A Librarian's Journey - Part 2

New York State Library Reading Room
(New York State Library School Circular of Information, 1909-1910)

 

When he arrived in 1919 at the New York State Library School, Hung Yu-Feng became its sole Chinese student. However, he was not new to the world of library science.

Born in 1892 in Anhui Province in eastern China, Hung probably grew up in a straw hut. Although Anhui produced vast crops of rice and tea, floods and famine tormented its population. Partly traversed by a railway that would take 80 years to complete, Anhui drew plenty of missionaries. 

Very likely, the American Methodist missionary Arthur J. Bowen plucked Hung from his village and placed him in a religious academy when he was a boy. In 1912, urged onward, Hung enrolled at the University of Nanking.

Arthur J. Bowen

Established just two years earlier, the University of Nanking merged three American-sponsored Chinese Christian colleges. Subsequently, the New York State Board of Regents granted it accreditation.

At Nanking, Hung worked with Professor Harry Clemons, formerly a reference librarian at Princeton who arrived in China in 1913 to organize the new university’s library school. Intelligent and generous, Clemons effectively straddled library studies and Bible studies. As an employee of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., he and other Americans in China could pursue twin commitments in this way.

W. H. Clemons

New York State Library School Junior Lecture Room, 1920
(American Library Association Archives)

In Albany, all of Hung’s 17 peers in the Class of 1921 were college graduates with some library experience. As a fluent English speaker who had served under Clemons as assistant librarian at Nanking, Hung was competitive. The rigorous three-year curriculum would not have fazed him, already well-versed in bibliography, classification, cataloguing, indexing, subject headings, and book selection.

The school also required fieldwork. One summer, Hung worked as a cataloguer in the Library of Congress’s Chinese Collection, which originated in 1869 with a gift from Tongzhi, the sickly boy emperor of the Qing Dynasty. By 1919, the Chinese Collection of maps, manuscripts, and books was substantial.   

On April Fool’s Day, 1920, Hung and his schoolmates visited libraries in Hartford and Providence. Well-hatted, they posed for a picture on the steps outside the Connecticut State Library.  

Some look happy; others impassive. Either way, they would make their mark in a nation with 93.5% literacy (the percentage is still debated). With the professionalization of librarianship, jobs proliferated at public schools, university reference departments, and trade and public libraries.

In 1921, Hung Yu-feng returned to Nanking, where the newly incorporated Southeast University hired him as director of its Meng Fang Library. He oversaw its construction, organized a national library association, married and fathered at least one son.

After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the Republic of China was led by Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party. But warlords wracked the mainland, and civil war became inevitable—especially after Chinese Communist Party members aligned with the Kuomintang’s left wing during the early 1920s. In March 1927, the Kuomintang officially split left and right.

Now the right wing of the army, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, swept through Nanking, executing foreigners and Communists, terrorizing professors, students, and diplomats, leaving death and destruction.

In September 1927, Albany’s Library School News Letter reported:

 

Hung Yu-Feng, ’21, librarian of Southeastern [sic] University, Nanking, China, has been relieved of that post, due to the reorganization of the university and the library, the outcome of political events.

 

After the Nanking Massacre and the Nationalist takeover, Hung continued in the library field and published a book about library management in 1935. The school newsletter announced his death in 1963.

Reflecting on Hung, I have concluded that he was a master administrator. During the 1920s, the call for credentials and expertise in the professions ushered in greater emphasis on efficiency. 

Thus, librarians trained in the U.S. focused on design, organization, and systems. From Albany to Nanking, this type of management enabled libraries to flourish during an important time of growth. 

And the expanse of Hung's life: immeasurably astonishing.  

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/10/a-librarians-journey-part-2.html?m=1

   

A Librarian's Journey

 

Postcard of Angel Island, 1915

Hung Yu-Feng arrived at Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, on a foggy September day in 1919. His unlikely destination: Albany, N.Y., where Hung would study for three years at the New York State Library School.

Although Congress had passed the horrendous Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, exceptions were made routinely, especially for students. In fact, Hung was one of 206 Chinese students traveling on the S.S. Nanking, an American-made ship operated by the China Mail Steamship Company.  

Twenty-seven-year-old Hung held a B.A. from the University of Nanking, where he had worked as an assistant, associate, and acting librarian. Now, his tuition and expenses would be paid largely through a “Boxer Indemnity Scholarship” arranged by his sponsors, A.J. Bowen, a missionary and president of the University of Nanking and Frank K. Walter, a New York State Library School official.

The scholarships were established by Congress in 1908 with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt. They were perhaps the sole positive outcome of the Boxer Rebellion in China, a bloody conflict driven by rage about imperialism, missionaries, and foreigners who denigrated Chinese culture.

University of Nanking, 1920

The Rebellion started in 1899 among Chinese peasants but soon grew into a national movement. By 1901, the U.S., Germany, Russia, Italy, France, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and England had formed an alliance and collectively sent 20,000 soldiers to put down the uprising.

Presumably the goal was to protect foreign delegations; in fact, some of the nations hoped to gain new territory. But no land would be granted through the Boxer Protocol signed in September 1901, about one month after the victorious alliance troops reached the Imperial City.

Instead, the Protocol granted the alliance nations $330 million worth of indemnities, to be paid out in silver by the Qing Dynasty across 39 years, ending in 1940.

Onerous and crippling, the payments devastated China even though eventually some nations forgave part of the debt.

In 1908, the United States waived its claim to its remaining share of Boxer Indemnities. The balance would be applied to the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. 

Initially, the program focused on math and science students. Before long it encompassed library studies. Modernization of university and public libraries had been a goal of Chinese leaders since 1898. American librarians sailed to China to support the effort. Their work was funded by Christian missions and foundations. 

 

***

 

Typically, Chinese visitors were detained for weeks or months at the Angel Island Immigration Station. They endured tortuous rounds of interviews and invasive, humiliating physical exams. Perhaps Hung was fortunate enough to pass through quickly; then boarded the Southern Pacific Railroad headed to Chicago, where he switched to the New York Central.  

At the end of the four-day trip, Hung stepped out of Union Station into New York’s state capital, population about 112,000. 

Union Station, Albany, N.Y., early 19th century

Albany, which started life as a Dutch trading post in 1614, lay along the west bank of the Hudson River. Its Romanesque capitol rose on a hill in a neighborhood ever busier with politics and higher education.

From a rooming house on High Street, where he lived with eight lodgers, Hung could walk toward the Medical College and over to Washington Avenue where the State Education Building housed the Library School.     

The other lodgers hailed from Czechoslovakia, England, Luxembourg, Ireland, Germany, and Massachusetts. The head of the boarding house, Eugenia Mitchell, is listed in the 1920 census as a missionary whose profession was Bible study.   

Arriving in Albany a few days after classes started, Hung hurried up the long staircase and walked between the marble columns toward the bronze doors, then slipped into the soaring rotunda.

State Education Building, Albany, N.Y., 1915

 

To be continued.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/09/a-librarians-journey.html?m=1

Firefly Sky

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/08/firefly-sky.html?m=1

 

Now and Then

 

Why We Celebrate Our Holidays 
by Mary I. Curtis (1924)

In the chilly spring of 1888, James Russell Lowell was invited to give an address at the newly established Reform Club of New York. 

A well-known political and social observer, the bushy-bearded Lowell had honed his intellect since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1842. Poet and essayist, diplomat and abolitionist; a linguistics scholar who became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell moved in distinguished literary circles.

Lowell also drew contempt. Some of his peers dismissed him as a moody lightweight who espoused convenient, inconsistent arguments. He and the Transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller detested each other. “Posterity will not remember him,” she once wrote.   

However, in his remarks at the Reform Club, just a few years before his death at age 72, Lowell identified an interesting twist in American culture. It seems especially intriguing now, when we face controversial interpretations of patriotism and American history.

Up until the start of the Civil War, Lowell told the elite audience, Americans were filled with optimism, “seeing the future in rose-color.”  

He had an explanation for this antebellum anticipation of endless American glory. 

“The hues of our dawn had scarcely faded from the sky. Men were still living who had seen the face and heard the voice of the most august personage in our history.”

Did he mean George Washington? I believe so. 

“This was what may be called the Fourth of July period of our history,” Lowell said.

During that time, he explained, Americans were still close to the epochal events of the past. Inevitably, many traditions had fallen by the wayside. A few old holidays—once momentous celebrations—had lost their meaning, and industrialization chipped away at community cohesion.

Yet thousands of Americans still remembered the big events or held onto the 18^th- and 19^th-century stories recounted by people who were there in the moment. For many years, those memories drove profound feelings of citizenship. 

Of course we could not live perpetually in the Fourth of July period, but it continued to glimmer.

During the Bicentennial in 1976, the writer Brendan Gill mused aloud that we possess founding documents but no recordings of founding voices. After a pause, his friend Ned announced: “I have heard an eighteenth-century voice.”

 

“We pressed him to tell us how that was possible,” Gill recalled. ‘I was born in 1883,’ Ned said, ‘and I was brought up in part by my great-grandmother, who as a little girl was taken down to the new Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to observe Washington being sworn in as the first President of the United States. That was in 1790.’”

Statue of George Washington
Federal Hall, New York City
(National Park Service)

Through these remarkable leaps, 20^th century Americans could touch the deep past. My mother liked to recall a parade in the 1930s where she watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march by.

Really? I’d ask, dubiously.  

Yes, really. In fact, there is a newsreel of the parade. On Memorial Day 1935, Civil War veterans were among the soldiers who marched up Broadway toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park.  

Universal Newspaper Newsreel, May 1935

G.A.R. veterans at the 1935 parade

Even today, the past may resonate unexpectedly, unprompted by a monument, fireworks or a battle reenactment. You might be driving on Interstate 435, a beltway that surrounds the Kansas City metropolitan area. Along the way, the road slopes down to a marsh. The land is undeveloped although not primeval. A low bridge carries you across the Missouri River. 

You might recall “Shenandoah,” a popular 19^th-century American folksong.

 

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, you rolling river

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, I’m bound away, ’cross the wide Missouri.

             

“Shenandoah” is a lilting river ballad filled with love and longing. Any online search will tell you that. Shenandoah was an Indian chief whose daughter the riverboat captain wished to marry but had to leave behind. 

And there you are, back in time and place, brushing up against the Fourth of July period of our history. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/07/now-and-then.html?m=1

Vilna Lamplight

 

My grandparents during the late 1920s

When the 19-year old immigrant arrived in New York City in 1914, he knew all about fur. This was borne out by a story that he—my father’s father—liked to tell my brother and me. The incident took place in the shadowy nineteenth century long before his birth.

The family lived in Vilna, a city in Lithuania, a Northern European nation that borders the Baltic Sea on the east and Belarus to the west. During that time, Vilna was part of the Russian Empire.

His grandparents owned a fur shop—beautiful minks, he described, laid out on deep wooden counters.

One day, like many other days, the Cossacks came to plunder Vilna.*

Inside the store, they demanded: “Give us the furs.” But his grandmother cried, “Never!” and flung her body across the pelts. Why would they spare her life?

By the time we heard this story for the first time, in our grandparents’ apartment in the north Bronx, he had retired from the fur business and liked to watch the Lawrence Welk Show on a Zenith color television.    

Now, looking at early 20^th century photographs of Vilna: the cobblestone streets crowded with old, bearded men and little boys wearing caps and short pants, I understand fully the distance that he, like all immigrants, traveled.  

In the winter of 1934, a naturalized American at last, married with two sons, co-owner of a small fur processing company, he returned to Vilna. His parents had died but several brothers and at least a dozen cousins remained.

“I went back to Vilna,” he would often say. “I stood under the lamplight and waited. And my own brother walked by. I stopped him and . . . ” 

Here he would tear up. “I said, ‘It’s Josef, it’s me! Your brother!'” 

That is all I know about his visit except that the encounter with his brother must have occurred in the Jewish Quarter. Also that most of the family members whom he saw on that trip were still living in Vilna in June 1941 when the German occupation began.  

In May, while visiting Vilna, I looked for the light under which he perpetually stands. But there are so many. Turning down this street and that, a multitude of iron lanterns revealed themselves and lit up my grandfather’s story.  

I am ever, ever grateful that he left to become an American. 

 

Note: Following the formal recognition of Lithuania's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Vilna became Vilnius. After World War I, when the city was part of the Second Polish Republic, it was called Wilno. 

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/06/vilna-lamplight.html?m=1

Through a Screen, Darkly

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/06/through-screen-darkly.html?m=1

Onstage with Evelyn Archer

 

Evelyn Archer, newspaper photo, 1927;
earliest known picture of her. 

One of the lovely aspects of early-twentieth-century American life was the wide-open opportunity for reinvention. Not just once, but as often as necessary. You could hop on a train and disappear into cities and small towns. Abandon everything, even your past! Not a breadcrumb left behind.

Eva Sterry Hubbard, born in Wisconsin in 1878 or 1880 or 1885, got out as soon as possible. She would have done well enough in the river city of Eau Claire, the daughter of Martin, a county clerk, and Alice, a descendant of settlers, who liked to address the crowd on patriotic holidays. 

Perhaps Eva consulted an astrologer and saw her future in the theater, so off she went to Chicago. While time ticked on and the century wound down, she probably worked as a cabaret dancer. Burlesque had kicked and teased its way into the city with the 1893 Columbian Exposition.    

Eva decided to take a stage name—“Evelyn Archer”—and her star rose a bit. Cast in Quo Vadis?, a six-act drama about Nero’s destruction of Rome and the rise of Christian martyrs, Evelyn toured Jim Crow America with performances in Indiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky.

In 1901, she married James Dille Barton, born Dillie Barton Black in Newark, Ohio, son of a Scottish immigrant physician.

Barton was at least 12 years older than Evelyn but the same age in ambition. He, too, escaped his hometown, along with his given name, because he saw his future in show business. The couple left Chicago and went east where J.D., as he dubbed himself, hit the jackpot as a theatrical agent and producer.

J.D. Barton, passport photograph

They settled in a New York City suburb, Mount Vernon, and built a grand house. Evelyn had a baby, bought a brindle bull puppy, and forsook the theater for a while. She and J.D. gadded about town. When they visited the circus, a monkey reached through the bars of his cage, grabbed a $300 diamond pin from Evelyn’s lapel and swallowed it “with a little jerk of his neck,” noted a reporter. The circus refused to chloroform the monkey or reimburse the Bartons. 

Archer appeared on Broadway in 1918.

The marriage ended quietly and the glitz receded. Evelyn and her little girl moved to a more modest house several blocks away. Evelyn landed a few Broadway roles, including The Copperhead (1918), opposite Lionel Barrymore. Before long she heard the siren song of Florida.

St. Petersburg, 1920s

The 27^th state had become its own brand of the Wild West, a place for reinvention; perfect for Evelyn. She and daughter Polly, now about 11 years old, arrived in St. Petersburg right after the end of World War I when the land boom began its rumble. By the mid-1920s, real estate speculation reached a frenzy as investors snapped up waterfront lots for hotels, apartment houses, and casinos. 

But September 1926 spelled devastation. The Great Miami Hurricane wiped out the coastline, local banks, and investors. In fact, the hurricane triggered Florida’s economic decline well before the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Evelyn landed on her feet, or perhaps on her Cuban heels. She had married Fred Rittenhouse, a prominent dentist and realtor, in 1925. Newly launched as president of the “New York Society”—an association of 330 New Yorkers who wintered in Florida—Evelyn regained social stature and influence.    

Cuban heels were all the rage in the 1920s.

After Polly won a few beauty contests, Evelyn brought her daughter back to New York City, helped her get a job with the Ziegfield Follies, and guided her toward movies. As Polly Archer, she appeared in Java Head, The New School Teacher, and The Enchanted Cottage in the early twenties.   

Her greatest feat was yet to come. On New Year’s Eve, 1929, Polly wed a local theater owner while soaring high over St. Petersburg in a “Tin Goose,” Henry Ford’s three-engine airliner.

Polly Archer's wedding photo

The city sparkled 1,500 feet below as the bride and groom walked to the rear of the plane, where the Reverend J.A. McClure performed the ceremony at the stroke of midnight.

The guests threw rice as the plane began its descent. Two hundred people greeted the bridal party at the end of a grass runway at Piper-Fuller Field.

Polly’s career languished and she became an apartment building manager in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, the snowbird population grew and Evelyn came to preside over an empire. Inevitably, as the years passed, she lost her cache and had to let go.

I guess they made the best of things, a mother and daughter who didn’t land in the place they’d hoped for.

*Evelyn Barton Rittenhouse died in 1970, outliving Polly by eight years. J.D. Barton flourished as a writer and producer, including his 1907 drama Through Death Valley, based on his encounters with rattlesnakes while living in Arizona.       

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/05/onstage-with-evelyn-archer.html?m=1