International Harmony: Threat or Menace? U.S. Youth Services Librarians and Cold War Censorship, 1946-1955

The traditional stance of youth services librarians has been strong advocacy on behalf of children's books that promote intergroup cooperation and international understanding. With the onset of the McCarthy era, however, books with an intergroup and international focus became politically suspect, and librarians found themselves confronting both unspoken and overt "blacklists" of so-called subversive titles and authors. During the Cold War, librarians in the United States who served children and young adults were subject to demands from political pressure groups to remove or restrict books and other library materials viewed by those groups as pro-Communist propaganda. Many librarians succeeded in actively resisting these pressures. They did so, however, in ways that were largely invisible to their contemporaries outside the field. Thus far, their strategies of resistance have gone unnoticed by historians as well. ALA youth services leaders' rhetoric and strategies of resistance--quiet, positive, and active--effectively countered pressure groups' censorship efforts and, in doing so, maintained librarians' professional jurisdiction over the selection and evaluation of books for young readers.