In Soviet Russia, Books Censor You!

I must say, I was really hoping to watch Storm Center in class. Partly because Louise's 450 class watched it, partly because I feel like I've already watched it through Louise's description in the The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown, partly because I graded something like 550 exams before coming to class and could have used a mental break, and partly because I just watched another Bette Davis movie, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, on Thanksgiving. It would be nice to see her in a less-creepy, not-so-evil role than that of a grown-up Baby Jane. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it, but brace yourself for some psychological horror. I tried to find as evil-looking of a picture of Bette as possible that also portrayed Joan Crawford as significantly more innocent, and the result is seen here.

But anyway, enough about Bette Davis. Back to the book in hand (well, not in hand, because I already returned it to the library at this point). I think the most interesting part of this book for me was the fact that Louise talked more in-depth about the McCarthy era than I've really seen in any other context. I know I studied the time period in my junior-year-of-high-school history class, but I remember focusing more on the Korean Conflict and not so much on the closer-to-home policies. I have trouble understanding how communism could have created such a scare in America, but I don't doubt that it truly did. It was particularly interesting to see in this book how the national scare of communism really managed to work its way into a small town in Oklahoma.

And now I wonder, how much have we really gotten away from the McCarthy era? How safe are we from censorship, especially as librarians? When I think about censorship in libraries, I immediately think of an article that I read sometime in the past year: Child protection or censorship? Library employees lose jobs over book. I think I remember it in particular because I spent four years of undergrad in Lexington, KY, fairly close to the town in question. What is surprising about this article is that it shows the opposite of what we expect: it's the "librarians" (you'll notice in the article that it makes a point that they're not librarians because they don't have the MLS degree) who are censoring materials, not the community. The ALA relies on its librarians to properly enforce the Bill of Rights and freedom of access to information, and these employees of the library clearly didn't do that. I can fully understand moving a book to another location, or keeping it as a reserve material, but only if the community at large truly deems a book to be inappropriate. It's not the role of a single library employee to decide what is or isn't appropriate for the public at large. The evidence from other area libraries (granted, Louisville isn't a particularly good example, as it's a larger city and as such traditionally much more liberal) just goes to show that it's possible to house the book and sill not cause an uproar. In fact, I don't think it was even causing an uproar where it was in the Nicholasville library; it was a single person who had a problem with the book. Moreover, even when she went through the proper channels, no one saw any problems with the book. So, in response to the article's title: it's censorship. In response to hero or villain: it appears she's much more toward the villain end of the spectrum. I doubt she meant any harm by her actions, but the broader impacts of her actions are what make it dangerous: if we allow one book to be censored by a single person, how far do we allow individuals to go in the censorship of library materials?