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

Chapter 1: Literacy Debates and Dangers

  Literacy: Debates and Dangers E It seems to me that education (including librarianship) must either take a vital part in everyday life, or be dropped overboard by life as it progresses. John Chancellor, “Education for Democracy” The basis of Communism and socialistic influence is education of the people. Congressman Harold Velde (R., Illinois, 950) One evening in early November 1952, Jane Livingston, director of the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library, and assistant Andy Kroeger drove the county bookmobile south from Sturgeon Bay to a meeting at a tavern with some furious inhabitants of the township of Montpelier in Wisconsin’s Kewaunee County. “There were people down there having a royal fit,” Livingston later recalled in an interview, “because a library book had some pretty frank language—an adult book.”1 In Montpelier, anxieties about reading “bad books” was a symptom of a more general community opposition to an experiment in providing public library services in rural Door and Kewaunee Counties. The two library staff members realized that they were about to encounter some tough questioning. They little knew, however, that some people in Montpelier were planning to confront them in more a direct and unambiguous manner. In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, complaints about the subversive or immoral nature of some library books were not unusual, but 1 Interview with Jane Livingston, 23 October 2000. Interviews with former librarians, teachers , school students, and other past and present members of the Door and Kewaunee County communities took place between 2000 and 2002. To protect interviewees’ privacy, most are referred to only by first name.  Literacy: Debates and Dangers these Montpelier residents were opposed not only to the specific book in question. They also wanted to register their displeasure with the library’s very existence. Livingston and Kroeger had convened the town meeting in the hope of carrying out a discussion about the challenged book, but when they arrived, they found the Montpelier residents already primed with other kinds of ammunition. “They tried nailing me to the wall with complaints and criticisms and everything else,” Livingston later remembered. Help came from an unexpected quarter. “The Lutheran pastor was there, and he stood up for me,” she recalled, still astonished in retrospect, since some local clergy had spoken out against the library project. But even he failed to persuade the crowd, and when the library staff members finally came to leave, they discovered a new problem: the bookmobile failed to start. “It was a matter of spark plugs or something, not permanent damage,” Livingston said. “Well, I have not had very kindly feelings about the township of Montpelier.” Fortunately, Kroeger’s mechanical skill saved the day, and they reached home safely that night. “Andy, dear Andy, figured out just what might have happened to the bookmobile.” Why was the Regional Library such a contentious issue, and what led this group of citizens to express such anger against it that some were prepared to sabotage the bookmobile? Reading Places tells the story of this mid-twentieth century experiment that policy-makers around the country carefully watched. Understanding the region’s responses, which included both eager support and fierce opposition, involves investigating the contemporary print culture of the area and its history as well as the history of the experiment itself. In part, opposition to the library rested on long-standing antagonisms arising from class, gender, and ethnic differences that contributed to a suspicion of official projects to expand education. Such differences had their roots in a history of tension between different groups of nineteenth-century migrants who created Wisconsin as a site of cultural contest. On the one hand were Yankees (white Americans born in the states of New England and the MidAtlantic ), who brought with them beliefs about civilization that underpinned efforts at social and educational reform. On the other hand were more recent European immigrants, at least some of whom resented paying taxes for such initiatives as public schools and libraries since they felt that they derived little benefit from them. Descendants of these migrants had inherited these various beliefs, and now reproduced them in the midtwentieth century context of the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library. Library opponents also drew inspiration from contemporary Cold War rhetoric that rejected such social programs as at best ineffective against the threat of Communism and at worst helping to bolster it. Support, on the other hand, rested on a vision of print and reading...