American Insight: Charting Terra Incognita

In 1933, Dartmouth College was invited to become one of seventeen college libraries to participate in a philanthropic plan initiated by a wealthy bibliophile named Tracy McGregor. Dartmouth's Library, under the direction of Nathanial Goodrich, was in the process of growing into a true research library. One major aspect lacking in its collections was a strong rare book collection. This exhibit illustrates how Dartmouth's participation in the McGregor Plan laid the groundwork for the Library's rare book collections and their integration into the curriculum.

The exhibit was curated by Josh Lascell and Peter Carini and was on display in the Class of 1965 Galleries from July 10 to August 31, 2009.

You may download a small, 8x10 version of the poster: American Insight (1 MB). You may also download a handlist of the items in this exhibition: American Insight.

Materials Included in the Exhibition

Case 1. The McGregor Plan

In 1933, Dartmouth College Professor of History Frank Malloy Anderson received a letter from J. Franklin Jameson, the chief of the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress. Jameson invited Dartmouth to become part of a philanthropic plan then being organized by a wealthy bibliophile name Tracy McGregor and operated under the auspices of the American Historical Association.  Dartmouth participation in the McGregor Plan would have an effect on generations of students and faculty studying and teaching American history and bibliography at Dartmouth.

The American Historical Association Committee on Americana for College Libraries ran the program known as the “The McGregor Plan for the Encouragement of Book Collecting by American College Libraries” after its namesake, Tracy W. McGregor.  "The Plan" would eventually add about 200 rare Americana books to Special Collections at Dartmouth. Among the books were Ptolemy's “Geographie” (1513); Smith’s “General History of Virginia” (1624) and  Las Casas' devastating depiction of natives at the hand of Conquistadors in a “Brief Account on the Destruction of the Indies...” (1578).  These titles are  among the rarest and most valuable Americana holdings in Rauner and have offered continuing support to Dartmouth’s humanities curriculum for decades.

Dartmouth joined 16 other colleges and universities to benefit from the plan, which stipulated that the McGregor Fund (Tracy McGregor's philanthropic organization) would make an annual gift to participating colleges of $500, matching the same amount contributed by the college for a total of $1,000 per year (roughly $16,500 adjusted for inflation in 2008).  The money could be used only to buy rare books related to the study of early American history that were produced contemporaneously with the events that they chronicled.

During the first years of the Plan, titles were selected and held by McGregor himself in consultation with librarians, antiquarian booksellers and historians and were to represent what a good Americana library ought to hold.  The Plan would then issue catalogues listing books available to be purchased by colleges under the program.  McGregor, who had recently built up his own rare Americana library, was well-versed in the auctions, catalogues and nomenclature of antiquarian booksellers.  He wanted to use this expertise to relieve librarians, who may not have had specialized knowledge of the rare book trade and Americana, of the burdens of navigating the rare book market.  After most of the libraries had formed the nucleus of their Americana holdings, the Plan allowed individual libraries to purchase directly from book dealers using Plan funds for assistance.

The Plan ran through the height of the Great Depression offering colleges the opportunity to expand their holdings despite the economic pressures they faced.   Even with the assistance  offered by the Plan, two of the approved colleges (Mills and Lafayette) were not able to complete the planned 10 year cycle due to economic pressures.  Dartmouth was able to participate in every year the Plan was available.

Driving down the cost of some titles was their condition.  A number of books that were offered by the Plan were missing plates or illustrations, reducing their cost in a book market obsessed with condition and original states.  In such cases, usable facsimiles were tipped in.  In other instances, pages of text were missing or damaged and paper repair to the volume was undertaken.  Dartmouth holds examples of both instances in its McGregor holdings.   These altered titles allowed colleges engaged in the Plan an opportunity to obtain books that might otherwise have been financially impossible to acquire.  As both McGregor wished and Dartmouth librarians demanded, the books were destined to be part of an active curriculum, not retained as museum pieces.

McGregor envisioned the Plan to last ten years and to include colleges neither near major urban research libraries nor in book rich New England.  How Dartmouth came to be invited is unknown – Hanover then being within easy rail reach of the libraries at Harvard, Yale, Worcester (American Antiquarian Society Library), and Brown (the John Carter Brown Library).  Randolph Adams, head of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and later administrator of the Plan, was a “friend” of Dartmouth president Ernest M. Hopkins, but no evidence in the correspondence held by Dartmouth has been found to support this connection yielding the invitation.

Although the Plan lasted only nine years, running through the height of the Great Depression, offered Dartmouth the opportunity to expand its nascent rare book holdings despite the economic pressures of the time. The Plan was structured to make an annual gift to the 17 participating colleges of $500, matching the same amount contributed by the college for a total of $1,000 per year.  The money could be used only to buy rare books related to the study of early American history.  The plan ended as a result of shifting priorities related to World War II.

The items in this case document the implementation of the McGregor Plan at Dartmouth.

Institutions that participated in the McGregor Plan: