Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice, Together Again: Schlesinger’s Vital Center and Library Activism

Abstract

Contemporary debates within American librarianship, and in the country at large, often frame intellectual freedom and social justice as competing or opposed values, but looking back to earlier moments in the intellectual history of libraries and the country demonstrates the fundamental and interdependent relationship that exists between civil liberties and civil rights. In the early Cold War period, librarians and the American Library Association (ALA) engaged in an activist campaign to protect intellectual freedom from threats like anti-communist censorship and loyalty oaths. At the same time, historian and public intellectual Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom laid out a program of radical centrism, capturing the intellectual currents that informed ALA documents like the 1948 Library Bill of Rights and 1953’s The Freedom to Read. Revisiting Schlesinger’s work underscores the extent to which, both historically and in the present, racism and oppression represent primary barriers to the intellectual freedom of Americans and provides an opportunity to explore new framings of fundamental values within the library profession.