BackTalk: Can Libraries Save Democracy?

"No nation can remain both ignorant and free." This quotation from Thomas Jefferson should be the mantra of all public librarians. The freedoms we enjoy through democracy are currently endangered by popular ignorance and political apathy. Public librarians can be a big part of the solution if we will accept the responsibility. Otherwise, ours will be among the first institutions to be destroyed when democracy collapses.

Americans are just beginning to realize that we are mired in a triple crisis (the trifecta, as President Bush so jocularly terms it): an economic recession, a "war," and a national emergency. This tri-crisis is being exploited by the federal government as an excuse for strangling constitutionally established freedoms. Our freedoms and democracy itself have been eroding for many years owing to our own neglect. Lately that erosion has become a landslide into plutocracy as corporate special interests have effectively purchased the federal government.

The current national troubles provide an opportunity for librarians to demonstrate the importance of public libraries to freedom and democracy. They also provide the incentive for us to remake our profession and institutions and in the process remake America.

We laud libraries as educational and informational institutions, as centers of grass-roots democracy, crucial to community social and economic well-being. Yet those functions have sometimes been relegated to peripheral status while recreational reading and support of education have been seen as libraries' de facto priorities. These priorities have not brought libraries success or respect. Public libraries are poorly supported and are among the first public services to be reduced during any decline in local revenues. We've experienced this cycle for decades and yet have never reformulated the library's mission to make it more socially valued and more politically defensible.

What change in mission will provide the social gravitas to assure appropriate recognition and funding for libraries? The trustees of Boston PL first stated the idea in 1852 when they asked the city fathers to fund a library from taxes: "[I]t is of paramount importance that the means of general information be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order...and which we, as a people, are required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely."

The Public Library Inquiry gave us the same answer 50 years ago. The public library should be considered a primarily political institution, providing citizens with the information they need to fulfill their civic duties in our democracy. That mission has become even more imperative today as our public educational systems spew forth barely literate graduates who are then at the mercy of a rapacious economic system that threatens to co-opt our political institutions.

Librarians have never fully heeded the call to exercise their institutions' inherent and highest function as bulwarks of democracy. We must now recognize that we are part of the problem of a degenerate democracy that is in imminent danger of slipping into some bitter flavor of authoritarianism.

If informed citizenship had been the primary goal of libraries over the past 50 years, America might be a much different country. People would be better informed about political issues. Grass-roots activism would be an integral social activity. The right to vote would be understood as an almost sacred privilege exercised by an informed citizenry. Politicians would work for the public good because citizens would not tolerate undue political influence by special interests.

Perhaps it's not yet too late. Here's what public librarians must do if they would save American democracy:

• Revise your library's mission statement to prioritize the maintenance of democracy through the provision of civic information. No other major institution in American society has taken on this most important task.
• Dispense with the concept of passively providing information and the errant "give them what they want" philosophy. Americans, immersed in confusion by junk media, are distracted by junk entertainment into political apathy.
• Educate and retrain librarians as civic information specialists who develop critical issues programs, actively disseminate issues-oriented information, and encourage responsible political activity in a nonpartisan manner.
• Foment public interest in social/political issues. Creatively market your library as the civic information/action center.
• Partner with local and national organizations that promote democracy, ethical leadership, and civic responsibility.

We stand at a watershed moment. We must not take American democracy for granted. It can disappear just as did the Greek democracies and the Roman republic.

The American public library is the most important invention of our democratic society after the Constitution itself. Libraries can provide the social leverage to return America to a democratic destiny. We will be condemned by history and by ourselves if we allow democracy to perish. I'm no Tom Paine, but I'll borrow his mantle for a moment. Now is the time for all good librarians to come to the aid of their country!