A Review of Main Street Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand

A few years ago I ran across an article in the March 2002 issue of American Libraries magazine by library historian Wayne A. Wiegand. In the article Wiegand encouraged readers to celebrate Women's History Month by remembering early female librarians. As an example, he included an excerpt from a contemporary account of Martha Chaddock, Dubuque Young Men’s Library Association Librarian from 1866 until her retirement in 1876. According to the account, if Martha Chaddock told a young library patron, "You have read fiction enough for the present, John; here is a book about birds that will interest you," the boy would "devour the birds, feathers and all." No one entered Chaddock's library "without having a great thought driven like a golden nail into his mind." A repint of the description of Martha Chaddock appears under "A MODEL LIBRARIAN" in the November 1870 issue of Association Monthly in Google Books.

Although Wiegand barely mentions Dubuque in his new book, Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956, it is full of Martha Chaddock’s domineering spirit. Main Street Public Library examines the early history of four small-town libraries in the Midwest: Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Osage, Iowa; Rhinelander, Wisconsin; and Lexington, Michigan. Wiegand uses an impressive range of sources to reconstruct the history of these libraries, like board minutes, circulation statistics, librarians' correspondence, library association publications, newspaper articles and editorials, and so on. Wiegand even compiled a working database of titles owned by the each of the libraries from 1890 to 1970.

These sources reveal that the daily routine in a small Carnegie library one hundred years ago was not much different than today:

In 1918 Rhinelander was one of 211 Wisconsin public libraries, 89 of which occupied their own building; Carnegie had funded 63. Daily, [Jessie W.] Bingham and her staff changed date stamps, arranged book cards, entered circulation statistics, and shelved books. Periodically they read the shelves, often pulling worn books to be mended or unused books to be weeded. For acquisitions Bingham checked the pages of Booklist and other collection guides that the WFLC [Wisconsin Free Library Commission] provided, and upon purchasing new books ordered Library of Congress catalog cards. She also responded to any letters, regulated the schedule for the assembly room (including citizenship classes held every Friday night), attended to small bills and petty cash, and ordered necessary supplies, all of which she dutifully reported to her board (page 113).

But while the daily routines seem familiar, Wiegand’s bottom up, "library-in-the-life-of-the-user" approach shows that these libraries did not uphold what we think of today as basic tenets of librarianship. The libraries did not "keep their local citizens informed so that political democracy could function," nor did they "function as important information institutions to address local economic problems." And instead of promoting intellectual freedom, early librarians routinely excluded materials from their collections in attempt to "mold and police morality."

Some Wisconsin librarians, in my favorite example, removed comic sections from Sunday newspapers because "laughter they evoked disturbed the dignity of the library." And like today's entertainment DVDs, popular fiction was especially suspect:

In June 1921, the Bulletin of the Iowa Library Commission castigated "some libraries" for "making the mistake of advertising their new fiction" in local newspapers. "The desire to attract people to the library is legitimate," the author argued, "but to attempt to do so with new fiction as bait is like tempting a sick person to eat food which will make him sicker and also increase the percentage of sickness in the town." In the issue following, another author explained why the ALA [American Library Association] did not endorse serial fiction for boys and girls. "The fact that, after he had mastered the first book" of the series "he can sail through several volumes without mental effort, is exactly what makes the reading of series delightful to the child, and here is the greatest danger, for the child slips easily into the rut of easy reading." As a result, the author concluded, "librarians have adopted the general rule that any series that runs to more than four volumes is unsafe" (page 150).

Despite efforts to save patrons from the "rut of easy reading," much of what actually ends up in library collections, then and now, is driven by local demand more so than professional rhetoric. According to Wiegand, public libraries are "agents of social harmony," or places where community members meet to negotiate shared cultural values. And when they do, most people seem agree that their libraries should focus on making popular fiction available in various formats. When librarians discount this, Wiegand suggests, "we fail to account for the power of fiction to inform, foster ideas, construct community, develop a sense of discovery, inspire, and offer encouragement."

~Michael May, Adult Services

Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 by Wayne A. Wiegand was published in October 2011 by University of Iowa Press.

This review was based on the digital galley obtained from University of Iowa Press through NetGalley.com.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Several weeks ago I turned off the air conditioner and opened all of the windows in hopes that a nighttime breeze would keep my house cool. Muggy heat rolled in instead, and I wasn't comfortable in bed, so I went out to the living room to lie on the couch. After tossing and turning for a few minutes, I got up and checked the bookshelves for something to read. I chose my wife Maggie's twenty-year-old paperback copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

Maggie's kept this dog-eared, yellowing copy of Slaughterhouse-Five since high school, longer than she's known me. I hadn't read the book before, but I remembered hearing about it when Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007. At that time I had been reading the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish university professor at Dresden, and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is a novel about the Allied firebombing of Dresden where Vonnegut had been a prisoner of war.

Knowing that the bombings killed an estimated 25,000 civilians, I was moved when I first heard about the passage in Slaughterhouse-Five where Kurt Vonnegut imagines the American planes flying backwards, sucking up their loads of unexploded bombs, returning to their bases in England, the airmen shipping back home to States, turning back into high school kids, becoming children again, and eventually turning into infants.

Maggie's paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five has 215 pages, and I read most of it on the couch that muggy night. Vonnegut is wry and irreverent. Protagonist Billy Pilgrim time travels back and forth between experiences, from when he was a prisoner of war at Dresden, to becoming an optometrist after the war, and then being abducted by aliens and put on display in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore (Slaughterhouse-Five was recently selected 19th of the Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books by NPR).

At one point, Billy overhears literary critics discussing "whether the novel was dead or not":

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically." Another one said, "To teach wives of junior executives what to buy next and how to act in a French restaurant."

I loved this because I'd been trying to write a review Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, and in that novel the main character loses one of her shoes under her table at a French restaurant and later vomits her asparagus and champagne into a nearby alley. So the function of this new novel Rules of Civility must be to show us how not to act in a French restaurant?

Just a few days after I read Slaughterhouse-Five, and while I was still feeling pretty smug about discovering this wonderful novel in my own living room, a school board in Missouri voted to remove it along with Sarah Ockler's Twenty Boy Summer from their high school library and curriculum after a resident complained that these two books "teach principles contrary to the Bible." The school board deemed the books to be "inappropriate for kids" rather than "good or bad." The superintendent explained, "We very clearly stayed out of discussion about moral issues." The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis responded by offering free copies of the Slaughterhouse-Five to the school’s students.

I searched for Slaughterhouse-Five in the Dubuque Community School District's online library catalog, and it looks like they have copies in print and audio CD. I hope Slaughterhouse-Five is taught in the high school curriculum, too, especially since my kids attend Dubuque schools. I enlisted in the Marine Corps through a delayed-entry program when I was still in high school, and the idea that it would have been inappropriate for me to read one of the most important American war novels at the same time as I signed my enlistment papers is disturbing.

Removing books from schools and libraries harms children more than it protects them; it teaches children that banning controversial material is better than trying to understand and discuss it. Where access to books and ideas enriches the lives of people of all ages, censorship diminishes and impoverishes us all.

Michael May, Adult Services

Too Many F-Words in The King's Speech?

The King's Speech is on DVD and Blu-ray at Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque, but this Best Picture of the Year is not without controversy (pronounced con-TRO-versy in Britain); its R rating "for some language" apparently puts it on par with Saw: The Final Chapter, which is rated R for "sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, and language."

The head of the Motion Picture Association of America's rating board, Joan Graves, explains it this way: "It's just a lot easier to quantify language than it is violence .... Our perception is that parents still feel the same way about bad language, especially in areas like the Midwest and the South, where they often have a problem with God, as in goddamnit. On the coasts, perhaps because they have more urban centers, they’re more concerned with violence."

Earlier this month, in what's been called a "marketing ploy" to "lure in younger moviegoers," a re-edited PG-13 version of The King's Speech with "less obscenity" replaced the R-rated version in 1,007 movie theaters. In Great Britain, where the story takes place, the uncut version is recommended for ages 12 and up.

Carnegie-Stout Public Library's uncut copies of The King's Speech on DVD and Blu-ray are rated R.

~Mike, Adult Services