Blatant Berry: Hopes and Fears for Boston

Bernie Margolis was told that his contract as president of the Boston Public Library (BPL) will not be renewed (see news, p. 16). Margolis is a strong librarian, the last of a series of great librarians who have directed BPL. I've known the last four of them. I was closest to Margolis's predecessor, Arthur Curley. Milton E. Lord, three directors before Margolis, was also a trustee at Simmons College, so his signature graces my MS in LS from the School of Library Science. I worked as a librarian at Simmons and taught there. Before that I attended Boston University. The university library was weak then, so we went down to Copley Square to use the fabulous resources of BPL.

From my time in Boston, I learned that the old city has a split personality. It's full of conservatives and liberals, those who censor what scares them and those who want to know more about it.

All those librarians who ran BPL became expert at the unique brand of urban politics needed to run a Boston city department. More important, like Margolis, they were all deeply committed to the fundamental values of librarianship. Being Boston, these were frequently challenged. It was only during Curley's tenure, for example, that a scantily clad sculpture by the great Augustus Saint-Gaudens was returned to public display in the courtyard at BPL from which it had been removed by censorious Boston Brahmins decades before. Getting “Banned in Boston” was always a great way to sell your book, play, or movie in the rest of the country.

Margolis's ten-year reign at BPL began with a dispute with Mayor Thomas Menino over filtering the web on the library's public computers. The mayor wanted filters, Margolis fought the idea. They struck the compromise that the Supreme Court picked up in its decision supporting the Children's Internet Protection Act: you can require filters on computers for kids if adults can have unfiltered access—about as good a solution as one can get in the divided Boston I knew.

From the side of Boston that celebrates learning, knowing, freedom, and the city's revolutionary roots, a few proper Bostonians wrote in 1852 the following:

For it has been rightly judged that—under political, social and religious institutions like ours—it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should 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, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely....

That quote comes from the famous Report of the Trustees of BPL (with the unwieldy title “Upon the Objects To Be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library”), recommending that the city build the library. With classic civic pride, the trustees went on to say, “…if it can be done anywhere, it can be done here in Boston; for no population…was ever before so well fitted to become a reading, self-cultivating population....”

The city built a great public library and wisely put its care and nurture in the hands of great librarians. Margolis, like his predecessors, fought for and protected BPL and those values of knowledge and freedom. The fight cost Margolis and BPL plenty, including that crucial political necessity, a good relationship with Boston's strong mayor. Margolis believes it cost the library fiscal support.

“We don't teach people in library school any skills that equip them to deal with the rough-and-tumble politics in big city government...,” Margolis told me. He, like Lord, Phil McNiff (another former director), and Curley had to learn that on the job. It only took a week for Margolis to get his first lesson. He learned fast and did a fine job for the next decade. Fundamental to that job was his grounding in those library values, values that appeal to the intellectual, revolutionary side of Boston.

Now I'm worried about BPL's future. I hope that Mayor Menino and the BPL trustees he appointed have the wisdom to be sensitive to both sides of Boston. I hope they have the good sense to appoint a librarian steeped in the foundations of the library profession, to strengthen, nurture, and protect BPL in these times. As those first BPL trustees said, “If it can be done anywhere, it can be done here in Boston.”