Carol Kennicott's dilemma

Abstract

Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street can be used as the point of departure for an examination of the dilemmas existing in modern librarianship. Its heroine, a librarian, seeks answers to the question of what public libraries are for. Her quest has broader connotations and is related to a question of what societies are for. The US is an interesting case in this regard because of the operation of two forces, Puritanism and the Enlightenment, shaping its destiny. Unlike the US, Australia has not completely severed its ties with the mother country and this fact is reflected in the history of Australian libraries.

Keywords::

• history of libraries
• philosophy and librarianship
• librarians in literature

Readers against non-readers

For librarians, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis is a particularly interesting novel. Its heroine, Carol Kennicott, is a librarian with a mission. Her plan is to make the world a better place by encouraging people to read ‘worthy’ books. She is an idealist who dreams of lifting her fellow citizens to a higher level of being. Not satisfied with the state of affairs in America in the 1910s, Kennicott wages a war against the mediocrity, narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction of the respectable citizenry of a small Mid-West town, and pars pro toto, against the inhabitants of all small American towns who presumably share these characteristics.

At library school, she imagines her future work to be exciting and uplifting. The real library work is much less inspiring. When Carol starts her career as a librarian, working in a city library, her enthusiasm is met with indifference. Library users do not share Carol's idealistic views on the world. They are not interested in moral and intellectual improvement, opting instead for mindless entertainment or purely practical information.

When the action of the novel moves to a small town, Lewis engages in an orgy of criticism. He makes Carol see in the town's inhabitants a horde of mindless creatures who took ‘vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge’ and are ‘proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by’. The local library is neglected, the library board being composed of people who have no understanding or interest in librarianship.

People's poor reading habits are not their only vice:

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners … It is dullness made God.

A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. (Lewis 1953, 284–285)

Lewis suggests that people who do not read ‘good’ books are not capable of building a civilisation worthy of its name. Carol's suffering is particularly painful because her husband does not share her views. He describes his wife as an impossibilist and perfectionist. It seems that readers and non-readers cannot understand each other.

Carol concludes that ‘there are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine “neurotic”; mine calls his “stupid”. We'll never understand each other, never’.

Carol denies people the right to be happy and satisfied with their ordinary lives. She wants them to seek greatness while her husband believes that the search for greatness is illusory and must always end in failure. Life is hard enough without such aspirations. For him, happiness is the only attainable goal for most of us, and even that is only possible from time to time when circumstances are favourable and when our expectations are limited.

Theoretical foundations of librarianship

This problem, of happiness versus greatness, is as old as human reflection about social organisation. It is also a fundamental dilemma for librarianship. What should be the answer to the question of what libraries are for? Do libraries have a social mission and what would that mission be? Should libraries try to make people happy or make them more knowledgeable? Should readers be provided with what they want or what they need?

These questions are linked with matters of a wider nature. Libraries do not exist in a social vacuum. Their goals reflect the structure and aspirations of societies in which they function. Librarianship is determined by social developments which are in turn influenced by political structure, religious beliefs and philosophical reflection.

Barbara McCrimmon writes in the Encyclopedia of Library History (McCrimmon 1994) that Plato and Aristotle provided the ground for the philosophical reflection about libraries in the West. As Western civilisation was shaped by these two philosophers, Western librarianship has also been under their influence.

Aristotle writes in Politics that every community seeks some good. What is, then, the highest good of societies? Plato answers that it is the pursuit of an ideal, whereas Aristotle thinks that it is happiness. Plato believes in the perfectibility of man; Aristotle is sceptical whether the ideal state can be attained, considering human weaknesses.

In The Republic, Plato describes an ideal state in which guardians rule over a society divided into groups according to people's abilities. For Plato, virtue is knowledge and, therefore, it is teachable. People do bad things out of ignorance. Once they acquire more knowledge, they become virtuous. What follows is that ignorant people and societies cannot be virtuous.

In Plato's state, education plays an important role. As knowledge makes one virtuous, knowledgeable people can make moral judgements about those who are ignorant. That is what Carol Kennicott and other librarians with Platonic leanings do – they want people to read with the purpose of making themselves more knowledgeable and therefore more virtuous. Such librarians act as guardians whose role is to ensure that libraries stimulate public enlightenment and social progress. There is no place for light fiction and tabloids in libraries managed by Platonists.

In Politics, Aristotle criticises Plato's ideal state point by point on the grounds that an ideal state does not agree with common sense. According to Aristotle, Plato makes people unhappy by expecting too much from them. He sees in Plato's model of social organisation the influences of the Spartan constitution, which is ‘adverse to the happiness of the state’. Plato ignores human weaknesses. His project is impractical because it is based on a false understanding of human nature. The end of the state, says Aristotle, is to create conditions in which people will lead happy lives without troubling themselves with Plato's unattainable ideals because ‘perfection in everything can hardly be expected’. Perfectionism can only lead to despair. All utopian projects invariably fail.

These observations apply to librarianship, too. Librarians, generally speaking, can be divided into two groups, idealists and pragmatists. This division varies in intensity in different countries. It can be studied in its purest form in America.

Puritanism in American librarianship

Platonic idealism takes a peculiar form in American librarianship. It is not an accident that nineteenth century American librarians insisted on protecting the reading public from the evils of reading fiction and newspapers, which were perceived as mere entertainment. During the first phase of their history, US public libraries were understood to have a civilising mission. Library users were supposed to read serious books with the purpose of moral and intellectual elevation.

Melvil Dewey saw in the library the third pillar of a civilised society:

With the founding of New England it was recognized that the church alone could not do all that was necessary for the safety and uplifting of the people … Great educational work, now well begun, [cannot] be complete without the church as a basis, the school on one side and the library on the other. (McCrossen 2006, 181)

People could not be trusted to choose books. That choice was the domain of librarians who, as Platonic guardians, had to protect library users from their own inclination to waste time on unworthy reading matter.

Where does this strength of conviction that one is right and others are wrong come from? No doubt, the distrust of the masses could also be detected at the same time in Europe. What makes the US public libraries different from European libraries in the nineteenth century is Puritanism and its derivative, puritanism. ‘Puritanism, as a living religious tradition, died out in the course of the eighteenth century but elements of the tradition lived on … Until quite recently, New England dominated American culture and New England was wholly Puritan in origin’ (Higham 1962, 18).

Carol Kennicott does not belong to any church, but she is clearly a Puritan in her world view. She has a vision of creating a perfect community in which reading for intellectual elevation plays a central role. In Carol's pleas for serious reading, there are echoes of John Winthrop's sermon, delivered in 1630, about a city upon a hill, a new Jerusalem to be built in New England which would be a visible sign of the Puritans' covenant with God (Winthrop 1838). Carol has a sense of being chosen for a task of extraordinary importance: that of making people better educated, as if the salvation of the community depended on it. She imagines her position in the society to be similar to that of the ‘saints’ in early New England who acted as guardians of the Godly Commonwealth.

Lewis seems to be aware that his socialist views are mixed with Puritanism. He declares: ‘I am an old evangelist – a moral evangelist preaching to my people … Really I should have been a preacher’ (Dooley 1967, 240). He makes Carol a preacher too, a believer in the power of reading to save souls, proselytising among those who care only about their earthly happiness. Carol is the descendant of Puritan zealots.

The Enlightenment and the perfectibility of man

However, the matter is much more complicated. America was built on two pillars, those of Puritanism and the Enlightenment, with far-reaching consequences for its social institutions including libraries. America was created twice, the first time when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and the second time when the Founding Fathers declared independence from England in 1776 and thus re-created America as an enlightened republic. The Pilgrim Fathers were motivated by a religious idea and their aim was the creation of a theocratic state. The Founding Fathers cared primarily about the rational organisation of the state whose role was to create an environment in which people could focus on the pursuit of happiness. The aim of the state was the safety and happiness of its citizens rather than some grand, religiously inspired project. Happiness features prominently in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness … it is the Right of the People to … institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

However, it does not mean that Puritanism vanished from peoples' minds. Many Enlightenment thinkers were so enthusiastic about the notion of the perfectibility of man that they cared little about ordinary human needs and desires.

The project of building an enlightened republic could only succeed with the participation of informed citizenry. There was, therefore, a need for places where ordinary people could transform themselves from subjects into citizens. Thus, the idea of a public library as a democratic institution emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Its mission was nation-building. It is significant that one of the Founding Fathers and an archetypal American, Benjamin Franklin, is also the founder of a library. For Franklin, libraries are the very essence of civilisation. He credits the North American subscription libraries with many positive developments in his country:

These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges. (Franklin 1969, 67)

Franklin is obsessed with moral and intellectual improvement through study. He approaches his project of making himself a better person with quasi-religious zeal. Raised as a Presbyterian, Franklin abandons his church to become a deist. Sunday, which should be a day of worship, is now devoted to studies. His enterprise of achieving moral perfection is indeed a bold one.

Carol Kennicott is also a perfectionist. Like Franklin's, her energy is also channelled into making herself a perfect person and moulding her environment to fit her ideas. She fails because people forgot about the original idea of the America of the Pilgrim Fathers and the subsequent one of the Founding Fathers. They lack the zeal of their ancestors. Main Street can be considered a jeremiad, a favourite genre of Puritans, a call to action by juxtaposing the current, lamentable state of affairs and the ideal to which all should aspire.

Jeremiads are not uncommon in American librarianship. Librarians with puritanic inclinations bemoan the lack of interest in serious reading among the wider public and the apparent commercialisation of libraries.

‘An exclusive life goal of purely material achievement is profoundly inadequate to express the essence of what is to be human’ laments William J. Gilmore in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835. He also believes that lost virtues have to be revived. Americans risk perdition if they do not change their sinful habits: ‘Which path will we choose to outpace forces portending our collective destruction?’ (Gilmore 1989, XIX). These dramatic statements suggest that the modern American way of life offends against the original American project in its two versions, Puritan and humanistic. For Gilmore, the role of reading in people's lives is inherently connected with the idealistic projects of their ancestors. The original mission of libraries, of elevating moral and intellectual standards in the community, must be restored. Reading needs to become again a necessity of life.

Libraries as democratic institutions

The American Revolution triggered a process of democratisation which seems to be unstoppable. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, is sceptical about the dominant doctrine of the Republic, that of the perfectibility of man. It is impossible, Tocqueville considers, to make people more intelligent for the simple reason that intellectual work requires considerable time to be devoted to it. In order to survive, people must work. They can only read in their leisure time. Even people equipped by nature with superior intelligence often fail in their intellectual endeavours. How would it then be possible for the common people to succeed when they have neither mental capabilities, nor time, nor inclination for such efforts?

Tocqueville discovers in democracy the propensity to act impulsively in the search for instantaneous gratification. In a democratic society, the dominant majority makes dissent futile. People are strongly convinced that they live in the best of all possible worlds and do not tolerate criticism. ‘I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. … The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause’ (Tocqueville 1863, 339).

This attitude to life has implications for all social organisations, including libraries. In the democratic model of librarianship, all wishes of citizens – who are taxpayers – have to be respected. The role of librarians is to provide the public with popular books regardless of their quality. In other words, librarians are passive intermediaries between books and readers.

In the aristocratic society, if one is to use Tocqueville's vocabulary, librarians play an active role of selecting reading material according to its potential value of making readers more knowledgeable, better in a moral sense, and stronger in character.

Democratic libraries collect trivial reading material of ephemeral value. They provide people with books that give readers temporary enjoyment but no lasting satisfaction and the appearance of knowledge instead of true knowledge. Such libraries are popular but not necessarily respected. Aristocratic libraries are selective in their collection policies. They provide people with demanding literature and scholarly books that require intelligence, time and effort to understand. The problem is that not many readers have the inclination or the time for attentive reading.

Modern librarians are faced with a dilemma. Can libraries be both democratic and aristocratic institutions? American librarians can discuss these problems by referring to the rich literature from the time when their nation was being created. In the Declaration of Independence, both idealists and pragmatists can find arguments supporting their position.

American librarians are in a comfortable situation because of a long tradition of treating libraries very seriously indeed. The Puritans' attachment to education and the Founding Fathers' optimistic vision of humanity have created a fertile environment for libraries.

Librarianship in other countries: the case of Australia

Even in countries with the same language and similar institutions as the US, the way librarians think about their role in the society can be quite different. These differences can be illustrated by comparing the US with Australia.

If the US is a heterogeneous society, an embodiment of both Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, then Australia is rather an Aristotelian creation. Its beginnings are marked by the need to survive in a harsh environment by a group of convicts and marines whose only aspiration was to return to England. ‘Necessity and not vision founded Australia … for there was no escaping the fact that New South Wales was founded as a gaol’ (Crawford 1968, 35). Australians do not have their own foundation myth. They cannot judge the current state of affairs by comparing it with the idealised beginnings, as in the US.

Another factor, of Australian institutions being modelled on British ones, is also important. A penal settlement in New South Wales could not be anything but an outpost of the British Empire. Its administrators were Englishmen, acting on orders from London. Their world view found expression in the way the colonies were organised.

The role of Lachlan Macquarie is particularly important. His enlightened policies, which he implemented as the fifth governor of New South Wales, shaped the future of the colony. Macquarie was an enlightened autocrat who provided convicts with incentives to become law-abiding citizens. Religion was not an important factor in the colony; Macquarie was a freemason. His emancipist policies fit well with the Zeitgeist of the late eighteenth century when people were motivated by the ideas of the Enlightenment such as deism, natural religion, meliorism, social progress and common humanity. Some mental effort is now required to appreciate how progressive the Scottish, French and American forms of the Enlightenment were. Australia was established in a period marked by the irreverence of picaresque novels of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, the political radicalism of Thomas Paine, the revolutionary fervour in France, the philosophical scepticism of David Hume, the liberalism of John Locke, the economic self-interest of Adam Smith and the hostile attitude to Christianity of Edward Gibbon. In his monumental and idiosyncratic history of Australia, Clark (1985, vol. 1, 72) puts the Enlightenment in the centre of colonial Australia:

the settlement would solve the overcrowding in the gaols, effect mundane benefits by an expansion of commerce, or even create a new society in which the great dream of the enlightenment would come to pass – the perfection of the human race … these victims of the overcrowding of the gaols were making the voyage across the oceans of the world as exiles of not only from their families and their country, but also from God.

God is indeed rather absent in Australia and Australians are reluctant to discuss religious matters. For historical reasons, Australians distrust idealism of the religious kind and are reluctant to talk about religion and politics as they fear sectarian divisions. However, historian John Hirst complains that avoidance of matters that are thought to be divisive contributes to ‘the vacuousness of our public discourse’ (Hirst 2009, 19).

The fact that Australia is a British creation cannot be overstated. There are many signs that Australia is still, to a certain extent, a dependent country and its culture derivative. The head of state is the British queen and her representatives act as governors, or viceroys, both at the federal and state levels. The political system is based on the Westminster model and the legal system shows little divergence from British common law. Australia is a constitutional monarchy and its laws still require royal assent. For baby-boomers, being British was a tangible reality only several decades ago. Journalist Terry Lane (2004) recalls reciting in his school days in the early 1950s: ‘I am an Australian, I love my country the British Empire. I salute her flag, the Union Jack and I honour her king, King George the Sixth’. Australian citizens ceased to be considered British subjects only in 1984. The umbilical cord between Australia and the mother country has not yet been completely severed because, curiously enough, many Australians want their country to remain politically and culturally attached to England.

British colonial libraries in Australia

It is justifiable, therefore, to treat the first phase of the history of Australian libraries as the history of British colonial libraries in Australia; seeing it in any other way would be an anachronism. Australia's dependence on Britain has shaped its libraries and retarded the development of readership of indigenous literary works. Even today, Australian classics are under-represented in public libraries. There is little nationalism in collection policies of Australian libraries and even Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, arguably the best Australian novel, is not always found on library shelves.

The library movement in Australian colonies was imported from Britain as mechanics' institutes in Victoria, and schools of arts in New South Wales and Queensland. Originally, the purpose of these institutions was to elevate the working class to a higher cultural level. It was a top-down, rather than bottom-up, process and for that reason did not last long. Utopian idealism was behind the movement, which eventually died out due to the lack of popular support. Richard Myers wonders about ‘the extent to which Mechanics Institutes in Australia existed for the education of the working classes and, conversely, the extent to which they were really middle class social clubs masquerading under a false name’ (Myers 1999, 2). There were over 1000 mechanics' institutes in Victoria in their heyday, but many closed before the end of the nineteenth century. Their gradual demise was due to the limited enthusiasm for moral elevation among the users of these institutions.

The prevailing mood of that time among working men was that of egalitarianism, mateship, democratic instinct, distrust of the authorities and disinterest in abstract thinking. ‘Not so much gentlemening, if you please!’ says a gold miner in Australia Felix, the first part of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony – ‘Men's what we are – that's good enough for us’ (Richardson 2011, 14). Australians were satisfied with themselves and refused to be turned into gentlemen. For some observers, Australia was excessively democratic. D.H. Lawrence criticised its democratic spirit in Kangaroo. For A.D. Hope, Australians were Nietzsche's Last Men and Australia was

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,

The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

In them at last the ultimate men arrive

Whose boast is not: “we live” but “we survive”,

A type who will inhabit the dying earth. (Hope 1972, ‘Australia’).

Australian literary culture is split into two streams. In literature, sentimental patriotism of bush nationalists such as A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Henry Lawson coexists uneasily with the cosmopolitan sophistication of expatriates such as Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and Martin Boyd. Readers of novels written by the latter group are in the minority. Men and women with intellectual aspirations often feel uneasy about their appreciation of literature and art, which is not shared by the majority of their compatriots. It is one thing to read a simple poem by Paterson or Lawson and another to devote several days or weeks to Richardson's opus magnum of around 800 pages, depending on the edition. Serious reading is a peculiar occupation, akin to contemplation. It is solitary, time consuming, intellectually demanding and bringing no obvious benefits.

The current issues in Australian librarianship have their origins in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the initiative to establish publicly minded cultural institutions failed to resonate with the wider public. Mechanics' institutes, literary institutes, athenaeums and schools of arts were eventually replaced by government-funded public libraries after Ralph Munn and Ernest Pitt issued a damning report on Australian libraries in 1935 (Whitlam 1986). Once municipal and shire councils were made responsible for the maintenance of public libraries, funding was no longer a problem. The question of what libraries are for remained.

Public libraries usually state that they have a dual purpose, that of instruction and entertainment. In practice, it is difficult to achieve a proper balance between these two conflicting aims. One could argue that entertainment dominates over instruction in Australian libraries. It could not be otherwise in a thoroughly democratic society.

Libraries in a Benthamite society

In his essay Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society, Hugh Collins asserts that Australia's dominant political ideology is utilitarianism. In a Benthamite society, people are focused on striving to be happy and political institutions are charged with the aim of creating conditions conducive to the pursuit of happiness of the greatest number. Pragmatism reigns in such a society. Collins writes that ‘The expectations are mundane and unheroic; there is neither a messianic mission nor a return to a classical ideal. Utility imposes its own discipline upon reality and sets its own limits to imagination’ (Collins 1985, 149). H.C. Allen observes that ‘the element of perfectionism, which is so marked in the American character, is conspicuously absent in the Australian’ (Albinski 1985, 405).

Utilitarianism is also clearly visible in Australian libraries. Librarians are devoid of Platonic inclinations and their focus is on serving the largest number of readers by providing them with popular reading material. As democratic institutions, Australian libraries fulfil their mission admirably. They are well managed and organised, librarians are efficient and polite, and collections are constantly updated. Readers can even access vast online collections of texts, music files and audio books from home.

At the same time, most public libraries have little to offer to a discerning reader. Even a superficial examination of collections of public libraries reveals the under-representation of classics and over-representation of best sellers in fiction. In the non-fiction section, there are many books written by those whose aim is commercial success. It is not uncommon for libraries to have a corner where young people play video games on library-owned equipment. In newly developed suburbs in particular, libraries are more like entertainment centres than traditional libraries. It is often easier to find a book on divination, witchcraft and casting spells than a book on philosophy.

Collins warns that Benthamite societies have limitations that make them ill equipped to face challenges from outside. When he wrote his essay in the mid-1980s, the biggest challenge was Soviet communism. Since that time, new challenges have emerged that are more difficult to comprehend. New phenomena such as rising Asia, militant Islam and bellicose Russia require intellectual engagement; it would be irresponsible to escape from it into entertainment.

Australian librarianship needs a rethinking of its priorities. There is too much emphasis in it on practical and technical matters and not enough philosophical reflection. More intellectual boldness is needed in thinking about the purpose of public libraries. The author of this essay believes that a shift is needed towards more instruction and less entertainment. The latter can easily be found elsewhere.

American librarians are in a peculiar position of being able to draw from two very different traditions which, when combined, proved to be a rich source of ideas for modern librarianship. A fruitful tension between Puritanism and humanism, idealism and pragmatism, and elitism and egalitarianism makes society and librarianship in the US particularly interesting for Australian librarians to study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miroslav Kruk

Miroslav Kruk undertook his studies in librarianship at the Department of Librarianship, Archives and Records at Monash University. He was awarded the Graduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies in 1998. He works as an abstracter at Roy Morgan Research in Melbourne.