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

Chapter 2: The Geography of Rural Reading

33 2 The Geography of Rural Reading E When, as often happens, my mental vision sweeps over all the country to see where the best work in some particular line is being done, the state most likely to loom up as leader is Wisconsin , to which we of New York always claim a kinship and think of it as a new New York a thousand miles nearer the sunset. Melvil Dewey, letter to Lutie Stearns, 1912 Jane Livingston, Director of the Sturgeon Bay Public Library, moved to Door County in 1945. Born in 1915 and raised on a farm in central Wisconsin, like many other young women of her day Livingston at first planned to become a teacher. This in itself was no easy proposition. During the Depression, “getting an education was a real achievement,” she later recalled. The state teachers college at Stevens Point was just twenty miles from her parents’ farm, and she traveled home every weekend, she said, for her mother to hand her the money that would see her through the next week, and “to stock up on food . . . There wasn’t any extra money.” After finishing her degree, instead of teaching school, she worked for a year in the children’s department of the Green Bay Public Library and then attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she obtained a qualification in library science . Librarianship was one of the few professions that encouraged women members, and the path by way of school teaching was not unusual. Librarians who had classroom teaching experience were likely to forge strong bonds with local schoolteachers, forming alliances that could have political as well as practical consequences. After graduation, Livingston worked for several years in a Michigan county library system. However, on a visit home, she found herself recruited for the directorship of the Sturgeon Bay Public Library, largely on the 34฀ The Geography of Rural Reading basis of her Michigan experience. Four years later, she became Director of the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library. Although WFLC officials congratulated themselves on having recruited an ideal area for its literacy experiment, in fact the Door Peninsula was less homogeneous than it may have appeared from far-off Madison. In the postwar period, tight ethnic enclaves still patterned the two counties, creating distinct communities that were clearly marked off from each other by “nationality” and even by language. Not only did the counties differ from each other, but within each county one area could diverge from the next. In this the region resembled much of the rest of Wisconsin, a state etched by the flows of immigration it experienced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ethnic communities held contrasting views about the importance of books and reading, a matter of concern to reformers, politicians, and officials anxious about the effect of immigration on the quality of democracy in America. In rural areas, it was hard for people to get their hands on books and newspapers even if they wanted to. Improved library services , officials hoped, would open up the distribution of reading materials and encourage reading as a ingrained habit of everyday life. Habitual readers, they felt, were better equipped to exercise the responsibilities of democracy than those with little regard for print. North and South Sturgeon Bay was—as it still is—the biggest community on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, marking the boundary between the north and the south. In the postwar period, the contiguous counties of Door and Kewaunee relied mostly on agriculture. Their total population was just over 38,000, two-thirds of whom lived in country areas, while most of the urban population lived in three cities: Sturgeon Bay (population 7,054), Algoma (3,384), and Kewaunee (2,583).1 The median annual income for the two counties was similar: $2,438 for families in Door County, $2,323 for families in Kewaunee County.2 Local industry 1 “Door-Kewaunee Regional Library,” promotional leaflet produced by the WFLC. Originally found in WHS Series 1111. 2 “Characteristics of the Population, Part 49: Wisconsin,” in Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2 The Geography of Rural Reading฀ 35 included shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay and Kewaunee (where World War II had brought boomtown conditions as shipyards expanded their industrial output), but much of the region was still heavily rural.3 The southern peninsula relied mainly on farming, and north of Sturgeon Bay extensive cherry orchards attracted Mexican families as...