Fighting McCarthyism through film - A library censorship case becomes a Storm Center

When Daniel Taradash and flick Moll decided to use the story of a library c ensorship case in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, described in a September 1950 let ter to the editor of the Saturday Review as the seed for a script, they con ceived "to fight McCarthyism through film" and masked their topic and theme behind "as dull a title as we could think of"-The Library. Despite their e fforts at subterfuge, the story of a middle-aged librarian who refused to r emove a book from her library's shelves and suffered the loss of her job an d her friends as a result became a Storm Center in reality as well as in ti tle. In so doing, it mirrored both the conditions that inspired it and the case on which it was based. This study employs a number of primary sources, including the papers of writer-director Daniel Taradash, the records of th e American Library Association, and the papers of Ruth W. Brown, the librar ian an whose case the film was loosely based, to examine the controversies that swirled around Storm Center from its inception during the investigatio ns into Communist influence in Hollywood to its reception more than five ye ars later at the American Library Association's summer conference and subse quent release. Through its highly fictionalized version of the BartlesviIle Library censorship case, Storm Center directly challenged McCarthyism.