Southern librarianship and the culture of resentment.

The development of library service in the southern states occurred in a supposedly reconciliatory period of American history following the Civil War, but the reforms of Reconstruction, the indigenous remnants of "southern culture," and feelings of isolation from larger professional affairs bred dissent and feelings of estrangement between natives and outsiders. This article relates "the southern problem" to early key events in southern library development and current fractures in American cultural politics.

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Those still dazed by the tawdriness of style, if not the content, of the 2004 election campaign, with its predictable diversions and sideshows, should consider the journalistic garbage dredged up in past presidential campaigns: Andrew Jackson shot a man who insulted his wife, Rachel Donelson, because he had claimed their marriage was not legal; James Buchanan, the bachelor president, lived for years in Washington with Alabama senator Rufus King, who was skewered in the press as "Miss Nancy"; and FDR and his First Lady were variously characterized by enemies of the administration as Jew-mongers, miscegenationists, and Communists. (1) Neither conservatives nor liberals--whatever those labels may mean--have room for complacency about the "rightness" of their causes: consider how quaint now seems William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" on which the common man was being crucified by Wall Street or how wrong-headed the surge of xenophobia and anti-Catholicism that swept the Ku Klux Klan into prominent city and state posts in the early 1920s. (2) Bryan's anti-evolutionist stance in the Scopes trial still plagues school systems in the form of Creationist challenges, and the Klan's latter-day descendants posed as much a lethal threat to later-twentieth-century "liberals" as they did to various individuals in the 1920s--for example, in the unrequited murder of a black Vietnam veteran in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1970 by a member of the KKK or the infamous 1979 attack on an anti-Klan rally by KKK members and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina, that left five dead, ten wounded, and the police department implicated in the slaughter of at least one person. (3)

History teaches that neither winners nor losers should gloat, for unforeseen events, not rhetorical quid pro quo, provide the emotional content of historical narrative. None could have predicted the rise of the Populist Party in 1890, the amassing of 900,000 votes by the American Communist Party in 1936, or even the assassination of Huey Long. There will always be dissent in the face of perceived injustice, whether that oppression is borne by farmers trapped in the tenancy in the Cotton Belt or by Vietnamese peasants caught in the crossfire. Losers can't claim much solace from martyrdom, either: the specter of the former liberal becoming reactionary in old age recurs regularly (librarian Louis Shores and UNC Press editor Terry Couch come to mind). (4) The proto-Populist Tom Watson had become a reactionary demagogue by 1913, when he launched a campaign of anti-Semitism and fear of "outside" interference in his newspaper, the Jeffersonian. Watson was at least partially responsible for creating the mood of rabid Christian outrage that led to the lynching of Atlanta's Leo Frank in 1915. (5)

Librarians are rarely motivated to consider the context of their own history, since history provides only a backdrop to the mundane workings of their service ethos. Aristotle believed that poetry was truer than history, which may explain why historical fiction is more popular than history and fictional librarians are often more attractive than real ones. Obsession with facts, so this line of thinking goes, dims the power of narrative. Ahistoricism is a necessary corollary to American anti-intellectualism, and the costs of failing to imagine or contextualize the moment in terms of precedent are high. (6) Describing the insipidity of the two party conventions of 2004, Joan Didion asked, "Did we not find it remarkable that the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to concentrate our intelligence functions in the White House would have been met with general approval?... Did we not remember the Nixon White House and the point to which the lust for collecting intelligence had taken it? The helicopter on the lawn, the weeping daughter, the felony indictments?" (7)

What is true for American history generally may be even truer for southern U.S. history, with its various layers of whitewashing, vilification, and, more recently, political correctness, which, while it may begin to address the historical, economic, and social consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, and white paternalism, ultimately brings the country no closer to confronting present injustices. (8) An overseas reviewer's reading of Charles Lieven's What's Wrong with America? leaves him wondering why "so many inhabitants of the world's largest and most powerful nation have fallen prey to a culture of resentment."

 
  The answer lies in the comprehensive defeat of Southern Confederate 
  nationalism in the Civil War. For almost a century afterwards ... the 
  states of the defeated Confederacy were reduced to "an opposition of 
  almost colonial dependence on the North and the East Coast." Until the 
  southern [political] realignment [with the Republican Party in the 
  1968 presidential election], however, the grievances of the South 
  amounted to little more than an embattled regionalism, and had scant 
  ideological purchase in the rest of the United States, which tended to 
  view the South as an archaic embarrassment. (9) 

Dragon Country

The literature of southern librarianship is thin, but historians have a more complete picture than they did only a decade or two ago. Mary Edna Anders described the southern library movement until 1950 before civil rights. Betty Callaham left a fine administrative and curricular summary of the first two decades of the Atlanta school. I treated Tommie Dora Barker's career, particularly her role as American Library Association (ALA) regional field agent for the South (1930-36), against the larger context of regional library development, while Robert Martin detailed the accomplishments of Louis Round Wilson's years at the University of North Carolina (1901-32). Mary Mallory focused on Mary Utopia Rothrock's years as director of library services for the Tennessee Valley Authority (1934-48). I also surveyed library education programs in the South through 1945 and drew comparisons between the collective profiles of graduates of the three principal library education programs serving the South. Cheryl Knott Malone investigated the founding of separate public library branches for African Americans in Louisville, Houston, and Nashville. In recent years civil rights conflict in Alabama and Louisiana as it affected libraries has been described by Toby Graham and Steven Harris, while Jean Preer has given a detailed account of the infamous 1936 Richmond ALA Conference during which many nonsouthern librarians witnessed segregation for the first time. Additionally, in this collection, Louise Robbins discusses the impact of Julius Rosenwald Fund projects in Oklahoma. (10)

In the case of southern library history one does not have to search back too far to find southerners depicted as the professional "Other," if for no other reason than for the hold-out state library associations of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, which maintained racially segregated membership and assemblies even after other southern state associations had capitulated to the inevitable consequences of federal legislation. In the case of North Carolina the professional librarians association had been officially integrated since 1954, and Vera Snook of Little Rock had integrated the public library even before the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down, but in the Deep South state associations, feelings ran high. (11) American Libraries editor Eric Moon recalled an evening when he and Mary Lee Bundy attended a cocktail party at an ALA convention in the early 1960s and were "having sort of a quiet chat [on the sofa] when the brigade of southern dragons, mostly lady librarians from high up in state activities, came marching into the room and launched their usual verbal attack on me. Mary Lee got rather bored with this and got up and made to leave the room. As she did, she said 'Eric, I'll see you later,' and they picked her up and literally threw her out in the hallway." (12) While mutual understanding between southern and "northern" librarians (Moon is British) rarely reached such an impasse, the fracas expressed a mutual resentment that had festered among segments of southern and northern librarians since the turn of the century, most notably at the 1923 Hot Springs ALA Conference, when the atmosphere at the short-lived Library Work with Negroes Round Table became so charged that the euphemistic editor of Public Libraries, the ubiquitous and prolix Mary Eileen Ahern, declared that "discussion was futile," and the group disbanded. (13) On the other hand, important though it was, race was only one of many elements that created cultural divisions between librarians of the "North" and "South." Not all native-born southern librarians were segregationist "dragons," although scant attention has been paid to the less vitriolic or conciliatory of their number. It is almost as if, by refusing to defy local custom, city ordinances, and legal precedent governing racial segregation during their careers, they do not merit attention as professionals or individuals. (14)

The purpose of the present essay is to outline the highlights of southern library professionalism as it emerged both distinctly and as a part of the national professional movement. Through the period 1905-60 at least one segment of southern librarianship aligned itself with liberal thought in the form of racial accommodationism, and, while modern historians have criticized southern liberal thought for its failure to confront segregation more directly, the experiences of other parts of the country that did not institute legal segregation were not necessarily more sanguine. As one southern adage had it, life for African Americans in the South was terrible from a legal point of view, but many entertained close relationships with individual whites; in the North, no legal barriers stood in the way of African Americans, but they could pass an entire life without any but the most superficial contacts with whites. Moreover, the politics of southern librarianship seemed to mirror the struggles of the national government to come to terms with race as well. Southerners were not always the stereotypical, one-dimensional, patriarchal, and bigoted caricatures portrayed in literature, film, and political humor, nor, at another ridiculous extreme, were they the facile gallant gentlemen and delicate ladies of plantation lore.

Region, Reading, and Race

Even if one could agree on the geographic dimensions of the South, it would be difficult to agree on regional characteristics. Portions of eastern Tennessee and North Carolina have a staunch Republican base that predates the South's cross-over to the Republican Party by many decades. River ports along the…