When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library

A Montana county’s battle shows how faith in public learning and public space is fraying.
An illustration of a person reading while disintegrating into pieces.
Illustration by Emmanuel Polanco

Every public library is an exception. The world outside is costly and cordoned off, but here no one is charged, and no one is turned away. People browse for books and go online. They learn English, meet with friends, dawdle, nap, and play. For children, the public library is a place to build an inner life, unencumbered by grownups. Story time is an invitation to that experience. A librarian reads a book aloud to a huddle of kids seated cross-legged on the floor. It’s part early-literacy tool, part theatre, and looks basically the same wherever it happens. The public libraries in Flathead County, Montana, a region of mountainous beauty bordering Canada and Glacier National Park, offer seven story times per week, for babies on up. Three scattered branch locations—in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Bigfork—serve a population of a hundred and eleven thousand people, spread out over five thousand rugged square miles.

On a spring day in 2019, Ellie Newell, the youth-services librarian at the main branch, in a historic post office in downtown Kalispell, hosted a special story time for a visiting class of preschoolers. Newell was raised by librarians and had taken the job straight out of graduate school, drawn to Flathead’s reputation for “doing cutting-edge library stuff.” Several years earlier, the library had rebranded to adopt a new name and logo, as well as an updated, possibly foolhardy mission. The Flathead County Library System became the ImagineIF Libraries and set out to use technology and interactive programs to bring together far-flung residents of the county. This new approach earned ImagineIF a John Cotton Dana Award (the equivalent of a library Oscar) and the title of State Library of the Year.

Like most children’s librarians, Newell did a lot of story times and kept a stack of read-aloud books on her desk. She considered it important to mix things up: some books with animals, some with people; some classics, some new releases. At the top of Newell’s pile that day was “Prince & Knight,” a fairy-tale picture book published in 2018. The story features a charismatic dragon, but no lady who wins a warrior’s heart. The romance instead unfolds between the titular prince (a man) and knight (also a man). Newell thought the book was sweet: a bit edgy in its gayness, but still chaste and traditional, culminating in marriage. Her calendar didn’t show any special book requests or even the name of the visiting school, so she grabbed “Prince & Knight” off her desk and went out to read it. She opened her eyes wide behind her glasses and swivelled to connect with every member of her audience. The children giggled and clapped. But, at the end of the reading, their teacher looked upset.

The class had come from a Catholic school, and, a few days later, the teacher wrote to the Daily Inter Lake, a local newspaper, saying how “shocked and grieved” she was by the presentation of a book about “homosexual marriage.” She argued that “such a controversial topic” should not be introduced to “innocent children.” Flathead County had always trended conservative, and harbored clusters of Ammon Bundy extremists, but its mainstream politics, until recently, tended toward a live-and-let-live libertarianism. The weeks that followed stunned library staff. Newell, who is openly bisexual, was harassed: “I had people get in my face, yell, and spit, and scream an inch from my face.” At an outreach event, she was grabbed by a man complaining of the “library’s agenda about transgenderism.” In April, a queer-youth support group met, as it often did, in the library basement. Afterward, several men waiting outside chased two of the teens down the street, yelling, “Fucking faggots.”

During the pandemic, Flathead became the fastest-growing county in the state, thanks in part to new migration. The arrivals were split between lovers of the outdoors (of various political persuasions) and people in search of a Trumpian refuge from urban ills. The responses to the “Prince & Knight” reading tracked with the county’s divergent politics. Was the story time a sign of open-mindedness or proof that the library was promoting “all these alternative lifestyles,” as one Kalispell man wrote to the Inter Lake? The Catholic schoolteacher filed a formal challenge to “Prince & Knight,” seeking its removal from ImagineIF’s collection. The library director, Connie Behe, recommended that the book be retained because the work as a whole conformed to ImagineIF standards. The final decision was up to the library’s five-member board of trustees.

A meeting was held to hear public comments on the book challenge. Board meetings were usually sedate affairs, but a small crowd filled the meeting room in the basement of the Kalispell branch. Most came to speak in support of “Prince & Knight,” but a landscaper named Doug Adams volunteered a contrasting view. Adams was an evangelical Christian with salt-and-pepper hair and a lilting cadence nurtured in his native Georgia. “I don’t think that this was a venue in which that should have been displayed to little kids,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s an agenda that should have been displayed to anybody.”

Adams did not like the book, but he didn’t advocate for its removal, either. ​​The board voted to keep the book in the collection, and subsequent meetings were quiet. It appeared that the tumult over Newell’s story time had settled. Then, two months later, a spot on the board opened up and Adams applied for the position. Board members were appointed by a trio of elected county commissioners, all of whom were conservative Republicans. The newest commissioner was Randy Brodehl, a former state legislator and retired fire chief with a fondness for Western attire. When Adams applied, a supporter of ImagineIF went to Brodehl with an op-ed that Adams had written in the Inter Lake just after Donald Trump’s Inauguration. In the article, Adams instructed liberals to “toughen up and take it,” just as he had done during the Obama Administration. “I have to go against everything I believe in order to not disenfranchise someone who can’t come to grips with his/her/its sex,” he wrote. “I have to be ashamed of America in order not to offend an illegal alien. I have to let perverts use the restroom with my wife.” The library supporter hoped that Brodehl would be shocked by Adams’s polemic. “When I think about the idiocy of trying to give Randy a heads-up about Doug’s divisiveness, I wish I could go back in time and slap myself,” she told me. (Brodehl said that he did not recall having this conversation.)

In fact, Brodehl’s fellow county commissioners, who belonged to the right wing of the Flathead Republican Party, had encouraged Adams to apply for the library board. The commissioners seemed to think that the library director and employees were too liberal, and that the library board too often bent to their will. Adams agreed. He had accused ImagineIF of using taxpayer funds to push a “gay agenda.” He said repeatedly that, if it were up to him to create a library, it would “be a religious library.” The commissioners unanimously appointed him to the board.

For years, the Flathead County Library System operated with little controversy. It did what it could with a small budget, a team of three dozen full- and part-time employees, and the fund-raising help of a dedicated nonprofit. Kim Crowley became the director of the system in 2004. I met her in February at the Bigfork branch, a “nano-library” the size of a large apartment, situated in a ski-lodge-style civic complex, about a thirty-minute drive from Kalispell. Crowley is lean and plainspoken, and worked in commercial fishing before going to library school. When she came to Flathead County, she found the libraries to be old-fashioned—little more than repositories for books—and “ripe for reimagining,” she told me. There was a fourth branch back then, in the resort town of Whitefish, that resisted Crowley’s reforms and seceded from the county system. Crowley went ahead with the rebranding. At the new ImagineIF, furniture was removed to increase space for meetings and play. A book bike went out to the community, and youth-services librarians expanded their story times in parks and schools. There were no more fines for overdue materials.

The changes were popular, but not universally so. Some residents didn’t like that the county’s name had been erased. They saw ImagineIF as a space of haughty leftism, run by women with master’s degrees. Crowley had the library board’s support at the time, but the county commissioners were dubious and began to inspect her spending. They refused her request to buy a Toyota Prius for transporting staff and supplies between branches: Couldn’t she pick something less obviously enviro-Democrat?

In retrospect, the skirmishing over ImagineIF contained the germ of today’s library wars. Public libraries—once as popular with libertarian autodidacts as leftists—have become targets of the Republican Party, and not just in Flathead County. Local-library systems, and local librarians, are being vilified nationwide as peddlers of Marxism and child pornography. Whatever faith there was in public learning and public space is fraying. Though book bans aren’t new, current bids at censorship are often paired with cuts to library budgets. Last month, the Missouri House of Representatives tried to eliminate all funding for public libraries. A group of citizens in Ada County, Idaho, attempted to force a vote that would dissolve the local-library system. Tactics previously applied in public schools, ostensibly to protect children, are now being used against city- and county-library systems whose mandate is to help everyone.

Part of the issue in Flathead County was a disagreement over the term “everyone.” The commissioners and conservative trustees appeared to prioritize the majority. If the area was predominantly white, straight, and Christian, then books such as “Prince & Knight” surely had no place in the public library. The workers of ImagineIF saw things differently. Yes, they served a large number of devout homeschooling families. But they also catered to atheists, immigrants, racial minorities, and people who are L.G.B.T.Q.+. Nor was it their job to assume what kinds of books or DVDs a given patron would want. “The library has always been an organization that collects not just for majority populations but also minority populations,” said John Chrastka, of the national advocacy group EveryLibrary, which advised ImagineIF’s staff and trustees. S. R. Ranganathan, a founder of library science, made the same argument a century ago, in his statement of basic principles: “Every reader his book. Every book its reader.”

In 2018, Crowley grew tired of her dealings with the commissioners and retired early. Behe, the longtime assistant director, took over. She shared Crowley’s enthusiasm for making ImagineIF “an inspired, creative place,” but had a softer, conciliatory bearing that she hoped would mollify the commissioners. Not long into her term, though, came the controversy over “Prince & Knight.” That month, the library’s fund-raising nonprofit, the ImagineIF Foundation, had the misfortune of having to announce a capital campaign for a new, larger Bigfork branch. The county commissioners declared that they would have nothing to do with the project. (Brodehl, the commissioner, told me that the decision was budgetary and unrelated to the story-time reading.)

Soon, COVID-19 arrived. Flathead County had some of the highest caseloads in the state, prompting the nearby Blackfeet Nation to impose a stay-at-home order and close the eastern entrance to Glacier National Park. The county government, in contrast, debated how dangerous the virus really was. A doctor on the Board of Health deemed the coronavirus “no more dangerous than influenza.” Commissioner Brodehl told reporters, “Whether you choose to mask up or make a different choice should belong to our citizens.” Behe was far more cautious. She shut down all three branches of ImagineIF, then mandated face coverings when it came time to gradually reopen. Many patrons reacted angrily to this policy and accosted library employees. Behe tried to mediate, and trained her team on how to communicate across political divides.

The county commissioners, however, were intent on jerking the library rightward. Their recruitment of Adams was only the first step in remaking the board. In the summer of 2020, they reappointed an incumbent trustee, Heidi Roedel, a Christian homeschooler and a G.O.P. activist. A year later, they replaced a moderate Republican who was twice named Trustee of the Year by the Montana Library Association with David Ingram, a retired anesthesiologist who regarded contemporary notions of race and gender identity as incompatible with his Christian world view. “The sexualization of children and minors is what I’m against. They’ve been indoctrinated,” he said, of trans youth, when I met him and Adams at a pizza restaurant in Whitefish. (He also brought along a list of “woke books” that he’d assembled based on Internet research.) Ingram, Roedel, and Adams secured a three-vote majority on the five-member library board. The conservatives were in control.

In July of 2021, just after Ingram’s appointment, Behe stepped down as director. A current employee of ImagineIF told me that the “sheer strain” had forced her out. Behe took a library job in Tacoma, Washington, and wrote, in her farewell note, “As public servants, the library director and staff don’t get to cherry-pick which interests, perspectives, and values are represented through library materials and programs, even when it violates their own values and perspectives, or those of Trustees.” Shortly thereafter, Newell, the youth-services librarian, left ImagineIF for a better-paid position in Bozeman, one of the wealthiest cities in Montana. With the director and youth-services posts vacant, the trustees voted to drastically cut both salaries, despite warnings that it would make recruitment difficult.

The assistant director at the Kalispell branch, Martha Furman, agreed to fill in as interim director. Furman is tall and serious, but has a generous laugh. She had worked as a bookseller in Minneapolis, and disliked the politicking required of her in Flathead County. She tried to establish a rapport with the board and the commissioners, she told me, but struggled with “the extremeness” of their views. In late September of 2021, after voting for the salary change, Ingram, the new trustee, wrote to the rest of the board and the county commissioners, alerting them to two books in ImagineIF’s collection: “Gender Queer,” a graphic-novel memoir about a nonbinary person’s coming of age (and love of libraries), by Maia Kobabe, and “Lawn Boy,” a novel by Jonathan Evison with gay themes. As reported by Micah Drew in the Flathead Beacon, Ingram linked to a Virginia school-board debate regarding these books, and vowed to scrutinize ImagineIF’s own selection policy. Adams, his fellow-trustee, replied that they needed “to get rid of those 2 books.” Brodehl, the county commissioner, promised to “fix this.”

A woman named Carmen Cuthbertson apparently had the same idea. Just a few days after Ingram’s e-mail, she entered the Kalispell branch and inveighed against “Gender Queer” to a library worker named Ben Mason, who has long blond hair and identifies as nonbinary. To Mason, it felt personal. It was as if she had said, “Hi, I’d like to complain about your general identity,” they told me. “It was a big ‘fuck you.’ ” (Cuthbertson said that she merely went to ask “how one would go about complaining about a book.”) Cuthbertson is a Swiss immigrant and an active member of the county G.O.P. She filed a formal challenge to “Gender Queer,” arguing that it contributed to the “mainstreaming of fringe experiences and behavior” and reflected the “state of mind of a troubled individual.” Cuthbertson’s husband submitted his own challenge: he wrote that the book depicted “immoral sexuality” and called the author “morally sick.” “Lawn Boy” was also challenged.

When the library board met to discuss both books, in December, 2021, dozens of people crammed into the Kalispell basement. A live video feed of the meeting was played in the foyer, as library patrons came in and out. Cuthbertson called “Gender Queer” pornographic and inappropriate for children. She brought giant blowups of the illustrated panels, ironically putting this content in full view. Furman explained that her staff had properly vetted the book and shelved it in adult nonfiction, not in the children’s section. There was less discussion about “Lawn Boy,” which seemed like an add-on: it was often paired with “Gender Queer” in book challenges throughout the U.S.

Library workers had an important ally: Montana’s constitution, which upholds every person’s right “to speak or publish whatever he will on any subject.” The majority trustees despised “Gender Queer,” but were wary of costly litigation, and knew that the A.C.L.U. of Montana was paying close attention. When it came time to vote on the books, the board agreed to retain “Lawn Boy” (the traditional prose format was perhaps less threatening), but split on “Gender Queer.” The three conservatives voted to abstain, delaying a final decision and leaving the graphic novel in the collection.

Meanwhile, the board subjected the librarians, and their procedures, to a kind of audit. When making book purchases, ImagineIF typically considered borrowing data, special requests, and the recommendations of a contractor that reviewed new releases in keeping with library guidelines. Why, the conservative trustees asked, didn’t the librarians use a “Christian library resource”? Ingram told Furman that he wanted to sit with library staff as they reviewed booklists for future acquisitions. Furman refused. At a board meeting, in the fall of 2021, she told the trustees that they had no right to micromanage the collection. She later posted a long message to ImagineIF’s Facebook account. “Encountering a book that violates one’s own world view can cause feelings of stress, sadness, surprise and anger,” she wrote. “Yet the library needs to provide access to our current materials so you can make up your own minds.” Furman noted that L.G.B.T.Q.+ titles constituted 0.6 per cent of the collection, and Christian titles comprised 1.5 per cent. She was soon pulled into a private meeting with a trustee and the county’s head of human resources.

In December, Furman resigned—the second director to quit in six months. She told the board that the book challenges and understaffing had created a climate of mistrust and unease. The head of the library foundation warned that it had become nearly impossible to raise money for such a divided and dysfunctional organization. Furman moved several hours east, to a sunlit town house in Helena, and took a job at the public library downtown. Her new workplace was spacious and modern, with polished-wood ceilings and offerings such as adult technology classes and take-home book-club kits bundled in custom tote bags. Most important, the library in Helena was generally drama-free.

In early 2022, the Flathead County Library Alliance, a group formed by worried book lovers, organized rallies to show support for ImagineIF. A few dozen people gathered with homemade picket signs in the freezing cold outside the Kalispell branch. “Thank you for being our librarians” and “ImagineIF there was no ImagineIF,” their signs read. The library staff was shrivelling from resignations and low morale. The director position was proving difficult to fill. Any interested candidate who Googled “ImagineIF” would be inundated with coverage of book challenges and clashes between the librarians, trustees, and commissioners. To spur recruitment, the trustees had voted to drop the requirement of a master’s degree.

From the handful of applicants for director, Ashley Cummins, a thirty-six-year-old with funky glasses and an unassuming mien, was chosen by the trustees. Cummins was running a small public library in Russellville, Alabama, and still earning her bachelor’s degree. The board’s decision weakened the library in an immediate and obvious way: by hiring a director who lacked a master’s degree, ImagineIF lost its certification by the state’s library commission and an accompanying infusion of thirty-five thousand dollars per year.

Cummins thought she knew what she was getting into when she moved across the country with her husband and two teen-age sons. Like most librarians, she was idealistic about her profession—one that often demands caregiving and self-sacrifice (famously described as “vocational awe”), especially from women. But, because Cummins came from a rural, conservative, working-class background, she was also realistic about the job. The salary in Flathead County, however reduced, was more than she’d ever earned in Alabama, and her previous work had inured her to meddling. “I’d dealt with challenging boards and challenging local governments,” she told me. She was less prepared to deal with the ImagineIF supporters who mocked her credentials.

At a board retreat held soon after Cummins started, the trustees and librarians arrived with very different priorities. Ingram was upset that ImagineIF had the book version of the Times’ “1619 Project,” but no books that criticized that project. Adams wanted to rewrite the library’s policies to give the board more say—over book displays, for instance. (He denied that he was trying to exert control and said that it was routine for board members to review ImagineIF’s policies.) He also wanted to remove all references to the American Library Association, which prescribes standards for public libraries. Adams argued that the A.L.A. was really a political organization and cited, as proof, its support for the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties. (Adams told me that he does not oppose the civil-rights movement and stated repeatedly that he is not racist, and that his ex-girlfriend is Black. According to the president of the A.L.A., the group does not take political positions, but felt it necessary to condemn racial segregation because it affects who gets to be in a library.)

ImagineIF employees used the retreat to highlight their dismal working conditions. They presented a survey that found a “hostile environment for L.G.B.T.Q. and non-Christian staff and public.” They were being called pedophiles and groomers and, in recent weeks, had logged many instances of patrons hiding or vandalizing books that dealt with sex or BIPOC identity. The board members looked unconcerned. Adams later scoffed at the term “BIPOC.” “What about URLP (ungodly racist liberal perverts)?” he e-mailed another trustee.

Cummins, the new director, tried to tamp down conflict and prevent people from quitting. She also reorganized the budget to save money, earning much praise from the conservative trustees. Those trustees, and the county commissioners, meanwhile, became more audacious in their approach to the library. Adams pushed to sequester controversial books, a notion he floated in an e-mail to Ingram. “I just had an idea that might allow us to avoid a lawsuit,” he wrote. “We could, instead of voting to not keep the book in stock, vote to restrict access by having a restricted section, or perhaps just keeping the book, and maybe other challenged books, in the office.” Cummins was horrified by his suggestion.

In June, 2022, one of two moderate trustees left on the library board was forced by term limits to step down. Cuthbertson, who’d brought the challenge to “Gender Queer,” applied for the spot, and Cummins begged the commissioners not to appoint her. (Two commissioners, including Brodehl, denied having spoken with Cummins about this; the third did not respond to a request for comment.) The Library Alliance recruited a number of applicants from the community, including a longtime volunteer with the ImagineIF Foundation. But, of all these candidates, the county commissioners chose Cuthbertson. Four of the five board members were now ideologically in synch. The Library Alliance lost steam and became less active.

Later that summer, things somehow got worse. One morning, library workers checking the overnight book drop in Kalispell found a bundle of hardcover thrillers pierced by bullet holes. They called Cummins, who was out of town, as well as the police, and shut down all three libraries. Twice more in the following days, bullet-riddled books were left in the drop. (That same week, the Montana Library Association recognized the ImagineIF staff with an intellectual-freedom award.) The Kalispell police investigated the incidents and concluded that the books had been used as “target practice” and put in the slot mistakenly or as a prank. The trustees weren’t overly concerned. Adams said that he suspected that leftists had caused the disturbance in order to make conservatives like him look bad. Three library employees quit in the weeks afterward. The assistant director resigned a few months later.

Around the same time, two more books were challenged. The first was “Not My Idea,” a children’s book about racism in American history, by Anastasia Higginbotham. The second was a protest challenge from the other side of the political spectrum: a library user in Bigfork demanded the removal of “Why Children Matter,” a self-published parenting polemic by Douglas Wilson, a pastor who had been accused of enabling child sexual abuse and domestic violence in his church in Idaho. (Wilson has previously denied these allegations.) The board held yet another contentious meeting, almost ritualized by this point, and voted again to preserve both books, lest troublemaking lawyers intervene. But this time they ordered Cummins to create a dedicated “parent resource” section for “Not My Idea”—a de-facto sequestration.

In February, I spent time at all three library branches in Flathead County. At the high-ceilinged library in Columbia Falls, a woman roamed the fiction stacks while her two children beelined toward an elevated play area; a free “seed library” lined one wall. At the nano-library in Bigfork, a girl in lace-up snow boots examined the DVDs. The main library, in Kalispell, was crowded with browsers and borrowers. A mother held a stack of books like a bouquet as her child played nearby. A teen-ager with dyed-blue hair read cross-legged in an armchair. A middle-aged man parked his wheelchair in front of a computer. At all of these locations, queer and trans people, and straight people, and people of color, and white people, and people without housing, and people with housing, were still showing up every day, only some of them aware of any intrigue.

I noticed, though, that in lieu of displays for Black History Month, which ImagineIF had observed in the past, the libraries leaned on a Valentine’s Day theme: “Blind Date with a Book.” Near the entrance of each branch were books wrapped in kraft paper, described enticingly on heart-shaped tags. In Kalispell, there was also a new section upstairs for young-adult graphic novels—a classification devised to separate manga from, say, “Gender Queer” and other books meant for adults.

Downstairs, in the children’s section, the trustees’ demand for a “parent resource” shelf—their solution for materials they found to be objectionable—had taken shape. At adult eye level, above the sing-along CDs, was a cluster of thirty-nine books, each marked with bright-green tape. Some were actual resources for parents: “The Everything Guide to Raising a Toddler” and “Building Resilience in Children and Teens.” Others were clearly intended for children but shelved here to avoid trouble. There were two copies of “Not My Idea.” There was one copy of “It’s Perfectly Normal,” an illustrated guide to puberty and sex that a local mother I interviewed called pornographic, and a volume I hadn’t heard of yet: “This Book Is Anti-Racist.” The library workers I spoke with hated that the shelf was there—one called it “soft censorship”—but they understood that Cummins had agreed to it as a compromise, to prevent hard censorship. “Always in my mind is the access,” Cummins told me. “With the books still being in the library and unrestricted, I can live with it, even though I don’t love it.” She brokered a period of calm at ImagineIF—at least until mid-April, when her staff found another shot-up hardcover in the Kalispell book drop.

The fights at ImagineIF also played out on much larger stages. In the Montana legislature, and ten other Republican-controlled statehouses, lawmakers introduced legislation that would criminalize the distribution of “obscene materials” to minors by public librarians, public-school employees, and museum workers—groups long exempted from obscenity statutes, given their interaction with a range of subjects and texts. Politicians from tiny, rural towns gave speeches on the dangers posed by the transgender lobby and comic books. (After civil-liberties groups pushed back, the sponsors of the Montana bill deleted mention of librarians and museum workers.) Another bill pending in Montana, and sponsored by a Republican from Flathead County, sought to prohibit drag shows—later renamed “adult-oriented shows”—in public libraries and other places frequented by minors. The head of the Montana Library Association told me that he had no knowledge of any public library in the state ever hosting a drag story time.

Not so long ago, when ImagineIF was an award-winning library system, its budget was small, much as it is today. It was housed in the same cramped, aging, misfit buildings that the branches still occupy, and which the ImagineIF Foundation still raises funds to cure. But it all worked because of a sense of trust—between the library staff, the library director, the library board, the library foundation, the county commissioners, and the public. In recent years, this trust has worn away, shrinking the bonds of state and citizen, and the public sector over all. Brodehl, the county commissioner, told me that he has no personal grievance with the library or its staff. The day-to-day management of ImagineIF, he said, was left entirely to the board of trustees. Yet Brodehl continued to monitor certain aspects of library business. “I did receive some data,” he said, on the number of “diverse titles” in the collection. The percentage was “a lot higher” than what he understood to be the recommended “minimum amount.” “So, I’m very comfortable that the board is probably looking at that—and is aware of that,” he said. The trustees were already on it. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated which librarian was grabbed at an outreach event.