Philip Keeney

Philip Olin Keeney (1891–1962), and his wife, Mary Jane Keeney, were librarians who became part of the Silvermaster spy ring in the 1940s.

Keeney met Mary Jane when both were working as librarians at the University of Michigan in 1929. In 1931, he became head librarian and professor of library economy at Montana State University (now known as the University of Montana) at Missoula, where he made several improvements. By the mid-1930s, both Keeney and his wife were involved with left-wing political movements. In 1937, Keeney, although tenured, was summarily terminated after questioning book censorship by a local politician and supporting a proposal to revive a local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors, among others, Keeney brought a wrongful dismissal suit and, in 1939, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in his favor and mandated reinstatement. But, made ill by the stress, he soon resigned.

The Keeneys moved to Berkeley, California, where they became members of the Marin County CPUSA Club, according to Mary Jane's diaries. In 1939, the Keeneys founded the Progressive Librarians' Council (PLC). That year, the PLC endorsed for Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, chairman in 1937 of the first open meeting of the Second Congress of the League of American Writers, which was “founded under Communist auspices in 1935,” according to a 1942 report by President Roosevelt's Attorney General Francis Biddle. As he was not a librarian, the American Library Association (ALA) opposed MacLeish's candidacy, but when FDR made his appointment, the PLC candidate got the nod.

The PLC also smuggled money to Emilio Andrés, commissar of an army corps of the Soviet-backed Spanish Republican Army, in exile in France after the Spanish Civil War. During the Hitler-Stalin pact, the PLC sent a letter to FDR urging him not to aid Poland, France or the United Kingdom, all fighting for their lives under the Nazi onslaught. (The letter had been phrased in such a way that it appeared to be from the ALA, but that group sent the President its own missive clarifying that the PLC did not speak for the ALA.) Once the pact broke down, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the PLC altered its position, advocating American participation in the war.

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