Book Banning Part I: The History of Banned Books

The Daily Show Clip

The new culture war raging across America is over books.

According to The New York Times, the pace at which groups of parents and officials and lawmakers are challenging books in school libraries has reached a speed that many haven't seen in decades. Just since the start of the school year, the American Library Association has tracked more than 230 book challenges nationwide. Parents and school officials banning books at an unprecedented rate. I'm sure we've got hundreds of people out there that would like to see those books before we burn them.

Bethanne Patrick: According to PEN America bans are up 33% across the country. Statewide laws have been passed to pull what’s on the shelves in public libraries and public schools. Jobs have been lost. Educators have been threatened.

Adam Laats: The graduate students that I work with who are teaching, they tell me stories of their day to day work life these days that are different than anything I experienced.

Bethanne Patrick: This is Adam Laats a historian and college professor. But he's also taught in public schools, and he knows the ins and outs of the issues those teachers face.

Adam Laats It's the same tensions. But it's like all cranked up to 11. The tensions have always been there about, well, gosh, you know, if I teach this book and it has this sex part in it, are, are, is some parent going to get mad about that? I think these days though, uh, it's kind of like the difference between going to a family dinner.  Say you're going to the big Thanksgiving dinner.

Every year, you know of all these same tensions in the family.

Those tensions have always been there. I think the moment that we're in right now though is that moment at the sort of middle end of the dinner when everyone's had too much to drink and somebody, said the thing out loud in accusing tones and maybe even threw a glass on the ground.

You know, it's gotten scary and everybody knew the tension going in, but right now we're all just kind of Staring at each other, fingers crossed, you know, hoping that the sort of, um, you know, the responsible adults in the room will find a way to work this out peacefully, but honestly not sure that they will because some years.

It doesn't end that way. Some years it ends with family brawls. And so I think that's the situation right now. It's, it's always tense. For a hundred years it's been tense, but right now it's beyond tense.

Bethanne Patrick: It's a scary time, tensions are high and physical violence doesn't seem out of the question.  

NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT

“Teachers in Florida had to cover up their book shelves for fear of getting sanctioned or fired over the books that were in circulation”

NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT

“Strong reaction tonight from both sides after Governor Prtizker made Illinois the first state in America to essentially ban book bans.”

NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT 

“Mainstream media is running with a story about a Florida school banning a poem.”

News Clip

“Librarians at the Central Bucks School District have been ordered to remove two titles from library shelves.”

News Clip

“parents packing last night’s school board meeting in Dearborn with six books at the center of the conflict, four have LGBTQ themes”

Bethanne Patrick: Hearing the headlines has made me feel like everything is coming to a head, like civility and discourse are a thing of the past. It can feel like things are worse than ever!..

Which led me to ask. Is this true? Has America faced moments like this before?

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, writer and literary critic, Bethanne Patrick. This is the podcast where we examine some of the most surprising, industry-shaking controversies in the literary world and try to make sense of them.

This is the first episode in a series covering recent bans and violence that we’ve seen in the literary world. Today is part one of a two parter on book bans. Next week we’re going to talk to the people who have been directly affected. But today, we’re going to put the practice of book banning into historical context.

Chapter 1: We’ve Been Here Before

Gillian Frank: My name is Gillian Frank. I'm a historian of religion and sexuality, and I am the co host of the Sexing History Podcast.

Bethanne Patrick: Why are we talking to a professor whose expertise is in religion and sexuality on an episode about book bans? I’m sure, to the surprise of no one, the two are inextricably related. When we talk about book bans now we are most frequently talking about public schools and public libraries. Taxpayer funded institutions. But America has a long history of book banning that informs the conversation today. So before we move on to school bans we are speaking with Historian Gillian Frank about the grandfather of bannings... 

Gillian Frank. All right, so Anthony Comstock was the former Postmaster General of the United States. He was a devoutly religious Protestant. if you look at the pictures of him, he was a man with like this giant sort of Mutton chop beard. He was a fierce in public about his moral convictions. He was outspoken in his denunciation of all sorts of vices.

He was what we would call right now, we would say generously, deeply devout. Others would have accused him of being a moral fanatic. He was obsessed with those who disagreed with him.

Bethanne Patrick: In the late 19th century, Comstock sought power and while he had his detractors, he had fans.

Gillian Frank: He was good at networking. He was part of a larger set of networks, um, of folks who were involved in various forms. 

Bethanne Patrick: America was changing, it was industrializing, immigrants were turning up at the shores and moving into the cities. And when society is changing traditional values feel threatened—even back in the 19th century. 

Gillian Frank: And he was part of a larger network of people who were concerned about the morality of the populace and believed that it was the role, not just of churches, but of the state to make sure that the population had temptations removed from it. He called obscenities,basically various forms of lewd representations. He described them as traps for the young.

The idea was that young people were blank slates, they were profoundly impressionable, that they could be easily corrupted, and that by being exposed to lewd images, to sexualized representations to mass culture and books and notions that might somehow indoctrinate them, they would be forever turned deviant and therefore these, what he called traps for the young, must be removed from the streets, from plain sight, collected, and outright banned.

Bethanne Patrick:: In the words of the great American classic: 

The Simpsons Clip:
‘Think of the children. Won’t somebody please think of the children?’

Bethanne Patrick: But why was Comstock so obsessed with the corruption of children? Why was he so sure Americans were being ruined by moral decay?

Gillian Frank: He was a compulsive masturbator, this appeared repeatedly in his diaries.

When we talk about masturbation, we have to understand that in that particular era, it was fraught with a different set of meanings. 

In the 19th century, it was quite literally associated not only with sin It was called the deadly vice. It was seen as a form of moral decay and, uh, might actually, they believed, cause physical harm.

Bethanne Patrick: People believed that diseases associated with masturbating could decompose the human body. 

Gillian Frank:  Comstock was of a generation that literally believed that masturbation could kill, if not your soul, then your body.

Bethanne Patrick: Say what you want about the impact of the laws named after Comstock, but he was genuinely worried about saving the lives of the masses. He knew his weaknesses and was worried about everyone else succumbing. 

Gillian Frank: He was incapable of self governance, and therefore the surest way to assure moral purity was to remove the objects of temptation 

Bethanne Patrick: In 1873 and 1909 laws were passed to remove such temptations. 

Gillian Frank: The Comstock laws, which are named after him, basically were both federal and existed on the state level and they were all encompassing. These laws attempted to regulate what could be represented in print. Visually and also to make criminal the advertisement of and dissemination of devices that would interrupt pregnancies, whether that was a contraceptive or to enable abortion, which is to say. Actual abortion providers, but also devices and medicines that might terminate a pregnancy. So it was fairly wide ranging.

Bethanne Patrick: Think about what is included in ALL temptations. That's everything from education on contraception to anything that might tantalize a reader. How the heck do you enforce that? 

Through the post office. 

From 1873 to 1907 Comstock was a special agent of the U.S. Postal service. Which may seem like an odd choice. But think about what power that gives him. 

Gillian Frank: What he did was he systematized it. And that systematization happened through the province of the post office.What it basically did was it did it on a federal level and made using the U.S. post office as a means to distribute these materials a crime. 

Bethanne Patrick: The post office could and would investigate and charge people with trying to distribute all the things Comstock worried would corrupt the nation. Comstock personally arrested a feminist author who argued women should have rights over their own bodies. And he arrested someone who received the book in the mail.

Remember this is almost a century and a half ago. All of the items that concerned Comstock would need to be printed on paper. Aside from going door to door, the only way to distribute this kind of printed information, whether it was about contraception or something else the postmaster general deemed improper was to go through the post office.

Gillan Frank: So what we saw was quite literally a regime that was trying to create an information chokehold. 

Bethanne Patrick: Talk about big government infringing upon the lives of its citizens. 

But as the years went by, paying for the post office to inspect pieces of mail at such a level went out of vogue. But the laws stayed on the books and what's offensive adapts with the time. 

Gillian Frank: The goal is to give the state, to give regulators, to give those who are on the side of controlling sexual expression, controlling reproductive freedom, a multi tool.

And the power of it is not in the precision, it's the part of it is in the vagueness, right? increasingly as you see the rise of gay and lesbian communities, really starting in the 19th century through the rise of cities, gay magazines, gay film.

Bethanne Patrick: The Comstock laws were used to stop the spread of these materials. Even when they weren’t sexual or graphic. Just being gay positive was enough to be obscene. 

Gillian Frank: Um, they weren't initially planned to target gay people, right? The sort of notion that there was sort of a homosexual community as they would have called it in the day or a lesbian community. That was an alien thing to Comstock. And so, what we see is this sort of expansive capacity to enforce sexual and social norms as they're defined and as they change over time it establishes a governing order for sexuality.

Bethanne Patrick: This wide brush, it banned all sorts of material from magazines to literature. For instance DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Whatever caught the eye of government workers or christian activists or local police could and would be brought up on obscenity charges. The impacts of these laws have affected some of the great works of American literature. 

Gillian Frank: if we're thinking in the 1950s, we can look at Allen Ginsberg and the Howl trial, which was brought up on obscenity charges. And some of the reasons among them were the fact that it had explicit words, but this was Howl and other poems was explicitly pro gay.

HOWL read by Allen Ginsberg, 1975

or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, 

alcohol and cock and endless balls

Gillian Frank: So the logic of Howl's obscene, you know, It was offensive at the time by virtue of the fact that it was unabashedly and affirmatively queer, um, affirmed communism, didn't disavow it at the height of the Red Scare and the Lavender Menace of the 50s. This was a book that was like proudly both.

Bethanne Patrick: In 1957, officials seized the book, and released a statement saying, “you wouldn’t want your children to come across it.” Months later a bookstore manager sold a copy to an undercover cop and was arrested and jailed.

A trial ensued. It captured the attention of the press and literati. In the end a judge ruled that the poem held “redeeming social importance.” This was a turning point which led to books like Lady Chatterly’s lover to be available after a nearly 30 year ban. And Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

As the decades go by, obscenity charges on a national level have tended to fail. Famously attempts at banning offensive music only led to the parental advisory stickers being put on cds. Which in my experience as a parent was basically a flag for my kids to want the cd more. 

Anyways, now the law states a work has to be utterly without serious value in order for something to be banned. Which is certainly a higher bar but can still lead to expensive and high stress situations for small business owners or school libraries that carry works activists find offensive.

So, it’s a fight that continues and simultaneously there’s another battle that goes on and on. What should be taught in public education, what books should be stocked in public and school libraries. As we know this is where battle really lies today. Has this fight ever been as intense as it is now? That’s after the break. 

Chapter 2: Losing Touch With Nuance

Adam Laats: My name is Adam Laatz. I'm a professor of education and history at Binghamton University, State University of New York in upstate New York.

Bethanne Patrick: Professor Laats is the man we heard up top whose Thanksgiving dinner sometimes results in brawls. Suffice to say, Laats isn't the cliche stuffy historian type. 

Adam Laats: And one of the professors said, well, you know, if you're thinking about teaching high school or you're thinking about, you know, doing a PhD, you should teach high school or middle school. If you like history and you like fart jokes. And I was like, that's me. 

Bethanne Patrick: Laats has been working at the university of Binghamton for nearly two decades. His research has focused on the history of book bans but he still makes time for his other passions.

Adam Laats: but I still get to work in high school, middle school classrooms. And I get to hear the fart joke still, it's just the greatest job.

Bethanne Patrick: Clearly Laats loves teaching, even though he had to deal with upset parents over what's okay and not okay to teach middle schoolers and highschoolers. 

Adam Laats: Lots of groups on both the right and the left have been book banners. For gosh, 50 years now, books like Huck Finn have come under pressure from the left because it include, includes this, you know, horrible racial language, you know, about, black people, indigenous people. And so from the left groups have said, Hey, our kids shouldn't be exposed to that. So sometimes you hear this you know, like both sides kind of approach.

Bethanne Patrick: Depending on your perspective what is and isn't appropriate to teach a child will change but according to Laats for nearly 100 years one ideology has been pushing the issue, setting us on a course we keep perpetuating. 

Adam Laats: I take it to the 1920s. That is sort of the fault line in U. S. history. When it comes to school culture wars, the, the ways that Americans are fighting right now, the sides. Those sides were defined in the 1920s.

Bethanne Patrick: Who started it exactly? 

Adam Laats: Well, in the 1920s, this is one that gets people very nervous. I think justifiably, Americans don't like to talk about this group.

But in the 1920s, there was a clear leader of this kind of book banning, this kind we're still seeing today. And that group was the Ku Klux Klan.

Is the KKK movement still alive in the US? - BBC News

The Klu Klux Klan is alive and well in America today.

Bethanne Patrick: Today we imagine a terrorist group that society at large has rejected, but back in the roaring 20's that wasn't the case.

Adam Laats: It wasn't just a southern thing. It was a huge thing.

The Ku Klux Klan in the 20s ran the state of Indiana. They ran the state of Oregon. Right here in upstate New York, they held these huge ceremonies on Lookout Hill, where I am right now, where they, they naturalized citizens, they were, um, they were violent and they were racist, uh, but they weren't, the same, their biggest parades in Washington, DC. They didn't wear their hoods. They were proud to be members of this group back then. And they were ferocious book banners and book controllers

Bethanne Patrick: The Klan was prominent across America. Their reach even extended into the classroom.

Adam Laats: So in the 1920s, and we can do this in the, you know, the thirties, the forties, the fifties, you can pick a decade, but, the name that they called themselves were the women of the Ku Klux Klan. Uh, they would conduct whispering campaigns in local communities where they would, uh, talk about what any local teacher was teaching and they reserved to themselves the right physically to go into the school, inspect the books and, uh, you know, to accuse teachers of.

You know, teaching ideas that weren't up to sort of their idea of what made, you know, traditional American values, which again, it's the clan. So their idea of traditional American values was very strangled and stunted.

Bethanne Patrick: Not surprisingly, English wasn't the only department the Klan took issue with. There was a famous American history textbook written by a nationally known scholar, David Saville Muzzey that the Klan wanted to replace. So they wrote their own textbook.

Adam Laats: The Klan textbook from the 1920s? it said that slavery, the big problem with slavery was that it brought a bunch of black people to America and imposed a burden on white people. I say that again. The Klan version from 1920 said that, insisted every kid in America should understand race. Every kid in America should understand the bad, the terrible nature of slavery and that the worst thing about slavery was that poor white people were forced to, uh, dish out welfare for the black people who had come to this country by slavery.

Bethanne Patrick: And when people read this at the time, they realized just how hateful the klan was and they recycled all of the klans textbooks and used it as mulch to make non segregated community gardens. ... I'm kidding. Sadly. The racism against black people wasn't what upset most people. 

Adam Laats: So when you take people like Catholic Irish immigrants. We're just, I mean, they wouldn't say this, but the implication was anti black and anti indigenous racism sort of defines white America at the time, but it was a struggle for groups like Catholic, especially Catholic Irish, but also Catholic, Catholic Germans, Catholic Polish to be included in this sort of white American history.

Bethanne Patrick: The Klan textbook was a failure. Fortunately. 

So on a grassroots level there was a fight over what we should teach kids, which is similar to our current moment. But one thing we are seeing now is Mayors, Governors, Presidential candidates campaigning and focusing on what's taught in schools. I was curious if prominent politicians were interested in book banning in schools all those decades ago.

Adam Laats: So in the 1930s, you got a guy that doesn't get remembered a lot except by historians. But in the, in the 1920s and 30s, he's very famous because he's trying to be very famous.

His name is Thomas L. Blanton. He's a congressman from the great state of Texas. And in the, in 1935, He thinks he's riding this wave of school paranoia. You know, this sort of end of the family dinner anxiety that happens, you know, He thinks he's going to get, um, accolades.

Uh, back then the U S Congress controlled, uh, Washington DC public schools. And Blanton snuck in what he called the Little Red Rider. Blanton passed a law that D. C. teachers could not talk about communism, even outside of work. So inside school, outside of school, if you were a teacher in D. C., you weren't allowed to talk about communism.

And you had to come pick up your paycheck every two weeks and swear an oath that you had not done so. And this was the law that U. S. Congress passed this law. 

So teachers in the 1930s said, wait, like how can I teach kids anything if I can't talk about communism? And again, this is 1935 when there was communism.

Bethanne Patrick: So all the way back in the 30's you had opportunistic politicians trying to rile people up by turning public education into a fight. And Laats told me you also had the media playing the same songs as today. 

Adam Laats:  Obviously there's no internet in 1940. But there is Forbes magazine, uh, and the, the man who founded Forbes magazine, Bertie Forbes, he was, uh, he, he was telling people take over your local school boards because these local school boards are sneaking in all this anti American stuff.

And so Forbes magazine, you know, uh, was a sort of, you know, influent influencer of the day. 

Bethanne Patrick: Forbes was particularly focused on a history text book whose main author was Harold Rug and was referred to as the Rug’s textbook.

Adam Laats: They taught that the U.S. was not, by definition, the only good country on the planet. They taught kids that the U. S. had a history of, of racial strife, of class strife. Uh, they even tried to, to de-authorize to, you know, turn classrooms into a more democratic structure where teachers wouldn't be the only authority. And in, at the end of the 1930s, literally while Nazis are burning books in Europe, these books become accused of being subversive, anti American, anti white, anti Christian, and they are yanked from, from millions of, uh, sold copies to, I mean, an unmeasurable number.

They just, you couldn't, you couldn't sell one. And in some places, Marshfield, Wisconsin, Binghamton, New York, they made bonfires of these history books.

Bethanne Patrick: KKK history books. Politicians in congress making teachers swear to not speak about communism. Book burnings! Instead of feeling like now is worse than ever I started to wonder how we ever made our way out. But of course these people don't represent everyone. 

In Binghamton, New York, a group of parents were outraged about the Rugs textbook and the superintendent spoke up.

Adam Laats: The school superintendent Daniel Kelly said, I love these books. I use these books. I read these books to my children, Kelly went to the school board and said, has anyone here besides me, has anyone here read these books?

And they all said, no, but we hear that they're socialist. We hear that they're subversive and we can't take that risk. We got, if they, if they might be dangerous, we got to get rid of them for the sake of the children. 

 Daniel Kelly said, if you want to get rid of them, fine, we'll get rid of them.

I'm not going to fight with you about that because you seem so angry and you haven't read the books and I'm not going to die on this Hill.,

Bethanne Patrick: Instead Superintendent Daniel Kelly just ordered new textbooks. Ones that were very similar…

Adam Laats:  And that's what gives me hope.

The adults in the room, people like superintendent Kelly Schools are going to do what they, we've always done, which is find ways to do what's best for the children. Even when some people in the community are running around doing things that they're claiming are for the children, but are really dangerous for the children.

Bethanne Patrick: So this moment we are in now, it's similar to the 20's and 30s. I wasn’t too encouraged to learn that considering the world wars we saw in those decades. But Laats assured me America has gone through moments like in the 20s and 30s, like today…

Adam Laats: People like Ronald Reagan made their name in California, standing up for a very stunted curriculum. And in fact, against books like Land of the Free, which was a tech history textbook, again, super similar to 1619 project, a history textbook that purportedly was going to include more non white voices, especially black voices.

Ronald Reagan makes a national name for himself as a culture warrior specifically about what history to teach in the great state of California.

Bethanne Patrick: This scary turbulent moment, according to Laats it's been like this many times before, but why does it keep coming up time and again?

Adam Laats: It's a chronic condition because the United States Has never been able to figure out its pronouns. The United States cannot who we are and who they are. And a bunch of different groups for a hundred years have tried to insist that our group counts as part of the American us.

That's the problem and it's always been a problem, a chronic condition that comes out during periods of stress, like say a global pandemic. Like say a particularly turbulent presidency, these stressors, this, huge cultural tumult, you know, like what does America mean? Take your pick!

Bethanne Patrick: When you’re living in history, it’s easy to forget we are part of history. And America is no stranger to turbulence.

Adam Laats: In the 1950s we have, you know, anti communism and McCarthyism, the 1960s, the name of the decade even means political culture war. So, uh, no matter where you look, it's a chronic condition that America doesn't know how to define itself. And we can kind of muddle along, but when it comes to what the schools are supposed to teach, suddenly we have to say, Hey, wait, you know, what do the kids need to know?

And then suddenly we have to define it and we, we, we can't, uh, the, we being the United States, the United States can't tell kids who we are because we literally don't agree.

Bethanne Patrick: America has been through hard times before, those times stress our conflicting identity crisis. Right now we are certainly feeling the effects. But in the 70s one town saw blood spilled over textbooks. 

ARCHIVAL: Does it, uh, does an elementary teacher have the right to challenge that child's belief in God? Cause him to doubt that there is a God?

That's after the break. 

Chapter 3: From Printed Page to Bloodstained Streets

Adam Laats: it was Willa Cather, the author who in 1936, she named it. She heard the famous quote, the world broke apart in 1922 or thereabouts.

Meaning this sense of, of a divided culture that can't agree on what, what books are right for children. who represent the canon of what kids should read that has for us as a through line been it's about literally who kids are becoming, if the pressure, the pressure point, the reason for these ferocious culture wars in schools Is because America doesn't know what to tell children about what defines America.

Literature is the thing in schools that is supposed to have, help children to do that. So to pick just one episode, it was the mid 1970s. And it was literally explosive.  

Adam Laats: Her name was Alice Moore and sadly she just passed away. She was a really sweet and generous person, but she was also an ardent conservative activist. And she ran, took over her school board and in 1974, Kanawha County West Virginia

Bethanne Patrick: Moore took her position on the school board seriously and went through the textbooks they were voting to approve. And she took real issue with the new literature textbooks.

Adam Laats: The school board was just kind of passing it through, clearly the chairman expected this to be a very boring school board meeting, all in favor, all opposed, you know, just going through the motions, but clearly expecting he would have five, you know, unanimous five in favor.

Adam Laats: But then you hear, uh, Alice Moore saying, well, no, wait a minute. Has anyone looked really closely at these books? Cause I have, and they include literature like E. E. Cummings. I like my body when it is with your body, 

E.E. Cummings: I Like My Body When It Is With Your Body:

i like your body.   i like what it does,

i like its hows.   i like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones,

and the trembling

-firm-smooth ness and which i will

again and again and again

kiss,

Adam Laats: Which she thought was too sexual for kids. It includes a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem, you know, he was one of the beats. The poem that it included was Christ Climbed Down.

Christ Climbed Down

Christ climbed down from his bare tree this year

And ran away to where no intrepid bible salesman

Covered the territory in two tone cadillacs and

where no Sears Roebuck creches

complete with plastic babe in manger

arrived by parcel post

Adam Laats: And if you read the poem, uh, I think a Christian would say, I'm not much of a Christian, but a Christian would say, actually, this is a very Christian poem because it says that Christ would look sourly upon the things people, bad things people have done in his name.

Um, it included bits from, um, uh, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, you know, his prison memoirs, The Black Militant.

Eldridge Cleaver: Soul On Ice

I had planned to run for President of the United States. My slogan? PUT A BLACK FINGER ON THE NUCLEAR TRIGGER. 400 years of docility, of being calm, cool and collected under stress and strain would go to prove that I was the man for the job.

Bethanne Patrick: Even a celebrity at the time got caught in the crosshairs. There was an excerpt from Evel Knievel's memoir. 

Adam Laats: It included bits from his memoir where he talks about being a kid taking, this is the word he used, taking goofballs.

And running away from cops. I don't know what a goofball is exactly, like pharmaceutically

Bethanne Patrick: But Alice Moore, the conservative mom at the center of this, Moore didn't want her kids knowing about Goofballs - or any of the text Laats mentioned above. So she made her case against the textbook.

Adam Laats: Alice Moore in 1974 said this literature is not gonna raise a new generation of American kids. It's anti Christian, it's anti patriotic, it's pro drug, it's anti white, you know, take, it's everything bad.

And we're not just allowing kids to read it. We're giving it to them in school and saying that this counts as your culture. Read it. Learn it. This is you. It got real ugly real fast. 

Bethanne Patrick: Moore didn't have enough votes to ban the textbook so she helped organize a boycott till the school removed it. And things got out of hand fast.

ARCHIVAdam Laats:  Mr. Cleaver, in his poetry, obviously thinks it is beautiful to rape people.

Bethanne Patrick: After a 3 hour debate on June 27th 1974 the board approved the books, and in response Moore and her supporters staged a boycott. 45k elementary school students were kept home, miners, bus drivers and trucking workers joined the boycott. 

Adam Laats: They dynamite bombed the school district headquarters. They firebombed elementary schools. 

Bethanne Patrick: Thankfully the bombing happened at night so no one was hurt but this wasn't the only acts of violence over these text books.

Adam Laats:  They formed picket lines. Two people got shot, not killed. So school buses were sniped, you know, with rifle fire, cop cars shot.

Bethanne Patrick: The superintendent moved his family out of town. 

Adam Laats:  You know, for the people in Kanawha County, when they sent you a death threat, you had to take that seriously. He didn't sleep in the same place two nights in a row.

Bethanne Patrick: All of this over textbooks. The white house, the Ford administration got involved!

Adam Laats: the white house sent out an official statement after the school district headquarters had been dynamite bombed, the white house sent out a formal statement in support of the boycott, in support of the side that had bombed the school district headquarters.

Bethanne Patrick: After nearly 5 months the battle petered out. 

Adam Laats: In the end, the county came back to what the school district had proposed in the first place. You don't like the book, let's do this. We don't want to keep the old textbooks, we need new textbooks.

But, we'll have whatever books are the most sort of controversial, parents will have to sign a permission slip. Two people are shot, buildings are bombed, it's a mess. And finally, they come back and say, okay, that's what we'll do. Partly it's because it was, it became clear that the boycotters, even in a conservative area, like Kanawha County, West Virginia, we're in the minority.

The biggest March. Was in favor of the books, and it was led by high school students,

So it fizzled, and you ended up exactly in the same place we had been before the boycott.

It's just that everyone was a lot angrier, and the teachers, uh, were a lot more frightened. Uh, and the teaching was a lot more watered down, 

Bethanne Patrick: I can't even imagine what that must have been like for the teachers or the students. With all this in mind, I started to wonder, how bad is this moment, if it's always been an issue that's ebbed and flowed. What should we think about this culture war as it continues into a third century?

Adam Laats: I hate to say that this isn't as bad as it gets because the kinds of things we're seeing now, and this I say more as a teacher and a parent than as a historian. But when I see, um, students who are, you know, afraid to express, uh, their identity, uh, when I see students who feel like the state is, like the government is somehow against them, you know, as, as a gay kid, as a black kid, you know, like the, the, it's 17 years old.

Uh, but to be in a school and to have the governor of your state either imply or say straight out that you don't somehow count as much as a fully person is some other kinds of kids in that school. That's as bad as it gets. 

Bethanne Patrick: But... on the other hand..

Adam Laats: Having said that, it's numbers wise. It's been worse in the fifties. if you, if you, if you ask teachers in New York city in 1953, they were fired in fistfuls.

Bethanne Patrick: Between 1948-1953, 250 teachers were forced out because of concerns that they were communists or had communist sympathies.

Adam Laats: So they had no autonomy to, they tried, they sued. And that's one of the reasons we know about it as historians is because they put their evaluations, their annual evaluations. In the court records to prove that they were good teachers and got fired anyway, but they were accused of being subversive. And so they were fired. Um, so they, you know, they, they, they weren't able to push back successfully. They lost their jobs. And again, one even lost her life.

Bethanne Patrick: Starting in the late 40’s and lasting over a decade, teachers in New York were subject to investigations trying to determine their loyalty to the country. Minnie Gutride was one of the teachers subjected to this. She was accused of attending communist meetings nearly a decade earlier. Two days after being interrogated, she died by suicide.

I’d like to imagine- and I feel confident, that at least today Gutride would have supporters and resources to help her. 

I didn't think I'd say this when we started researching the episodes on book bans, but I'm at least grateful that the culture war this time around- at least so far- has been a cold war, that buildings haven’t been blown up, that protestors haven’t been shot. It’s cold comfort I know. And it doesn’t change the fact that the situation today is still dire.  

Next week we talk to those directly affected.

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, Produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Boniello with additional production and editing by Jordan Aaron.

This episode was produced by Claire McInerny.

This episode was written by Lauren Delisle.

Additional production and writing by Grant Irving.

Fact checking by Douglas Weissman

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vannessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena. 

Art by Tom Grillo. 

Produced and Hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. 

Original music composed and performed by Hashem Assadullahi, additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate.

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Matt Keeley, Adam Laats, Gillian Frank, Kasey Meehan, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Len Niehoff and Alexandra Stevenson.

You can learn more about Missing Pages at the podglomerate dot com, on twitter at miss pages pod and on Instagram at missing pages pod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to.