Is Boston Telling Whoppers over First Library?

Walter Skold writes “The noisy herd of Donkeys assembled in Boston this week are being fed the same kind of “enhanced truths” from Beantown that jaded voters expect to hear from politicians these days.
In spiffy subway ads paid for by Boston 2004, Inc., signed by Mayor Thomas Menino, and created pro-bono by Arnold Worldwide advertising, the host city makes several false claims, the first being that Boston is the home of America’s first public library.

Being from Pennsylvania originally, where another ex-Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, created the first shareholder library in 1731 (which relied on dues, not taxes or town vote), I was immediately skeptical of this claim.

So I contacted the Peterborough, New Hampshire library, which is considered by most library historians as the first public lending library in the US. Michael Price, the director, responded with a quote from an official Boston Public Library publication in 1911, which admitted:

“The free town library of Peterborough, New Hampshire, now recognized as the first free public library supported by a municipal tax among English-speaking people, was established…” in 1833.“So much for corporate memory,” he quipped, joking that Peterborough (pop 6,000) doesn’t have enough money for an ad campaign.

“I think their justification is that they’re bigger, so they count more” added Brian Hackert, the reference librarian at Peterborough.

“We both apply the same library characteristics to our origins, and the timeline clearly shows that they were later,” wrote Hackert, “Yet they deliberately enhance their history by mislabeling themselves.”

For a DNC delegate from New York it would be like seeing an ad which claimed Boston has the world’s winningest baseball team. Preposterous! Outlandish! Au Contraire!

So, unless someone from Mayor Menino’s office goes over to the BPL rare book room and stuffs that 1911 report into their pants when the archivists aren’t looking, it is valid to ask “Why is Boston lying?”

It’s a shame when a big city attempts to drop the historical record of a little town like Peterborough into an Orwellian memory hole! Why should Big Brother Boston take all the credit?

Officials at Arnold Worldwide contacted Friday said that perhaps those who worked on the campaign could get back to me Monday, and the first BPL officials I contacted Thursday morning stuck by the claims on their website. (http://www.bpl.org/guides/firsts.htm). They were also swamped with preparing for big DNC events, so they couldn’t give my little question first billing.

Then on Thursday afternoon BPL’s President, Dr. Bernard Margolis, was gracious enough to send me a quick e-mail in which he upheld Boston’s claims, but also acknowledged the “semantic issues” and long-standing “jockeying with Peterboro” that is involved as well.

Margolis mentioned that Bostonians, not BPL as a modern institution, notes a “continuous line of service� that goes back to 1657, when Captain Robert Keayne’s left money in his will for a library. Some public monies were voted for the upkeep of this building, which housed State records, but it burnt to the ground in 1711.

Michael Price acknowledged that “it basically comes down to how you define a ‘public library’,” but still maintained that based on the standard definitions of what constitutes a tax-funded public library, “It happened here first, in 1833.”

There is also the matter of the conclusion from BPL’s own 1911 report, and the consensus among library historians that Peterborough was first.

An official ALA history from the sixties akknowledge that the BPL was the first large public library in America, whose founding in 1848 and opening in 1854 did have had the most influence on the future of public libraries. For this Americans should be grateful.

Nonetheless, Hackert argues that BPL fudges on their title “to make it more important,” and thinks “they have an obligation to include the word “large” wherever they make the “first” claim.”

And to confuse things, there are other claimants to the title of first public library too: Charleston, SC; Brunswick, NJ; Salem, MA; Salisbury, CT; and even more.

The ALA comes to town next January and those 20,000 delegates know how to do their fact checking. Maybe the BPL could sponsor a good-old American debate and representatives from each library could state their case?

As for the Boston2004 propa, uh, I mean ad campaign, the even bigger beefless whopper they are selling to DNC delegates is this: they are claiming that “Democracy” itself was created in Boston!

Can you beat that one!

Are there no Greeks in Boston who read that and reach for their swords?

When is John Edwards going to call one of his trial-lawyer friends and seek damages in a class-action suit for false advertising?

It is a sad day for our Constitutional Republic when a founding city has forgotten the warnings of it’s founding fathers. If a delegate goes over to majestic BPL and asks for the original papers of John Adams, they’ll find this quote that Boston 2004 somehow overlooked:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.�

Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark is in the same vein: “an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic.”

Maybe the Donkeys don’t want folks to be reminded that gaining power by trading votes for programs that are paid for in mandatory taxes wasn’t a virtue in 1776? Come to think of it, lot’s of their fat, big-spending friends among the Elephants about to stampede in New York probably agree!

With all due respect to Boston — which does have great baked beans, excellent universities, a vital history of liberty, a baseball team that brings Yankee fans joy each fall when it tanks, and a truly historic library — change the Pinocchio claims in your next ad campaign.

Or prove them.

As for Al Gore, I just have one word of caution. You better guard your legacy, like Peterborough, cause pretty soon Menino and the creative folks at Arnolds may be claiming that Boston invented the Internet too.

Walter Skold is a card-carrying member of the ALA and the BPL and an independent librarian and journalist currently living in Maine, the first
state in the Union.”