Agnes Inglis

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Agnes Inglis
Agnes Ann Inglis.jpg
Born
Agnes Ann Inglis

(1870-12-03)December 3, 1870
Detroit, Michigan, United States
DiedJanuary 30, 1952(1952-01-30) (aged 81)
Michigan, United States
Occupation(s) Librarian, archivist
Employer University of Michigan Library
Organization Labadie Collection
Movement Anarchism in the United States

Agnes Ann Inglis was an American librarian and anarchist activist. Born into a wealthy family, she was radicalized by her work as a social worker and was inspired by the works of Emma Goldman to join the American anarchist movement. She used her inheritance to support the movement, paying into strike funds and for the bail of arrested activists. Following the First Red Scare, she began working at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library. She soon became the head curator of the collection, developing a system of organization that contextualized items by their subject. She devoted the rest of her life to the collection, expanding, organizing and providing public access to it.

Contents

Biography

Early life

Agnes Inglis was born into a wealthy family in Detroit, [1] in 1870. [2] She was raised in a religious conservative household and spent only a single, brief year in education. Her father died in 1874, and a young Inglis later spent many of her early years caring for her dying sister and mother. After her immediate family had all died, when Inglis was turning 30, she left home to study history and literature at the University of Michigan. [3]

She never graduated from university and instead spent some years travelling around as an itinerant social worker, working at Hull House in Chicago, the Franklin Street Settlement House in Detroit, and the YWCA in Ann Arbor. She was radicalized by the poor living and working conditions she observed foreign workers enduring, which made her question liberal charitable programs and the wider social order in the United States. [3]

Anarchist activism

She began an informal education, during which time she read many works and attended several lectures by revolutionaries. [3] She was particularly inspired by the writings of the anarchist Emma Goldman, which led her to join the American anarchist movement. [2] In 1915, she met Goldman and Alexander Berkman, with whom she became fast friends. [3]

She soon joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and began organizing anarchist lectures throughout southeast Michigan, [3] including a lecture by Emma Goldman at the University of Michigan in 1916. [2] She also spoke alongside Rudolf Rocker at cultural events organised by the Detroit Modern School. [4] Inglis mobilized support for organized labor and the early civil rights movement, using her inheritence to support strike funds and pay the bail of arrested activists. [5]

Following the American entry into World War I, Inglis joined the anti-war movement in protest against the introduction of conscription. [3] Throughout the First Red Scare, she paid the bail and organised legal defense funds for many draft evaders; her extended family responded by restricting her allowance so she would spend less of it supporting radical politics. [5] In 1918, when Emma Goldman was imprisoned for anti-war activism, she visited her in her cell in Jefferson City, Missouri; Goldman was deported the following year. [2]

Library curation

In the early 1920s, Inglis began visiting the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, where she initially worked on her own research, before turning her attention to organizing the collection. [6] By 1924, Inglis was voluntarily working as a curator for the collection. [7] Without any assistance from trained librarians, she developed a new method of organizing the collection by dividing it into subjects and cataloguing it by item. She also bound paperback publications and compiled newspaper clippings into scrapbooks. [8] Her work as a librarian was directly motivated by her anarchist philosophy and left-wing politics, and she used her knowledge of the movement and connections within activist circles to acquire and sort materials for the collection. [9] Inglis prioritised public access of the collection, allowing materials to be lent out and responding kindly to borrowers even when they returned books in a damaged state. [10]

Inglis reached out to hundreds of radicals requesting they contribute new materials, which resulted in a massive increase in the collection's holdings. [11] Through her efforts, the collection received contributions from Roger Nash Baldwin, Ralph Chaplin, [12] Joseph Desser, Millie Grobstein, [13] Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, [12] Mark Mratchny, [14] Hugo Rolland, [15] and Alfred Sanftleben. [16] Inglis also collected the papers of the American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre and the socialist economist John Francis Bray, and provided research materials for the autobiographies of Goldman and Chapman and history books by Paul Avrich and James J. Martin. [12] Avrich credited Inglis and Labadie with having preserved much of the historical record of American anarchism. [2]

Inglis quickly became indespensable to the functioning of the collection, with Joseph Labadie himself recommending they change the name to the "Inglis-Labadie Collection", but she declined any official recognition for her work. [17] Five years into her work as a librarian, in 1929, the head librarian William Warner Bishop finally gave her a salary. [18] In 1933, Labadie died, leaving Inglis to continue his work with the collection. [18] She would go on to devote the rest of her life to curating the collection, [19] dying on January 29, 1952. [20]

Legacy

Warner Rice, the head librarian at the University, did not fill her post despite having promised he would do so. The collection was opened up to unsupervised patrons, resulting in the deterioration of her filing system over the course of the 1950s. [20] Hugo Rolland said that he continued to contribute materials to the Labadie Collection after Inglis' death, but that the new head of the library destroyed some of it due to his conservative politics. [15] The collection was eventually taken over by Edward Weber, who curated it from 1960 to 2000 and expanded its holdings to include gay liberation publications. [21]

References

  1. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 481n48; Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 7.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Avrich 1995, p. 481n48.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 7.
  4. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 196.
  5. 1 2 Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 7; Herrada 2007, p. 135.
  6. ↑ Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 7; Herrada 2007, pp. 135–136.
  7. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 481n48; Herrada & Hyry 1999, pp. 7–9; Herrada 2007, pp. 135–136.
  8. ↑ Herrada & Hyry 1999, pp. 8–9.
  9. ↑ Herrada & Hyry 1999, pp. 9–10.
  10. ↑ Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 10.
  11. ↑ Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 9; Herrada 2007, pp. 136–137.
  12. 1 2 3 Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 9.
  13. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 79.
  14. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 384.
  15. 1 2 Avrich 1995, p. 160.
  16. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 312.
  17. ↑ Herrada 2007, pp. 135–136.
  18. 1 2 Herrada 2007, p. 136.
  19. ↑ Avrich 1995, p. 481n48; Herrada & Hyry 1999, p. 10; Herrada 2007, pp. 136–137.
  20. 1 2 Herrada 2007, p. 137.
  21. ↑ Herrada 2007, pp. 137–138.

Bibliography

Further reading

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