Library renewals: private citizens are remaking a public institution

Reason, March, 1994 by Elizabeth Larson

At a private institution, a censorious librarian is accountable to the board of directors and the community. The financial lifeblood of a private library flows directly from local citizens through their money and volunteer time, rather than indirectly through taxes. Popular objections to a librarian who began censoring books would be felt immediately through lost donations and customers.

In fact, the main advantage of private libraries is their responsiveness to the needs and wants of users. By contrast, public funding through taxes isolates the library from the community. And if a community isn't interested in its library, all the inspiring rhetoric about enriching people's lives won't mean a thing.

Andrew Carnegie learned this lesson around the turn of the century. Carnegie had immigrated to the United States from Scotland at age 13 and built a huge fortune as the owner of Carnegie Steel. After retiring some 50 years later, he devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy. Motivated by the Progressive notion of uplifting people by providing them with free books, he donated more than $40 million ($324 million in 1992 dollars) between 1886 and 1919 for the construction of almost 1,700 libraries across the United States. The gifts came with one major condition: Each town had to promise to support its library with annual taxes equal to 10 percent of Carnegie's original investment. But the taxpayers in many towns refused to uphold their half of the arrangement--often within the first year after their libraries opened.

The experience of one Texas town, as related by historian D.W. Davies, was typical. After the citizens lost interest in the library, tramps began calling it home. The books that Carnegie thought would help people better themselves were burned for heat. The shelves went up in flames next. Left with the library's ravaged interior, the town council decided to auction the building. The only taker was a barber who wanted it for his shop. After a council member observed that the town might have to give the Carnegie Corp. any money raised from the sale, the council called off the auction and boarded up the building. Similar events happened in so many towns that, after an investigation lasting several years, the Carnegie Corp, decided that lack of interest rather than lack of money was the problem. In November 1919, it stopped the donations.

Carnegie was not the only philanthropist to overestimate the demand for libraries during the last two centuries. Davies writes: "Those interested in the establishment of popular libraries were naturally people interested in books. When they polled their friends and acquaintances, people of similar tastes, they were delighted to find that large numbers of them were also interested in books. In this way the belief was created that a considerable segment of the population was afflicted with bibliophilia."

This sort of enthusiasm can lead to failures like the many unsuccessful Carnegie libraries, but it can also sustain such institutions as Sedona's free private library. "Everyone saw the need for a library, and since it wasn't going to cost the taxpayers anything, there wasn't anything to complain about," Gene Ash, one of the library's founders, told Sedona Magazine in 1992. "After all, who doesn't like books and magazines and information? If they don't, they sure are a sorry lot."