Dangerous Libraries? Yes, But to Whom?

Edmund Morgan, one of the greatest American historians, has published a collection of essays (American heroes : profiles of men and women who shaped early America / at LinkCat - WAPO review) including one titled Dangerous Books (originally published in 1959). In the essay Morgan relates that the founding of Yale University in 1701 was due in significant part to concern that Harvard College (already some 65 years old by then) was teaching the boys things they ought not to read.

The Harvard faculty was disseminating the Arminian heresy - the idea that a person "could alter God's eternal decrees and get to heaven on his own merits." Arminianism was anathema to the Puritan's doctrine of predestination, which basically holds that God has already decided who is going to heaven and hell (Puritans nonetheless insisted on performing Good Deeds as evidence of their membership among the Elect.). Comparison of Calvinism and Arminianism

(By the way, there are still folks out there who are still mighty steamed up about the Arminian heresy. Who knew?)

Yale opened with two faculty members and a dozen students. There were no college buildings save the rector's house. "But there was a library....The men who founded the college had realized that it might exist without buildings but not without a library..." (Morgan). An ardent Yale supporter managed to get gifts of books from Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Sir Hans Sloane, and Richard Steele. Soon the Yale library was overflowing with "an enormous variety of riches". The students' world suddenly opened to include the ideas of Newton, Locke, Boyle, Defoe and Addison - and all at once.

Of course, the inevitable happened. Arminianism and other new ideas spread to and were propagated at Yale. The college's trustees brought in a new president to guide the boys to safer shores. And he did so, but he also kept the library and then he hired Ezra Stiles. "There was only one thing wrong with this young man: he had an insatiable curiosity. If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is surely the father of it. And invention is heresy by another name. It was probably inevitable that Ezra Stiles, placed in reach of the Yale Library, would sooner or later arrive at a number of heretical ideas." (Morgan).

The Puritans, to their credit, did not fear books or even ideas, so convinced were they of the divine superiority of their own beliefs. Stiles pursued ideas and heresies through hours and days of reading at the Yale Library. His Puritan ideas bent under the weight of the new thoughts. Stiles "read himself to the edge of deism with Shaftesbury and then tried to read himself back again..." He eventually succeeded and became a "thoroughgoing Calvinist."

"It might seem therefore that Ezra Stiles fully recovered from his bout with the library. But the books he read left a lasting mark upon him and, through him, others. Having met temptation and survived, he concluded, perhaps too easily, that others who met it....would also survive....Let men read and think freely...and they would come to the truth in the end, just as he had." (Morgan)

But Stiles went further: "If reason did not bring other men to his opinions, he was content to let them hold their wrong opinions in peace." (Morgan). Stiles later wrote, "....with this liberty, error may be introduced; but turn the tables, the propagation of truth may be extinguished." When Stiles later became president of Yale: "He not only let the students read what they wanted but encouraged them to discuss controversial questions in every field of thought." Stiles believed that truth would prevail when it came "forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an equal Footing." (Stiles)

If free inquiry led to the death of kings, Stiles was undaunted for he believed that "only tyrants need fear the truth."

Morgan summarizes: "Ezra Stiles was, as you can see, a dangerous man. But the danger lay less in his own radical views than in the freedom he wanted for others, the freedom to read and from reading to think and speak the thoughts that dissolve old institutions and create new ones. That kind of freedom is as dangerous today [1959] as it was then. If we allow young men and women to read and think, we must expect that their thoughts will not be our thoughts and that they will violate much that we hold dear."

Morgan discusses a number of "dangerous Americans who defied the orthodoxy of their times ands could teach their readers to do likewise." (Just to avoid confusion, when Morgan says 'dangerous' in this context he means dangerous to the powers that be and their orthodoxies.)

Morgan concludes that: "those who fear change and hope to find protection against it in American history are likely to be disillusioned. If they could control the kind of history taught in our schools and colleges, they might conceivably be successful. But while libraries exist, where students and scholars can go to the original sources and discover the facts for themselves, all efforts at control will be futile. The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it." (Morgan) As long as people are allowed to read whatever books they choose, "libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will preserve....the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come." (Morgan).

Amen to that, brother.

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And it is worth reembering that Morgan wrote this essay in 1959 at the height of the Cold War.