Ditzion Article

It is easy for me to be critical looking back on the super idealistic and sometimes seemly elitist motives of reformers but the third paragraph of the Ditzion article brings up the point that nineteenth century humanitarianism was feed by the developing field of social science. Librarians sought to help people help themselves because picking ones self up by their bootstraps was how you escaped poverty and crime. Even the quote from the American Social Science Association mentions the “causes of Human Failure,” which sounds suspiciously similar to "individual failure." That was just how social problems were popularly viewed at the time and as Ditzion makes clear Libraries weren’t the only institutions that followed this line of reasoning.

I think that Ditzion was the first in the articles that we’ve read to bring up the Temperance movement in relationship to the humanitarianism of libraries but there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between the two besides that the both touted the economic advantages of temperance. Ditzion says that he couldn’t even find information about significant Temperance work done specifically in or through libraries but suggest at the end of the section “Drink” that Temperance workers were asking too much of public libraries by asking them to remove literature that was inappropriate by their standards. He says that Temperance literature in libraries was more popular than Temperance reading rooms but doesn’t give a reason why. In his last sentence of the section he undermines Temperance workers efforts in general as if he forgot that they eventually succeed with prohibition (and later these same women who “may well have been afraid of a democratic, intelligent, free public library” also got the right to vote).