Fain: "Books for New Citizens" Article

When I started reading this article I was worried that it was going to rehash the debate over whether the early public library was a tool for social control or more a progressive institution. This article does deal with this debate but to Fain’s credit not by making generalizations about huge social, political and economic factors but by narrowing in on the immigrant experience with public libraries in the late 1800s.

Fain argues that the librarians saw it as their job to Americanize immigrants. Given that the goal was assimilation it’s not that surprising that bringing foreign language books into the library would be a contentious issue. But it also sounds a lot like “the fiction problem” where light reading was offered to entice people inside. I had to look up the word “polyglot” and was surprised at its neutral definition considering the negative connotations the editor of the Library Journal weighted it with. It reminded me that we can debate the motives and integrity of Americanization efforts where there was subtle subconscious ethnic and racial prejudices that might have underlay some librarians’ good intentions but there was also glaring discrimination that was just as socially acceptable. It reminded me of the discussion we had in class about how historians with an understanding of sexism see feminization with contemporary understanding.

I liked the accounts of individual Americanizers in the library because it really illustrates that not only were there different routes that people took to foster assimilation but there were various standards of the appropriate level of American-ness that an immigrant should have. For example, Carr didn’t encourage people to stop being Italian but (as bad as it sounds) to be less Italian and more American.