Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
Power and Libraries
by Chris Maisano
As a New Yorker without much in the way of wealth or access to the rarefied circles of the city's social and economic elite, it's hard not to be bitter these days. Reading the newspaper certainly doesn't help. On one page, you'll learn that the supposedly indispensable men and women of Wall Street are making money like it's 2006, as if the financial collapse and subsequent economic crisis never even happened. And on the next, you'll see that Mike Bloomberg, the multi-billionaire mayor who just bought his way into an unprecedented third term, wants to take a meat cleaver to the city's budget in the coming fiscal year.
Bloomberg has proposed nothing less than a doomsday budget that would dramatically cut spending on the public services that so many ordinary New Yorkers rely on. It calls for the closing of 20 fire companies, cuts to programs for the homeless and people living with H.I.V. and AIDS, and the elimination nurses from many public schools. And if state-level budget cuts are as deep as Governor David Paterson would like them to be, the results would be truly catastrophic. Senior centers, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters would be shuttered and thousands of city workers would be laid off, including scores of teachers and firefighters.
Of course, these cuts will not affect personally Bloomberg or New York's elite, who don't need soup kitchens, homeless shelters, or public schools. Nor will Bloomberg raise taxes on the rich to prevent the worst cuts, because he thinks that the city's upper crust are just so darn put-upon as it is, what with worrying about how to spend their year-end bonuses and all. To put things in perspective, it's worth noting that Bloomberg could pay for the city's projected $4.9 billion budget deficit himself and still have about $12.5 billion in personal wealth left over. That would still be more than Haiti's estimated 2009 Gross Domestic Product. This would almost be funny if it weren't so grotesque.
These budget proposals aren't just abstractions to me. I am a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), and if the governor and mayor have their way, I could lose my job. That's because in Bloomberg's budget, New York's public libraries and the millions of New Yorkers that use them would be among the biggest losers. It calls for the elimination of approximately 300 library jobs, and hours of service and materials budgets would likely be severely curtailed. Libraries in the city and around the country have seen a marked increase in the number of people using our services during the economic crisis. To cut libraries when they have become more important than ever is stupid and cruel, not just because I'd like to continue being able to feed and clothe myself, but because libraries are one of the few public places left where anyone can come for help and sanctuary, free of charge.
This all underscores the larger point: libraries are, and always have been, inherently political institutions that are shaped by the institutions in which they are embedded. They are not the sacred, autonomous spaces that are often conceived in the public imagination. They are as integrated into the political economy of capitalism as Goldman Sachs, except of course for the fact that librarians don't ever get asked to run the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve.
Last summer, Red Channels screened two 1956 films that highlight the political aspects of librarians and librarianship: Toute la mémoire du monde (All the Memory of the World), a short essay film by Alain Resnais on the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Storm Center, starring an aging but still glamorous Bette Davis playing a small-town librarian whose commitment to intellectual freedom makes her a victim of the Red Scare. While the focus of each film differs fairly dramatically, they both demonstrate how libraries are deeply political institutions that are influenced by the pressures, interests, and ideologies (sometimes benign, sometimes sinister) of the governments and publics that support them, a highly relevant concern for friends of the library in this time of austerity and budgetary uncertainty.
Before he made Toute la mémoire du monde, Resnais established himself as a filmmaker of note with Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), a short documentary masterpiece on the horror and brutality of the Holocaust. If the Holocaust represented the destruction of civilization, then France's national library stands as a monument to the lofty Enlightenment ideals of universal progress and reason. Resnais is clearly sympathetic to this vision in the film, but his depiction of the library's project implies a somewhat sinister side to it as well. We are reminded of the library's origins in the absolutist French monarchy, which used it to help maintain its control over information and legitimate its power and grandeur. Books and other materials are buried on shelves deep in the library's bowels or held in cages, seemingly never to be heard from again. As a sometimes portentous soundtrack plays, the camera pans across endless rows of bookshelves and readers at their study tables, evoking the rows of fetid latrines, cells, and gas chambers at the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek captured in Night and Fog. The library catalogs books while the concentration camp catalogs victims.
Taking these two films together, one may plausibly conclude that Resnais echoes the argument made by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the classic analysis of the dual nature of modernity: the impulses that make something as grand as Bibliothèque nationale de France possible can also be used in different political and cultural contexts to serve very destructive ends. It's a sobering reminder that the library is not a neutral, value-free environment independent of the world around us and that the values that animate it at its best must always be protected from the powerful and unscrupulous.
The powerful and unscrupulous certainly have their sights set on the library in Storm Center, the first Hollywood film to take on McCarthyism and censorship in the 1950s. Bette Davis plays Mrs. Hull, a widowed small-town librarian who seems to embody all of the best stereotypes of the profession. She knows everyone in town, serves as a mentor to the children, and is single-mindedly committed to adding a new children's wing to the old ivy-covered library building. It looks like the city council is set to approve the expansion, but with one condition—that Mrs. Hull remove from her collection a book called The Communist Dream, which generated a number of angry complaints from the public. She accepts the deal at first, but as her guilt mounts she defiantly places the book back in the collection. The city council, led by an ambitious young politician, exposes her membership in Communist front groups during the 1930s and threatens to fire her if she persists in her defiance. When she refuses to budge, she is fired and ostracized. Freddy, her prized pupil, finds out about all this, turns against his former mentor, becomes a juvenile delinquent, and finally winds up burning down the library. The town learns its lesson and rehires Mrs. Hull to build a new library from the ashes of the old.
Now, this is not the best film. It's melodramatic and formulaic, and much of the dialogue is pretty laughable. It does, however, highlight some important ongoing concerns. In her showdown with the city council, Mrs. Hull pithily defines a librarian as a peninsula surrounded on three sides by politicians, and that definition is still quite apt. Libraries continue to rely for funding on politicians that all too often have very different priorities in mind. In most cases, they adhere to a vision of government that privileges business interests over public and cultural interests. In these times of budget crisis brought on by the failure of neoliberal capitalism, our libraries face potentially devastating cuts that will severely undermine their mission and purpose. The political implications are clear: if librarians and friends of the library are to be effective defenders of their institutions and the profession, as citizens we should be forceful advocates for a politics that recognizes the need for a strong, generous public sector and an economy that places the public interest first.
I don't know about you, but I'd love to see a film starring a radical, militant librarian takes who takes on a billionaire mayor and saves the city from catastrophe. It would be even better if it were based on a true story.