0.5 Chapter three: professionalization and postwar expansion, 192  (Page 6/13)

The difficult postwar years of r.w.g. vail, 1944-1950

During the Society's first 140 years, it had always hired an internal candidate as the new chief executive (who had been the librarian through 1938 but was now the director). For the first time in its history, the Society looked outside for a replacement. Why the Society conducted an outside search cannot be known, but there are several possible explanations. One explanation could be that it was an indication of the success of Alexander Wall in professionalizing the Society. An­other possibility might be that the Society needed to find a leader of high prestige and stature—someone to enhance even further the esteemed position die Society had staked out for itself. There is yet another possible explanation, dependent on a certain degree of speculation, that the Society searched externally because the most qualified inside candidate was a woman.

Over the course of the Society's history (except for the relatively brief period during which Robert Kelby chose not to be librarian), the assistant librarian had always ascended to the role of librarian. To carry on that tradition within the new organization structure, the likely choice for the position of director would have been the standing librarian. But Wall, who was ahead of his time in so many ways, had entrusted the position of librarian to Dorothy Barck, the first woman in the history of the Society to hold such a high office. Even though Barck had served the Society for twenty-four years, she was not chosen to be the director. This break from the traditional succession process, for whatever reason, altered the power bal­ance among departments within the Society, a development that would have reper­cussions in terms of both leadership and direction in the years to come.

The job of leading the Society had become complicated. Balancing the some­times competing demands of the museum and the library, in terms of both finances and focus, represented a formidable challenge. After a two-month search, the Board hired Robert W. G. Vail to succeed Wall as director. By hiring Vail, the board signaled that the library, not the museum, was of primary importance, for Vail's professional background was exclusively as a librarian.

Vail came to the Society from the New York State Library, where he had served as librarian since 1940. His previous experiences included a two-year stint as the librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society and nine years as the librarian at the American Antiquarian Society. Did Vail's experience prepare him for the complexities of the Society and for managing its two valuable and grow­ing collections? Perhaps not. Vail's primary focus appears to have been scholar­ship and the publication of collections, not administration. In The Collections and Programs of the American Antiquarian Society: A 175th Anniversary Guide, a single sentence is devoted to Vail's nine-year tenure from 1930 to 1939. It reads: "While in office, he [Vail] completed Sabin's Bibliotecha Americana (volumes 22-29), picking up where Wilberforce Eames of the New York Public Library had left off."