‘Free for All: The Public Library’ Renews Appreciation for a Public Good

Once upon a time in this country, you could not come up with a more innocuous title for a documentary than Free for All: The Public Library. The moniker has all the blood-pulsing drama and cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a grade school educational film. The only conceivable title with less pizzazz might be Neither Snow Nor Rain: The Postal Service.

After all, what conflict could engulf the public library? Who could possibly be against America’s most ubiquitous and benevolent institution? The solid brick building where Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak live on orderly shelves, where great American novels co-exist with mass-market bestsellers?

A rangy history and contemporary survey skillfully arranged in a first-person frame, Free for All: The Public Library (airing Tuesday, April 29 on KQED) is both a defense of and argument for the titular institution. Amidst a 150-year parade of pioneering visionaries, community stalwarts and fiercely dedicated branch librarians, Bay Area filmmakers Dawn Logsdon and Lucie Faulknor (Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans) honor the public library and, along the way, resurface inequities embedded in America’s past.

In the current environment, Free for All feels like an act of advocacy and subversion. Foregrounding the contributions of women and the needs of marginalized groups is antithetical to the current attitude in Washington, D.C. The very fact that the case for libraries needs to be relitigated, and that the country needs a reminder of their essential utility to an enlightened populace, offers insight into how we arrived at the present state of our democracy.

Logsdon and Faulknor (along with co-writer and co-editor Elizabeth Finlayson and co-editor Debra Schaffner) strategically hop between the past and present to excellent effect. The forgotten history of America’s public libraries — a cornerstone of the American tradition of both public good and public spaces, forged by that radical leftist Benjamin Franklin — contrasts sharply with the wave of attacks on public libraries by narrow-minded parents’ groups, short-sighted tax-cutters (California’s Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13 have a cameo), religious conservatives and opportunistic politicians.

After becoming the first in their respective families to go to college, Logsdon’s parents worked as Louisiana public school teachers. They took their kids on lengthy road trips every summer, procuring temporary library cards when they settled in one spot for a spell. By the time she was 12, the New Orleans native and future filmmaker had visited nearly a hundred library branches across the United States.

Logsdon parlays this personal connection into the role of narrator and guide. She takes viewers back to the 19th century, when women were taught to read (so they could take wisdom and solace from the Bible) but not write (what did they have to contribute?), and when enslaved Black Americans were forbidden to learn to read.

The libraries were run then by men from elite backgrounds. After Melvil Dewey (yes, that Dewey) founded the School of Library Economy of Columbia College in 1887, middle-class women gravitated to the field. The status of the profession declined with the departure of men in the early 20th Century, but the next generation of women were hugely impactful. Focused on the specific needs and demographics of their neighborhoods, they made libraries indispensable resources for refugees and working-class people determined to move up the ladder.

New York librarian Ernestine Rose, who took over the 135th Street branch in Harlem in 1920 after a stint at the Seward Park Branch on the largely Jewish Lower East Side, asserted, “We show, if we can, what patriotism really is, so that the ideals of America may be realized.”

Free for All unambiguously conveys how marginalized people have always needed libraries the most. The composition of patrons changes somewhat over time; these days it includes lower-income people without internet access, people without a place to live, people of color, new immigrants and small-town LGBT teenagers.

In this age of oligarchs, it’s instructive how the filmmakers treat steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who funded the construction of hundreds of libraries nationwide. Logsdon notes that he built a library in the company town of Braddock, Pennsylvania one year after he crushed the local union. Carnegie’s gigantic profits wouldn’t have been possible without ruthless exploitation; his claim that he spent the accumulated money more wisely than the workers would have spent a raise reeks of arrogance.

The filmmakers worked on Free for All for more than a decade; I recently came across a 2014 email touting their successful Kickstarter campaign. I’m going to assume that the shape and tone of the film evolved as “alternative facts” and “fake news,” along with threats to free speech and privacy, highlighted the need for the free flow of ideas in our society, one of many benefits of the public library.

Near the end of Free for All, Faulknor and Logsdon include a snippet of a drag queen reading a children’s story. After all the testimony we’ve heard from librarians and patrons about the very real benefits of libraries, the clip underscores how trivial and dangerous the so-called culture wars are. They are not, however, innocuous.

‘Free for All: The Public Library’ airs on KQED Tuesday, April 29, at 10 p.m. as part of the Independent Lens documentary series. Details here.