Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America (review)

Christine Pawley, a historian of print culture, provides a detailed account of the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library Demonstration project in Door and Kewaunee Counties, Wisconsin, from 1950 to 1952. This project was designed to bring books to rural residents—specifically residents of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula—in part as an effort to enhance participation in democratic processes. As such, the work is an important contribution to our understanding of how libraries sought to enhance access to reading materials in rural areas; she also provides a valuable analysis of who benefited from this outreach effort. Pawley puts this program in the contexts of the history of literacy, education (particularly rural education), and libraries, as well as the histories of various ethnic groups in Wisconsin. She intended these oral histories to deepen our understanding of both the social and institutional contexts in which librarians and bookmobile users operated and to “uncover the meaning of reading on the Door Peninsula” (22).

The Regional Library was intended to be a pilot project for state-local partnerships to bring bookmobiles to rural counties in Wisconsin. Pawley skillfully places the project in the context of the Wisconsin Idea—the notion that the state should promote the well-being of its citizens by sharing the expertise developed at the state universities. Despite these good intentions, the Regional Library was not universally welcomed. Pawley’s thesis is that the resistance was a product of ethnic differences, fiscal conservatism, and concerns about the content of the books distributed by the bookmobile. For example, descendants of Germans, Scandinavians, Belgians, and immigrants from New England (among others) populated the area in the 1950s, and they were perceived as having different attitudes toward printed communication. Class differences, urban-rural conflict, and the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of the bookmobile were rural children are also convincingly argued to have been factors in the defeat of funding for the project. Despite the title, the connection to Cold War concerns does not predominate in her analysis, although it is certainly present. While she discusses concerns about book content and provides evidence about books that were considered “unfit for children” (123), the arguments presented against the Regional Library at the time of the local referendum appear to have been largely financial, or at least antitax. Granted, people who were concerned about the ideas in the books lent by the library would be less likely to see the library itself as a good investment.

In addition to an analysis of the political support for or opposition to the Regional Library, Pawley provides significant analysis of the meaning of books and reading in the lives of the people of the Door Peninsula in the 1950s. She places this analysis in various contexts, including those of women’s changing roles and rural education, and examines the cultural content and meaning of the books that were actually borrowed from the bookmobile.

While the story of the Regional Library occurs at the intersection of the histories of libraries, ethnic settlement patterns, education, literacy, and women’s roles, Pawley does not assume the reader has significant knowledge in these areas. She provides extensive contextual material. While this material is sometimes overly ambitious in its extent, it does provide a larger framework for those coming from other areas of study.

The most notable aspect of her methodology is her analysis of circulation records, which are a rare and much sought-after form of primary source material in the world of library history. Their historical value lies in enabling the researcher to look at the borrowing habits of individuals as opposed to the aggregate, library-level figures that are more widely available. While privacy concerns prevented the author from using these documents to identify potential interviewees, she was able to assess what books different types of borrowers read and to examine some individuals’ reading habits. She found that the bulk of the...