two main sections: one an alphabetical section, usually by author, and the other a section of state laws. The first entry in the catalog is The Annual Register (a British publication still being issued) and the last is Xenophon's Cyropedia.

In 1825 Secretary John Quincy Adams appointed Thomas L. Thurston to care for the library, which was in disarray from having been moved so frequently after the fires of 1814. Adams said that he charged Thurston with the "custody of the Library, and directed him to let no book go out without a minute of it being made, and notice given to the person taking it that he must be responsible for its return."

Printed catalogs published in 1825 and 1830 listed 3,905 and 5,239 titles respectively. These catalogs contain the kinds of titles that might be expected in a foreign affairs library: The Ambassador and His Functions, Lewis and Clark-Travels to the Source of the Missouri River and across the American Continent to the Pacific Ocean, London, 1814. But they also contain such titles as Hall's Distiller, Philadelphia, 1818; Denman-Practice of Midwifery, New York, 1821; and Waterhouse-On Whooping Cough, Boston, 1822, which were probably received unsolicited on deposit. The books in the catalogues of 1825 and 1830 are arranged by broad subject areas, but the alphabetic arrangement within those areas is somewhat haphazard.

One of the more curious items in the collection is a handwritten ledger book in which records of loans and returns for the 1820s and the 1830s were maintained. Two of the earlier entries in the ledger show that President Martin Van Buren had returned Kent's Commentaries, Wheaton's Law of Nations, Jones' Sketches of Naval Life, and Bigelow's Elements of Technology. In August 1829, Secretary of State Edward Livingston returned a number of books including Bailey's Latin Lexicon, Webster's Dictionary, and a 12-volume set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Secretary of the Treasury returned Marshall's Life of Washington on December 1, 1832. Secretary of State Daniel Webster had 29 volumes "sent to his house" on one day, but the record shows that only one of them was returned.

The Department continued to receive materials for preservation until the copyright function was transferred from the Library to the Department of the Interior in 1859 and then to the Library of Congress in 1870. In recognition of a growing national role for the Library of Congress, the Congress and the President agreed in 1903 to a law that gave government agencies the authority to transfer materials no longer needed for their use to the Library of Congress. Among the very special documents transferred that year from State to the Library of Congress were the papers of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, and Franklin. State was no longer able to house and service these valuable papers, acquired for a total cost of $155,000 throughout the nineteenth century.

The collection grew relatively slowly after 1859 because no more books were acquired through copyright deposit and because of limited book budgets. In 1864, for example, the Library was given only $100 to buy books. By 1875 the collection had reached some 40,000 volumes. Theodore F. Dwight, the librarian in at that time, described the collection in the following terms: "The real character of the Library was determined by the necessities of the service. After the organization of the Department of State, a demand was created for works on the law of nations, diplomatic history and the cognate topics, which led to the gradual accumulation of American and foreign histories, voyages, treatises on political science, political economy, and affording liberal information on the subjects of investigation of the Department."

From its founding in 1789, the Department and its library moved from Philadelphia to Princeton to Annapolis to Trenton to New York City before finally moving to Washington in 1800. Between 1800 and 1875 the Department and the Library had eight homes in Washington before it came to rest in the State, War and Navy Building (now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) on Pennsylvania Avenue next to the White House.

By 1898 the collection had grown to 60,000 volumes. Thanks in part to many Foreign Service officers who acquired material on behalf of the library from all over the world, the library has acquired and continues to maintain a distinguished collection of foreign language materials.

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