In celebration of its 100th year as an institution open to the public, the Morgan Library and Museum has launched the exhibition, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” a comprehensive retrospective of the lives and career of the Morgan’s first director. First hired in 1905 and appointed director in 1924, Greene (1879-1950) was a colorful and talented character who invented not only herself, but the Library, and, to some degree, the science of librarianship. Greene died, without descendants, of cancer, in 1950.
Hired at age 26 as personal librarian to Wall Street giant John Pierpont Morgan Sr. (1837-1913), Greene would continue in service to the Morgan dynasty under J.P. Morgan Jr. (1867-1943) until her retirement in 1948. Throughout this time, she built up a reputation for astute bibliophilia and sharp collector’s acumen. She was profiled in the New York Times, among many other publications. She came to be readily recognizable for her signature flapper hats (facsimiles of which the Morgan currently has on sale in its gift shop).
While Greene was very much a public figure in the forefront of New York high society, her personal history was shrouded in secrecy, the continuance of which she took an active role in ensuring. She discarded all of her personal records. Nothing remains in writing of her thoughts outside professional correspondence related to her job at the Morgan Library.
This was because Greene lived a dual life. She was born Black and died white.
The exhibition is bisected into two separate halls (the museum’s twin Morgan Stanley Galleries), located beside each other and connected by a central greeting lobby. This arrangement aptly befits Greene’s biography, split as it was into two identities – one, by construction, as the “bold, fearless, uncompromising” – and white – inaugural director of the Morgan Library. The other, by inheritance, as scion of “an elite Black family in Washington, DC.”
Installed in Morgan Stanley Gallery West is the latter of these two existences, the professional life and works that earned Greene the moniker, “Soul of the Morgan Library.” Therein are selections of Greene’s most notable acquisitions for the library’s holdings – manuscripts, prints and other historical objects that Greene traveled to Europe and around the United States to inspect and purchase. The gallery also contains memorabilia from Greene’s professional life – correspondence from colleagues and mentees, and the stories behind their associations. Noteworthy is a triptych of photographs of the American poet, Amy Lowell, whose research for a biography of Keats she was writing Greene facilitated at the Morgan. Lowell, the exhibition notes, “lived openly as a lesbian in Boston and dedicated [the book] to her longtime partner, the stage actor, Ada Dwyer Russell.” To this queer woman the Bohemian Greene gave unqualified support, once consenting to Lowell’s “cheeky request” to consult a manuscript overnight in her hotel room while recovering from surgery with a written reply using the royal “we”: “What we ‘think of you’ is entirely too complimentary for transmission by mere paper,” Greene wrote.
One striking object on display is a beautiful man’s ring, which Greene came across in the desk of J.P. Morgan Jr. (“Jack”) after his passing. The ring’s intricate design and intriguing backstory Greene commented on in a letter to Jack’s sister, Jane Morgan Nichols, then president of the Morgan Library board of directors. “It takes a Morgan!” Greene wrote with bold familiarity. “No – I did not open the ‘true lovers’ ring. As no-one had ever given me one I did not even suspect that they did open. I’m furious at the neglect shown me.” Greene’s derision mixed with self-deprecation swathed in hilarity is here an epistolary feat of “double consciousness,” the African American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois’ term for the twoness of self-presentation Black people developed in order to negotiate a white dominated society that prevented them from being anything beyond one-dimensional.
At the end of this side of the exhibition is Greene’s former desk, a solid, leonine-footed structure, custom made for her in England, from which she built and steered the Morgan Library for nearly a quarter-century. Beside it is the last photograph taken of Greene. She is seated at her desk, dressed in a wide-lapelled pinstripe blazer, poring over one of her precious acquisitions.
In Morgan Stanley Gallery East, the substance of Greene’s former existence – the family history she erased – is on display. For context, this half of the exhibition is couched in information about “passing,” a practice and psychology in American history of white-appearing Black people burying their pasts to live as white in order to evade the pervasive racial discrimination that would otherwise limit all their possibilities.
Greene was born Belle Marion Greener. Her father, Richard T. Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard University. He’d gone on to an illustrious legal and academic career, holding a string of influential positions. But, his marriage to Belle’s mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet, also legally African American though racially ambiguous in appearance, ended bitterly, and Belle, her mother, and some of her siblings proceeded to completely disassociate themselves from not only him, but blackness altogether. They moved to New York City, dropped the “r” in their surname and Belle replaced her middle name with “da Costa,” presumably to give the suggestion she was of Portuguese extraction to preempt questions about her darker complexion.
To modern-day observers, the notion that a woman of Greene’s physical appearance could pull the wool over so many for so long might seem perplexing. While her features were not unquestionably Black, they certainly weren’t indubitably Caucasian either. Viewed through a contemporary lens, Greene would not be passing, but rather passing for passing.
When I repeatedly mentioned this thought to the friend who’d accompanied me to view the exhibition, an African American woman whose own mother she’d told me for years had been taken for Italian in the workplace, an assumption the mother sometimes corrected, sometimes didn’t, an assessment of risk made on a rolling basis – my friend reminded me that what makes sense now – what lay in the realm of possibilities within the collective consciousness – did not then. And therein lies the bigger backstory of race and rights that supplied the logic to secure in place Greene’s lie. College-educated African Americans were so rare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the likelihood dictated the perception. Although Greene was not in receipt of a college degree, she did attend a training program in library science, then a nascent field of study, at prestigious Amherst College, in Massachusetts. A photograph from 1900 of her among the class of some 40 fellow trainees is telling, personally and professionally. Greene is wedged in at the very back, as if for intentional inconspicuousness. Women far outnumber men in the shot, showing how the librarian profession, formerly the province of distinguished men, was becoming gendered female. And, closer scrutiny finds Greene is not the only person in the shot with an ethnically ambiguous appearance. One woman, in fact, is even much darker than Greene, leaving open the question, “What conditions qualified a person as white, or excused them from not-white – gave them a pass?”
A handwritten letter on display in the exhibition speaks to this enigma. It is from a Charlotte Martins, superintendent of the purchasing department of the library of Princeton University, where Greene held her first job, from 1901, before she was hired by J.P. Morgan in 1905. The letter is very familial and warm, with Martins referring to herself and signing off as “Aunt Lottie.” The older woman had clearly looked out for Greene during her time in the rarefied Princeton environment. But, most significantly, the exhibition text notes, Martins, like Greene, was of mixed-race ancestry, and likely passing for white herself.
As it turns out, Greene was probably known to her employers as Black the whole time. Another letter, penned in 1896 by a high society philanthropist, Grace Hoadley Dodge, to an Emma Moody, founder of a seminary school for young women in Massachusetts, imploring Moody to admit Greene, states, “While the trace of Negro blood is noticeable, Belle has always associated intimately with the best class of white girls.” This letter is not included in the exhibition, but written about on the Morgan Library website under the headline, “New Light on Belle da Costa Greene.” The write-up goes on to state, “Dodge was both a member of J. Pierpont Morgan’s social world and also his neighbor… Given their physical proximity and the fact that Dodge and Morgan traveled in the same close-knit social circles, it seems more than likely that Morgan himself was aware of Greene’s closely-guarded family history.”
What appears to have captivated and impressed all those who promoted Greene was, as Dodge wrote, that she was “bright, quick to learn, easily influenced, full of fun and energy” and, according to another acquaintance, her “wild, gay humor.” An uncomfortable confluence of likability, lying, and location produced Belle da Costa Greene, made her ability make sense.
“Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” | Morgan Library & Museum | Until May 4, 2024
Nicholas Boston, Ph.D., is a professor of media sociology at the City University of New York-Lehman College
