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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adelaide Hasse | 4/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Hasse | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:06:11.891784+00:00 | kb-cron |
== The Anderson File == From 1917 forward, Hasse would struggle because of her German ancestry, support of the women's suffrage movement and equal pay and working conditions, desire to aggressively market library services, and lack of a husband. Anderson began keeping a file on Hasse, documenting every questionable move she made, even misconstruing legitimate inquiries to suit his needs. He reported her to the United States Secret Service in 1917 for "suspicious activity," which was largely due in part to her seeking other employment with President Wilson's Inquiry group. The Inquiry was formed by President Woodrow Wilson to "collect and organize information for the eventual peace conference" that would occur at the conclusion of World War I. Hasse inquired about work with the group only to find that Lydenberg and Anderson were already heading it up in the basement of the NYPL. Anderson claimed that since she had been born to German parents (her parents were Americans of German heritage) and was at a conference in Germany when the war began, she could not possibly have any other motive for working with The Inquiry other than that as a German spy. The NYPL special collections division had an extensive collection of Latin American documents. There was, however, a gap in the collection, and in 1918, Hasse asked Anderson for permission to travel to Mexico on a vacation to California to collect the missing documents. Anderson again reported Hasse to the Secret Service for suspicious activity because this was during a time of great unrest in Mexico. She was denied permission to go to Mexico, but while she was in California, her house was searched by the Secret Service no fewer than four times over the course of six weeks. Later in 1918, when the New York city police came to the library to inquire about possible suspicious activity by library employees, Lydenberg readily offered Hasse up to them, claiming she had ties to Jews, Marxism, Trotskyism, and Bolshevism because of a thank you note she had written to him regarding a "Marx book" a patron had requested. Also in 1918, Anderson and Lydenberg hired Edith Clarke, Hasse's colleague from the GPO, who eagerly "came out against Hasse's work" and agreed that she was difficult to work with. The Anderson file also contained accusations that Hasse was a lesbian and was involved in a relationship with Tilloah Squire, an assistant Hasse hired in 1918 to work on the Foreign Relations Index. As late as 1922, three years after her departure from the NYPL, Anderson was still reporting her to the Justice Department and even worked with J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to open a file on her. The Anderson file is located in the NYPL Archives, which, in addition to the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, and FBI, also has their own files on Hasse. As of 2006, the FBI still refuses to release five pages of their file on Hasse.
== Life after the NYPL == For the first time in her career, Hasse was out of a job and had no immediate prospects for one. From 1919 to 1923, she conducted research for the War Labor Policies Board, becoming an "expert in the Council of National Defense" and identified herself as a bibliographer rather than a librarian. She went on to found the School for Business Librarians within the Washington School for Secretaries and became editor of Special Libraries. She also wrote an autobiography entitled Compensations of Librarianship, in which she finally had her say against Anderson, Crandall, Clarke, and Lydenberg. In 1923, she was hired on as a bibliographer for the Brookings Institution through 1932, at which time she was again out of a job, this time for a year. She finally obtained employment as an instructor at George Washington University and as a research consultant for what would later become the Works Progress Administration (WPA), publishing bibliographies of Social Security information. From there she worked temporarily for the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) and then as indexer for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and later still, as a bibliographer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
== Lasting contributions == Hasse died on July 28, 1953, with a fifty-four year career in library and information science. In those fifty-four years, Hasse made a significant mark on the field as a library assistant, indexer, cataloguer, classifier, bibliographer, editorial analyst, and author. She was an advocate of "efficient and effective" library service, public access to government materials, and the women's movement. Hasse overcame great obstacles in her quest for providing quick, easy access to materials. American Libraries states that she was best "known for her acerbic personality"; however, Gail K. Nelson and John V. Richardson Jr. state that, regardless of what one may say of her professional relationships and personal life, the basis of the Superintendent of Documents Classification system still in use today was "essentially Hasse's." Because of her work in the GPO, the American public has a system for easily accessing a century's worth of government publications and documents.
== Notes ==
== Bibliography == Beck, C. (2006). The new woman as librarian: The career of Adelaide Hasse. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc. Government Printing Office. (2004). GPO living history: Adelaide R. Hasse. Retrieved May 15, 2009, from [1]. Grotzinger, Laurel A. (May 1978). "Women Who Spoke for Themselves" (PDF). College & Research Libraries. 39 (3): 175–190. doi:10.5860/crl_39_03_175. Retrieved 13 September 2019. Hasse, A. R. (1895). Travel and exploration. In A. H. Leypoldt & G. Iles (Eds.), List of books for girls and women and their clubs: With descriptive and critical notes and a list of periodicals and hints for girls' and women's clubs (pp. 55–59). Boston, MA: The Library Bureau. Hasse's unique task. (1897, June 2). The New York Times, p. 12[Electronic version]. Retrieved May 1, 2009, from [2]. Kniffel, L.; Sullivan, P.; McCormick, E. (1999). "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century". American Libraries. 30 (11): 43. Malcomb, L. (2005). "Documents librarianship in Indiana: A historical review". Indiana Libraries. 24 (1): 13–17. hdl:1805/1373. Nelson, G. K.; Richardson, John V. Jr. (1986). "Adelaide Hasse and the early history of the U.S. superintendent of documents classification scheme". Government Publications Review. 13: 79–96. doi:10.1016/0277-9390(86)90030-0.