HELPING YOUTH AT RISK: AN OVERVIEW OF REFORMIST MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES TO YOUTH

Abstract

One of the hallmarks of the American public library is its service to youth. In fulfilling this mandate, it has often been involved in social reform movements. This was true in the past and it continues today. From the late nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I, the American public library was very much involved in progressive social reform issues of those periods. In those times, librarians tended to define their social reformist role as that of improving culture, in raising standards of literacy, and in fostering the love of reading and good books. On a larger scale these movements, of which the American public library was a part, had both social and political motives in the perceived need to control and contain certain labour and social movements that were viewed as harmful to American social order. Much of the energy for these feared social dislocations was believed to come from the growing American working class in urban areas and its association with the rise of organised American labour and the arrival of European immigrants with non-American socialistic agendas. In concert with other social reform groups, the American public library directed much of its attention to improving the lot of the working-class poor youth (both native and foreign-born) by improving culture and literacy and in helping working-class youth become good Americans. Providing good literature and good books for working-class youth was a mainstay of the public library's reform activities. Understanding this to be a primary social responsibility, librarians easily condemned as harmful to youth certain types of literature and other forms of mass entertainment often enjoyed by both working-class and middle-class youth while at the same time supporting only literature judged by them to be of higher cultural value. Although this aspect of reform has been replaced by more enlightened understanding of the role of the librarian in society, modern-day librarians have much in common with their earlier counterparts as they still seek to improve the lives of at-risk youth. This paper highlights this commonality, and emphasises the role that community and new concepts of community development play in current-day American reform movements.