WASILLA, Alaska – Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.
According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.
Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well-liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented.
It all happened 12 years ago and the controversy long ago disappeared into musty files. Until this week. Under intense national scrutiny, the issue has returned to dog Palin. It has been mentioned in Time magazine and the New York Times and is spreading like a virus through the blogosphere.
In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her – starting before she was sworn in – about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.
Emmons told the Frontiersman she flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship.
When the matter came up for the second time in October 1996, during a City Council meeting, Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla housewife who often attends council meetings, was there.
"Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?' " Kilkenny said.
"I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.' "
Palin, questioned at the time, called her inquiries rhetorical and simply part of a policy discussion with a department head "about understanding and following administration agendas," according to the Frontiersman article.
Four days before the exchange at the City Council, Emmons got a letter from Palin asking for her resignation. Similar letters went to four other department heads. Palin told the Anchorage Daily News then that the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the mayor's job, which she'd won in a hard-fought election from three-term mayor John Stein. Stein had hired many of the department heads.
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