The Canary in the Public Library
The Canary in the Public Library
Being a lifelong, mild, and not especially engagé liberal, I was surprised and somewhat flattered when in the spring of 1990 I was invited to join the newly formed Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG). A few months before, I had published an article in The New Republic critiquing the current vogue towards the overt commercialization of library acquisitions that, from my perspective on the reference desk at the Brooklyn Public Library, wasn’t serving the public very well.
I should have suspected something was off about the invitation from the start. I had already been criticized by colleagues for publishing in The New Republic at all: that was supposed to be like shaking hands with the devil. And when, a couple of months later, at the never-to-be-forgotten, numbingly boring, three-and-a-half hour PLG meeting held in a dismal office building near the Port Authority bus station in midtown Manhattan, I broached the suggestion that perhaps some gesture of inclusiveness towards slightly less Jacobin members of the library profession might not be amiss, I was told, essentially, to piss off: We don’t bow down to liberals, I was informed. If they want in, they have to buy in.
That meeting comes back to me now, because I see in it some of the seeds that were to exfoliate in the woke progressivism of our own time. In particular, the PLGers, both at that meeting and in their house organ, Progressive Librarian, seemed less interested in instigating dialogue than in terminating it. A key issue on the agenda that day was the upcoming exhibition planned by the Library of Congress documenting the quincentenary of what had once been called, cringingly, “Columbus’ Discovery of America.” Even in 1990 it was perfectly clear that the arrival of Columbus’ shock troops in the New World was hardly the triumphalist pageant of manifest destiny drilled into the heads of generations of impressionable schoolchildren. But the PLGers didn’t want an acknowledgement from the Library of Congress of the legacy of violence, enslavement, and exploitation attendant on Columbus’ landfall in the Caribbean. They wanted to shut down the exhibition before it started: no Columbus at all, not even the name. Which was, of course, a non-starter.
That inability to compromise did the PLG no favors. The exhibition, 1492: An Ongoing Voyage, went on as scheduled. Nevertheless, our discussion—a discussion to forbid discussion, which carried the day—was ahead of its time. It seemed to anticipate the intolerance for dissent that characterizes at least some quarters of today’s left.
A second suggestion of mine was met with similar indifference bordering on hostility. Wouldn’t it be a good idea, I naively asked, if the nascent house organ had a letters-to-the-editor section that might encourage other points of view and convey the message that our positions were not set in stone? That question, apparently, was so stupid that it scarcely merited a reply. It was waved off impatiently before getting to serious matters on the agenda, which would have included (according to my notes) an “informational boycott” of South Africa and a formal proclamation condemning Israeli censorship. One impressive thing about the PLGers was their lack of hypocrisy regarding Israel. Although many of the fifteen or sixteen members present had obviously Jewish surnames, they were as one in their hostility to the state of Israel. Some of that hostility was surely justified. And some of it wasn’t. For the PLGers, as for much of the far left, Israel was an all or nothing proposition: You were wholly, unreservedly on the side of the Palestinians or you were with the oppressors. There could be only one point of view, and it wasn’t the point of view of the wishy-washy, both-sides, center-left liberals like me who saw a tragic collision of conflicting grievances where they saw fixed polarities of victimization and oppression.
It’s possible that the PLGers devoted much of their free time to wrestling with foundational leftist texts by Marx, Engels, Gramsci, and others, but from what I could tell, the positions they adopted didn’t require a great deal of thought. They identified the most far-left position on any given issue and pretty much stuck to it. A friend of mine around that time, not a PLGer but certainly a progressive, told me that in any real or potential conflict between the United States and another country, she automatically supported the other country. Well, at least she knew where she stood.
The large geopolitical issues favored by the PLGers were, I'm afraid, pretty remote from the working life of most librarians. Yes, sign me up for any protest against South African apartheid, but couldn’t we devote a little bit of time to considering ways of making libraries more effective and democratic institutions? Many public libraries were, just then, radically dumbing down their collections in a deluded effort to give the public what the mass media determined it wanted—couldn’t we talk about that? No, we were going to talk about South Africa and Israel and colonialism. Lacking the confrontational spirit of my comrades, I deferred asking the question that was really on my mind: If you’re really that committed to the struggle against injustice and oppression, why futz around with librarianship? Why waste time lobbing snowballs at the hated Library of Congress when the Legal Aid Society or the Democratic Socialists of America were taking the fight directly to the institutions of oppression? For all I know, the PLGers were equally invested in other organizations of protest, but their library-related activism struck me as, at once, grandiose and trivial. They were fighting the good fight. And no one noticed.
I left librarianship some years ago, but the PLG is still at it, recognizing, as their current mission statement has it, “that libraries are sites where structures of injustice, exploitation, control and oppression are nourished, normalized and perpetuated.” That language seems a bit extreme to describe an institution, however imperfect, where you can reserve the latest John Grisham thriller or, for that matter, do research on “structures of injustice, exploitation, control and oppression.” The PLG might have seemed absurd—nothing but virtue-signaling—but give credit where it is due. It anticipated by a couple of decades the language adopted across the spectrum of institutional America. These days even chain drugstores want you to know how virtuous they are. The PLG got there first.
It wouldn’t be fair to describe the PLGers as sanctimonious and humorless, though I did think the clenched fist logo on the cover of Progressive Librarian was a bit much. They had their style and I had mine. I wouldn’t have minded their style if the substance hadn’t been so troubling: the inflexibility of the positions taken, the hostility towards dissent, the reduction of complexities to slogans, the belief in the magic power of nomenclature. Yet even now I'm still struggling with some of the issues that long-ago meeting brought to the surface. I have no more patience with MAGA America than the PLGers did with my moderate liberalism. I’ve heard a good deal of feeble rationalization of the bigotry, barbarity, and ignorance of Trumpism; I don’t want to hear it anymore. Does that make me any different—any less narrow, any less myopic, any less convinced of the unimpeachable rightness of my opinions—than the ideologues of the Progressive Librarians Guild that I once deplored? I don’t know. But at least I, a cautious, skeptical, classically conflicted liberal, can ask the question.
Stephen Akey is a memoirist and essayist who lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of Raccoon Love, Culture Fever, and Library.
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