University of Virginia Library

1. GRAPHS OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE
LIBRARY

THE QUARTER CENTURY that began the second
hundred years of the University of Virginia
was close-packed with an exhausting succession of
economic and political events: an extravagant
boom in the United States, a worldwide financial depression,
a global war, and an aftermath in which hope of peace
faded before an ideological struggle between fundamentally
opposed conceptions of the rights of man. The University
of Virginia, like other institutions of higher learning, was
a microcosm reflecting those changes. The closing years of
President Alderman's administration proved to be a harvest
time for material growth. His sudden death in 1931
spared him from a financial winter in which his friend and
successor, John Lloyd Newcomb, strained the powers of
the human spirit in the effort to conserve. Against the foundation
thus preserved swept the tornado of the second world
war, turning the University once more into a training
camp. Discerning statesmanship, the salutary effect of which
may become increasingly evident in the decades to follow,

saved the benefits of education for that wartime generation
of American youth, and, on the cessation of the
fighting, flooded the Universities with students notably
above the average in maturity and diligence. When President
Newcomb retired in 1947, his successor, Colgate
Whitehead Darden, Jr., the third President of the University,
continued the development of the material resources
of the University, with the aim of a more adequate girding
for concentration on the primary functions of a State
University; namely, to preserve the people's heritage and to
contribute to the advancement and the diffusion of knowledge,
with steadfast belief, in the familiar Jeffersonian
words, that enlightenment of the people and the quickening
of its hostility to every form of tyranny are essential for
the preservation of free government and human liberty.

The story of library development through this quarter
of a century differs from the story of the first hundred years.
In the first hundred years, the Library, after a promising
start, fell into a minor role; and the graph of its progress
follows closely the rise and fall in the fortunes of the University.
By contrast, in the twenty-five years from 1925 to
1950 the university and the library developments were
not parallel. A graph of the University's history for those
years would somewhat resemble the fluctuating register of
earth tremors on a seismograph; while a graph of library
development would take the form of a steady and accelerating
curve upward. The University's first decade of boom
altitudes followed by valleys of financial retrenchment was
for the Library a period of lowly struggle over a consistently
rough course. There did emerge, however, an early gleam
of hope. Then, while the University was still plunged in
the depths of the economic depression, that first essential for
the betterment of the library service, a new building for
the general library, was secured. Thereafter, through the
shooting war and the cold war, the course of the University

remained variable, but with an upturn at the close. As for
the Library, though there were delays and disappointments,
its progress continued resolutely towards something like
the combined undergraduate and research service that was
the goal. By 1950, therefore, the University Library was at
long last beginning to resume the stature which Jefferson's
vision and personal efforts had established for it in 1825.

The telling of the story of this quarter of a century also
takes a different form. The earlier record is an historical
sketch, written from the outside. In this last section, the
writer himself had a part in the action, and there is
unavoidably a subjective approach—the story tends to be a
report rather than a history. Perhaps the most visible indication
that this is a personal narrative is in the frequent
manifestation of the tenth Librarian's pride in his associates.
The confession of this pride is made to the reader at
the outset of this sixth section, not in apology, but as an
early clue to the chief cause of such success as has attended
this quarter century of effort.