Eight years ago I wrote about the film Storm Center. I recently learned that this film, produced at the height of McCarthyism, was loosely based on the case of Ruth Brown, who was fired from her job as librarian at the Bartlesville (Oklahoma) Public Library in 1950. Robbins' book even contains a rather thorough summary of the movie. Bette Davis (who played ousted librarian Alicia Hull) was questioned about taking the role by at least one parent, Anne Smart.
Smart sent Davis a "report of the book controversy" she was causing in Marin County [California]...Her report depicted in "vivid detail...the type of material being given to our children in some schools. [The report]...made its way around the country for for several years [and contained] the names of authors "all extremely well listed as to their communist and/or communist front affiliations by various government investigating committees."
The more things change...
Brown was an outspoken civil rights activist in her town. Her racial justice work during the height of McCarthyism made her an easy target. Charges that she was circulating "subversive" materials was a façade for the real reason of her dismissal.
The back cover blurb of this work (published in 2000) reads
The fundamental issues of the Brown case make it especially pertinent today when differences - in race, gender, class, and national origin - are again feared and as challenges to materials in library collections again escalate. Ruth Brown's story helps us understand the matrix of personal, community, state, and national forces that can lead to censorship, intolerance, and the suppression of individual rights
This description is even more eerily prescient today. As are discussions in the book of neutrality, academic freedom, freedom of acquisition, freedom of access (especially to controversial materials) and the blatant sexism.
Ruth Brown was one of the women, mostly white and middle-class, who made up 88.8 percent of the allied profession of librarianship in 1950. For a salary less than a man would receive, she organized and maintained a comfortable homelike space where people, especially young people, went for wholesome enlightenment (emphasis mine). The professional role of the librarian gave communities low-cost female employees (emphasis mine) to provide healthy recreational and informational reading while it extended the margins of the domestic sphere without exploding them. The librarian's role did not transgress boundaries as long as the homelike space and the materials and activities organized in it remained safe, comforting, and submissive to the prevailing ideology...
The more things change...
The Library Bill of Rights was originally adopted by the American Library Association (ALA) in 1939 to ensure access to information (even what some might consider harmful or dangerous) to all. "The ALA articulated the importance of allowing citizens to decide for themselves what they should read, an idea Brown expressed in her interview with the city commission". This is a stark contrast to the description of the "stereotypical" librarian
in Alice I. Byran's 1952 research report, The Public Librarian...[who] was "rather submissive in social situations" and lacked self confidence. "Indiscreet" was not part of the lexicon by which librarians, especially female librarians, were described. In fact female librarians have been characterized as discreet to a fault in book selection practices, "ruthless in their own censorship." Marjorie Fiske's 1959 classic , Book Selection and Censorship, depicted its mostly female subjects as anxious and fearful, avoiding challenges to library materials through self-censorship.
The more things change...
And on a final note, we see the same ideological concerns in libraries today as libraries in Montana and Georgia cut ties with the ALA over president Emily Drabinski's identity as a Marxist lesbian.
The more things change...
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