A librarian to remember

One of the questions I most enjoyed answering in my history of free speech was, "Since when did librarians become champions of free speech?"  There was a time in this country when the leaders of the book community believed it was their job to help suppress "bad" books.  "Titillation through the imagination is not a process of nature at all," publisher Henry Holt wrote in 1922.  "It leads to more murders and suicides than all other causes put together."

Most booksellers and librarians thought the same way. An Atlanta librarian told the Library Journal in 1909 that she hid trashy novels in the stacks in the hopes that no one would find them.  Booksellers joined the censors in suppressing books in Boston during the early 1920s.  

So all of us book people were complicit in censorship.  Yet it was the librarians who came to carry the stigma of censoriousness.  The image of the shushing librarian is deeply ingrained in popular culture.

But the free expression movement in this country owes a lot to librarians.  In 1939, the American Library Association adopted the Library Bill of Rights, encouraging librarians to buy books based on their "value and interest," ignoring "the race or nationality or the political or religious views of the writers."  In 1953, when Joseph McCarthy was still riding high, librarians joined publishers in proclaiming the importance of intellectual freedom in a statement, "The Freedom to Read."

Many librarians have shown great courage in upholding free speech.  One of the most celebrated cases occurred in 1950 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, when Ruth Brown, the town's librarian for over 30 years, was dismissed for subscribing to five "subversive" publications, The Nation, The New Republic, Soviet Russia Today, Negro Digest and Consumer Reports.  (Yes, Consumer Reports!)

I knew about Ruth Brown, but I had not heard about Jeanne Layton until I read her obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune the other day.  Layton also lost her job, not in the dark ages of the McCarthy era, but in 1979.  She was fired for refusing to remove Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana, from the shelves of the Davis County library.  (Davis is a small county just north of Salt Lake City.)

It seems that Morris F. Swapp, a county commissioner who was also a member of the county library board, considered DeLillo's novel "obscene" and instructed Layton to ban it.  He had picked a fight with the wrong woman.   She not only refused to ban the book: she refused to accept her firing, launching a fight for reinstatement.  "Jeanne was a very small person in stature, but she was one of the strongest people I know," her nephew, Craig Layton, told the Tribune.

It was not an easy fight.  According  to her nephew,  it was an "excruciating" experience for the librarian.  But she won her job back in 1980, vindicating the principle for which she had fought.  "It's not the library's role to determine choices for adults," she told an interviewer in 1990.  "It's important for the library to serve everyone in the community, not just select groups."

Jeanne Layton died on January 19 at the age of 77.  Hers was a life--and an example--to be remembered.