The instructive history of book bans

Books “are disappearing” from K-12 classrooms and libraries across the country in an “unprecedented flood.” After reaching a record high in the 2021-22 school year, book bans increased another 33 percent last year, “supercharged” by “punitive state laws” and “local and national coordinated pressure campaigns.” This is despite opposition from roughly two-thirds of Americans.

As the fight to control what students read accelerates, Americans would do well to reflect on the nation’s long history of banning books during periods of social and cultural upheaval. Book banning campaigns didn’t work, wasted time and money, upended the lives of innocent people and, most important, erased aspects of the past and of contemporary human experience.

While similar in many respects to previous efforts, the current campaign is new in its breadth and scale and its almost exclusive focus on books intended for schoolchildren and young adults, including picture books, which account for roughly 10 percent of challenged titles.

In Orange County, Florida, 673 books, ranging from “well-known classics to popular contemporary novels,” were pulled from classrooms this year because they might violate recent laws restricting students’ access to material dealing with race, sexual orientation and gender identity. In Texas, which is entering its “third straight year of coordinated book banning,” districts are pulling books by Dr. Seuss, Judy Blume and Eric Carle, among others.

A Texas law requires publishers to label books based on their sexual content. Books rated “sexually explicit” can’t be sold to public schools and must be removed from school libraries. Books that refer to or depict sex “require parental permission to read.”

Penalties for using banned books are draconian. In the last two years, at least seven states have passed laws exposing librarians and school officials to large fines and years of imprisonment “for providing sexually explicit, obscene, or ‘harmful’ books to children.” In Georgia, a teacher was fired for reading a book discussing gender identity to fifth graders. In Texas, a teacher was dismissed for assigning “an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary” to her eighth-grade class. Not surprisingly, educators are often pulling books from shelves before challenges are raised.

Teachers, librarians, parents, authors and publishers have begun to push back, filing lawsuits challenging book bans on free expression and equal protection grounds in Florida, Texas, Iowa and Arkansas. In Iowa, a federal judge issued an injunction against a state law denying K-12 students access to books that describe sex in any way. And a recent law in Illinois moves in the opposite direction — public libraries that ban books on partisan grounds will lose state funding.

Opponents of book bans can take some solace from the fate of past campaigns, which, though nasty and brutish, were often relatively short.

In 1637, “The New English Canaan,”Thomas Morton’s “withering critique” of Puritan life, was banned by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That ban turned an otherwise forgettable work into an “anti-authoritarian icon.”

In the decades before the Civil War, multiple Southern states passed laws outlawing works expressing “antislavery sentiments.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published in 1851, was the first book to be banned throughout the southern states, but it still became the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Over time, it became clear that book bans and other forms of censorship could not win the “battle of ideas” or materially affect the forces that led to the Civil War.

In the 1870s, Anthony Comstock, “a carping moralist government official,” persuaded Congress to prohibit the dissemination of “obscene” or “immoral” materials through the mail. The law’s vague language allowed overly zealous bureaucrats to stop everything from anatomy textbooks to “The Canterbury Tales.” Censors in Boston banned books ranging from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” Ironically, as Boston became infamous for banning books, authors started to deliberately publish there, hoping the publicity would boost sales elsewhere.

By the early 1900s, however, “the public grew less prudish,” courts found Comstock’s cases specious, and his condemnations almost “invariably translated” into higher book sales. Although “Comstockery” was an object of ridicule, the Comstock Act, though rarely used, remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court limited the definition of obscenity to works “utterly without redeeming social importance.”

In the aftermath of World War II, Cold War tensions helped propel the “Red Scare,” a sweeping anti-Communist campaign associated with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, to suppress “subversive” and “un-American” views. Popular textbooks were attacked for espousing “the ‘Statist propaganda’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal alongside his ‘Communist party line’ on American inequality.” Indiana’s textbook commission even attempted to ban “Robin Hood” for following “the Communist line” of robbing from the rich to give to the poor.

In contrast to the devastating impact of its witch hunts, loyalty oaths and blacklists, the censorship of the McCarthy Era “generated more ridicule than change.” Corporate interests — including the Rockefeller and Carnegie corporations, Chrysler and the National Association of Manufacturers — joined forces with educators, librarians and others to resist its excesses. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged the graduating class at Dartmouth College not to “be afraid to go in your library and read every book,” because the “only censorship” should be “our own ideas of decency.”

In 1982, after a school board in New York State yanked books considered “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy,” the Supreme Court ruled that “local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”

Yet that is precisely what today’s book banners are doing. As in the past, a small group of people are responsible for most of the challenges to books dealing with LGBTQ themes and characters, race and racism. Of over 1,000 cases analyzed by the Washington Post, almost 60 percent were filed by just 11 people.

While most books remain on school shelves after challenges are resolved, some do not, and the cost for educators in time, energy and anxiety is enormous. In what PEN America has labeled the “Ed Scare,” at least 25 states have passed laws restricting teaching about “divisive” subjects, including race, gender identity and sexual orientation, or limiting books that schools may use. Uncertain about restrictions that might apply to them, roughly 25 percent of instructors, even in states without restrictive laws, are revising their teaching materials and practices to avoid discussion of sensitive subjects, thus undermining students’ education in the process.

In time, today’s book bans will likely appear as pointless, harmful and misguided as those of the past. Parents, of course, have a legitimate interest in their children’s schooling and a right to object to material that is sexually explicit, violent, racist or otherwise harmful. Overwhelmingly, however, educators take great care to select material that is age-appropriate, meets professional standards and furthers students’ education. Instead of commanding the sun to stand still in the heavens, we should, in all but the rarest of cases, trust their judgment.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. David Wippman is President of Hamilton College.