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Book'em, Dayton [1]

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Date: 2023-09-22  

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors." – Charles Baudelaire

In the midst of the disturbingly dark news that the American Library Association reports that book bans and book challenges from January to August 2023, half of them in libraries, are 20% higher than in the same period of 2022 (the year with the highest number of bans and challenges in the 20 years that the ALA has kept count), a small spot of light was aglow in Dayton, WA. The Dayton Library, the only library in the nation that has so far been threatened with closure over book choices, was given a reprieve by Judge Julie Karl of the Columbia County Courthouse.

Dayton is the county seat of Columbia County, a rural county northeast of Walla Walla with a population of ~4000. Sandwiched between the Snake River and the Blue Mountains, and encompassing part of the historical area of the Nimiipuu (Nez-Perce Indians), the county is now mostly agricultural, noted for asparagus and the wheat that grows so well in the Palouse loess country of eastern Washington. Lewis and Clark floated along the county’s northern border on the Snake River on their way to the Pacific and camped a few miles from the present site of Dayton on their return trip.

The 86-year-old Dayton library is the only library in the county. Dayton women fund-raised for 19 years before they got help from the Works Progress Administration to build the library in 1937. In 2005, dwindling city funds led to a campaign to create a rural library district, taxing the entire county for the library but giving control to non-city residents.

The culture war broke out in the Dayton Library in 2022. Jessica Ruffcorn, a mother of two and now leader of the effort to close the library, objected to the book “What’s the T?”, described as “the no-nonsense guide to all things trans and/or nonbinary for teens”, in the young adult section. She and her supporters quickly found other books on race and sexuality that they objected to, growing eventually to 165 books. Then-library-director Todd Vandenbark declined to remove them. The library board supported his decision. But library board meetings soon become inundated by Ruffcorn and her supporters, who accused Vandenbark of being a “groomer”. This spring she began circulating a petition to put library closure on the November ballot. Vandenbark resigned in June and left Dayton, saying he was tired of the fight. His replacement, Ellen Brigham, placed the books in a new Parenting section and moved the non-fiction young adult books to the adult section, but this was not enough to satisfy Ruffcorn. She asked for the library board chair to resign and for the library to withdraw from the American and Washington Library Associations. Since only non-city voters, only about a third of all county voters, can vote on the fate of the library, Ruffcorn only needed 107 signatures to place library closure on the November ballot, and she submitted 163.

Library supporters sued the county and Ruffcorn, arguing that the initiative process unconstitutionally disenfranchised city residents, who pay taxes but would not be able to vote on the measure. They also claimed the petition process was “plagued by fraud”. On Wednesday, Judge Karl agreed and barred the initiative from the ballot. Karl said “We did away with taxation without representation a long time ago.” She also stressed the value of the library to the community as both a resource and a public space. Ruffcorn predictably vowed to continue the fight, and called Karl “a lib” whose “politics do not align with our politics”. Although Ruffcorn could appeal, I don’t think her chances at the WA State Supreme court are likely to be very good.

The story has personal as well as political meaning to me. My mother was a librarian for 50 years, primarily working as a children’s librarian for most of that time. I remember displays on banned books, controversies over some books (especially sex ed books), meetings of the American Library Association, and my mother’s assistant coming out to her one day when he did not yet feel able to come out to his own parents. Of course this eased my own coming out some years later, and libraries were where I could look for information on bisexuals.

My introduction to colleges was as a sixth-grader hanging out in the library stacks reading mythology books when my mother was a college reference librarian. If she ever had any concerns that Greek mythology includes rapes, homosexual relations, sexual infidelity, matricide and patricide, and many other violent and unsavory acts, I don’t think she ever mentioned them to me. Instead, I was encouraged to view libraries as places of freedom, ideas, exploration, and learning, and to never feel that even as a sixth grader in a college library that anything was outside my reach. It rubbed off, and there is barely a wall in my house that isn’t covered with bookshelves jam-packed with books. While my wife keeps hundreds of books on Kindle, she accuses me (with some justification) of acquiring a new shelf’s worth of books with every trip we take. And whenever we travel, books take up the largest space in my luggage.

I hope to go visit the Dayton Library some day, and see another example of the WPA legacy. I feel overdue for another trip to the Blue Mountains, where we chanced upon a Nez-Perce festival, and camped in the Wallowas. And I want to camp along the Snake River where the cliff swallows entertain above the gravel bars and other flood features from the Pleistocene Lake Missoula floods, while barges of wheat float by and coyotes peak out of the fields. It’s a short hop to Hell’s Canyon, and Dayton is on part of the Lewis and Clark Trail that I have previously bypassed. Books will make all these sights richer with context and detail, and I am glad the residents of Columbia County will still have all their rich treasures available to them. My mother would be pleased.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/22/2194762/-Book-em-Dayton

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