The Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C. has been converted into an Apple store. At least it makes no pretense of being a library anymore, unlike so many American “libraries.”

[T]he privileges of the learned become more obnoxious to egalitarian sentiment as they become fewer and smaller; and since the learned are not exempt from egalitarian fever, but on the contrary are often its most active fomenters, those privileges become more obnoxious even to the learned themselves.

— Alexis de Tocqueville

ALAN writes:

The men who designed and built big-city American libraries knew that quiet is a necessary condition for contemplation. The purpose of quiet in traditional libraries was to differentiate them from other buildings and to provide a place where the interior voice and thought were respected and encouraged.

Modern libraries, by contrast, are delighted to pulverize that distinction by pandering to the lowest common denominator and attempting to make libraries just like other places that aren’t libraries. If you walk into a library today and think you are walking into a library, you are ten percent right. But what stands before you is a package-deal: ten percent library, 90 percent not-library.  That other 90 percent consists of:

–A place to converse in person or by phone
–A movie and music rental store
–A place to loiter
–A refuge for the down and out to get out of the cold or heat
–A playroom for children
–A voter registration office
–A passport agency
–An entertainment center where you can watch cartoons and porn
–A center for political advocacy and activism (invariably Leftist, Feminist, and Communist).

I have no objection to most of those activities. But they should be kept in separate buildings. Call it a Pseudo-Library, but don’t call it a library. A library is books and periodicals, plus the reading, writing, contemplation, or research that quiet makes possible. Grafting those other nine functions on to a traditional library does not improve a library; it degrades it.

“Children should have places to go when they want quiet and freedom from social stimulation. Public libraries have provided such a place, although for a rather specialized clientele.  Now even that is changing as libraries become media centers that encourage bustle and social interaction.  What has happened to the librarians who used to hiss “Shush!”?  Perhaps we could find reemployment for them in new kinds of institutions where quiet prevailed but where there was no particular thing that children were supposed to do—where they could read or draw or sew or dream or engage in tête-à-têtes provided they did not rise above a murmur.  It would also be nice if such places could provide booths for privacy……”

Carl Bereiter wrote those words 53 years ago. [Must We Educate?, Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 105-6]

The answer is that the librarians of old had the moral fortitude and strength of character to uphold rules (being quiet was one of them).  Try to find such librarians today. They have been consigned to an Orwellian Memory Hole, never to be seen, heard, spoken of, or thought about again. In their place today are the revolutionists who just love libraries filled with “bustle and social interaction” and lots and lots of “social stimulation” and laughter and rambunctious children whooping it up. If perchance there is a lull in those fun activities, then young, feminism-brainwashed librarians and clerks can fill the “dead air” with their own chattering and giggling.  The revolutionists are determined not to permit any library to function qua library. Their goal is (and has been for some time) to make libraries into conduits for revolutionary ideology, vocabulary, and sloganeering.

The thing to note is that the interior voice is essential for reading, writing, or thinking — activities whose encouragement and defense were one of the very reasons why libraries were created and built in the first place.

And accommodating all those modern, hip, cutting-edge trends and fun activities and techno-gadgets means what for the interior voice? Oblivion.

Sallie Tisdale understood this when she wrote her defense of traditional libraries [“Silence, Please: The Public Library as Entertainment Center”, Harper’s Magazine, March 1997, pp. 65-74 ].

The importance of the interior voice was once common knowledge among Americans, above all by those who ran libraries and schools.  It can be seen in some old movies and TV shows.  Even something as simple as drumming a pencil on a tabletop was understood as inexcusable in a quiet setting where other people were trying to concentrate (watch the scene with Rick and Wally in the Feb. 22, 1962 episode “Making Wally Study” in “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” TV series).

When he was a boy in New Jersey in the 1940s, St. Louis newspaperman George Londa and his pals walked three miles many times to get books from a library — not games, toys, or fishing poles, but books with stories that they read eagerly. [ George Londa, “In Olden Days, They Read”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 11, 1980, p. 4G ]

Why did they do that?  What impelled them?

Adele Starbird, Dean of Women Students at Washington University, wrote about a woman she knew “whose precision and elegance in conversation I have envied.  ….She explains that having spent a childhood without radio, television, movies, or air conditioning, she could find nothing to do during the hot months of the school vacations but like on the floor and read.  At an early age she had polished off Dickens and Thackeray, besides other authors she found in her father’s library…..”. [ Adele Starbird, “Benefits From Reading”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 18, 1966, p. 5D ]

Why did she do that?  What impelled her?

I suggest that the answer in both instances is the interior voice–the encouragement and cultivation of which were precisely some of the reasons why the St. Louis Public Library in its early years sought to provide “surroundings of quietude and refined good taste”, the very words it used in a 1912 booklet to celebrate the Library’s opening.

American boys today cannot grow up the way Mr. Londa did (assuming that they can grow up at all, which I doubt).  Mr. Londa had no radio, television, or electronic gadgets to anesthetize his interior voice.  What he had instead were books, through which he cultivated and sharpened his interior voice.  But boys today have little or no chance of doing that–because they have radio, television, movies, music, and electronic gadgets with screens and games in their face and in their ear from infancy onward.  Could anything be more useful in the deliberate dumbing down of Americans than the mass communicationS and entertainment industries?  Could anything be more obvious than that hip libraries are enthusiastic participants in that project?

You could read about that decades-long project in Charlotte Iserbyt’s book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (1999), which I once found on a shelf in the St. Louis Public Library, except that it has since been discarded and sent down that Orwellian Memory Hole by people who never stop telling us that they are opposed to banning books.

It must have been a Saturday in or around 1959 when my father took me downtown and walked me for the first time into the Central St. Louis Public Library building.  I have no concrete memories from that day–except one: A book that he permitted me to borrow.  If I recall correctly, its title was Jokes and Riddles.  It was a book for children, with no dust jacket, bound in red cloth.  I found the book fascinating and may have borrowed it more than once.  In the years before then, I had read my share of Little Golden Books.

The people who ran American libraries in those years were not like those who run them today.  They were not revolutionists.  They valued order, restraint, and quiet in their libraries.  Today those who run libraries look with disdain upon such things.  Instead, they encourage conversation, commotion, busy-ness, and unruly children.  The honest ones among them will admit that they hate quiet.  But keep in mind that they are revolutionists working to advance the Revolution behind the innocent-looking word “Library”.

The thought occurred to me that the modern resentment of quiet is partly a consequence of the invention of commercial radio.  The St. Louis Public Library opened years before radio stations were established.  At that time, people in St. Louis did not have the benefit (?) of the babbling and noise and shouting and giggling that would begin to clutter up the airwaves in the 1920s and then increase exponentially to fill the airwaves 24 hours a day, seven days a week by the 1960s.  Entire generations have now gotten older (which is not to say they have grown up; that is a different matter) believing that round-the-clock chatter and entertainment is a good thing.  How could they imagine otherwise?  Radio hypesters were so intent on promoting their new invention—voices and noise coming out of boxes—that they characterized the absence of that sound as a bad thing, and expressed their disapproval in the cute little expression “dead air”.  A century later, nearly everyone has been taught to think of quiet as a form of “dead air”.  It is, of course, nothing of the kind.

“If you have libraries and the leisure to use them, but every moment of waking life is filled with loud music from Red Guards, rock music, or some other source, the libraries and leisure might as well not exist as far as learning is concerned…”, wrote philosopher David Stone.  [Quoted by William M. Briggs in “There Is No Culture Without Inequality: Stove 1”, July 9, 2024.]

And that applies with pinpoint precision to modern, hip libraries.

— Comments —

Kathy G. writes:

Every word Alan posted about libraries today is true. I used to love going to the library, now I seldom go.

“Try to find such librarians today. They have been consigned to an Orwellian Memory Hole, never to be seen, heard, spoken of, or thought about again. In their place today are the revolutionists who just love libraries filled with ‘bustle and social interaction’ and lots and lots of ‘social stimulation’ and laughter and rambunctious children whooping it up. If perchance there is a lull in those fun activities, then young, feminism-brainwashed librarians and clerks can fill the “dead air” with their own chattering and giggling.  The revolutionists are determined not to permit any library to function qua library. Their goal is (and has been for some time) to make libraries into conduits for revolutionary ideology, vocabulary, and sloganeering.”

This is also true of nearly every church, club, institution, agency, and large company in the US today. Even the Salvation Army surrendered, went “woke” and grovels to homosexuals. The slow communist march through the institutions.They have been infiltrated and subverted into serving the purposes of Gramscian revolutionary communists. It is particularly hard to see the libraries (now often called “Learning Resource Centers”, and the like) go, but they are gone, only their husks remain.

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