Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand

Abstract

Reviewed by: Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand Dawson Barrett PART OF OUR LIVES: A People's History of the American Public Library. By Wayne A. Wiegand. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. In the spirit of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Wayne A. Wiegand draws on library records, newspaper accounts, and the professional journals of librarians to present the public library as a contested space across lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, and age. Wiegand begins with Benjamin Franklin's establishment of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1732, which Franklin hoped would inform and empower a community of "self-made" colonial men (and which ultimately offered its assistance to the writers of the U.S. Constitution). In what became a recurring theme among [End Page 126] subsequent librarians, Franklin rejected fiction, instead preferring to collect books that offered so-called "useful knowledge." This judgment, on both books and their readers, proved elitist and sexist, and it was overruled, again and again, by popular demand. After all, as Wiegand notes, novels were empowering companions for different subsets of library users, including women, people of color, youth, and the working classes. As a study of libraries (and librarians, as their gatekeepers), Part of Our Lives is largely a history of clashes over censorship and First Amendment rights—and over the uses of community spaces more broadly. American libraries have provided public platforms for the Humane Society, Amnesty International, and the National Organization for Women, as well as for neo-Nazis (and groups protesting against them). At various points in U.S. history, librarians have banned Mark Twain, Harry Potter, and suspected communist sympathizers—and proudly defended the availability of Mein Kampf. In more recent decades, libraries across the country have celebrated "Banned Books Week" to draw attention to censorship debates and their history—a history that Wiegand traces through a series of cultural, political, and technological changes. In Part of Our Lives, the central questions that frame the history of American public libraries ask which public(s) they should serve—and how. In the Jim Crow South, for example, libraries enforced racial segregation and promoted pro-Confederate historical narratives. Librarians who spoke out against segregation were fired or threatened, and anti-racist librarians struggled at various points even to identify and stock titles that featured people of color without negative racial stereotypes. Unquestionably, libraries, like many other public institutions, perpetuated white supremacy both directly and indirectly, but they also served as spaces of resistance to it. In addition to a powerful anecdote that Wiegand relays about the author Richard Wright, public libraries offered meeting spaces for civil rights organizations, were the targets of civil rights protest campaigns, and, today, serve as memorials to those struggles. Libraries have similarly reflected the country's relationship to poverty, including debates over whether or not to keep them open late enough to be accessible to workers, public disgust at libraries'openness to homeless populations, and attempts to open new branches and reach rural areas with bookmobiles. Library funding was a key component of both the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s, and cutting it has been a frequent topic of policy and discussion in the post-1960s period. Part of Our Lives is a love letter to U.S. libraries, warts and all, and a helpful study in both the hopeful promises and the ugly failures of the American democratic experiment. Appropriately, children and teenagers have been central to the missions of public libraries for the last century. Libraries, Wiegand argues, were, collectively, one of the arenas in which U.S. history was decided. The nation's investment (or lack thereof) in the next generation through libraries will make them equally important to its future. Dawson Barrett Del Mar College Copyright © 2018 Mid-America American Studies Association