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College and Research Libraries
November 2003, Vol. 64, No. 6

Book Review

Samek, Toni. Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967–1974. Foreword by Sanford Berman. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. 179p. alk. paper, $35 (ISBN 0786409169). LC 00-55391.

"The question for the future," concludes Toni Samek in her study of how 1960s librarians attempted to alter the profession’s definitions of intellectual freedom and social responsibility, "is whose culture is library culture?"

There seem to have been two contenders. First, the "establishment," in Samek’s term, officials of the American Library Association (ALA) and top library administrators. Then, the librarians who argued that neutrality in selection served the status quo and so, in effect, was anything but neutral; who sought out alternative press publications for collections; and who fought to make ALA hear their concerns.

It is impossible to recall the 1960s without the radical newspapers and little magazines so available on the street in cities and college towns everywhere. But not so available in libraries, as Samek faults the day’s librarians for staying safely within the mainstream. Such exceptions as Celeste West and others, who founded the San Francisco Public Library’s Bay Area Reference Center and its newsletter Synergy, remained on librarianship’s fringe, as did Sanford Berman (contributor of the foreword here) who failed to convince H. W. Wilson to launch an alternative literature index.

If they had less effect on collections than hoped for, radical librarians left a greater mark on the profession’s central organization, ALA. Librarians, activists argued, should address social inequities by emphasizing the needs of those who, due to race, class, or other circumstance, were kept down by institutions bent mainly on serving the dominant culture that sustained them. "One of the key characteristics of hegemony is that power is distributed across a network of civil institutions," writes Samek, who places libraries among these.

In 1967, at ALA’s summer meeting in San Francisco, a small group demonstrated as General Maxwell Taylor spoke about U.S. policy in Vietnam. A year later, in Kansas City, activist librarians called on ALA to address social responsibility issues and to back librarians who took stands on intellectual freedom, complaining of a sluggish and out-of-touch bureaucracy. So begin the chapters at the heart of Samek’s book, where she records the debates, actions, and inactions that took place in Washington, Atlantic City, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York, as ALA conferences became a moveable arena for activists to contest the library’s social role.

Any number of groups formed. Among the most durable were ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), Freedom to Read Foundation, and Black Caucus. Others long disbanded included ACONDA, the Activities Committee for New Directions for ALA, formed to study ALA structure and goals; then ANACONDA, the Ad Hoc Council Committee on ACONDA, a second body to study the first; both dissolved, reports Samek, without resolving key questions. ALA made strategic concessions, but when "calls for social responsibility challenged ALA’s vital interests," she says, "such as preservation of the traditional role and privileges of the profession or of the entrenched interests of the elite, ALA not only exercised its moral, intellectual, and political leadership prerogatives, but also flexed its organizational muscle to overcome the challenge."

In fact, Samek presents slight evidence of organizational muscle flexing. Instead, she shows more on how activist librarians were able to change ALA. The centerpiece of Samek’s final chapter, for example, is a 1972 Library Journal cover story by David Berninghausen, director of the University of Minnesota library school. Berninghausen, who since the 1940s had been active on ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, wrote in support of professional neutrality, arguing that the social responsibility movement, in calls for advocacy, was itself a threat to intellectual freedom.

So much mail came in that LJ ran a second cover story, highlighting excerpts from dissenting letters. Many of the librarians quarrelling with Berninghausen themselves soon became, or already were, highly influential members of the profession. They included Robert Wedgeworth, Patricia Schuman, Eli Oboler, E. J. Josey, Arthur Curley, and others, not to mention the "prickly" LJ editorial written by John Berry. "Despite the social responsibility movement’s counter-establishment tactics," Samek writes, "ALA seemed to create room to absorb the agitation, then incorporate and contain it within its institutional focus, bureaucracy, and organizational structure." There were larger implications. "While the library was positioned in the 1960s to play a role in social change, the conservative tradition and structure of the institution prevented it from realizing such a transformation."

A more generous interpretation might seem warranted. Librarian-activists of the 1960s, having inherited neither, were able to create structures and traditions having something to do with today’s librarians who oppose the USA Patriot Act, Internet filtering, book banning at the local level, and a publisher trying to pull the plug on Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. Was ALA acting merely as an "instrument of power" when, as Samek puts it, "The Association, whether intentionally or not, delivered the coup de grace by smothering SRRT out with a plethora of overlapping round tables, e.g., a round table for intellectual freedom, a round table for women, a round table for international relations, a round table for government documents, and a round table for exhibits, among many others." Or, was ALA responding in the ways a large organization can to librarians who felt empowered by the first wave of activism?

Were activist librarians and ALA bureaucrats really the only two characters in the story? Having one’s finger on the pulse of ALA, as every librarian knows, is not the same thing as knowing what is actually going on in libraries. What of the librarians who didn’t attend conferences or write letters? What about their patrons and their communities? How much support did they give, or would they have given, to libraries with an activist mission? How were questions about intellectual freedom and social responsibility actually worked out on the library floor? What of the community members who might have liked more books about religious fundamentalism or handguns? If a library can be an active agent for social change in the first place, who decides the agenda?

These questions risk that cardinal reviewing sin, faulting the author for not having written a different book. In fairness, Samek, who teaches at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies, chose to focus on ALA. The result is a study of what the most outspoken librarians of the day were saying to one another. Knowing what actually took place in libraries is, of course, a more difficult historical undertaking. Nonetheless, "Whose culture is library culture?" remains a question not only for the future, but also for the past.—Bob Nardini, YBP Library Services.