Boola Boola for Yale’s Beinecke Library, a Modernist Masterpiece at 60

Frederick Douglass stars in an anniversary show. And who’s picking Yale’s next president?

A few days ago, I was in New Haven, the city of my birth. I’d gone back to Ye Olde North Haven, where I grew up, for a funeral of an old friend and political crony. After the funeral lunch, I visited the Yale University Art Gallery, where I’d spent many happy hours as a Yale student. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, also a haunt, is celebrating its 60th anniversary. It opened in 1963 but is still young in 2024. When it comes to birthdays, spillage is allowed. I had a lovely visit there as well.

The Beinecke is sublime and the crown jewel among Yale’s batch of masterpiece, post-war buildings. I went there to bathe my mind in its unique interior lighting and to see Douglass, Baldwin, Harrington: The Collections of Walter O. Evans, a clunker of a title, but librarians are librarians not because they know how to compose New York Post headlines.

Douglass is Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist powerhouse and, I learned, the most-photographed American of the 19th century. Yale owns the Douglass family albums of photographs and press clippings. Baldwin is James Baldwin, the writer, whose section I only glimpsed because I think he’s a crybaby. Harrington is Ollie Harrington, the black social-justice cartoonist who defected to East Germany in 1961. Walter Evans is a black physician who has assembled a stellar collection of books, art, and manuscripts about black subjects in America. He bought objects when they were cheap.

Yale owns a chunk of his collection, keeping it at the Beinecke and showing a portion of it as an anniversary exhibition. The biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a very good read from 2018, by Yale professor David Blight, had much to do with Yale’s acquisition.

The Beinecke itself is a transporting work of art. A million rare books call it home, as do millions of manuscript pages, papyrus scrolls, photographs, maps, and drawings. It’s a six-story rectangular box sitting on four inverted triangular pylons, one on each corner, that look squat but extend 50 feet below the Beinecke building till they hit rock. The rare-book library shares an elegant plaza with Yale’s concert hall, the president’s office, the main dining hall, its World War I monument, and the lairs of Book and Snake, and Scroll and Key, two secret societies. It all looks positively Roman. Ancient Roman, that is.

A honeycomb façade, identical on each of four sides, hides the building’s metal frame. Each honeycomb is framed with light-gray Woodbury granite from Vermont, and filling each frame is a slab of white, gray-veined marble, one-and-one-quarter-inch thick, quarried in Danby, not far from my home in Vermont. The marble’s so thin that it’s translucent.

A sunken courtyard next to Beinecke displays Isamu Noguchi’s The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube), three sculptures representing time, energy, and chance. How positively Masonic. Yale has wonderful public art. Alexander Calder’s Gallows and Lollipops — a very red thing — is also there, giving a dash of hot sauce to the stately space.

Exquisite light streams through the sheets of stone. Seen from the Beinecke’s interior, veins become swirling golden shapes, some gauzy and tonal if it’s cloudy, but if it’s sunny, the chromatic cymbals clash. Here in southwestern Vermont, we’re connoisseurs of maple syrup, cows, fall leaf color, and marble. Danby marble rivals that of the Carrara region, whose Zebrino marble is similar to the Beinecke’s Montclair line. But Danby marble is the least porous in the world. It doesn’t stain.

Inside the library, another box rises six stories. It’s made from glass fixed in black, stark metal frames. Inside are stacks holding 180,000 books. The thin marble sheets filter the light — book bindings are light sensitive — and the temperature and humidity of the interior glass box are controlled. It’s also fireproof. If the library’s got bugs, and death beetles infested it in the 1970s, well, the stacks can turn into freezers. After three days at 30 below, no bug lives to tell the tale.

A layer of windows wraps around the first floor, but the glass is darkened, and there are no other windows in the building. Whenever I enter, I feel whisked to a cocooned world of study and contemplation. What a salve, after going to my friend’s funeral.

The Gutenberg Bible and Audubon’s four-volume baby-elephant-size Birds of America are on permanent display in a gallery space that wraps around the base of the stacks. Temporary, revolving exhibitions are staged there, too.

Gordon Bunshaft, from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, designed the building, which opened in 1963. Ivy League universities were slow to go modern in look. Yale’s campus was substantially rebuilt in the early 1930s in Academy Gothic style. These piles were meant to evoke the depth and antiquity of Oxford and Cambridge.

Modernist architecture wasn’t natural to the cloistered mind, which, in the heads of tenured faculty, is conservative, at least on issues of style. In the early ’50s, though, a new culture sheriff came to town, and art-savvy, entrepreneurial, and risk-keen he was. Charlie Sawyer, who’d been the first director of the Addison Gallery, where I was the fifth director, and director of the Worcester Art Museum, arrived as director of Yale’s art gallery and, soon, an arts dean. He hired Louis Kahn, the Modernist wunderkind, to design a new Yale University Art Gallery.

A Modernist building boom followed. Yale’s Brutalist Art and Architecture Building, its whale-shaped skating rink, Science Hill, the British Art Center, and the Beinecke are icons of good, cutting-edge architecture. Sawyer was fired for his trouble, but the Yale campus is alone worth a visit to New Haven.

Douglass, Baldwin, Harrington starts with Douglass (1818–1895), born a slave in Maryland’s Eastern Shore, his father a white man and possibly his master. He escaped in 1838, and, by the 1850s was a statesman, preacher, and writer promoting abolition of slavery as a Christian imperative. Douglass, alongside men such as Lincoln, Grant, Mark Twain, Andrew Jackson, and Washington Irving, defined the era. Last year, I wrote about a very good exhibition of portraits of Douglass — mostly photographs — organized by the National Portrait Gallery. There’s Douglass the public figure, and then there’s Douglass the family man.

The Beinecke exhibition doesn’t serve startling revelations. He’s famous and known to all except the heads-in-the-sand element unlikely to roll into Beinecke. As manuscript shows tend to do, the Douglass component reminds, clarifies here and there, offers the nosy a peek at family dynamics, and then there’s the aura of relics. In any event, we can never get enough of Douglass, who would be chagrined by race pimps such as Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Claudine Gay, and their grasping, greedy ilk. Living during the Gilded Age, in Washington, D.C., he wouldn’t have been mystified. Then — as now — grifters teemed like sewer rats.

Douglass and his wife, Anna, had three sons and two daughters, one of whom died as a child, and the four who lived were part of Douglass, Inc., what I’d call Douglass’s publishing side and the business of the orator’s everyday life. Douglass grew prosperous enough from speaking fees, sales of his books, and a sinecure to buy Cedar Hill, a spacious house and eight acres in Anacostia, now a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Anna, who died in 1882, is nearly invisible in Douglass’s correspondence.

Douglass taught his sons the ins and outs of the publishing business, from editing to setting type. He was a master speaker and, like the best communicators, kept tuned to mass media. He owned two black-focused newspapers when he lived in Rochester, N.Y., and another in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War. His sons and daughter worked at each.

Douglass’s oldest son, Lewis, and youngest son, Charles, served in the Union Army, enlisting in 1863 immediately after the Army started to welcome black troops. Lewis was badly wounded in the bloody Battle of Fort Wagner, where Robert Gould Shaw was killed. Some of Lewis’s affectionate letters to his wife are on view. Douglass’s middle son, Frederick Jr., “has met the world with a frown,” Douglass wrote, and never found traction. He died in 1892 after a life of malaise and poor health.

“We must suffer and be strong,” he wrote to his oldest son, Charles, when Charles’s daughter died in 1891. This might seem like cold comfort today, but Victorians prized stoicism. Two of Douglass’s children died before he did. He lived to see ten of his 21 grandchildren die as well. Letters, speeches, ephemera, and books help us navigate the highs and lows.

All of Douglass’s sons lived in the shadow of their famous father, an old story, to be sure, but living on pins and needles isn’t fun to see. I felt their pain. Each had scrapbooks filled mostly with material related to the great man. Lewis and Charles especially curated their scrapbooks with future readers in mind. Charles delivered a lecture in 1917 on Douglass’s home life, describing his mother as “banker, baker, and general manager of the home,” and station master as well. She ran a branch of the Underground Railroad from her kitchen.

Some of Douglass’s typed and handwritten speeches are displayed. I would have hired an actor –Yale is thick with drama students — to record passages from My Bondage and My Freedom, one of his autobiographies, and passages from “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — his fiery 1852 speech on the gross mismatch between the slave system and the Declaration of Independence’s promises of freedom. Seeing a handwritten speech is a “meh” moment. Hearing it, and Douglass’s speeches were meant for the voice and the ear, is how words go magnetic. We don’t need James Earl Jones, though basso profundo would stir the soul.

I didn’t know that Douglass was the U.S. minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891 and found imperial interests stateside who wanted the tiny island as a colony, as crazy as that sounds. Later, letters from Douglass describe his work on the Haitian Pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The world’s fair was an extravaganza that black Americans could attend on designated days only, showing to Douglass that “though slavery’s now gone, its asserted spirit remains.” Low points like these live with the highs. In 1880, Frederick Jr. wrote in a scrapbook about the visit to Cedar Hill by President Hayes and Treasury Secretary John Sherman on November 21, 1880, “the first time that a President of the United States called on a colored man at his residence.”

I enjoyed diving into Douglass. The labels are meaty and clear. Transcriptions of spindly handwriting can be summoned on devices via bar codes. It’s a smart, satisfying affair.

That said, the Douglass section is too big. Five sections — small ones — cover recorded texts of his speeches, the memorial statue of Douglass in Rochester, N.Y., collectible Douglassiana, notes from biographies of Douglass published after his death, and Langston Hughes’s response to Douglass’s three autobiographies. This is too many. The exhibition feels like a show that won’t end, and its size devalues the far slighter presentations on Baldwin (1924–1987) and Harrington (1912–1995).

The three men share an exhibition title. Their displays are and aren’t separate, and this makes a problem. Douglass is a titan. Baldwin and Harrington aren’t. The Baldwin exhibition is a selection of letters he wrote in the late 1950s and early ’60s to Mary Painter Garin, a close friend. I’m not a Baldwin fan but, conscientious critic that I am, I didn’t ignore it. There were about 100 letters from Baldwin to Painter, as she was known. Some were lost, but Evans managed to find the envelopes. Painter’s letters to Baldwin are at the Schomburg Center in Manhattan. I would have done a show of the correspondence of both to help viewers see the whole picture.

I’d never heard of Ollie Harrington, whom Langston Hughes described as “America’s greatest African-American cartoonist.” The Beinecke is showing a selection of his cartoon drawings. The exhibit is curated by a graduate student and feels like it. A label entitled “Ronald Reagan and Other Evils” crosses not the line between objectivity and polemics but the one between perspicacity and amateur hour. Reagan, in Harrington’s view, interpreted by the student curator, “embodied government greed and dishonesty.” Does this make sense? After all, Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Reagan, of course, killed Communism, which might be why Harrington didn’t like him. He put the East German nirvana out of business.

I love cartoon art, and Harrington’s pen and ink drawings are fun, pungent, and deft. Still, he did spend the last 30 years of his life in East Berlin, center of a vicious police state, and he apparently thought that was hunky-dory, nothin’ but blue skies, and you can always count on the Stasi for a best bud. That’s a problem. The graduate-student curator needed an experienced handler to help her interrogate it. Another problem — again, it’s Harrington himself — is his political beliefs. They’re programmatic and predictable. Countless lefties espoused the same blah, blah, blah from the 1930s into the ’50s and beyond. A cartoon spoof of an early Apple computer is a nice bit of fancy and unexpected, but otherwise, he’s a rote thinker, which explains why he was so happy behind the Iron Curtain.

Beinecke, Yale’s art gallery, and the British Art Center are only three of a dozen or so museums on campus. This spring, Yale’s Peabody Museum, where dinosaur skeletons and petrified eggs rule supreme, reopens after a long renovation. Everyone on campus and the engaged alumni are probably waiting to learn whom Yale will pick as its new president, especially after the debacle that was Harvard’s Claudine Gay. A search committee is at work.

Yale didn’t go all “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” after October 7, as Harvard, Penn, Cornell, and Columbia did. But the poison is there. Yale does indeed have a serious antisemitism problem that its leaders ignore. Students thought to be hearty supporters of Israel were barred from Gaza pep rallies. The Yale Daily News, the campus paper, refused to label what happened on October 7 as one atrocity after another, its dope of an editor claiming they were “unsubstantiated.” (She later changed her tune.) This week Today the law school’s Students for Justice in Palestine branch bitterly complained about an Israel Defense Forces officer speaking on campus. Doing so, the group insists, “makes many of us — especially Palestinian Arab, Muslim, black, and brown students — feel physically and psychologically unsafe.” To borrow from “Gee, Officer Krupke,”a timeless classic, “It’s just their neurosis that oughta be curbed / they’re psychologically disturbed.”

The place needs tough love, or an exorcist. Can this search committee deliver? Its twelve members were appointed by the Yale Corporation — Yale’s trustees — before Harvard’s president resigned, though the Harvard board, as disgraced and odious as Gay, didn’t. They’re all cut from the same cloth. The chairman of Yale’s search committee, Josh Bekenstein, heads Bain Capital. He was Mitt Romney’s first hire at the fledgling Bain in 1984, and he also chairs the Yale Corporation.

Cappy Hill, once the president of Vassar and Bekenstein’s predecessor as chairman of the Yale trustees, is on the committee. She’s a crafty one. Three years ago, after the alumni tried to elect a trustee who wasn’t on the Obamas’ Merry Kwanzaa card list, she squashed their right to submit candidates by petition. Now, Yale’s alumni office picks the candidates. How very Venezuelan. I know one search-committee member, one of my Andover donors, Josh Steiner. He is a very good guy.

Overall, the search committee is heavy on tech execs, nonprofit executives, and money movers who pivot from government to the investment business and back. I yearn for a Thurston Howell III for Old Bulldog ballast, or a Yalie who owns a construction business, or an alum who’s a farmer, or all three for a critical mass. There are four faculty members on the committee. One of the professors chaired the African American Studies Department, which should be abolished along with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the new LGBT committee, itching to be a department. All three are parking places for defective ideas, over-their-head students, and sinecure-seekers.

Daniel Colón-Ramos teaches at the medical school, where the sleazy quack, public-health mediocrity, leaky-lab patron, drug-company shill, and cover-up artist Dr. Fauci delivered a commencement address last year. Also on the committee are an economics professor and a biomedical-engineering professor who invented an inexpensive respirator for prematurely born babies in poor countries. God bless her.

I have nothing against any of them. Yale’s trustees once included a Chinese billionaire, which means a CCP confrere, but he’s gone. Everyone on the search committee has been in leadership gigs at Yale for a while, which means they’re part of the problem. Though Peter Salovey, Yale’s retiring president, is infinitely more likable and scholarly than the no-longer-president Claudine Gay, and Yale’s temperament is less imperious and smug than Harvard’s, both places are in a crisis.

At Yale, race-driven standards pollute too much of the place, as do antisemitism and bureaucratic bloat. Yale worshipped fake science during the Covid mass hysteria and hypnosis. It’s a den of climate kooks. The buck stops with the trustees, who are complicit. Ultimately, they’ll pick the next president. The search committee is their creature.

I wish that Gina Boswell was one of the trustees on the search committee. She’s a new trustee, runs the manufacturer Bath & Body Works, and lives in Columbus, Ohio, not in the blinkered, smug, fat-cat Silicon Valley, Upper West Side, or Washington, D.C. She grew up in New Haven. Her family runs Pepe’s, one of the city’s famous temples to pizza. New Haven pizza is complex, but it brooks no wacko ideas. It evokes heritage and tradition, wins customers through merit, and is another reason, along with Yale’s buildings and museums, to visit New Haven.