books

A good post at the LA Times blog about the recent "scandal" involving books at the White House.

When conservative Rob Port took a tour of the White House this week, he was scandalized by the books he found on shelves in the White House library. "Photo Evidence: Michelle Obama Keeps Socialist Books in the White House Library," he blogged. He took a photo of the books in question, which includes "The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912" by Ira Kipnis (1952) and "The Social Basis of American Communism" by Nathan Glazer (1961).

Well, it was a first lady who put those books there, the Washington Post reports, but it wasn't Michelle Obama. It was Jacqueline Kennedy, who was known for the care and attention she gave to outfitting the White House; she hired Yale's librarian to stock it for her.The books Port photographed have been sitting in the library since 1963. The library came into being during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy asked Yale University librarian James T. Babb to oversee a committee that would select books for the library. In 1963, 1,780 were placed on the shelves.

About the library Babb once wrote, "It is intended to contain books which best represent the history and culture of the United States, works most essential for an understanding of our national experience."

That kind of understanding seems to be lacking these days, and Port's manufactured uproar is the perfect poster child for the situation. The LA Times refers to comments on Port's blog post, including one which lays it out clearly: "These are history books, not how-to books."

Which is the point that's being missed: owning a book means an intellectual curiosity, not blind allegiance to what's inside it. We have a history of reading to understand and learn.

That, right there, is a great sentiment. It's also the LA Times' lead in to reprint the American Library Association's statement on the "Freedom to Read":

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label "controversial" views, to distribute lists of "objectionable" books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to safety or national security, as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as individuals devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.

That statement, the Times says, was written during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Maybe we haven't come as far as we like to think. Need more proof? Read Port's defense of his outrage in response to this revelation.