Scott Sherman Writes An Article In The Nation That Declares Us As Activists The Winners In Thwarting Library Destruction Plans: Is It Believable?- Let’s Boil It Down To Some Quotes

Scott Sherman's new article in The Nation declaring Library Defenders victorious- His 2015 book and bio from its dust jacket.

Let’s begin here with a few quotes:

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your efforts to believe it.—
   Wilson Mizner

History is written by the victors.—

That’s an old adage that so reflexively accepted as true, we don’t even know who first said it and there are so many various iterations of it that hardly matters. . .  like Winston Churchill famously saying, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  

We begin with these quotes because?–  Because Scott Sherman has written an article in The Nation that declares us as library defending activists the victors in the fight to rescue our New York City libraries from destruction by the trustees.  See: The Rescue of the New York Public Library—Activists—and The Nation—thwarted NYPL trustees’ harebrained plans and restored democracy to this vital public institution, July 26, 2021.

When you’re flattered, there is always the impulse to go along willingly to accept it as true, but that can be dangerous, which is why Machiavelli counseled shunning flatterers.    “Flattery is all right so long as you don’t inhale.” said Adlai E Stevenson somewhat more lightly.

The reason why we are not inhaling Mr. Sherman’s flattery, is because, to go back to our first quote, his flattery is so careless that, try and exhaust ourselves as we might, we just can’t believe it.

What also makes Mr. Sherman’s article so hard to believe is his very strange way of writing this history of us as the ostensible victors: He may have proclaimed us as the `victors’ but he never contacted us for quotes or perspective on the conclusions he was about to assert.  So much for ‘history being written by the winners’!

In fact, whatever accomplishments we might in fact admit to, and they exist, and whatever caveats Mr. Sherman supplies about his proclamations, we overall disagree with Mr. Sherman’s simplistic conclusion that we’ve rescued the NYPL libraries or restored democracy to the NYPL as an institution.

We were one of two groups with overlapping membership foremost in taking the lead and working together to prevent the library destruction that Mr. Sherman writes about: The Committee to Save the New York Public Library and Citizens Defending Libraries.  Although Mr. Sherman names our groups in the book he wrote and in earlier articles he had published in The Nation, we go unnamed in this latest article.  Citizens Defending Libraries was the first of the named plaintiffs in the “two lawsuits” Mr. Sherman mentions were filed against the NYPL’s destructive Central Library Plan. The plan was the intended consolidating shrinkage of Manhattan’s most important centrals destination libraries: The 42nd Street Central Reference Library (the one with the lions), The 34th Street Science, Business and Industry Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the remnants of the then just destroyed Donnell Library.

Mr. Sherman notes that the “trustees, from 2007 to 2014, were bent on selling the property, on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, to real estate developers,” and he rhetorically asks “How did one of the world’s greatest libraries get into the real estate business?” then supplying his analysis that the “sordid” answer was that the NYPL wanted to “profit from the city’s real estate boom” by central Manhattan real estate.  While Mr. Sherman had already written derisively about the NYPL’s dismantling plans for the 42nd Street Research library, Citizens Defending Libraries was first to identify the role that real estate interests played in driving proposals so adverse to the public interest.

We don’t want to underrate the value of Mr. Sherman’s prior work.  He was on the scene writing about the expensive foolishness of the NYPL’s plans for the 42nd Street central reference library as early as November, 2011.  That’s before Citizens Defending Libraries was born in the very beginning of 2013.  His 2015 book “Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library” brought further attention to these issues and included valuable additional research.

The main criticism some offered of his analysis back then was that he was too kind in the judgments he offered of the New York Public Library’s wealthy and powerful trustees even while he described them as inept and clueless.  He never accused them of greed, self dealing, or of placing any other goals above the public interest in setting their agenda.  As he described it, the main flaws these wealthy trustees had was apparently not being very clear sighted about financial matters and not caring enough about scholarship and the real value of the information in libraries, and being too enamored of the glitzy, glamour of the redesign of library space by starchitect Norman Foster.

Mr. Sherman also confined himself to writing about just the NYPL, which only has  responsibilities for the New York City libraries in the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten island, and he wrote mostly just about a few libraries in Manhattan.  He did this without relating how the issue of library trustees straying off path this way was a citywide issue.  For example. he pretty much neglected to mention the sell-off of libraries in Brooklyn. Although, as he obviously had to, he wrote often about David Offensend the NYPL’s Chief Operating Officer being very involved in steering the NYPL into its library sales, including, the shrink-and-sink sale of the beloved 97,000 square foot Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art, he totally didn’t mention the striking non-coincidence that at the very same time Janet Offensend, David Offensend’s wife, was a trustee of the Brooklyn Public library who was steering that library system into its own library sales including the shrink-and-sink sale Brooklyn’s second biggest library (63,000 square feet) in a transaction mirroring the Donnell sale.       

Mr. Sherman’s book did unveil relevant numbers showing that when the very valuable Donnell was sold in 2007 in what was essentially a secretly handled no-bid sale (the transaction brought Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law a hidden windfall), the NYPL netted less than $30 million for it, maybe only about only $25 million when all costs are reckoned.  In other words, it netted less than individual apartments would be selling for in the in the luxury hotel and condo building that would replace Donnell.  It likely netted less than the hidden windfall to Jared Kushner (a windfall that Mr. Sherman did not identify or mention, something he has never caught up with to include in his writings).

Although Mr. Sherman tells us in various of his writings that the NYPL’s Central Library Plan was “born in secrecy, with Booz Allen Hamilton as the midwife” he does not tell enough about Booz Allen and he leaves it mostly to the readers of The Nation and his book to be self informed enough to wonder an important question: Why Did The NYPL  Hire Booz Allen Hamilton, A Top Spy Firm Working For The U.S. Government, Before Launching These Book Banishing Plans?

Booz Allen Hamilton “is really an arm of the intelligence community,” that we know from the 2013 Snowden revelations has been involved with the federal government’s “most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years.”  It is:

virtually indistinguishable from our government itself when it comes to surveillance, with as Bloomberg Businessweek said, the "federal government as practically its sole client."  The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz: "About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis."

And with the U.S. contracting out the huge preponderance of its surveillance to private firms, and mainly to just a very few firms with  Booz Allen Hamilton regarded as the “colossus” of those few.

Mr. Sherman mentions Booz Allen Hamilton being hired and describes the firm as “a gargantuan consulting firm that derives much of its revenue from U.S. military and intelligence agencies.” He did not, however, follow up well on the implications of that passing statement.  The closest he got was in the one of his last Nation articles, (The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan- Why did one of the world's greatest libraries adopt a $300 million transformation without any real public debate? August 28, 2013) where he expressed some anxious concern about what Booz was up to, but neglected to identify Booz as a spy agency, instead identifying it to readers of The Nation in alternative, if related, terms:

Finally, what was the role of Booz Allen Hamilton—the gargantuan consulting firm whose tentacles reach into the defense, energy, transportation and financial service sectors—which was hired by the NYPL in 2007 to formulate what became known inside the trustee meetings as “the strategy”?

Mr. Sherman did us a favor by combing through the minutes of the NYPL to find juicy tidbits that help tell his story in compelling ways (for instance he reports Booz Allen was paid $2.7 million by the NYPL), but he neglected to report how those NYPL minutes reveal that the NYPL hired Booz Allen not very long after its board was advised of the expectation that new federal law might “require” the NYPL and “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement's ability to monitor and intercept communications.”  Moreover, under direction from Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and his First Deputy Mayor, Patricia Harris, the Booz services were extended to the Brooklyn and Queens library systems, thus applying to all three. The NYPL’s initial hire was also around the time that it was finally disclosed to the public that a group of Connecticut librarians had fended off a federal government attempt to surveil their library as the government secretly asserted the PATRIOT Act for years.  

Scott Sherman also let us know that, before Booze Allen was hired, McKinsey & Company, replaced by Booz, had been advising the NYPL starting around 2003 on what became its real estate sell-offs.  Since that information about the NYPL hiring McKinsey & Company was furnished a lot of has come out affecting people’s understanding of the unsavory things McKinsey & Company (a private company that thereby avoids publicly reporting its activities) routinely gets involved with.  It has recast the firm’s reputation.

See: Why McKinsey’s Century Old Brand Name Is at Risk- Accused of aiding corruption, bribery, fraud, and opioid sales, the consulting giant faces reputation damage it may never recover from
Lance Ng, March 18, 2020,  Has McKinsey Lost Its Luster? More tough headlines for the consulting firm. By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jason Karaian, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
February. 25, 2021, How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments, By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, December 15, 2018, The McKinsey Way to Save an Island–  Why is a bankrupt Puerto Rico spending more than a billion dollars on expert advice? By Andrew Rice, April 17, 2019, The Secretive Firm Profiting from Puerto Rico's Crisis, WNYC, April 18, 2019, CIA has paid millions to a consulting firm to help with reorganization, By Greg Miller, July 1, 2015, Spies fear a consulting firm helped hobble U.S. intelligence- Insiders say a multimillion dollar McKinsey-fueled overhaul of the country’s intelligence community has left it less effective. By Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman 07/02/2019, US gov, Tony Blair, and McKinsey plan to rebuild Gaza – with sweatshops to exploit Palestinian workers, Max Blumenthal·October 16, 2014, Immigration and the Prison Industrial Complex, – Major companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and McKinsey & Company have contracted with ICE, and it is the latter which has gained the most notoriety for its connections.  By Andrew Moss,  January 8, 2020, Doing Business with Tyrants, By Lawrence Davidson, January 9, 2019

McKinsey & Company surfaced as a topic in the 2020 election given that it was part of Pete Buttigieg’s resume.  He worked there from June 2007 to March 2010.  At first Buttigieg treated this as a commendable part of his past, but then while being evasive about what he did for the company, he switched over to saying that McKinsey has made a lot of “poor choices” in recent years and that some of its work was  “disgusting.”  The issue of his employment there was being raised by those referring to Buttigieg as “Deep State Pete” who saw such evidence of deep state connections in Buttigieg working for McKinsey on unspecified assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and his thereafter going back to Afghanistan to work alongside the CIA while serving as a high-ranking Naval intelligence officer in 2014.  See: Media darling Pete Buttigieg was in unit that worked with CIA in Afghanistan, Alexander Rubinstein, February  7, 2020

In other words, there is a pattern that’s become much clearer in recent years of seeing McKinsey & Company get hired for dirty business.  This is something that Citizens Defending Libraries has come to appreciate only lately and well after the fact of knowing earlier that NYPL had hired McKinsey in connection with its library restructuring plans.  So we can’t chide Mr. Sherman for similarly not making more of a point of disreputableness of McKinsey & Company when he first wrote, but we are catching up with our writing here.

Mr. Sherman could, however, have brought more attention to the implications of hiring the Booz firm.  Did he hold back because he worried about sounding too shrill or too suspicious?  Or did his editors at the Nation want him to write at the level that the issue would only be picked up on by Nation readers capable of recognizing the issue and knowledgeable from reading other Nation articles about Booz and surveillance?

Booz Allen aside, had Mr. Sherman contacted us for quotes about how successful we consider ourselves to be in the ongoing fights to defend our libraries and where we consider ourselves to be in those fights, we would have brought up things not mentioned in Mr. Sherman article proclaiming us victorious.  We would have brought up things relating exactly to what Mr. Sherman mainly wrote about in his previous writings, the sale of libraries and the elimination of books.

We would have . . .

. . . brought up the fact that, just as previously planned, one of Mid-Manhattan’s central libraries has been sold: SIBL, the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library and the city’s biggest and only real science library was sold one of the very richest of the world’s multi-billionaires to be turned into a “comic book museum.”  See: Wall Street Journal Reveals Fate Of SIBL, The City’s Biggest Science Library: Super-Wealthy Paul Allen Will Turn It Into “Pop-Culture Museum.  June 4, 2018.  More shutting down of science just as we are facing challenges like global warming’s climate chaos?

Losing SIBL we lost a library that held a research collection of 1.2 million volumes, plus a circulating collection of 40,000 books and videos, over 10,000 business and scientific serials, open shelf-shelf reference offering 60,000 volumes.
 
Where are those 1.2 million+ volumes from SIBL going?–  To the revamped Mid-Manhattan Library with which SIBL is supposedly being consolidated?  The NYPL is not even really pretending that such is the case.  The resource is more or less simply vanishing with the NYPL saying to the public that it is abandoning collection of science books, expecting that people can resort to “the internet” to learn about science instead. . . . That's the increasingly censored internet. . . that's also data scraped and surveiled.

In his latest, Mr. Sherman retreads his previous account of the loss of Donnell and while asserting that we Library Defenders were victorious he says that “much was still lost,” cites as the examples of what he means the money lost and squandered on the plan he indicates was abandoned and he does not mention the loss of SIBL as being part of that plan fulfilled and he does not mention the loss of its books.  In fact, what he writes implies that with our saving of the Mid-Manhattan Library there has been a happy outcome with respect to the availability of books at Mid-Manhattan.  He says:

The NYPL wars of 2011–2014 were about saving the libraries and preserving the books on the shelves. When the trustees hatched their plan in 2007, they mistakenly assumed that e-books would replace actual books. That faith impelled them to hastily remove 3 million volumes from the 42nd Street facility; those books were never returned to the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. It is appropriate that the new Stavros Niarchos Library* has 400,000 books.

(* The Mid-Manhattan has been renamed the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library”– We say SNFL, Sniffle, for short– after the Greek Shipping Magnate with whom Edward G. Robinson, who played a librarian in his very last role, had a beef.)

Mr. Sherman does not put into context that "400,000" quantity of books for Mid-Manhattan, New York City’s largest circulating public library, as we have, when we, for instance, point out that Karl Lagerfeld’s personal, one-man, private library when he died held 300,000 books.  (See: Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned, March 8, 2019)

Moreover, no one reading Mr. Sherman’s words would know that the previous incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan was designed to hold 700,000 books, Plus, aside from supposedly absorbing SIBL that once held 1.2 million+ volumes, Mid-Manhattan was supposed to absorb another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collections when that central destination library was shut down.  And the NYPL has publicized that there could be even fewer books in the library in the future because the bookshelves “are not structural . . . you can take [them] away later if you want.”  Another dirty little secret: Although some administration space will be converted and added onto the public space, with only 100,000 square feet, the “renovated” SNFL Mid-Manhattan will have one third less space than the pre-renovation library.  This significant loss of valuable floor space is due to the floor space lost through the creation of atriums in the building.  See: Open House New York Hosts an NYPL Presentation of Its Mid-Manhattan Library “Renovation” Plan March 6, 2018

Had Mr. Sherman interviewed us we would also have told him that when it comes to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and its banished 3 million books we Library Defenders are complaining strenuously about proposed and ongoing renovations designed to commercialize it.  See:  NYPL’s Presentation of its “Master Plan” to alter and commercialize the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, January 27, 2018.  Heaven knows what has rushed forward under the concealing cloak of Covid.  

Moreover, we have pointed out and objected to in testimony before the City Council the NYPL’s very contracted and shortened hours for use of the 42nd Street Central Referenced Library by scholars in order to hold private gala events at the library, and “cocktail parties for the connected” represents a highly inappropriate privatization of that public asset intended to serve the public.

We would also have told Mr. Sherman to talk about the loss of other libraries and library space, like the Inwood Library, Sunset Library, etc.

Mr. Sherman’s article has a feel to it that he wants to close the book on this story, but his journalism in doing so is a very poor first draft of history.

There are well-known sayings about history, knowing and remembering it.  One of the best known is George Santayana’s “When experience (which is history) is not retained...infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which may be viewed as something of a retread of Cicero’s “Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.”  Malcolm X took a crack at essentially the same sentiment with: “History is a people's memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the lower animals.”

If Mr. Sherman had so much as mentioned Citizens Defending Libraries or the Committee to Save the New York Public Library by name instead of just referring nondescriptly to “an indefatigable group of citizens came together to save the libraries” as the victors his readers might have gone to our respective websites to get a far different picture of the status of our fights than he portrayed.

Dwelling on problems unrelentingly without solutions can be enervating and it can defeat the activist spirit.  That’s why on our Citizens Defending Libraries main page we proudly do declare our actual victories.  See: Achievements and Partial List of Successes of Citizens Defending Libraries (founded early 2013).
 
Notwithstanding the importance of giving due recognition to our victories in maintaining spirit and forward momentum, Mr. Sherman’s account that everything is now happily taken care of in some kind of lulling “end of history” way seems designed to send all the activists home and for all challenges to and questioning of the library trustees and their decisions, current and future, to cease.   Such a happy-ending erasure of our ongoing fight and important history raises this concern: If history is, as they say, written by the victors and we did not write this history, then somebody else somewhere, other than us, must be the actual victor. .  Somebody who had more to do with what te wanted written.  Then, with dread we remember George Orwell’s, words: “Whoever controls the past controls the future.”  

Hope you found some quotes you enjoyed reading this post, because, answer is, if you are looking at Mr. Sherman’s latest article in The Nation we don’t think you’ll find anything in it that’s in any way worthy of quoting.