It is the glory of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin that
Draper gathered into its collections the papers of the Ohio Valley
migrations, that Thwaites added the records of the fur trade, and that
neither forgot while pursuing these remote and unique sources to
assemble day after day the current accumulations of the people among
whom they lived. As the latter collector and editor loved to say: The
history for tomorrow is preserved in the waste paper baskets of today.
The society that lays aside the policy of accumulating accessions to
devote itself to the conscious pursuit of particular treasures can
never become more useful than its curators or wiser than its
superintendent. The greatest libraries are those whose growth has been
chiefly in the routine addition, from year to year of all that has
been regarded as worth saving, and of much more whose immediate value
has been doubtful.
The State Historical Society of Wisconsin has for so many years
followed the practice of saving its daily newspapers, and adding to
them as opportunity occurs, that it now owns one of the notable
American collections. From the middle of the last century, when the
state came into being, the development of its people can be traced in
the detail which only the inquisitive county daily can follow. Its
relations to the Northwest and to the rest of the nation can be
checked in the selected files which have ever been cherished. Through
the wise foresight of its founders it owns the great sources for all
of modern history--for in our day the course of the historian is more
and more fundamentally laid among the newspapers.
It has not been altogether easy to build up this collection. A
metropolitan daily of today means twelve large volumes to be bound,
shelved, and housed each year. The cubic contents of the sources know
no limit. There is some room for fear that after they have been stored
away they may rot in their bindings before any scholar uses them.
But no society which understands the course of modern history can fail
to run the risk of dry-rot or to preserve such records as exist. For
no period before the present is there such a factual reconstruction
possible as we possess. No newspaper can lie and live--very long. The
user must correct for bias, and careless error, and malicious
misstatement, all of which occur in nearly every issue of any paper.
But no student can read a continuous series of files for twenty years
without knowing that he has before him the truth, and more of the
truth than society has known in any earlier period.
In our judgment one of the great functions of any historical society
today is to collect ephemeral literature, beginning with the
newspapers of its immediate region and extending as far as its money
and its shelves permit. No Society should be too poor for the town
dailies and one New York file. Larger societies may take in the
county, or the region, as the area for their collections, and may
increase the selected list of remote journals to be preserved. All
will be judged in the future by the intelligence and patience in this
direction which their shelves may finally reveal. None can be
permanently of greatest use with a policy such as is exposed in the
journal of a sister society:
“The State of * * * has thousands of them [newspapers] in the
Libraries of the State House. Many of them are bound, others are
unbound, tied in bundles and carefully stowed away. Their day is done;
rarely has any one in our knowledge asked to examine any of these
newspapers for any date or facts. History has culled from them such
truths as could point a moral, or hold out a danger signal to the
world of the present time, and they are closed, perhaps never more to
be consulted.”