The Library of Congress's Salaried Cats — The True History of America's Official Federal Government Cat Program, 1898–1952

2026-06-12

19th Century Federal Cat Pay Records | Government Cats of America | The Hidden Story of the World's Largest Library

Somewhere inside the United States National Archives, there are bundles of documents that most people will never open in their lifetimes. The original Constitution. The Declaration of Independence. Executive orders from every president who ever held the office. And tucked somewhere among all of that — far less famous but arguably more entertaining than any of it — a piece of paper that has been quietly waiting for someone to notice it. An official accounting record confirming that the United States federal government paid a salary to a cat. The amount is specified. The purpose is stated. There are signatures. There are seals. A complete bureaucratic document exists — fully valid under the laws of the United States — proving that the federal government hired a cat as an official employee and compensated that employee through the standard payroll process. It started with a library. Not an ordinary one. The largest book collection in the world.

How the Library of Congress Came to Have a Rat Problem

The Library of Congress did not have an easy beginning. In 1800, when Congress relocated to Washington D.C., a small reference library was established to support the work of its members. It occupied a modest space inside the Capitol building and held a modest collection. Then in 1814, British forces invaded Washington and burned the Capitol to the ground. The library burned with it. Approximately 3,000 volumes — everything the library had accumulated — were destroyed in a single night. What saved the institution was Thomas Jefferson. The former president offered to sell his personal library of 6,487 volumes to Congress. Jefferson's collection was not a law library. It was the library of a man who believed, deeply and without reservation, that knowledge had no legitimate boundaries — philosophy, science, literature, geography, architecture, natural history. Congress accepted. The collection became the foundation on which everything else was built, and Jefferson's guiding principle became the library's permanent philosophy. The growth that followed was rapid. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the collection had swelled to hundreds of thousands of volumes. In 1897, the library moved into its own dedicated building — the Thomas Jefferson Building, an Italian Renaissance structure that was, at the time of its completion, among the largest and most magnificent library buildings anywhere in the world. It remains one of the most beautiful buildings in Washington D.C. And this magnificent building had a serious problem. Rats. Hundreds of thousands of books. Maps. Manuscripts. Documents. All of it made from paper and leather and cloth — precisely the materials rats find most appealing. The larger the building, the more rats it attracted, and nineteenth-century construction offered no reliable way to keep them out. Poison was dangerous to the books and to the people who worked among them. Traps could only do so much. The solution was the one humanity had been reaching for across thousands of years of civilization.

The First Official Record — A Pay Stub from 1898

The earliest well-documented evidence of the Library of Congress formally employing cats dates to 1898, during the tenure of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, one of the most consequential librarians in American history. In the library's operating budget from this period, an unusual line item appears. Feed and maintenance costs for cats. And more directly — cat salary. The exact figures vary slightly depending on which records you consult. The most frequently cited amount falls between $25 and $40 per year. Converted to present-day value, that works out to roughly $800 to $1,200 annually. It might sound modest, but in an era when an unskilled laborer earned approximately one dollar per day, it was a figure that carried real weight. The salary was not, of course, handed to the cat. A staff member received the funds and used them to cover food, veterinary care, and general maintenance. But the critical detail is how the budget line was labeled. This was not recorded as "animal maintenance costs" or "pest control expenditure." The official document classified it in language that treated the cat as a recipient of compensation — as an employee, not equipment. The precision of American federal accounting is what makes this story so remarkable. Every dollar spent by the federal government required a stated purpose and a stated beneficiary. Inside that system, a cat was entered as a beneficiary. This was not a joke. It was a straightforward administrative decision, handled with the same seriousness as any other line item in the budget.

The Man Who Hired Them — A Portrait of Spofford

Ainsworth Rand Spofford served as Librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897, a tenure of thirty-three years that transformed the institution beyond recognition. When he arrived, the library held approximately 82,000 volumes. When he left, it held nearly one million. The mechanism behind this extraordinary expansion was a single legislative masterstroke: in 1870, Spofford engineered an amendment to the copyright law requiring that two copies of every work registered for copyright in the United States be deposited with the Library of Congress. The elegance of this was absolute. Every book published in America flowed automatically into the library's collection, at no acquisition cost whatsoever. Spofford had found a way to make the entire American publishing industry work as an involuntary donor program. The library grew without spending a dollar on it. More books meant more rats. Spofford was a pragmatist. He identified the most effective solution to the problem and implemented it without ceremony. He hired cats. Whether Spofford thought of the cats as tools or as something closer to colleagues, the records don't say. But the fact that their compensation appeared as a formal line item in the official budget suggests he understood them as genuine participants in the library's operation — not consumables, but contributors.

It Was Never Just the Library — The Wider World of Federal Cats

The Library of Congress story is actually one chapter in a considerably larger history. Across the nineteenth century, multiple branches of the United States federal government were formally employing cats, and the practice at the library was not its origin but rather its continuation of an established pattern. The State Department had been including cat-related costs in its official budget since the 1860s. The reasoning was straightforward and serious: the department was responsible for safeguarding original treaties and critical diplomatic documents. A rat destroying a treaty original was not merely a records management problem. It was a potential diplomatic incident with a foreign nation. The Treasury Department faced an even more concrete form of the same threat. Printed currency and financial records were stored there. Rats had actually gotten into printed banknotes — this was documented, not hypothetical — and the resulting losses were quantifiable. The case for cats was easy to make on purely financial grounds. In 1907, the federal government formalized what had been operating as informal practice by issuing official guidance recognizing the "government cat" program. Individual agencies were authorized to employ cats as needed and to fund that employment through standard operating budgets. For the first and presumably only time in American history, cats were formally incorporated into the federal civil service structure. The program operated officially until 1952, when Congress removed it from the approved budget categories — citing advances in modern pest control technology, including more effective rodenticides and professional extermination services. The cats, however, did not entirely disappear. They continued in various agencies through informal arrangements: staff members quietly bringing food from home, small allocations buried in general operating expenses. The tradition outlasted its official recognition.

The Famous Ones — Cats Who Left Their Mark

Among the many cats who served in federal buildings over the decades, a handful left enough of an impression to be remembered by name. Tom is the most frequently cited of the Library of Congress cats, recorded as having served for at least a decade in the late nineteenth century. Staff accounts from the period describe him as exceptionally effective at his primary job, and also — this detail appears in multiple recollections — genuinely popular with visitors, particularly children who came to the library and discovered that its most approachable resident was a cat rather than a librarian. Speaking of Tom — you might wonder whether this particular Tom had any connection to a certain famous animated cat. He did not. The cat and mouse characters created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for MGM were originally named Jasper and Jinx when their first short, Puss Gets the Boot, was released in 1940. When the film became a hit and the studio decided to continue the series, MGM held an internal competition to rename the characters, offering a $50 prize. An animator named John Carr won with the suggestion of Tom and Jerry — drawing on a nineteenth-century British slang term for rowdy young men popularized by Pierce Egan's 1821 novel Life in London, and on a warm winter cocktail of the same name that had been popular in America for decades. The name also benefited from the fact that male cats were commonly called tomcats in everyday English. The Library of Congress employee and the cartoon character share a name and nothing else. The State Department cats generated some of the most detailed surviving records. Ledger entries from the 1880s and 1890s, currently held at the National Archives, document not just food costs but veterinary expenses — including treatment costs for cats that fell ill. Tucked among the documents of American diplomatic history, there are medical receipts for cats. This seems like it should be surprising. Somehow it isn't. The Treasury Department cats produced the most dramatic moment in federal cat history. Sometime in the 1920s, during a period of congressional debate over budget reductions, a member of Congress challenged the cat-related line items as unnecessary expenditure. A Treasury official responded that the costs avoided by employing cats — measured in prevented losses to currency, bonds, and financial records — exceeded the cost of employing them by a factor of many times over. The cats were defended before Congress. The cats won.

What the Bureaucracy Reveals

The most interesting thing about this story might not be the cats themselves. It might be what the paperwork reveals about the humans who processed it. The American federal accounting system demands that every expenditure be assigned a purpose and a recipient. When that system encountered a cat, it did not create a special exception. It did not establish a separate category for non-human employees. It applied its standard logic and arrived at its standard conclusion: this entity performs a service; this entity requires resources to continue performing that service; those resources must be allocated through the budget; the budget requires a line item; the line item requires a name. The result was "cat salary" in an official government document. Not as a joke. As an administrative record. It is worth placing this alongside what we have seen in other countries and other institutions. Britain gave its Downing Street cat an official job title. Russia recognized its Hermitage cats as cultural heritage guardians. America put its library cats on the payroll. The forms are different. The underlying acknowledgment is the same: this animal is doing something real here, and that reality deserves recognition in whatever language the institution uses to record what is real.

After 1952 — From Official to Unofficial

When Congress removed the cat program from the approved budget in 1952, the stated rationale was the availability of superior modern alternatives. Professional extermination services. Improved rodenticides. Ultrasonic deterrents. Technology had, at least in theory, made the cat's traditional function redundant. The cats disagreed, in the sense that they continued to appear in federal buildings regardless of their official status. Staff members at the Library of Congress have described cats being present in the building through the latter half of the twentieth century — some accounts extend into the 1990s. These were not authorized employees. They were sustained by the voluntary contributions of the people who worked among the books, who understood from daily experience what the budget documents of the 1920s had formally established: that the cats were earning their keep.

The Jefferson Building at Night

The Thomas Jefferson Building. The Library of Congress's main home. Its Great Hall is one of the most extraordinary interior spaces in the United States — mosaic tiles of extraordinary intricacy, marble columns, a gilded ceiling that rises to a height that makes the people below it feel appropriately small in the face of accumulated human knowledge. Imagine that hall late in the nineteenth century. The last staff member has left for the evening. The gas lamps have been turned down. Darkness has settled into the space between the columns and among the shelves. And somewhere in that darkness, a cat appears. It moves through the stacks where copies of the Constitution are kept, past the shelves where explorers' journals and presidents' speeches and poets' first drafts are stored, through rooms that hold everything the United States has ever thought important enough to write down. It is not admiring any of this. It is following a scent trail along the baseboard. It is doing its job. The job it was hired to do, at a salary of somewhere between twenty-five and forty dollars a year, by the largest library in the world, operating under the full administrative authority of the United States federal government. That is what cats have always done. In every civilization that ever built something worth protecting, in every institution that ever assembled something worth preserving — the cat was there, moving through the dark, keeping watch over what the humans cared most about. With or without the paperwork. The paperwork just makes it official.

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Catarot 고양이의 지혜로 당신의 길을 밝히다

신비로운 고양이의 직관과 타로의 지혜가 만나 당신의 미래를 안내합니다.
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사이트 소개

Catarot의 탄생 이야기와
우리의 목표

타로 이야기

타로와 관련된
흥미로운 이야기들을 만나보세요

고양이와 마법

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아르카나의 기억

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나의 마음

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현재 상황

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해결책

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타로의 역사와 유래

타로 카드의 정확한 기원에 대해서는 여전히 학자들 사이에서 다양한 이론이 존재하지만, 일반적으로 15세기 초 이탈리아 르네상스 시대에 처음 등장한 것으로 알려져 있습니다.

타로 카드 초보자 가이드

기초 마음가짐부터 실전 플레이까지, 고양이와 함께 타로의 세계로 떠나보세요 🐾

리딩 전 필수 마음가짐

타로 카드는 미래를 맹목적으로 예측하는 것이 아니라, 스스로를 탐색하고 성장을 돕는 안내자입니다. 리딩을 시작하기 전 아래의 4가지 마음가짐을 기억해 주세요.

개방적인 태도

정해진 답이나 특정 결과만 기대하지 말고, 예상치 못한 통찰과 도전적인 메시지에도 열린 마음을 가지세요.

직관 존중

처음 카드를 볼 때 떠오르는 느낌, 생각, 이미지를 믿으세요. 모호하더라도 내면의 소리를 듣는 것이 중요합니다.

책임감 있는 자세

카드는 통찰을 줄 뿐, 최종 선택과 그에 따른 책임은 온전히 당신의 몫입니다. 타로를 자유 의지를 강화하는 도구로 활용하세요.

객관적인 거리 유지

본인이나 아주 가까운 사람을 리딩할 때는 감정이 개입되기 쉽습니다. 감정이 격해진다면 잠시 쉬거나 타인의 도움을 요청하세요.

타로 카드 실전 플레이 방법

1단계

카드 섞기 (셔플)

질문자의 에너지를 담고 무작위성을 통해 잠재의식을 드러내는 과정입니다.

①

집중 명확하고 구체적인 질문에 마음을 집중합니다.

②

셔플 편안한 방식으로 카드가 골고루 섞이도록 충분히 섞어줍니다.

③

컷팅 다 섞인 카드를 2~3등분으로 나눈 뒤 다시 하나로 합쳐 에너지를 정돈합니다.

2단계

스프레드 (카드 배열)

질문에 맞게 카드를 특정 위치에 배열하여 의미를 해석합니다.

배열 방식	주요 용도	상세 설명 및 적용
1장 뽑기	하루 운세, 예/아니오, 간단한 조언	한 장을 뽑아 핵심 메시지 추출 (오늘의 캐타로, 예/아니오 캐타로)
3장 스프레드	문제의 흐름 파악, 심층적인 조언	왼쪽부터 3장을 배열해 인과관계나 시간 흐름 파악 (사랑 & 관계, 고민 해결 캐타로)

3장 스프레드 위치별 의미 예시

1st

나의 마음 · 현재 심리 상태 · 현 상황

→

2nd

상대방의 마음 · 타인의 관점 · 문제 해결의 장애물

→

3rd

관계의 발전 방향 · 구체적인 해결책 · 미래의 흐름

참고: 5장 스프레드와 같은 복잡한 리딩은 현재 지원하지 않습니다. 5장 리딩이 필요하시다면 아르카나의 기억을 방문해 주세요.

3단계

카드 해석 원칙

카드의 상징과 개인의 직관을 연결하여 종합적으로 이해하는 과정입니다.

직관적 연결

그림을 보고 가장 먼저 드는 직관적 느낌과 연상을 포착하세요.

키워드 적용

카드의 핵심 키워드와 카드가 놓인 자리의 의미를 연결해서 해석하세요.

방향 고려

정방향은 에너지의 긍정적 발현을, 역방향은 지연, 과도함, 왜곡, 내면화 등을 의미할 수 있습니다.

총체적 이해

카드 한 장에만 집중하기보다 전체 카드가 만들어내는 하나의 큰 이야기를 읽어내세요.

사이트 소개

Catarot의 탄생 이야기와 우리의 목표

우리는 복잡한 세상 속에서 길을 잃거나, 중요한 결정 앞에서 망설이는 이들에게 따뜻한 안내자가 되고자 합니다.

우리의 시작: 왜 고양이인가?

고양이는 예로부터 신비롭고 독립적인 존재로 여겨져 왔습니다. 그들은 뛰어난 직관력을 가지고 있으며, 조용히 세상을 관찰하며 자신만의 지혜를 쌓아갑니다. Catarot은 이러한 고양이의 특성을 타로의 신비와 결합하여, 인간의 감정과 이성만으로는 파악하기 어려운 문제들에 대한 새로운 시각을 제시합니다. 고양이의 지혜는 때로는 직접적이고, 때로는 은유적이지만, 항상 당신의 본질적인 질문에 답하고 당신을 올바른 길로 이끌 것입니다.

우리의 목표: 통찰과 위로를 통한 성장

Catarot은 다음과 같은 가치를 실현하고자 합니다:

직관적인 통찰

고양이의 직관처럼, 빠르고 명확한 타로 리딩을 통해 당신의 현재 상황과 미래의 가능성을 밝힙니다.

따뜻한 위로

때로는 냉철한 현실을 마주해야 할 때도 있지만, Catarot은 고양이의 부드러움처럼 당신의 마음을 보듬고 지지합니다.

자기 성장의 동반자

우리는 단순히 답을 제시하는 것을 넘어, 타로 카드를 통해 스스로의 내면을 탐색하고 성장할 수 있도록 돕는 동반자가 되고자 합니다.

살아있는 타로 경험

타로의 세계를 단순히 아는 것을 넘어, 카드와 이야기, 고양이의 상징을 직접 느끼고 경험할 수 있는 콘텐츠를 만날 수 있습니다.

Catarot은 매일의 작은 선택부터 삶의 큰 전환점까지, 당신의 모든 여정에 함께하며 고양이의 지혜로운 눈으로 당신의 길을 밝혀줄 것입니다. 당신의 질문이 무엇이든, 고양이의 신비로운 안내를 통해 해답을 찾고 더욱 풍요로운 삶을 만들어가세요.