A Working Class Library
Is Something to Be

September 22, 2007

Photo credit: Flickr User OZinOh, used under Creative Commons License.

At the beginning of his biography of Walter Reuther, Nelson Lichtenstein briefly narrates the story of the public library of Wheeling, West Virginia. When Andrew Carnegie was giving out large monetary grants to enable cities to build impressive public libraries, Wheeling hesitated. Labor organized to block the construction of a Carnegie-funded library.. and therefore turned down a large pot of civic money. Lichtenstein adds:

The city eventually built its own public library, with its own funds, in the very heart of proletarian South Wheeling. [3]

Above is a photo of the library that Wheeling built in 1911.

Such a fight over philanthropic funds for a library may sound silly.. but let's try to think about this from the point of view of the unionists who lived in Wheeling. Acceptance of the Carnegie funds would have meant a free library, but it also would have brought about an industrialist/capitalist reading of their city. The evocation of great literary names from the past (Shakespeare Plato Emerson) would have helped to set the city into a common Western framework. By turning down these library funds, unionists in Wheeling allowed for an outsider reading of their city. Their library would later be built (according to Lichtenstein) in a working class area.. and, as the picture shows, it is a building that makes no overt reference to the great literary tradition. The battle over the construction of a library was not what we might call a mere "symbolic battle".. it was a battle for the interpretation of a city.

Lichtenstein writes about this struggle:

...the labor assembly's fight against the Carnegie library was but a skirmish in the larger,protracted struggle waged by so many turn-of-the-century Americans to define and defend a consciously working-class citizenship. [2]

His term "working-class citizenship" I take to be a reference to an identity category. Labor represented an understanding of the self that had the emotional power of today's identity categories such as GBLT or African American or Hispanic. It is hard today to think of labor within those strong categories, but it once did have that kind of power.. at least in some parts of the country.

An interesting aspect of identity categories is their tendency to work themselves out in a symbolic manner in the physical world. By the use of monuments, parades, banners, and all kinds of symbolic representation, an identity comes to locate itself in a place. A careful observer can then "read" a place and understand something of the identity commitments of the population. The story of white and black appropriations of the southern landscape is told by W. Fitzhugh Brundage in The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory.. and this view of the connection between personal identity and the built landscape is central to my own video explorations of places.

A library is important for another reason: for the books it carries. Here again I think we have a hard time thinking about the social value of books and ideas. The idea of "great books" makes it sound as if there is a floating mass of books that will somehow improve us all if we read them. But people do not read books as universalists; they read with their identity commitments intact.. and form canons based on these commitments. African Americans develop an African American group of literary and musical references that speak to them. White Americans do the same.. but they have the annoying tendency to universalize their preferences and act as if everybody should like these books (they are the best!). At one time there was a similar Labor canon.. and control of a library meant control of the presentation of this canon.. and therefore some control over the formation of group identity.

Lichtenstein writes the following concerning the Labor canon of writers:

Goethe and Schiller, Lincoln and Jefferson, Darwin and Huxley, were all part of an expansive socialist lexicon studied by self-taught and intellectually hungry young workers like Val Reuther. Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle... won a vast audience, while the novels and stories of Jack London could be found in almost every schoolboy's bedroom. [4-5]

There are "great books" in that list, but it is more important to recognize that this is a canon of texts that connects directly to an identity, i.e. Labor. Today Jack London is embedded in general America literature.. and his actual readership early in the 20th century is forgotten. But when studying a text these kinds of social questions should be in the forefront of our critical inquiry.. since it is a fact that identities attract canons.