In Service To the State

Wayne Wiegand's war article pertains specifically to Wisconsin during World War I which is a unique choice within the war articles we read for this week.

Most Interesting Sentence: "While the U.S. was a belligerent power in World War I, American public librarians in general, and Wisconsin public librarians in particular, entertained no thought of channeling wartime energies away from their institutions" (Wiegand, 199). While I do not question the patriotism and good intentions of these librarians, I do find it amusing that many of them would see the war as a fantastic publicity stunt on behalf of libraries. The poster opposite page 199 is a clear illustration of this desire to wrap libraries into national wartime fervor.

I was also intrigued to see that certain shipments of books simply stopped before America got into the war. One has to hand it to Britain for winning the propaganda war. The lack of German books imported into America certainly must have helped the English, however subtly. I wonder if such information could be stopped now like it was back then. Would people willingly abandon such texts in the Internet age? I doubt it, but in a post-Freedom Fries universe, it would not surprise me, either.

Wisconsin's fear that it was being perceived as having a lack of patriotism seemed quaint at first until I realized that such concerns intensely dictated the political climate as recently as 2004. Such fervor as seemed to die off a bit by mid-2005, but once again, history repeats itself.