ued persuasively that books and the knowledge they represent ought to be readily accessible to everyone in a free society. However, few public funds were available to purchase and house books; his library company enlisted subscriber fees from its members to underwrite the costs of creating the library collection.
Franklin's subscription society established a model that was soon followed in many other major American cities; New York City's Society Library was founded in 1754 and boasted of owning "several Thousand Volumes of Choice Books, in History, Divinity, Travels, Voyages, Novels, &c." The first British subscription library was established in Liverpool in 1756, copying the American example.
In 1800, the U. S. government established the Library of Congress with legislation and an initial appropriation of $5,000; the first librarian for the collection was paid $2 per days for his services. When the library was burned by the British in 1812, former President Thomas Jefferson sold the government his private library of more than 6,000 volumes as a replacement. This hand-picked collection, much of which still resides in the Library of Congress, had an appraised value at the time of just under $24,000.
The country's oldest free public library, supported by local taxes, was established in 1833 in Peterboro, New Hampshire. In 1854, Boston opened the Boston Public Library, the first urban public library in the United States, beginning the modern library movement in America and establishing the idea that books should be freely available to all members of a democratic society. Such a concept was distinctly American. Paul Dickson quotes Lenin, writing in 1913, who decries "the strange, incomprehensible, barbaric aim [in the West] of making these great libraries accessible not only to scholars, professors and other specialists like them, but to the masses, the crowds, the man in the street." Marxism's faith in the power of t...