‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ Is Just the Beginning Libraries are the new culture-war battleground as woke politics invade some of America’s most enlightened and democratic institutions. By James Panero
In 2006 the American Library Association offered its members buttons emblazoned “radical militant librarian.” We should have taken the message at its word. The American library, once a haven of neutral calm, has become a battleground in the culture wars.
In 2018 the ALA dropped the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from its annual children’s literature award. The reason? The supposed culturally insensitive portrayals in her landmark “Little House on the Prairie” series. Three years later, the organization issued a “Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work.” It claimed that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality.”
The quiet, neutral library was out. Full-throated progressive politics were in. As Emily Drabinski, who was recently elected president of the ALA, said on her website: “So many of us find ourselves at the ends of our worlds. The consequences of decades of unchecked climate change, class war, white supremacy, and imperialism have led us here.”
The condemnation of the history of the American library, by its own gatekeepers, has done more than bring “Drag Queen Story Hour” to children’s reading rooms. It has also upended the library’s traditional role as an organization primarily dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and circulation of books. This radical overhaul is the work of some of America’s largest cultural philanthropies.
Last month the Mellon Foundation hosted a panel discussion on the American library with Mellon president Elizabeth Alexander, ALA executive director Tracie D. Hall and Los Angeles City Librarian John F. Szabo. “Library workers are on the front lines of some of our most pressing social justice issues,” began the discussion. They are “no longer relegated to the reference desk.”
What does this all mean? For one, that today’s librarians mock “the shushing part” of the traditional library: “I can’t think of too many contemporary library spaces I’ve been in where the librarian is going to be a shusher,” Ms. Hall said. “I probably was the librarian that others might have wanted to shush.” The panel spoke of “fulfilling the promise of what libraries were meant to be in terms of equity” through sewing classes, co-working spaces and “entrepreneurial incubators.”
As librarians now champion controversial books such as the graphic novel “Flamer,” they also call parents’ attempts to oversee what their children read as evidence of an “era of unprecedented book banning and censorship,” Ms. Alexander says. Meanwhile, books such as “When Harry Became Sally,” Ryan T. Anderson’s critique of modern transgender theory, which Amazon erased from its site, are never mentioned. “This is the third great wave of librarianship and libraries—as a social project,” Ms. Hall said. A popular American institution is being threatened by progressive politicization.
“I suspect that the human species—the only species—teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret—will endure.” It is easy to see how Jorge Luis Borges, in the early 1940s, drew such a conclusion in his short story “The Library of Babel.” Yet today it appears that the library is the entity teetering at the verge of extinction.
It is a crisis devised by the left, with rhetoric disconnected from the historical record. Far from upholding fascism or white supremacy, the library has been one of America’s most enlightened and democratic institutions. Libraries today, beyond the spurious “banned books” displays and the circulation-desk sermonizing, can still be places of reverie, uplift and reflection. This is due not only to the abundance of books that are—at least for now—still available. It is also an effect of the library building itself, which records the values of an earlier era in bricks and stone.
Now a radical “third great wave” seeks to wash over the American library to transform it into a “social project.” A decade ago, leaders of the New York Public Library unveiled their “Central Library Plan.” The aim was to transform the library’s flagship branch by gutting its stacks and turning the reference library into a “people’s palace.” Meanwhile, millions of books from the “core research collections” would be moved off-site—undermining the legacy of John Jacob Astor, who left a bequest of $400,000 to launch and support a free public reference library in 1848.
An 11th-hour appeal in these pages by the architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable tanked the scheme, but the episode reveals the lengths to which library leaders will go to destroy America’s great history of literary access for progressive ends. For them the real problem isn’t book banning but the availability of books they despise and the history these books represent, which our libraries offer up neutrally, and impartially, by design. A library of the book, by the book and for the book is the ultimate defense against their control—and the true democratic legacy of this American institution.
Mr. Panero is executive editor of the New Criterion, from whose December issue this article is adapted.
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