IN SMALL TOWNS across America–from New England village greens to sun-drenched county seats in California–there are FBI agents pounding on the doors of libraries, demanding to know what books the citizens are reading. Inside stand librarians, white-haired and apple-cheeked, resisting as best they can the terrible forces of McCarthyism, evangelical Christian book-burning, middle-class hypocrisy, and Big Brother government.
It’s a picture so poignant, one would need a heart of stone to mention that it’s also false, a deliberate and cold-blooded fabrication. Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Certainly not our Democratic presidential candidates, each of whom at some point last week spoke the word “libraries” on the campaign trail, always with a reverential catch in the voice–and always followed, shortly after, by the name “Ashcroft,” spat out with a sharp and holy scorn.
Certainly not the American Library Association, which denounced the anti-terrorist Patriot Act’s destruction of literary freedom at its 10,000-member meeting in San Diego last week.
And certainly not the activists and potential voters in the upcoming Democratic caucuses and primaries. Take an identification of Attorney General John Ashcroft as the frontman for the evangelicals’ plot to turn America into an illiterate theocracy. Add a long-festering distrust of federal law-enforcement that was denied outlet by the eight-year need to defend President Clinton’s Democratic administration. Roll the whole thing up in a belief that Republicans are all peeking, prying bigots, and you have, somehow, this shorthand way of expressing everything that’s wrong in President Bush’s America: They want to know what books we read! Republicans should not underestimate this trope. It is perhaps the single most motivating talking point on the left today, even though it has been repeatedly debunked.
Such as they are, the facts are these. A month after the attacks of September 11, Congress passed in a rush the USA-PATRIOT Act to help fight terrorism. Buried deep in the text, Section 215 amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow the FBI to examine “tangible things” in a terrorism investigation, “provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.”
Late in 2002, the first rumors of the section’s possible application to libraries began circulating. In January 2003, the American Library Association passed a resolution declaring the Patriot Act “a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users”–a declaration repeated in July 2003 and January 2004. Librarians across the nation began shredding records, posting frightening warnings, and even announcing their intention to refuse court orders: “I am literally willing to go to jail,” one California librarian announced.
Some of this may have derived from real fear that the FBI, armed with new powers, was culling library records. Much of it, though, was simple anti-Republican activism. “If We Didn’t Have Attorney General Ashcroft, We Would Have to Invent Him,” the editor of Library Journal candidly entitled a December editorial, and several commentators have noted the American Library Association’s apparent incapacity to show any comparable concern about the real imprisonment of independent librarians in Cuba this year.
Regardless, the brouhaha should have been put to rest by the revelation this September that Section 215 has never been used. “The Department of Justice has neither the staffing, the time, nor the inclination to monitor the reading habits of Americans,” Ashcroft tried to explain.
The errors of the “Bush administration vs. the libraries” trope are nearly endless. The uninvoked Section 215 doesn’t actually mention libraries and is aimed at things like airline, hotel, and bank records. Investigators have always been able to subpoena library records, and a judge still has to approve their requests–nor is it clear the new act has substantially reduced the requirements necessary to convince a judge. Besides, American law has never considered librarians as priests or doctors, holding privileged information. One doesn’t remember this level of outrage during the wide discussion of the Unabomber’s reading list.
It seems almost superfluous to add that every Democratic senator except one voted for the Patriot Act, and, anyway, Section 215 expires at the end of 2005 under the act’s sunset provision. But facts have never been the motor for this story. It’s always been about something else, something resonating at a level unreachable by appeals to reality or common sense. Republicans in Congress could pass a library exemption to the Patriot Act. Even that, we suspect, would not suffice. The picture of those white-haired librarians single-handedly braving the wrath of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft is too perfect to need to be true.
–Joseph Bottum, for the Editors
