Introduction: A Patient Labor

I do not know whether it must be said that the critical task still entails faith in the Enlightenment: I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.-Michel Foucault, 1984 This investigation of the West Bend (Wisconsin) Community Memorial Library controversy of 2009 is, most immediately, a case study of a library confronting organized challenge to its execution of its role in American culture.State and local statutes ensure the funding of public libraries with tax dollars and establish independent boards of trustees charged with oversight for the expenditure of such funds.In Wisconsin, Legislative Document Chapter 43 grants public library boards "exclusive charge, control and custody of all lands, buildings, money or other property" as well as authority to appoint the administration of the library.The library board may also cooperate with other agencies, including specifically the University of Wisconsin system, "to foster and encourage . . . the wider use of books and other resource, reference and educational materials upon scientific, historical, economic, literary, educational, and other useful subjects" (Chapter 43.58).These rights and privileges also establish the responsibility of the public library for intellectual and cultural enrichment of the service community, without any delineation of restrictions on that responsibility, ensuring that any boundaries of content, service populations, or types of materials are determined by the library itself.The missions of public libraries emerge from the roots of American democracy, while those who drafted the Constitution that shaped that democracy were themselves influenced by the broad period of the European Enlightenment.The Age of Reason-as the Enlightenment is also knowndecentered religion as a political structure and prioritized the values of freedom and equality.New political structures ostensibly drew their authority from the consent of those to be governed, and consent would be ideally