Show-Me Institute Podcast
The Role of American Institutions in Shaping Culture with Crosby Kemper III
James V. Shuls speaks with Crosby Kemper III, former director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, executive director of the Kansas City Public Library, and co-founder and former chairman of the Show-Me Institute, about the role of American institutions in shaping culture. They explore the impact of libraries, museums, and other cultural pillars on society, the ways in which these institutions influence public discourse and community engagement, the challenges they face in an evolving cultural landscape, and the importance of preserving these institutions for future generations.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
- Duration:
- 33m
- Broadcast on:
- 10 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Hello, I'm James Scholes, director of research and senior fellow at the Show Me Institute. You know, listeners of the podcast will likely know that the Show Me Institute is a free market think tank where we're focused on limited government and individual liberty. So today's conversation might seem a little bit odd because I'm speaking with a former director of a public library. But my guest, Crosby Kemper III, isn't your ordinary librarian. In addition to having run the Kansas City Public Library, he is one of the co-founders of the Show Me Institute. But in 2019, he had to step down from the Show Me Institute's board because he was tapped by then-president Trump to serve as the director of the US National Institute of Museum and Library Services. But having completed that term, he's back on our board and we're delighted to have him with us today. Crosby, thanks for joining me. - James, it's great to be with you and great to be back in the circle of the Show Me Institute of which you, as you say, I'm a founder and a devotee. - Well, Crosby, we'll certainly get into free markets and you're interested in that. But I gotta tell you what inspired me actually to reach out to you has nothing to do with free markets. I was reading a book by Roger Scruton on beauty and Scruton said that beauty is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature and a sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world. And it was also Roger Scruton. You know, it was a very popular conservative commentator and he said conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share. The sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created. You were in charge of, and you've led, a major American institution that's publicly funded institution. I'm curious to know how you see the role of institutions like libraries and museums in shaping and forming an American culture. - Well, and I think I'm a fan of Roger Scruton's work. Sadly, sadly gone too early in our world. And indeed, I've been talking to the folks at the Roger Scruton Foundation. They do regular events in the United States and in England. And so bringing up the subject of beauty and what might be called the institutionalization of beauty. The institutions that preserve the artifacts of civilization, our museums and our libraries, is what I've been all about over the last 20 years plus of my life and much of my life before that too. And let me connect it a little bit to our free market world for a second because in preparation for our conversation, I've been going back to one of those writers, one of those authors who have met a lot to me and that's Friedrich Hayek. And frequently, the mistake is made, particularly those who like to use words like neoliberalism as an epithet about free market people, people on the right. The mistake is made that we are not interested in the institutions that preserve our culture, our history, the artifacts of the world and sustain an interest in the making of those artifacts and things of beauty. In fact, Hayek is very much about the preservation as is Edmund Burke, I think Milton Friedman may be a little less so, but very interested in preserving the institutional vitality where he and Roger Scruton comes together is in the sense that civilization is made out of the community starting in the local community, in the community of family and friends. That's a phrase from Tocqueville, actually, whom both Scruton and Hayek admired and whom I admire as my load star in many ways about American culture. You have to have the strength of the family and friends at the local level and at the level of knowledge, the level of the usefulness of knowledge and the knowledge of creativity, of creating things that bring us together, the creating things that make our lives better, which include things of beauty, as well as things of utility. And so I think the real question here is what should be the states involved in that? And the state at the federal level has a very small engagement in the United States, much smaller than, say, most of the European countries. And the involvement that the IMLAS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services that I directed for a little over four years has is tiny and is really more than anything else about the sharing of information, the creation of help for institutions who are not connected to the larger world, the larger museum world, the larger world of culture. So things like we work with tribes, with HBCUs, et cetera, to help them preserve their culture in ways that in the larger institutional world we're going on substantially for literally hundreds of years. And so a little bit of help in catch up to the culture is, in essence, what we were and what the IMLAS still is doing. And then recognition of the importance of the culture in our lives, giving medals, giving attention to particular programs that are worthwhile and can be replicable in the larger universe. So I, but it does come back to, as Roger Scruton said, the things of beauty. You reconromen civilization or the foundations of Western civilization, even American civilization, both because of the political forms that they created, the philosophical ideas that they created, but also the beauty, the beauty of the sculpture, the architecture, their sense of the importance of the landscape, which informs most of the great writing that comes to us from Greece and Rome. - Well, I was fortunate to get, to take my family, my two older kids to Rome about a year ago. And like you mentioned, the beauty, around every corner, there is something beautiful. And the government plays a role in preserving a lot of that. And it helping to preserve the culture that was involved in the creation of those things. And so you bring up the important question here is, what is the proper role of government in this sphere? This isn't something that we talk about much here at the show me. And like you talked about some of our critics that might try to paint us as even anarchists or people who don't care about institutions, we are just a greedy capitalist who whatever one to just be concerned about themselves. But there is importance in passing on of a culture and institutions as, you know, to Tocqueville or any conservative scholar has written over time, institutions are the ways in which we pass along our culture oftentimes from one generation to the next. So how do you see the role of government in this area? - Well, one of the important things to learn, what are the differences between, say, a rationalist, utilitarian, frequently socialist view of the world? Or let's just say in the United States, the world of the public policy intellectual, is that there are things that, if only we were gonna be completely rational about this, we would do, we could change the world overnight and create the egalitarian society and benefit everyone, lift everyone out of poverty, give everyone the exact detail of Marx's phrase about, once we eliminate capitalism, everybody will be able to read a book, hunt and take a nap during the day. And the rationalist view of the universe is that we can create a new institution that will do all of that. And the truth of the conservative view of the institutional history, of the practical history of the history of human achievement, is that it's gradual, it's cumulative, and it's cumulative based on, in a Berke incense, the little platoons that are constantly working to build smaller institutions here and there that make the larger civilization. And so our view, I think, is that we need to help the growth, the state needs to provide the rules and to some extent with education, as we've grown wealthier in the world and can afford to do more, undergird that civilizational growth in certain ways without directing it, give help. But the obvious phrase in a way for this is, we need to be, government needs to be about teaching men and women how to fish, not just providing them with fish. And so that they can achieve for themselves, give people the tools so they can achieve for themselves. And that's a very different view of the world than simply just redistributing the fish that are currently available. And it is about helping people achieve themselves, helping communities achieve themselves. - Yeah, something you said there and earlier actually reminded me of, I was reading Mortimer Adler recently in a book on the Constitution and he talked about unchecked liberty, isn't just more liberty. It can grow into licentiousness, license to engage in all kinds of inappropriate behaviors. And this reminds me of Scrut and some of the things that you've mentioned where what we need are our communities and our institutions to provide the groundwork, the rules, the norms that allow us to conduct ourselves within society because we do live in a society with other people. We have to learn how to get along with one another. And so that's part of what our institutions do is they help create those ground rules and help perpetuate the ideas and the culture that we have. And I think this is part of the challenge that a lot of people on the right see today with our higher education institutions that they don't seem to be promoting the sort of normal dogma, the American, I say use the word dogma in a good way, the sort of American dogma of independence, of freedom, of liberty, of also patriotic duty, all those sorts of things. And so there's this worry that some of our institutions are drifting and they're out of sorts with sort of historic American culture. Again, what role should we play as citizens or what role does the government play and try to try to perpetuate some of the things you and I might see as traditional American values? - Well, the First Amendment comes to mind here. Which is a very substantial part of American government and was a very substantial part of the creation of the constitutional order. It was necessary that the Bill of Rights was necessary to achieve comedy between the very powers and interests in the country in 1789, 1790. And the First Amendment is under siege on college campuses. And we see a lot of cancel culture, there's a cancel culture of the left and of the right. And we should oppose and the government should help oppose cancel culture on either side of the aisle. The moms for and against liberty, you want to ban or limit the ability of people to read lots of books and one understands some of the concern they have with those books, but eliminating the ability of other people to read those books, they want the ability to direct their children's reading. They should absolutely have that, but they shouldn't limit other people's ability to get those books. And the presidents of the three universities who appeared before Chairs Tophonic in Congress, their problem was they, contrary to say Hayek's view of the world, they had an inability to establish and understand their own rules for freedom of speech. They said, well, it's all in the context and then they couldn't really describe the context. And consequently, we have, to use your word, licentiousness on campuses, where at UCLA as an example, as maybe the Horst example, they allowed students to take over a main part of the campus including the entrance to the library and demand people take a political stand in order to get into the area where the encampment was and make their way to the library. And they demanded that Jewish students, for instance, deny the state of Israel. Well, that UCLA allowed that to go on for any period of time. That's a violation of the First Amendment, a deep violation of the First Amendment. And I think the federal government has a role in that. Somebody like me as director of the IMLS or the president or anyone else who might be paying attention to that should say, should say, that's wrong. And also to indicate that if there's federal funding wandering around, we might not fund this institution because you are violated the First Amendment, which is a key part of the American compact. The American is part of the American constitution. - Crosby, I'm fascinated by how you, someone with your views, rose to leading a public library. I wonder if we could go back for a moment and tell me what formed you when you're thinking at an early age and then what led you down the path towards working at the Kansas City Public Library? - Well, I'd let my job as a banker, as CEO of a banking company and members of the board, including my cousin, Jonathan Kemper, of the library saw that I was available and they had just lost Dan Bradbury, who retired as director of the library. So they asked me to step in as an interim to solve what they thought was a significant financial problem. It turned out we didn't have a significant financial problem. We had an ongoing financial problem because of tax increment financing in the city, which as you know, the Shelby Institute opposes for the very good reason that it pulverizes the public funding, the voted public funding of libraries, museums, I'm sorry, libraries, school districts and other institutions, local institutions. But I loved what I was doing and I loved the people I worked with and the Kauffman Foundation was very generous to our public programming, which dovetail with their interests in education and entrepreneurship. And so I enjoyed being one of what I was told by a friend of mine. I was one of only three Republican conservative library directors in the country, but as it turns out, most people in the library will get the First Amendment, most people in the library world. There've been some serious challenges to that lately because of the banned book, banning a book's movement, which is mostly not actually banning books. It's removing books from reading lists in schools or removing books from the children's area in libraries. That's what most of it is about. Some of it, of course, is an attack on very specific books and an unfortunate attack on very specific books. Take my favorite example. It is the Bluest Eye, Tony Morrison's Bluest Eye, which is a book which is very hard to read because it's a very powerful exposure of a certain kind of racism through the eyes of a child who is exposed to some very difficult circumstances. It's not a book that you would want your nine-year-old or your 10-year-old to read because of its explicit, racial, racially sexualized extreme content. On the other hand, something you maybe your 16-year-old ought to read to understand some of the things that happened to this country in the past that we are hoping we've gotten rid of in the present and certainly for the future. - Yeah, that's a very difficult landscape for those of us who believe in the First Amendment and in the libraries. - The issue around book banning, I think you're absolutely right, that the term is used inappropriately. I sometimes call it, you know, censoring what your own children read or something along these lines. And I've written about this for the show me at Zooten. I have a funny story that I was at a faculty meeting at my university and the librarian came in and said, "How do you all feel about book bands?" And all of my colleagues said, "Oh, it's terrible." 'Cause they're thinking about books like you're mentioning, "The Bluest Eye" and these sorts of things. And so all my colleagues say, "Oh, it's terrible." And so the librarian says, "Terrific, I want to set up a booth in the library with banned books. I want to put out things like maybe Skippy John Jones, which you may know as a children's book about a Siamese cat who thinks he's a chihuahua and has a lot of sort of Mexican tropes in it. And as soon as she mentioned Skippy John Jones, all of my colleagues said, "Well, that book's problematic." Right, they were willing to have that book but not others. And that's what it comes down to oftentimes is people, people do want to curate what their own kids are reading or exposed to and that's understandable. And we could certainly go to a tangent discuss and why I think school choice is important this matter. But I want to go back and probe you further on sort of what formed you because you talked about Hayek and how influential he was on your thinking. I'm curious if, was there something that led you even into Hayek or was there a time in which you first remember reading Hayek? Like, I guess what I'm trying to get at is how far back do your sort of free market roots go, Crosby? - Pretty far back. It's my mother and father, of course, who helped educate me. My father, when I was 10 years old, started running for the United States Senate in Missouri. And one of my favorite stories about that is he came out against Fabianism, English socialism from the turn of the last century. And he got attacked in the Kansas city star by some younger person who thought he was attacking Fabian Singer. And so I thought I was pretty, I became instantly at the age of 10, interested in, I wasn't so interested in Fabian Singer. And what Fabianism might be that my father was so opposed to. And I began to read National Review at that point. And I read, before I read Hayek, I read Friedman, capitalism and freedom freely on. And I was reading "Everything Bill Buckley" wrote. And, you know, various people, Henry Haslett and others, some of the simpler, but powerful books about economics. And when I finally came to Hayek, I read the road to serfdom, Fairholi Erlich. When I was in high school, I read the road to serfdom, which was powerful to me at the time. I think it's a little overstated now in terms of, you know, the road to totalitarianism. But fundamentally philosophically correct, I read the Constitution of Liberty, my favorite book of Hayek's is actually the counter-revolution of science, because I think it describes the world of information correctly. And I was very engaged in that and am very engaged in that from my government service and misinformation and disinformation and whatnot. But essentially, you know, my father was a banker and believed in free markets. And that's definitely stuck with me all the way through. And I've read all the, you know, the major, major free market writers from Adam Smith on. - I think you've developed a reading list right there that some of our listeners should check out. Henry Haslett's economics in one lesson, I think is just terrific. I gave a copy to my son and I don't know if he's read it yet, but I sure hope he does at some point. But I'm curious, what then was the impetus for stepping in and helping to found the Show Me Institute? Was there an issue or a cause at the time that you thought Missouri needed an organization like this that could really help try to advance free market policies in the state? - So, you know, very specific things led to Show Me. First, my friendship with Rex Kingfield and my discovery that, you know, I chaired a commission on the future of higher education, zero for Bob Holden, our liberal democratic governor at the time, which was an interesting, like my becoming a library director, kind of interesting twist in the world. Bob and I share a love of Shakespeare, among other things. So, you know, we were friendly. I was, I was a banker when he was a state treasurer and we became friendly and bonded over that. And so I chaired the commission on the future of higher education and I found that the leadership and higher education in Missouri with an exception, two exceptions that I'll go into were way on the left and also, and they use that in a way of building institutions that were not related to the health and welfare of the citizens of the state of Missouri. And particularly we're failing folks on the lower end of the economic scale, social economic scale, who they profess to be serving and they weren't. And, you know, the only two people in higher education and in education generally in Missouri that I thought we're getting it right. The guy named Charlie McLean, who had been a superintendent of education under Governor Ashcroft and had been president of Truman State and Mike Podgursky, the economist, chair of the economics department at the University of Missouri and a great educational economist who happened to be sitting in our, when we had our commission meetings and I was learning that, you know, this is also the Pew and Pew Charitable Trust were funding this and they had an agenda that I didn't know about. It wasn't a terrible agenda, it was a, we need more community colleges, it was essentially their agenda. But they twisted things in the research they were giving us to point in that direction and they missed, they missed the problem for community colleges and for profit colleges as well, which is the kids who go there are unprepared by K through 12. And K through 12 in Missouri, as you know, as well as anybody in the state is a mess. It has been a mess for a long time. We've made some improvements with your stimulation and show me stimulation. But I knew that Mike Newy is talking about, I didn't know Mike was sitting there and I discovered, you know, after a couple of commission meetings, I sent him an email, I found out he was at the University of Missouri, I'd read some of his stuff and he said, well, I've been sitting in your meetings. Oh, thanks for telling me, you know. And he put me together with Charlie McLean who was actually on our commission and I hadn't known exactly what he had done before. And I realized that, you know, that and also the, you know, fighting, fighting issues like tax increment financing, the incredible amounts of corporate subsidy going on in the Kansas City and St. Louis, and the general disinterest in solving the crime problem in Kansas City and St. Louis, et cetera. There needed to be some new ideas in the state and the newspapers and the higher institutions, higher education, we're not going to provide those ideas. And so I met Rex, I met Mike and we decided we would do something about it. Rex coming back from California where he was with dimensional funds and willing to put himself into it and his resources into it. Mike, our intellectual resources and I had some connections in the world. So we put together the Show Me Institute and education was one of the first things we wanted to deal with, the charter school movement in Missouri, the failure of higher education, the failure of K through 12 education, public, universe, and then the tax system. And, you know, both Rex and I believe in what I would call the low simple fair tax system and the state of Missouri had pretty much the opposite of that. And we've made some inroads on that, which I think are all positive. But there's a lot more work to do, and particularly in terms of simplifying it and trying to get rid of the picking winners and losers part of our tax system, which at both the federal and the state level is a total mess. - Well, we're going on 20 years since the founding of the organization. I think we've really made significant contributions in lots of policy areas. There's still a lot of work to do on almost every topic you mentioned, we're still working on it because there are improvements that are needed. But in so many cases, the Show Me Institute is among the only voices on our side of the aisle, but that is changing. For example, when I first started in 2012 at the Show Me Institute, I would go down to the legislature to testify in favor of a school choice. And I would usually be about the only one speaking in favor. Now, if you go to Jefferson City to testify on a bill, you almost can't get in to testify because there are parents there, there are other organizations that are advocating for these policies. So I really do think we've been a leader in that area and others and we're making a difference. So I really appreciate you and the foresight that you and Rex and Mike had in founding the Show Me Institute. Crosby, I wanna, we're about out of our time, but I wanna finish with this unrelated question. You are a noted bibliophile. And this is one of the things I learned about you. The first time I met you when I came out to the Kansas City Library to meet with you when I started at the Show Me Institute. I'm curious, what's one of the most important or exciting books that you've read recently that you might recommend to our listeners? - Yuvalu Vinz got a new book about the Constitution and I've just started reading it. Yuvalu Vinz's work, I think, very highly of. I interviewed Yuval and Daniel Allen, whose book Our Declaration is, I think, the best recent book on the Declaration of Independence. And they're both leading lights about the civic empowerment, the civic depolarization, the civic communal movement that's going on in the country. I can't right now remember the title of Yuvalu's book 'cause I've been off doing other reading, distracted from it. - Well, that's a terrific recommendation. - I was just to say, that's a terrific recommendation to meet Daniel Allen, you know, center right and center left and how they come together about the necessity. And this is a scrutiny idea too. The necessity of creating a civic consciousness that starts at the local level, understanding how we deal with our friends and neighbors, is that it took a billion idea, more than anything else, it's a took a billion idea that the great strength of America, the great strength of the United States of America is our ability to freely associate with each other to solve problems. He saw that in the 1830s and we've lost some steam in that. And part of it's because of our centralization, our nationalization of all of our problems. And we know that solving problems at the national level is actually a lot harder, particularly today, a lot harder. And Yuval and Daniel are about solving problems. I would say if you're gonna read anything today, the best book I've read lately 'cause I read it virtually every two or three months is Democracy in America, Bilex is to Tokyo. - Well, we should-- - Always need it. Always refreshing. - It's always good to read old books. We'll end it there, Crosby. Thank you so much for joining me. - Great, James, it's great to be with you. Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)