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O bservers of Indiana culture have long remarked on its social and political contradictions. From 1890 to 1920, the state experienced a literary renaissance in which every Hoosier was a potential author. Some of America’s most popular and celebrated writers of the early twentieth century, including Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, and Gene StrattonPorter , hailed from Indiana.1 Yet Indiana lagged behind other northern states in literacy and high school graduation rates.2 Located at the crossroads of America, Indiana wrestled with the conflicting traditions of Yankee and Appalachian settlers. Having sided with the North during the Civil War and sheltered runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, in the 1920s Indiana had the largest state membership in the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Known for its political conservatism and insularity, Indiana was home to socialist Eugene V. Debs and Republican and One World proponent Wendell Wilkie, unsuccessful presidential candidates whose philosophies and global visions extended far beyond the banks of the Wabash. And despite its staunchly anticommunist stand during the Cold War, Indiana had been home to Robert Owen’s early-nineteenth-century utopian experiment that briefly flourished in New Harmony. An embodiment of this cultural contradiction, Kurt Vonnegut, a more recently celebrated Hoosier author, lauded his Indiana roots while he skewered midwestern society. Proud member of a prominent Indianapolis family of German immigrants, Vonnegut praised his splendid high school and its demanding teachers, the city’s wonderful symphony orchestra, and the beautiful buildings designed by his father and grandfather, both architects. In his fiction , however, Vonnegut portrayed heartland cities as intellectual wastelands with boring residents leading dreary lives. In Breakfast of Champions, he wrote: 129 Counter Culture  The World as Viewed from Inside the Indianapolis Public Library, 1944–1956 jean preer Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.3 Midland City, Ohio, was said to be modeled on Indianapolis. Speaking in Indianapolis in 1986, Vonnegut expressed disappointment that his hometown had failed to become the progressive and enlightened city it had promised to be at the close of World War II. Recalling an earlier visit, he said, “I would have felt more triumphant, I would have been happier, if this city had become what I thought it might become after the second World War. I thought this might become a marvelously liberal city because the potential was here.”4 Vonnegut’s wartime experience as a prisoner of the Germans during the firebombing of Dresden, a horror recounted in Slaughterhouse-Five, transformed his world view and shaped much of his fiction.5 He seems to have accepted the notion of his fellow midwesterners as poorly educated, provincial, and narrow-minded, although he, for one, was none of these. But during the last years of the war and into the early Cold War, the Indianapolis Public Library embraced ideas and sponsored programs that seem at odds with prominent aspects of Hoosier culture. In writings and interviews, Vonnegut scarcely mentioned the library, but had he viewed the world from inside the Indianapolis Public Library, he might have thought he had entered a parallel universe or landed on a different planet. In a culture that was said to disdain education and promote conformity and that regularly elected conservative if not stridently anticommunist politicians, Vonnegut might have been surprised at the library’s promotion of critical thought and its expansive definition of Americanism .6 Might the public library have been part of the city’s promised postwar enlightenment? Highly regarded among urban public libraries, the Indianapolis Public Library had developed under a succession of strong directors. Already a leader in adult education, the library in the late 1940s faced the challenges of a political and racial environment charged by anticommunist pressures and continuing racial segregation. Marian McFadden, director of the library from 1944 to 1956, established the library as a place where ideas counter to Hoosier culture 130 jean preer [18.188.252.23] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23:07...

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