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  • McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children's Librarian by Allison Hepler
  • Douglas C. Bennett
McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children's Librarian. By Allison Hepler. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2018. xiv + 193 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Hardcover $90; paper $39.99.

Between 1953 and 1960, a new librarian at Jeanes Memorial Library in Plymouth Meeting Pennsylvania doubled the library's circulation, increased the number of patrons, and tripled the programming offered to children. Serving the surrounding towns of Plymouth Meeting and Whitemarsh, the tiny library was owned by Plymouth Friends Meeting, the result of a bequest left to the Meeting by one of its members in 1933. It was governed by the Meeting's Library Committee.

During these same years, Mary Knowles, the librarian (significantly underpaid), was relentlessly attacked both from within and from beyond the Meeting because of allegations that she had been a Communist and was a threat to the security of the United States. She had been fired from her previous position at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1953. She was named by Herbert Philbrick, investigated by the FBI, forced to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and convicted on 52 counts of contempt of Congress for declining to answer questions in Congressional hearings before these charges were thrown out by a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling (Mary Knowles v. United States, 1960).

This story is recounted by Allison Hepler, a history professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, in McCarthyism in the Suburbs. (The working title was "The Communist Hussy Librarian.") The story is framed by Hepler as an heroic one, the stalwart librarian and the determined Library Committee standing up to an array of McCarthyite villains including the FBI, the House Unamerican Affairs Committee, the federal Department of Justice, vigilante local citizens and a local newspaper. Some others support the beleaguered librarian including surrounding Quaker Meetings and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Civil Liberties Committee. In the midst of the controversy, the Fund for the Republic, a creation of the Ford Foundation to promote "freedom of thought, inquiry and expression," surprised the library and the Meeting with a cash award of $5000. This provided needed material assistance but also added fuel to the conflict.

Hepler tells the story in part to make the case that it is worth giving more attention to how McCarthyism played out in local communities. [End Page 66] No doubt she is right in this; McCarthyism has largely been told as a drama on the national stage. She is also eager to show that women were more politically active in the 1950s than we have been led to think. Women do play the major roles on both sides of this local controversy but because we are dealing both with a library and with Quakers we should be cautious in inferring larger patterns.

More interesting to Friends is Hepler's account of how Plymouth Friends Meeting dealt with a search for unity in a situation where two opposed groups had dug themselves deeply into what each believed were principled positions. Long-inactive members of the Meeting began insisting they be heard, often without coming to Worship or to Business Meetings. At the end, one Friend (Bud Chapple) who stood by Mary Knowles said, "We cannot wait for the courage to do the thing that is right; but must do the thing that is right though scared. Courage will grow within us a little each time" (179).

Douglas C. Bennett
Earlham College
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