When the British set fire to much of Washington, DC in 1814, including the U.S. Capitol building, the 3,000 volumes that constituted the young nation’s library were destroyed. Thomas Jefferson, needing the money, offered to replenish the collection from his own library of more than 10,000 volumes.
As the Library of Congress notes on it’s website:
Jefferson promised to accept any price set by Congress, commenting that “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from this collection . . . there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” Records indicate the total of volumes received by the Library of Congress was 6,487.
The Library of Congress was launched. And it has been an illustrious institution every sense.
Harry Truman, an ambitious reader all his life, sent for books from the Library during his presidency, including on one occasion researching Abraham Lincoln’s sacking of General George McClellan during the Civil War. Harry was searching for historical support for his own firing of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
The Library hold the papers of 23 American presidents from Washington to Coolidge, as well as senators, artists and writers. Jefferson’s personal library has been recreated by the Library. I’ve spent some of my best days in the Library of Congress. It is a truly magical place staffed by great and good Americans. And it’s all free.
While I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the librarian – Carla Hayden – that the famous non-reader in the White House canned this week, by most accounts she is a star in the library world who pushed, among other things, plans to digitize more of the Library’s vast collection.
As the Washington Post noted in an editorial in 2021:
One of the country’s oldest cultural institutions is now writing the book on how to adapt to a brave new world. Only a few years after being labeled a digital laggard, the Library of Congress is bringing its hundreds of millions of documents’ worth of history to citizens across the country in ever more innovative ways. The success story is one that other government agencies, from the federal level to the local, should consider.
Imagine that, bringing history to the public by making access to history easier. I can personally attest to how marvelous it is to have desktop access to digitized material from, for example, the papers of presidents like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
But back to the librarian Donald Trump just fired:
Share on FacebookPrior to her current role, Dr. Hayden was the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, since 1993. She was the deputy commissioner and chief librarian of the Chicago Public Library from 1991 to 1993, an assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Pittsburgh from 1987 to 1991 and library services coordinator for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago from 1982 to 1987. She began her career with the Chicago Public Library as the young adult services coordinator from 1979 to 1982 and as a library associate and children’s librarian from 1973 to 1979.
Dr. Hayden was president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In 1995, she was the first African American to receive Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year Award in recognition of her outreach services at the Pratt Library, which included an after-school center for Baltimore teens offering homework assistance and college and career counseling. Hayden received a B.A. from Roosevelt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago.
Among her numerous civic and professional memberships and awards, Dr. Hayden is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Read about the remarkable professional accomplishments of Carla Hayden while you can. The White House, as of Sunday morning, hadn’t gotten around to scrubbing her bio from the Library of Congress website.
Still, in an administration where expertise and judgment count not at all, the White House has its agenda, as forehead slappingly stupid as it is:
“There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a news conference Friday, referring to Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in government. “We don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well, so she has been removed from her position, and the president is well within his rights to do that.”
That is highly debatable, indeed arguably illegal.
The Library is technically and legally within the prevue of Congress, not the president. It is, after all, the Library of Congress. There is even a joint House-Senate committee on the Library that dates to 1802. The Senate confirms the librarian to a ten-year term. Ms. Hayden has a year left on her term.
Additionally, the Library of Congress, unlike the talking points of the White House press secretary, is legally the depository of every single book printed in the good ol’ USA, and it doesn’t open its collection or reading rooms to anyone under 16 years of age, but the Library does offer a wide range of programs for families.
What’s more the MAGA world clearly didn’t get the Trump memo on the awful job being done by Carla Hayden at the Library of Congress.
At a hearing of the House Administration committee Tuesday, Republican Congressman Bryan Steil praised Hayden and her staff, saying they “dedicate a lot of time and service to the country and the Library of Congress, and their work should be commended.”
Wait. What?
Maybe we’re overthinking all this.
Perhaps what Donald Trump and his book banning staffers really don’t like is the fact that a remarkably accomplished Black woman was in charge of the country’s library with a mission to make its vast and incredibly valuable contents more widely available?
Oh, and Ms. Hayden was appointed by Barack Obama. Another mark against her.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries got it right, I think.
“Donald Trump’s unjust decision to fire Dr. Hayden in an email sent by a random political hack is a disgrace and the latest in his ongoing effort to ban books, whitewash American history and turn back the clock.”
Early on this administration signaled a mission to disband American knowledge and distort American history. As The New York Times pointed out:
A push to purge references to diversity and inclusion led to a page on Jackie Robinson’s life and military career temporarily vanishing from the Pentagon website. Arlington National Cemetery web pages highlighting the graves of Black and female service members disappeared. Books including “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the novel by Harper Lee about racism in the Depression-era South, were purged from schools run by the Defense Department, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The administration is after the arts and humanities, local libraries, public broadcasting and colleges and universities. Non-profit foundations are next. The aim isn’t really to silence some “woke” approach to history or even purge books, but to twist our complex and complicated national story into some Trumpian mind pretzel of dumbness, and further eliminate critical thinking on, well, anything.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said. He was right.
The opposite of paradise is what is happening with our country’s great cultural institutions.
If you agree – resist.
Resist it with all you have.
