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Commentary
The war on truth turns to books
Dwight Eisenhower had been president for six months when he gave the 1953 commencement address at Dartmouth College. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s ongoing rampage against alleged communists in government (his head count mutated faster than COVID) included his henchmen demanding that federal libraries purge themselves of allegedly subversive books. Eisenhower, whose wartime experience taught him to recognize fascism when he saw it, was having none of it.
“Don’t join the book burners,” he told the Ivy League graduates. “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”
The MAGA crowd’s war on truth has opened up a new front against books. Today’s book burners aren’t drenching volumes in lighter fluid, though one did declare: “We should throw those books in a fire.” Instead, they seek to ban from schools books about racism, or about LGBTQ themes offensive to some parents’ and politicians’ sense of propriety.
A school district in San Antonio, Texas must be down to comic books after emptying its libraries’ shelves of 400 titles, including William Styron’s Pulitzer-winning historical fiction about a slave revolt, “The Confessions of Nat Turner”; “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; and John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules.”
The first two titles are among the 850 books deemed offensive by Texas state Rep. Matt Krause. This is the intellectualism developed when you attend a college devoted to creationism, co-founded by an author of the “Left Behind” apocalyptic novels.
In all probability, many book banners worry less about guilt-ridden white kids or one-sided instruction than they are hell-bent on whitewashing history
The Lone Star State is hardly the Lone Ban State. Kansas’s Goddard district stripped out such classics and acclaimed works as “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Bluest Eye” (Toni Morrison), “The Hate U Give” and “Fences,” August Wilson’s play and another Pulitzer awardee. On the nonfiction side, Goddard’s thought police confiscated “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the terrorist group.
A Florida bill meanwhile bars teachers from instruction that might make a student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” It offers as examples Holocaust denial and critical race theory. The first is anti-Semitic falsehood. CRT is another matter.
The law school-taught doctrine, holding that racism is embedded in America’s institutions and legal system, is anathema to Republican politicians who’ve made it shorthand for any instruction in the history of racism. Some Republicans object, for example, to “The Story of Ruby Bridges,” a children’s picture book, dealing not with theory but the historical fact of a 6-year-old who desegregated a New Orleans elementary school in 1960.
A Florida bill meanwhile bars teachers from instruction that might make a student 'feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.'
In New England, only New Hampshire prohibits certain classroom discussions on race, gender and identity. Responding to my question, the co-chairs of Massachusetts’s Education Committee, Sen. Jason Lewis and Rep. Alice Peisch, said in a joint statement that no instruction-limiting bills are before them. The state evaluates curricula for cultural diversity, the statement said; “while many curriculum decisions are ultimately made at the local level, the Education Committee remains committed to supporting policies that expand access to an increasingly diverse curriculum that will benefit every student in the Commonwealth.”
White parents in red states may be upset by undeniable woke overreach. Troglodyte progressives in San Francisco, for example, equated Abraham Lincoln with Robert E. Lee, finding the 16th president undeserving of a namesake school, or a statue, because, after suppressing a Sioux war on white settlers, he hanged 38 Native Americans — despite sparing 265, and in defiance of public demand and political advice, after painstakingly ascertaining their trials were botched.
Trog progs being no happier than Trumpers as laughingstocks, the school idiocy was reversed. Good teachers, of course, provide more open, balanced classroom discussion of such history. As can parents over dinner: “What'd ya do in school today?”
If, on the other hand, parents fear their children can’t handle the truth about undeniable, historical racism, well, snowflakes are white for a reason. I read “The Confessions of Nat Turner” in high school without my white male’s psyche drowning in self-loathing. (The titillating passages didn’t warp me, either.) Fretful moms and dads should heed Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne:
A good curriculum would honor the country’s triumphs and its commitment to freedom while being honest about a past that denied that very same freedom to Black Americans for centuries through slavery, segregation — and, until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, a withholding in many states of the most basic right of citizenship. A great nation does not lie to itself about its grievous sins and failures.
In all probability, many book banners worry less about guilt-ridden white kids or one-sided instruction than they are hell-bent on whitewashing history, which is standard operating procedure among those of authoritarian bent. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture,” iconic sci-fi author Ray Bradbury put it. “Just stop reading them.”
He’d get an amen from Ike, a Republican who warned that censoring history and debate is the enemy of a free society. But that was a long time ago in a GOP far, far away.
