Cities and counties around the country have been debating whether to give more money to their local library systems. A column on the Time magazine website makes a good case for the value of these institutions by telling the story of how neglecting them in the 1930s almost had a disastrous impact on World War II.
The column is by Elyse Graham of Stony Brook University in New York, author of, “Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.”
Graham writes that today’s trend of reduced library acquisitions, along with making digital copies of library archives and then discarding the originals, is repeating the mistakes of nine decades ago, when the U.S. government had to send spies overseas to get information because America didn’t have any of it.
The government shut down its last intelligence office in 1929, leaving it with no ability to decode and read foreign diplomatic messages. This came at a tense time in world history: just 11 years after World War I ended, and only 12 years before the attack on Pearl Harbor put America into World War II.
The reason for this decision is comical: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” Secretary of State Henry Stimson said. Since then we have learned many times over that gentlemen should read stolen mail if the lives of soldiers and civilians depend on it.
In July 1941, as war raged in Europe and Asia, President Roosevelt started a new intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. (It later became the Central Intelligence Agency.) The new agency included a Research & Analysis branch, “in which analysts trained among library stacks read everything they could, from novels to newspapers to trash, and turned what they read into intelligence insights,” Graham wrote. “Their work represented a new type of spycraft.”
The OSS recruited librarians and college professors to gather information, first from the Library of Congress and then overseas. The work proved invaluable to military planners.
Due to a decade of neglect, perhaps amplified by the Great Depression, American institutions lacked detailed information about foreign countries. So OSS agents went overseas, taking photographs of some documents but sneaking others out of libraries, universities and government offices.
The information was basic but essential: What does the shoreline where our troops are landing look like? What are the street addresses of enemy factories to be bombed? But these details helped military planners. They saved American lives and ended the war more quickly.
That was a long time ago. Today, there’s a legitimate argument that since the world’s information is now online, that makes libraries less relevant and thus less deserving of taxpayer money. But Graham points out correctly that the internet would be a major target for disruption during any confrontation, so keeping hard copies of valuable information is worthwhile.
Still, pressure to cut funding for libraries isn’t going to disappear. They therefore must retain their importance by evolving into places that provide more services besides lending out books, collecting local documents and providing internet access. They must make this case in such a way to convince political officials at all levels of the merits of support.
It will be a challenge — if a library system gets more money, what’s going to get less? By any measure, though, the cost of greater support for libraries is a small price to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1930s.
