Public Libraries

What I found interesting in Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents is his description of public libraries which were established in industrial communities in the late nineteenth century as a contested terrain. He notes that it is a "ground on which issues of class access to information and recreation and of class control of that information and recreation were fought out" (48). Public library was viewed by the capitalists who endowed it as a way of "extending genteel culture" to workers and their children. For instance, in Pittsburgh and Homestead, the library was regarded as a "tool of socialization and social control, shaping habits and values, and regulating reading and recreation" (48). While public libraries sought to reform and control working class reading habits, it is interesting to note their resistance to such control. "Mill workers were suspicious of Carnegie's library, and in 1890, in Allegheny, 'working men and their representatives ... raised serious questions about who would control the library which Carnegie has offered the city'" (50).

Denning's examples show that rather than passively submitting to the ideological, moral, and social control of the dominant classes, workers had attempted to take control of their own cultural consumption, manifesting agency. The resistance of the workers to cultivate "genteel" reading tastes and reform themselves shows that they are, to an extent, actively forging their class identity in opposition to middle and upper classes. This reminded me of Paul Willis' contention in Learning to Labor - how working class youth consciously forge an oppositional class identity in public schools.