“To meet the needs of a nation at war” by Patti Becker

There were a few issues that Becker brings up that I thought were rather disturbing. Primarily, the idea that librarians and administrators hoped the war would signal a new phase of library expansion. I thought this idea was extremely self-serving, and evidently some dissenters caught onto the true motivations for fully supporting and working with government agencies. War should never be used for anything than the original goals stated by the government, and those should be the ones either accepted or rejected by the public. In my mind, this kind of self-serving mentality puts the librarians who tried using the war for their benefit on the same level as private contractors who salivate at the chances of government money during wartime. And when the ALA in 1941 felt they could not get “government attention” unless appearing to directly aid the war effort, what kind of attention could they mean besides money? Young men were dying in several fronts around the world and the ALA’s reaction is to plot how they can milk the government cash cow? I would have been appalled to be a member of such an organization.

There was one analysis that I disagreed with, however, which involved that of government soliciting information on attitudes of library patrons. According to the way that Becker presents the interaction between librarians and the OFF, the librarians were violating patron confidentiality when they wrote back with paraphrased, unsolicited observations from their patrons about the war and its effects on daily life. First, Becker admits that the librarians who participated never revealed names of the patrons who made the comments that were relevant to the OFF. Second, even when Kane requested information on “the actual reading done by your clients,” it is not at all clear that what he asked for or received were library records with patron’s names. Overall, she makes what seems like a plausible cooperation between those who know and those who want to know into something sinister. While I agree that librarians should protect their patrons to the end, is simply passing along unsolicited comments that were usually pro-government anyway that sinister? I think that had the government actually wanted to spy on its citizens through librarians, they wouldn’t have relegated that task to the OFF, of all agencies. It would have been the FBI, and it would have been much more secret.