Book Review

 

Louise S. Robbins.
The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship and the American Library.
University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.

Reviewed by Zoia Horn

There is nothing like a story about a real person battling for a principle against great odds to bring a surge of faith, optimism and even action in support of the good cause. The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown is such an account

The bare bones of the story are simple.  Ruth Brown, a long-time librarian at the public library in Bartlesville, a small city in Oklahoma, was dismissed by its City Commission.  She was highly regarded in the community.  There was no question of her competency.  But, early in 1950, forty Bartlesville citizens accused her of supplying 'subversive' materials at the library (p. 55). When asked for particulars, they identified subscriptions to the Nation, the New Republic and Soviet Russia Today. The Bartlesville Library Board supported her.  A Friends of Miss Brown Committee was quickly formed to publicize what had happened and to raise funds for her.

The pressures against Miss Brown escalated.  The City Commission crafted a new ordinance that permitted a summary dismissal of the Library Board and the replacement of the board members with anti-Brown people who could then control and oversee material selection (p. 69).  Such were the times after World War II when the cold war was revving up, and anti-communism was unleashed by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy with its flagrant witch hunts and loyalty oaths. As Louise Robbins graphically describes, on the surface, this was a censorship issue.  But, the urge to censor had an underlying fear driving it.  Ruth Brown had shown a commitment to racial equality both within and outside the library.  She had informally opened the library to African-Americans; she had friends among them, and she had, most shockingly to the community, come with two African-American teachers from the local segregated school into the largest drugstore that served food (p.54) and asked to be served.  (This was five years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and before the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement.)  It was February 1950, which was Brotherhood Month, and it seemed an appropriate step to take.  She had come to her anti-racist views through voracious reading over the years, but particularly from reading Richard Wright's Black Boy.

It was Ruth Brown's anti-racism, anti-discrimination and support of interracial programs that were perceived as the threat to the comfortable life of many in the community where an adequate supply of Negro manual labor was always available to do the daily chores.  This fear of a challenge to their way of life was the driving force behind the attack on Ruth Brown.

The remarkable quality of this book is the interweaving of the social, political and economic pressures on people in this period of United States history exemplified by this incident in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Using quotes from interviews, letters, and books mentioned in her extensive notes and bibliography, she provides a sense of immediacy to the events and to the analysis of them. The many uses of anti-communism, for example, have an economic as well as a political function. Conservative businessmenused the cold war anti-communist crusade to diminish the strength of labor unions and to combat liberalism generally. (p. 6) There was a fear of losing cheap black labor by business, or fear of job competition.  The Roosevelt New Deal reforms which emphasized social and economic welfare of all people (p. 4) were called communistic, and people advocating racial justice and equality were accused of being communists (p. 159).

It then became easy to label books and other publications that were liberal or just critical of the status quo.  Librarians became even more vulnerable to pressures to remove books. Ruth Brown was one of those who battled censorship, but no one knows how many chose to avoid any problems by not purchasing potentially controversial publications.  Ruth Brown had called for help from the American Library Association, which responded by publicizing her case, and even mandated the first on-site investigation of a censorship episode. But, as Brown put it, I could notunderstand why the ALA carefully seemed to avoid the racial aspects of the case.  As a matter of fact ALA may have unwittingly helped to obscure the issues of race [and] to nullify the attention Brown was trying to focus on segregation. (p.163)

Robbins points out the importance of gender in this skirmish (in Bartlesville) and in the nationwide battles (p.154). Women's cultural boundaries were understood.  They were to be submissive, nurturant, moral, and domestic.  This community had a patriarchal atmosphere cultivated and exploited by the major employer, Phillips Petroleum Company.  Librarians being, at that time, 88.8 percent women, they were expected to provide a homelike space, well-organized materials and services, and to be submissive to the prevailing ideology.  Brown stepped over these cultural strictures when she acted upon interracial commitments. She found strong allies among other women who had turned their energies beyond home-making alone, to social reforms that would improve the general welfare: peace, consumer protection, and advancement of women and minorities.   The YWCA was central among local institutions to work for these causes.  But the power was elsewhere. She  makes an interesting point that the containment of communism was mirrored in other containments domestically: the containment of women at home or in low paying jobs; of African Americans and other minorities in segregated ghettos, with limited educational and economic opportunities; and also, the containment of ideas that might transgress the prescribed beliefs.

Ruth Brown's story became the basis of the film Storm Center, starring Bette Davis, when a screenwriter read an eloquent letter to the editor in the Saturday Review written by a friend of Brown's, describing the events surrounding Brown's firing (p.128). Here too the example of the film's making and the reactions to it is revelatory. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had as early as 1947 held hearings to uncover communist influence in the film industry with devastating results.  Suspicion and fear permeated the atmosphere within the film industry (p. 130). Blacklisting destroyed jobs for many talented people. (Some were imprisoned for refusing to name names of friends and colleagues whose freedom to speak, write and associate with others was being endangered, despite the First Amendment.)  The intimidation by HUAC's activities resulted in the film industry's choice of safe, non-controversial scripts.

The film Storm Center (originally named The Library) was going to FightMcCarthyism through film (p. 128). The core of the film was the librarian's battle against pressure to remove books that were called subversive and communist in a red scare atmosphere.  The racial equality issue is totally missing from the film.

Support for the film came from outstanding people like Drew Pearson and Eleanor Roosevelt.  ALA's Library Bill of Rights was used in a brochure put out by the Motion Picture Association of America with Eisenhower's Don't Join the Book Burners speech (p.143).  ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee chairman was used as a technical consultant on the script. A pre-release screening of the film was held at the ALA Conference for 2000 librarians.  They were less than enthusiastic about it, for varied reasons.  Storm Center received more praise and acceptance abroad.  As Robbins sums up, the film was both the Ruth Brown story and the Hollywood story for it capturedthe reality of the red scare.

Louise Robbins' first book, Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association's Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939-1969, promised much with its careful scholarship, its historical viewpoint and the enthusiasm she brought to her writing.  In The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown, Robbins has hit her long stride.  She has brought to the surface how anti-intellectualism, the cold war with its anti-communism and its flagrant manifestations of loyalty oaths, witch-hunts, censorship, and guilt by association, have divided communities, undermined democratic principles, and victimized many people.  She also shares with the reader her experience and involvement in writing about Ruth Brown.  It is good history, a good story, and an inspiration.  It is to be hoped that Robbins will take on the challenge of another book, covering another challenging period for librarians, from 1969 to 1999, with the same verve and enthusiasm.

 

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