Gene Collier: Fear and loathing at the Library of Congress | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Gene Collier: Fear and loathing at the Library of Congress

By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, gcollier@post-gazette.com

Aug 17, 2025, 1:00 AM

Within the broader American consciousness, the Library of Congress comfortably occupies a position of towering anonymity, effortlessly and still purposefully avoiding the news cycle, sometimes for decades at a stretch.

Though it profiles as the staggeringly vast national deposit of knowledge, history, culture, and raw data, the Library’s habitual users tend to regard it with an esteem bordering on romance. With physical coordinates adjacent to the nation’s halls of power, the scholars and researchers and everyday Americans who visit frequently feel the intellectual weight of the place in the Thomas Jefferson Building’s main reading room, where you sit among some 70,000 volumes below the soaring coffered dome designed by sculptor Albert Weinert.

In the lantern of the dome is the mural known as Human Understanding, depicted as a female lifting from her eyes the veil of ignorance.

Yeah, well.

Not a great year for thinking institutions

It’s not been a great year for the Library of Congress, just as it hasn’t been a great year for the Kennedy Center, just as it’s about to become a dreary year for the Smithsonian, three institutions targeted by the Trump administration on what you might call suspicion of discomfiting ideology.

Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress, the first woman and first African American to attain the position, was fired in May in a two-sentence email from the White House. It did not include the courtesy of an explanation, perhaps as her dismissal was simply inexplicable.

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” was the way White House press jouster Karoline Leavitt presented it to reporters. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

Oh please. The Library of Congress is essentially a research facility. Kids who aren’t 16 can’t do research on site. The argument over what kind of material does and doesn’t belong there was settled in the 1800s, centuries before diversity, equity, and inclusion became a ubiquitous MAGA boogeyman.

“It’s puzzling,” the fired Hayden said charitably to CBS Sunday Morning, “how things like inclusion are seen as a negative.”

But she knew what’s behind all this. Knows what the point is: “I think it’s to diminish opportunities for the general public to have free access to information and inspiration.”

Two months after Hayden walked the plank, things started disappearing from the Library’s web site, specifically the portion that contained the Constitution of the United States. A coding error was blamed, and the missing portions were restored, so there’s no point in identifying the parts that temporarily vanished.

Like that would stop me.

Disappearing the Constitution

Away from the Constitution went the part about foreign emoluments, which prohibits the president from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” so I’m sure that had nothing to do with fact that in May, Trump accepted a $400 million airplane from the Qatari government.

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