Dear Editor
Dear Editor Free Libraries There is nothing novel about Lawrence J. White's notion ("The Public Library—Free or Fee?" NL, December 17,1979) that according to the arcane definitions of formal...
...Most branches are currently open less than 40 hours a week...
...The fact that White's "research" is funded by a private foundation is further evidence of the growing desire to dictate public policy, a desire apparent in the new breed of academics and their sponsors on foundation boards, neither of whom are accountable to voters...
...We may not be able to think about our domestic ills until he has begun his second term...
...But I would argue that improved Xeroxing, advanced research guidance, or information for businesses is less valuable than easy access to the stacks and a quiet reading room...
...Perhaps those delegates to the White House Conference are out of touch with reality...
...Is free public library service of much use to the adults of Harlem when that branch is only open from 2:00-6:00 p.m...
...Indeed, the only hope in this dismal business is the fact that economists, like those who serve on the governing boards of foundations, still only have one vote each...
...Curiously, he seems not to have heard of California's Proposition 13 and the effects it has had...
...But, for the moment, it has been given the lie by circumstance—Carter is now leading, visibly, if not necessarily rightly...
...Former Mayor Abraham Beame of New York got the message when voter protest forced him to restore some cuts in the library budget...
...Is Berry trying to "dictate" in his letter...
...Messrs...
...White is typical of the young educators from private institutions, most in the social sciences or business administration, who want "the market mechanism" to govern our society rather than the voters...
...The Newark City Council once decided to close the Newark Public Library, agreeing with White that "the poor and intellectually underprivileged" don't use libraries...
...Berry and Weber, the public library in America may be in deep trouble and not because of academics like myself...
...Kennedy's task is to recognize and then, more important, to define in comprehensive terms that make them seem soluble, the problem areas Carter has overlooked or handled inadequately during the last term...
...Meanwhile, our schools deteriorate, health costs soar, and the fundamental rights of women go without constitutional recognition...
...There is the depressing situation of the unemployed...
...Carter is also a hostage...
...and 6 per cent didn't know...
...Let me state at the outset that I was not hoping to "dictate" public policy...
...His first mistake was to consider "leadership" a real issue...
...What has happened to that free flow of ideas that, I thought, publishers and their editors-in-chief wished to encourage...
...we want a leader who, like Roosevelt, will tell us we can be strong, and then show us how...
...The only winds blowing are Mideasterly, and they whirl in dangerous circles for a challenger...
...For an inspiring story of how access to a library (in this case a private citizen's) can change a poor young immigrant's view of life, White should read a biography of Andrew Carnegie...
...Carter's belated proposal to help unemployed black youth in the cities shows that he also has a tendency "to throw money at problems," as he once accused Kennedy, but only at the end of a term...
...Clearly the Kennedy campaign has not been able to find a following wind...
...In many of those same cities they have found, unlike White, that the public library does indeed offer both educational and information services of more than sufficient value to have a just and appropriate claim on tax dollars...
...In an era of slow national economic growth, "Proposition 13 Fever" is likely to spread...
...The middle class is having enough trouble coping with escalating medical and housing costs (which hit it hardest, of course)—and now White suggests that it pay directly for its own use of library services as well as, through taxes, for making them available to poor children...
...Government officials, responding to (he wishes of their electorates, will have to pare budgets, and public libraries are likely to be at the top of the list for paring...
...It may even be said that the election is being (ought in the Mideast—for the more complex the situation (here grows, the more it appears that that's where Carter will make or break his candidacy...
...It is surprising that you overlooked this opposition to White's proposal in your comments...
...In fact, after all our Vietnams and Watergates, we do not want a "strong" leader...
...So while supporting the public library because of their faith in the democratic dogma, most of the workingmen of the country never crossed the threshold of a library and when they did they found it an inhospitable, and even hostile, place...
...He seems not to know either that the branch library system in the city in which he works, New York, has been cut back, way back...
...This appears to have been true throughout the public library's history...
...In the 1980s, the old myths, the old thought patterns, and the old ways are no longer adequate for the public library...
...As for Jeffrey Weber's letter, I did not claim that poor people never use the library...
...White's solution, to charge users for library cards, makes him only the latest in the parade of Ivy-League trained, private university types who have decided that the definitions developed in the heady unreality of private university social science departments or business schools should somehow set the criteria for public finance...
...Montdair, V .J...
...There are other economists, even at Harvard (although they are not terribly pleased with Galbraith there anymore) who take differing views...
...New York City Jeffrey Weber Lawrence J. White replies: It is a pleasure to engage in an intellectual debate with John Berry, who is willing to focus exclusively on the facts and the arguments and who avoids innuendo and inflammatory adjectives...
...His views on education, the typical diploma-mill mentality that asserts that "in a society that values certification, education with nothing to show for it requires more self-motivation than most people can muster," reveals that White would also risk the fate of higher education to that "market mechanism" along with our public libraries...
...They added, in the same resolution, that a national information policy ought to be formulated "to insure the right of access without charge or fee to the individual to all public and publicly supported libraries for all persons...
...Berry, that is the potential electorate speaking, not a "parade of Ivy-League (rained, private university types...
...They know citizens would not stand for the imposition of fees for library use...
...The resolution was proposed by New York Assemblyman Edward Sullivan, a delegate to the conference...
...He implies that there is something wrong with those adults who "use public libraries most often for 'recreation' and 'personal information'" rather than for "professional purposes...
...it is simply that most do not, and that those who do use it substantially less frequently than members of the middle class...
...Also, it is noteworthy that a Gallup Poll, undertaken in July 1978 at the request of the American Library Association, found that 50 per cent of the adults polled favored charging the users if their local library needed more funds...
...I urge him to consult his own publication {Library Journal, January 1, 1979, p. 5) to discover the savaging that California's public libraries have received...
...talent, after all, does not obey class or geographical distinctions, //it meets opportunity...
...It is time to soundly reject the continued attempts of new economists to force every human activity and every social service into the comfortable definitions of academe and that ubiquitous "market mechanism...
...Teddy's Tactics I found Andrew J. Glass' article on Teddy Kennedy ("A Hesitant Candidate," NL, November 19, 1979) thought-provoking...
...44 per cent were opposed...
...If philosophy begins in wonder, as someone once said, education begins with browsing...
...The substance of Berry's letter suggests, alas, that he is living in his own ivory tower...
...Or he has resorted to the empty demonstrative, "The times are bad—do you want more of that...
...I would also remind Weber that as late as the 1930s, over 75 per cent of the public libraries in the South did not provide any library service at all to blacks, clearly the poorest and least educated part of the Southern population...
...In cities as disparate economically as Memphis, Newark, Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Terre Haute, Great Neck, Cambridge, and even New York, voters have repeatedly registered their support for free public library service...
...Voters today are more sober, perhaps better informed and certainly more anxious than those of 1960: They suspect allusions to Came-lot, and they don't like being talked down to...
...The "folklore," as White calls it, of the library is not fantasy...
...Ask Mayors Coleman Young in Detroit or Tom Bradley in Los Angeles...
...Kennedy has not only failed to find a chink in the President's new Iranian armor, but he has "lurched" (to borrow his word for Carter's crisis-foreign policy) from one campaign pose to another...
...Moreover, the lack of library use by the poor is a reflection of the chronic inadequacy of our public schools?clearly something has to be done about that, but making libraries less accessible to everyone hardly seems a step in the right direction...
...Otherwise Kennedy has tried to revive the family mystique—calling up more and more of Joe Kennedy's grandchildren, with their unmistakable Kennedy smiles and Irish freckles...
...Ask Governor John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia...
...Joen Wiuimxs...
...New York City John N. Berry III Editor-in-Chief Library Journal Lawrence J. White's article urging our public libraries to charge fees manages to offend the interests of both the poor and the middle class...
...NL, December 17,1979) that according to the arcane definitions of formal economics, free public library service, after nearly two centuries of existence, now somehow fails "to satisfy the necessary criteria" to be provided by government...
...White also seems to think that improving the efficiency of existing library services, and increasing their specialization, is more important than extending their reach...
...From the critical point of view, frustrated legislation is not enough to prove Carter a weak leader?only a mistake can do that, and if Carter fails in the Persian Gulf the charge may have some substance...
...We need a candidate, too, who will foresee the human costs of any attempted solution to the problems of energy and inflation, someone who can moderate between Carter's realism and Jerry Brown's Zen and the Art of Vagueness...
...It was protests from that very constituency that forced them to reverse that decision...
...Does offering a set of findings and proposals in The New Leader constitute evidence that one wants to "dictate...
...And for a tale of how access to a public library (in this case by deception, in order to cross a racial bar) can strike a spark of creativity in a depressed soul, White should read Richard Wright's Native Son...
...Of course, those Mideasterly winds have dominated the political landscape...
...For Kennedy to see leadership as sufficient basis for a campaign is as mistaken as it would be for Carter to speak from the hustings on his pet theory, the American people's deep malaise...
...Those 911 delegates to the White House Conference, to whom you referred in "Between Issues" on page two of the same issue, reflecting sentiments from more than 50 state and territorial conferences on libraries, voted the following: "The White House Conference on Library and Information Services affirms that all persons should have free access, without charge or fee to the individual, to information in public and publicly supported libraries...
...Public Libraries and the Decline of the Democratic Dogma," Library Journal, November 1, 1976...
...On the other hand, White's plan will discourage those poor adults who only "tend" not to use the library, but nevertheless do use it...
...on Thursdays and Fridays...
...on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and from 1:00-5:00 p.m...
...Both are available—free—at the public library...
...The leadership issue has also reflected attention back on Kennedy's personal qualities, which do not inspire confidence, and away from his record, which should...
...You can never predict who will make the best use of an educational opportunity...
...A fee system may just be a way of salvaging the public library and, indeed, even of improving it...
...Let me again quote from an article in Berry's publication, this one by noted library historian Michael Harris: "The few workingmen who did use the public library during the 19th century, and the percentage of the total population was very low (perhaps 5 per cent), found it to be an institution managed by cold and stiff authoritarians who viewed their presence with mixed emotions of distaste and distrust...
...The institution is long overdue for some fresh thinking and fresh debate...
...It is the voters, those who pay the bills, who should decide which public services "satisfy the necessary criteria" for tax support, not the certified experts from academe nor the leaders of private foundations, neither of whom were elected...
...As the doctors, lawyers, social workers, and other "experts" are beginning to learn, people want and need information, not "certified" expertise, and certainly not the kind of world described solely by markets that is being asserted by NYU professors and their sponsors at the 20th Century Fund...
...And we have to recognize that insofar as we arc unwilling to sacrifice the lives of the 50 in the embassy...
...the Harlem branch is down to a total of 16 hours a week...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 2
