The Purpose of the American Library

An Inane Sentence: "George Ticknor [the liberal in a conservative family] was the son of a learned and prosperous father who sent his precocious boy to Dartmouth, Harvard, etc." (Harris, 2510).

Though I can appreciate that Harris is just trying to start a debate, I find it tiring to listen to him when he tries to slam historical characters he really could never know that much about. He himself admitted that he wrote the article without having all the facts. The significance of this article, more than anything else, was that it seems to have created some welcomed drama in the library field. It made for some pleasant conversation, and some lovely refutations from all sorts of well-known librarians, including our own Christine Pawley if I remember correctly.

It really just reminds me of the politics of personal destruction as we came to know them 1960-present. If Michael Harris was using incomplete evidence, then that is the intellectual equivalent of throwing some stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. In the end, if immigrants triumphed in the face of elitism in librarianship, then it's hard to say just what Harris was trying to accomplish (besides the feather rustling).