[Publib] Among Fellow Travelers

[Backwage at aol.com]

There are a few writers, not more than a hundred thousand,  with whose 
writings librarians should be or become familiar in order to  provide their 
patrons with adequate service.  And also in order to perform  that other 
function of librarians, the defense of personal rights and  liberties.
 
It is not in the job description that librarians should have read  
everything worth reading, but it is a very good idea that they die trying.   One of 
the more interesting ways a librarian can kill herself is by examining  the 
collected writings of that other champion of liberties, I. F. Stone.   
Stone, for those of you not old enough to know him, was a sort of  
socio-political investigative reporter whose blacklisting led him to produce his  own 
weekly publication--in a time long before the Internet, when the thing had  to 
be mailed to its small list of fearless subscribers, never numbering more  
than 70,000, and usually far fewer than that.
 
I write "fearless" because the folks who signed up for Stone's Weekly knew  
or should have known that they would become targets for the FBI, as was 
Stone  himself.  In our own time people have been banned from public and  
private employment for belonging to certain clubs, reading particular books  and 
stating their beliefs where they could be heard.  Stone cast a bright  light 
on the claims and acts of government, particularly when government wanted  
to commit armies, attack regimes, or suppress liberties.  His store of  
information came almost exclusively from public documents--testimony to the  
value of transparency in government and the value of hard-copy records in 
public  depositories.
 
Stone almost never turned a profit on his work.  He lived very close  to 
the ground.  His whole life was his writing, and his writing was known  to 
only a few people.  Many of those were librarians.  The Weekly  was subscribed 
to by a handful of libraries--most of them in  universities.  In case you 
missed the significance of this, think of it  this way:  If you wanted to read 
that your own government might be lying to  you in matters of great 
importance (and wished also to avoid losing your job  during one of those periodic 
spasms of idiocy we know as Red Scares) you could  find out this information 
only from a library.  The library would not  reveal that you had asked for 
the Weekly, nor that you had read one of Stone's  books.  
 
[As a kid I discovered a copy of Stone's Weekly in a neighbor's home.   It 
had been passed around like a samizdat manuscript, hand-to-hand, and looked  
as though it had been smuggled around the gulag a few times.  Which it had, 
 in a manner of speaking.]
 
Those wishing to acquaint themselves with Stone, whose writings seem more  
and more valuable in a time when we have replicated the Tonkin Gulf incident 
in  the matter of those "weapons of mass destruction," may inquire at 
either their  own library or via the usual bookstore sources.  
 
M. McGrorty
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