National Library Lovers Month is a call to action by all Americans who value freedom
Guest Column
My love affair with the public library began when I was a little girl barely able to read. As soon as school was out for summer, my mother would load us three children in the station wagon and take us to the health department for our summer shots. Across the street from the health department was the public library, and because my mother believed children needed to be still after inoculations, my brother and sister and I would load up all the books we could carry and spend the rest of that day and the next and the next curled up in a chair close to an open window or stretched in a webbed lawn chair in the front yard, reading.
These days, I take the library for granted. It’s always there, its doors open. Librarians are wizards, always find what I need, whether it’s a book from our local branch or digital sources from California. The library is a community space, it’s a resource for whatever information you might want, and everybody—every single person—is welcome to cross through the turnstile and enter.
But history tells me it hasn’t always been this way. And current events warn me it might drastically change. The first tax-supported public library was built in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833. In the late 1880s, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was born into poverty and taught himself to read by borrowing books from a friend, put money where his heart was. Over several decades, he gave over 60 million dollars—a fortune at the turn of the 20th century—to build 2,509 public libraries, both here and throughout the world, he said, to “bring books and information to all people.”
His libraries housed not just books and magazines but classrooms, Red Cross centers, public meeting spaces, and more. They were community centers and gathering places. Occasionally, his money was rejected—in Richmond, Virginia, for one—in fear that this new “library” might encourage people of color to use it. Yes, that too was Carnegie’s plan. When he said “all people,” he meant “all people.”
After the stock market crash in 1929, defunding the library became one way the government tried to recover the economy. What happened just over ten years later proved to the nation that it had made a big mistake.
Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, American involvement in the war began to look inevitable. Government agencies went to work, starting in the public library, where experts would comb through novels, newspapers, journals, and more to build intelligence on other countries. But what they found were serious deficits in our libraries.
Only two maps of Japan, for instance, were available in the entire country, and both were outdated. Documents were scarce, and even literature was not widespread.
To compensate for the library’s deficits, a new brand of “spies,” librarians and professors, were sent into enemy countries where they dug through novels, scholarly books, reference books, industry directories, postcards, travel guides, and more, all while dodging Gestapo and local police. Two library heroes were Adele Kibre, an archivist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, who, while based in Stockholm, sent home 20,000 documents a week. Joseph Curtiss, a mild-mannered Yale professor working in Istanbul, collected more than 4,000 pounds of documents, maps, and other texts during his three months there.
After the war, politicians resolved to “never again let our libraries be so dramatically deficient,” writes Elyse Graham in a New York Times article titled, “We Underfunded Our Libraries Once. It Almost Lost Us World War II.” They realized investment in libraries was “an act of American patriotism and a vision for American national security.”
We’ve forgotten. Once again, we as a society and a democracy are questioning the value of our libraries and the vital importance of available information. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent federal agency that is a primary funder for 123,000 public libraries and 35,000 museums in all 50 states and U.S.territories, has been called “unessential” by our current administration, and is threatened with elimination or with far-reaching cuts to staff, services, and funding sources.
Without funding from IMLS and other sources, public libraries are in danger of losing literacy programs, educational workshops, computer and internet upgrades and services, workforce development programs. These cuts would severely impact libraries in rural and underserved areas—those locations that need them the most—and disproportionately affect low-income and marginalized populations. Access to information and opportunities for lifelong learning are vital to an educated and informed America.
Libraries are also under threat by organizations, such as Moms for Liberty (M4L), a well- funded organization bent on removing books and materials they consider unacceptable (particularly related to LBGTQ and transgender issues) from libraries and schools, threatening intellectual freedom and inclusiveness. Remember Andrew Carnegie’s pledge: the library is for ALL people.
We have forgotten the vital lesson learned by our leaders in 1941: investment—both financial and personal—in libraries is “an act of American patriotism and a vision for American national security.”
I love the library, one of our greatest American freedoms, open to all, accessible by all, our national intellect and community vitality.
I still love my books. But these days, loving the library means speaking out, making certain our leaders understand that the heartbeat of our American freedoms is our ability to learn, to know, to explore. And making certain our children inherit from us not just a love of reading but an appreciation for real knowledge that is still available—for free--in every small town and big city in every state in America.
