Barbara Mezeske: The Library: A 21st-century battleground

Are you old enough to remember "The Music Man?" In that play, lovestruck Harold Hill serenades Marion the librarian, declaring that his love is “a long-lost cause I can never win/ for the civilized world accepts as unforgivable sin/ any talking out loud with any librarian.” This is the oldest stereotype of a librarian: the buttoned-up spinster who spends her days shushing people. In "It’s a Wonderful Life," when Harry Bailey is shown the future if he had never been born, his wife Mary is an “old maid” who works in the library — the most boring fate imaginable for a single woman.

There are other, more heroic librarian stereotypes as well. Popular fiction celebrates librarians as resisters of censorship and book burning. There are too many titles to mention, but a recent one is "The Paris Library" by Janet Skeslien Charles (2020). In that book, librarians preserve books subject to Nazi censorship by shipping them to the countryside. They send packages of books to soldiers at the battlefront. They hand deliver books to Jewish patrons denied access to the library. They then get arrested and sent to detention camps.

Librarians are keepers and curators of knowledge. They open windows to the world for people who want to know and learn. During the Great Depression, librarians on horseback rode routes through remote areas of Appalachia, delivering and loaning books.

Libraries as fixed spaces have a long history. At one point, they signified privilege and wealth. The old great houses of Europe feature libraries. Having a private library meant that a family was part of the intellectual elite.

The first public library in Michigan was opened in 1817 in Detroit. You had to purchase a membership. Philanthropist and steel-industry tycoon Andrew Carnegie made it his mission to build free public libraries across the country. Between 1886 and his death in 1919, he spent more than $40 million to build 1,679 new libraries across America. Why libraries? Carnegie said libraries gave ordinary people the opportunity to improve themselves.

Did the arrival of the digital age diminish the popularity or importance of libraries? Not at all. Librarians became adept at shifting into new technologies. The modern library offers all sorts of e-resources in addition to its hardbound collections. From Herrick Library in Holland, you can borrow movies, audiobooks and music. Our library has extensive genealogical resources, a “library of things” that includes surprising objects like a ukulele, telescopes, and a stud finder. There is also a seed library — actual seeds that you can take home and plant.

Libraries have become valued public spaces where people can gather for children’s story time and summer book clubs, access to public computers, tech help, resume writing, and presentations by authors and other community speakers.

Against this backdrop, consider the current political push to censor and sanitize library collections in public libraries and public schools. The state of Florida leads the charge, removing more than 170 titles according to PEN America, a nonprofit organization that works to defend free expression through the advancement of literature and human rights. The challenged books include biographies of Black and brown people like Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks and Roberto Clemente. They include histories of racism and the mid-20th century civil rights movement in this country. Books that feature LGBTQ+ characters are on the chopping block, as are references to adolescent sexuality.

It's not enough to place challenged books behind the desk so that readers have to request them, or get parental permission to check them out: The people rallying against libraries don’t want anyone at all to have access to these books. And they want to criminalize librarians who won’t remove books about race, gender and history from their shelves. Ultimately, they want to close libraries that won’t knuckle under.

And there’s the problem. Who gets to decide what can be read by the public? Whose moral code, or level of discomfort with ideas gets to rule everyone else? Is there a place in a free nation for the kind of censorship that will close Jamestown’s Patmos Library in 2025?

Public libraries are at the heart of democracy because they serve everybody, not just a select few. And that’s as democratic as it gets.

Note: This column was due two days after the board of commissioners declared Ottawa a constitutional county, and I needed time to process what that means for our future as citizens and neighbors. If the county commission can now, by its power over funding, deny support to programs for minorities, support for policing that enforces state firearm laws, support for prosecutors and judges who uphold state and federal law, and recognition of religious practice that doesn’t conform to a narrow Christian nationalist agenda — well, then, there is much work to be done if we are, collectively, to restore a sense of belonging for everyone in this county. Libraries play a role in that, and we can’t let such valuable public resources be destroyed by narrowness and prejudice.

— Community Columnist Barbara Mezeske is a retired teacher and resident of Park Township. She can be reached at bamezeske@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Barbara Mezeske: The Library: A 21st-century battleground