Can the KC Public Library Revive Its Golden Age?

The Kansas City Public Library actually had a Golden Age. From the years 2005 to 2020, no public library in America did more to enlighten and entertain all of its patrons than did Kansas City’s. Unfortunately, the library fell harder and quicker than the Kabul airport. If the library now has any educational value, it is to remind taxpayers of the dangers of institutional capture.

Kansas City’s library owed its prior success to the visions of two men, Crosby Kemper III, who served as library director from 2005 to 2020, and the late Henry Fortunato, his director of public affairs from 2006 to 2015. A rarity in the library biz, Kemper was a Republican. As to Fortunato’s politics, he was an ex-New Yorker who didn’t drive a car. You tell me.

What Kemper and Fortunato had in common was a passion for open dialogue and diversity of opinion. Together, they created what has been described as a “programming juggernaut.”

Their work caught the industry’s attention. In 2008, the library was awarded the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Said Democrat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of the honor: “Through their efforts, they have let loose imaginations, inspired change and become a cornerstone around which our entire community gathers.”

The secret sauce was balance. Kansas City became a must-stop for speakers of all political persuasions. On two occasions that I know of, nationally known authors volunteered to speak at the library to promote their new books.

Both were advancing theses that bordered on the conspiratorial. Kemper knew I had written on the same subjects but from an opposing perspective. He asked me if I’d be willing to put my knowledge of these subjects to the test in something of a public debate.

I jumped at the chance. The would-be speakers, alas, recoiled in terror. They weren’t used to being challenged. Better to peddle their Kool-Aid at lesser libraries where the audiences had been pre-programmed to drink whatever the programmers served up.

In November 2019, President Trump nominated Kemper to serve as the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Kemper’s reputation for fairness was such that the American Library Association endorsed his nomination, and the U.S. Senate confirmed it.

I am not sure the association would endorse Kemper today. Deranged by the mania surrounding COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd, it lost its balance and elected Emily Drabinski president in April 2022.

Upon her election, Drabinski infamously tweeted, “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity!”

Solidarity for thee, but not for me. Drabinski’s election seems to have activated sleeper cells now keen on imposing their collective idea of a better world on even small-town libraries.

I got a taste of the frenzy first-hand. In 2023, I was “disinvited” from speaking about my memoir “Untenable” at a local library in New York state after a coterie of local activists decided the material wasn’t fit for adult ears.

The fact that the town had a Republican mayor and the county voted 60-40 Trump did not concern the library board. Neither did the fact that my wife and other friends were—past tense—benefactors. For progressive activists, agenda trumps common sense, even survival.

Benefactors of the Kansas City Public Library have felt the tremors here at home. No longer “a cornerstone around which our entire community gathers,” the library has turned exclusive, elitist, divisive. Major slices of the community have suddenly found themselves unwelcome.

One long-time patron, Dwight Sutherland, has launched a one-man crusade to show the library board and its executives just how ideologically lopsided the programming has become.

As he pointed out in a letter to Margaret Perkins-McGuinness, the library’s deputy director for philanthropy, over the past couple years, the library has featured at least 30 programs “designed as a critique of America from the standpoint of political correctness.” In that same period, the library featured just one speaker or program that catered to conservative tastes.

The imbalance is not a statistical fluke. It is baked in. Programming recommendations emanate from in-house propaganda arms like the Refugee and Immigrant Services and Empowerment Department (RISE) and its Racial Equity Team. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the library was featuring scare documentaries on the imagined threat of “voter suppression” and “election subversion.”

In his letter, Sutherland lists the library description of its many and bizarre programs. One that caught my attention for being so contrary to the “cornerstone” spirit was “Boys and Oil—Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land.”

In the featured book, the wonderfully self-involved author, Taylor Brody, pulls off a progressive twofer: imagining “the distresses” of his gay youth as a “metaphor” for the alleged “destruction of large swaths of the west” due to fracking. If this program were an outlier, it would be one thing, but it’s not. It hews to the library’s unreflective new norm.

Each year, during so-called “Banned Books Week,” the Kansas City library, like all ALA libraries, explodes in paroxysms of self-righteousness. As example, Sutherland cites a panel discussion “by four local librarians opposed to the idea that sexually explicit materials should not be accessed by children as a threat to civil liberties.”

Parsing this labyrinthian mouthful is not easy. Let me try—at a time when the Kansas City Public Library was engaging in relentless viewpoint discrimination, its brass considered keeping sexually explicit books from schoolchildren the greatest threat to civil liberties. How explicit? Recall that parents were being arrested at school board meetings around the nation for trying to read the book aloud, and the FBI was investigating—the parents.

The Kansas City Public Library has lost its way. It’s time to find the way back.