When communal spirit lacks
If they didn’t already exist, public libraries would never be established in today’s America
Thank goodness public libraries already exist because if they didn’t, there’s no way we’d ever be able to establish similar institutions in today’s dis-United States of America.
There are a number of reasons I’m skeptical. For one, belief in institutions, in general, is at an all-time low ebb.
Government, schools, churches — the entities in which people are expected to come together and sacrifice some portion of their individual well-being for an overall increase in the common good — either have significantly less salience in today’s society (churches) or are under direct assault by forces that seem to not just be partisan politically but actively anti-democracy.
There also seems to be an overall lack of communal spirit.
“I’ve got mine” could be the slogan of our age. Our inability to act collectively to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic is illustrative here. Inconvenience or discomfort or, worse, someone else getting something one thinks they might not “deserve” would all make libraries a difficult sell.
I can imagine the internet hot take: Why punish people who can afford to buy books by making them free to read for everyone?
Or government giveaway: why we shouldn’t let people who can afford books read them for free.
Even if public libraries could be established, extremists are currently making what’s on the shelves central to their culture war campaigns, including some folks in Texas campaigning to have Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” removed because it is, somehow, pornographic.
It is sometimes difficult to tell if these campaigns are cynical bad faith to increase partisan temperatures before an election or sincere attempts by people who prioritize their own worldview over an expansive polity that makes room for multiple perspectives, but the upshot is the same: A shared public institution like a library would never get off the ground.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we also have a different class of robber barons in the 21st century.
As many know, a good chunk of the nation’s public libraries were founded through grants given by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. In 1919 nearly half the 3,500 libraries in the country had been established thanks to Carnegie money.
Illinois was home to 105 Carnegie libraries, many of which still operate, others of which have been repurposed, and still others of which have been lost. But it is the idea that every community should have a library that is most important, something Carnegie believed.
It’s not that Carnegie was some kind of secular saint. Much of his wealth was garnered through crushing laborers and engaging in monopolistic practices. His later-in-life philanthropy very much feels like a form of public penance, but we cannot deny that Carnegie’s gifts have had an enduring public benefit.
Meanwhile, today’s billionaires are launching rockets into space. Excuse me, not even all the way into space, into the “lobby” of space.
Even worse, by contemporary standards, when adjusted for inflation, Carnegie’s peak wealth — around $500 million during his time, the equivalent of $15 billion or so today — is a fraction of that held by figures like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, all of whom have fortunes north of $75 billion.
Carnegie’s investment in libraries in today’s dollars would amount to less than $800 million.
While I’m sure billionaires do some charitable giving, they do not approach the scale of their predecessors like Carnegie.
There are some exceptions, including Mackenzie Scott, ex-wife of Bezos, who has donated $3.8 billion of her money to various causes, giving heavily to educational institutions.
She gets it. What’s wrong with the rest of them?