Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today’s episode is the first in a three episode series in which we’ll be discussing the cultural and political elements of banning books.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This week we’ll look at three past book panics, and begin to trace some of the patterns that might help us understand the current unfortunate relevance of this issue.

Joanne Freeman:

Next week, we’ll look more broadly at political and economic attacks on public schools, and discuss why schools have been such a center of American culture wars since the early republic.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And for our final episode, we’ll look at the idea of book bans as an intersection of bullying and politics. We’ll also talk about other psychological aspects of bans, the pressure to self censor, the relationship between bans and nostalgia, and what the resurgence of book bans today says about the collective health of the nation.

Joanne Freeman:

This marks the first time that Now & Then has embarked on a multi episode arc. And we are so excited and happy that you’re here with us to explore this pressing piece of the American story. Now, obviously this is something that has been in the news a lot, beginning really, in the fall and continuing, and even increasing recently in the news at the beginning of this year. And we’ve heard about books being challenged that maybe they shouldn’t be present in school libraries. We’ve heard about books being removed from curricula or actually removed from school libraries or public libraries. So this has come up in a variety of different ways, but in one way or another, we have people stepping forward and challenging the right for libraries and various other institutions to be offering or teaching certain books.

Now, it’s certainly true that this is not something new, unfortunately, neither in America or in the world at large, as we’re going to be talking about today, Heather, you and I, that there’s a long history of controversy over banning or challenging or sidelining or silencing things that are seen in one way or another as dangerous, but what’s happening now seems to relate to some things that are much bigger, and that relate to some of the other crisis points in the place where we are in American history right now. This discussion about banning books has to do not only with access to knowledge, but it has to do with who controls the knowledge, who has access, and what that suggests about the actual working of democracy.

So that’s some of what we’re going to talk about today, but before we plunge into the historical context of that, we want to talk for just a little bit about what has been going on recently in the news regarding what’s happening on a state level in towns and states around the country. The most recent controversy that got a lot of attention was a Tennessee town’s decision to ban Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust. And it is a graphic novel in which Spiegelman talks about his parents’ experiences as prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats and Poles as pigs.

It has a lot of intense emotion as well as imagery, although it is graphic, it is “cartoon formed.” But it’s an intense book. It became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. So Maus was banned from the eighth grade curriculum in this town in Tennessee, prompting a huge debate and actually selling countless copies of Maus. Apparently it’s sold out on Amazon because once this became a controversy, everyone wanted to see what the controversy was about, which we’re going to see as a pattern repeated again and again and again, in American history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Maus has gotten a lot of attention and it’s an astonishing ban in the sense that it is a Pulitzer Prize winning book. It’s also a book that dramatically changed the introduction of graphic novels into America. It’s sort of the classic graphic novel.

Joanne Freeman:

And a new effective way of getting at the Holocaust, which is pretty huge.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is. And it’s an enormously popular book as well. But it was not the only that’s been under fire lately. In Texas, for example, a state representative put more than 800 books on what he called a watch list, which is something that writer has been doing to educators for a while now. And now they’ve got books on it as well. And many of those books deal with issues of race or sexuality, especially among young people who are LGBTQ. And what’s interesting about the list of 800 books if you have read it, which I happen to do one night.

Joanne Freeman:

What a surprise.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Exactly. But it’s really interesting because you know full well that they haven’t actually read the vast majority of these books, if any of them. It is a blanket declaration that any book that seems to come close to a line is not acceptable in Texas, one is that particular list. But then there is more of them.

There’s a similar list in Oklahoma where a state senator filed a bill to ban any books that addressed what that senator called sexual pervasion in school libraries. There are similar efforts in Wyoming, in Mississippi. And Republican governors have seized on this idea as a political winner. So for example, last November, Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, demanded that the state’s education agency investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography. And what they’re really looking at for the most part is books that take a look at LGBTQ issues.

The cost of violating these bans is high. So in addition to the idea of being dragged before your administrators or your school board, or perhaps losing your job, in places like Oklahoma, the proposed Oklahoma law would permit parents to challenge books in public school libraries, and for each day that the book remains on the shelves after 30 days, they would be able to collect $10,000.

So we seem to be in a moment where there is an increasing momentum behind the idea of policing what is available in our public schools. And that’s really a multifaceted issue. But it brings to mind, Joanne, where I wanted to start with this, because we can all just say, well, banning books is probably not a good idea, but it kind of starts us from the perspective of why not? Why shouldn’t we do that? Why shouldn’t our schools decide what is acceptable for public school students have access to?

Joanne Freeman:

That does, surprise, surprise, go back certainly to the founding period. And it has to do with the very nature of the American Republic, because one of the things that distinguished a Republic from a monarchy was to an extreme degree grounded on the American populists, it’s the people who govern. It’s the people who put people in office. It’s the people who remove them, and for the public to govern, for the public to have that kind of power, they need to be informed. They need to be educated. They need to have access to information. They need to have ways to read and understand things in a way that will make them ideally informed voters. So a democratic polity like ours, a democratic republic, relies on the free spread of information.

So the idea of really limiting that and even worse than that, limiting it based on one person or one organization deciding that somehow or other a particular work, a particular book, a particular pamphlet would be offensive in some way, that was literally something that endangered democracy in the eyes of the founder folk democracy, as they understood it.

So for example, in 1814, there was a book that became controversial, and it was by a Frenchman Regnald de Becourt. He wrote a book on the creation of the world. Jefferson, among others thought that it was going to be something that was geological or historical, but it actually was right. You’re laughing because indeed, and it’s Jefferson. It was more than that. It was about religion. It was challenging religion. And so it was seen by many as being blasphemous.

Americans began to challenge the book. They didn’t want the book sold. They began attacking people who were selling the book. It became a controversy at the time. And in 1814, Jefferson wrote the following, “I am mortified to be told that in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry and of criminal inquiry too as an offense against religion. That a question like this can be carried before the civil magistrate, is this then our freedom of religion? Are we to have a sensor? Who’s in premature shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy. If [inaudible 00:09:43] book be false in its facts, disprove them. If false in its reasoning, refute it. But for God’s sake, let us freely hear both sides if we choose.” Which is a really straightforward way of saying the free circulation of information is vitally important.

And he goes on to say something which will prove to be true in modern times too. He says, “I thought the work would be very innocent, and one which might be confided to the reason of any man, not likely to be much read, if let alone, but if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy in vindication of his right to buy and to read what he pleases.

So he points his finger at something that we just mentioned being true of Maus, which is as soon as something becomes controversial and is banned, of course, it’s going to attract attention, and people are going to want to read it, because what are they being prevented from reading?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m going to push back a little bit here because what the people who are banning say the LGBTQ books in eighth grades, for example, in Texas, would say, I suspect, is that if the majority wants to keep this out of their schools, shouldn’t they be allowed to?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that’s probably on a whole host of levels, beginning from the very fact of what does that mean, majority? Are they going to take a poll of all parents? But above and beyond that, it’s a bridging of fundamental right, that really is fundamental to the working of democracy. And as an example of that, I want to offer you what Jefferson thought the constitution-

Heather Cox Richardson:

You’re going to offer me Jefferson’s justification?

Joanne Freeman:

I am offering you Jefferson. I didn’t even realize till the words came out of my mouth, I’m doing that with a straight face. This is how into this topic I am, Heather, that I offered you Jefferson without even a smirk. But it’s worth noting, the first amendment in the bill of rights, I’ll read it as it exists. It’s, “Congress shall make no law of respecting and establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or a bridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Now, Jefferson weighed in, writing to Madison, on what he thought should be said in the bill of rights regarding a free press. This was his suggestion, the people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write or otherwise to publish anything but false facts. And I love the fact that Jefferson always has this category, two facts and false facts, which is problematic in many ways, but still, that people can publish anything but false facts affecting and injuriously the life, liberty, property, or reputation of others, or affecting the piece of the confederacy with foreign nations.

So he’s setting a pretty high bar there. He’s not saying well, we better not publish things if they offend people, he’s saying that things that injuriously really affect lives or foreign policy or property, those are reasons to not allow things to get in general circulation, but otherwise people have a right to speak, to write and to publish. That’s pretty sweeping. That’s obviously, as I just suggested, not what the first amendment ends up saying, but that gives you a sense of how important, not just Jefferson, but really the founding generation understood freedom of press and freedom of expression to be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because it enables people to weigh different ideas and to think things through, and with luck, the ideas the majority will pick what is the most obvious approach or closest approach to what should be reality.

Joanne Freeman:

That is the absolute grounding of democracy, which is you have conflicting ideas, they bounce off each other, you have debate or argument and compromise, any decision is made. And sometimes it is made through compromise. Sometimes it’s made through a majority, but it’s the bouncing around of ideas and possibilities being offered, and people being able to choose from among those possibilities, that’s the gut level reality of democracy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All right. So that goes very nicely into our first example. And that is what happens when somebody publishes a book that significant numbers of people in the country at large find offensive. And what happened was, in June of 1857, a white man from north Carolina named Hinton Rowan Helper, published a book called The Impending Crisis of the South, fun fact here, one of the first primary documents I ever read in my career.

Joanne Freeman:

Really?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. I thought they were all like this. And it was kind of disappointing after that, because what he argued in this book was that human enslavement in the American south had hurt the southern economy as a whole, that it had kept it back. So in 1857, people are arguing to defend human enslavement by saying, Hey, look, we’re the richest people in the world. Slavery is great. And white people who are part of this really elite slave voting class are the richest, the most abled, the best educated people in the world. So slavery’s a great thing.

He looks at the actual statistics, and the whole book is full of charts and numbers. And he looks at the statistics and he says, no, no, no, no, human enslavement has held the south back. So if you actually look, yeah, a few of really rich guys are doing well, but for the most people in the American south, and he’s focused exclusively on the welfare of white southerners, they are being destroyed by human enslavement. So if you’re trying to make the south better, you white guys who currently are supporting enslavement, you need to turn your back on it and get rid of slavery all together. And this is not a pro-black rights document at all.

Joanne Freeman:

No, he’s actually extremely racist. So he’s not some freedom screaming abolitionist. He is simply saying he’s encouraging white southerners to back away from slavery, and even discusses the rebellion of enslaved people as being part of what might need to happen to eliminate slavery. I want to read just a sentence that shows what he’s saying about southerners, and what is happening in the south that’s holding them back. He says, “Southerners were “swaddled” in northern muslin at birth, instructed from northern books in their youth, treated by northern medicine as adults, and shrouded in northern cambric at death, born to the grave in a northern carriage, entombed with a northern spade, and memorialized with a northern slab. It’s all the north, and the south is doing that to themselves.

So he wants to end slavery, and he’s ready for black rebellion to be a part of that. And he’s a southerner. So in and of itself, it would’ve been shocking. Add to the fact that he’s a north Carolinian, and that gave it even greater spread and power. And as we were just discussing a moment ago, initially it’s selling relative well. But when it’s becomes controversial, is when it really begins to spread. When people suddenly wonder what this is, it sells in much larger and larger numbers. It becomes part of the Lincoln’s Republican party, a campaign document for them, leading up to the election of 1860.

So it becomes a big deal because it’s controversial. I should add, only because it tells you so much about Helper, north Carolinians in Congress are standing up and attacking him because he’s from their state and they feel the need to just crush him. So a number of them stand up and accuse him of a variety of things, for example, a north Carolina representative named Asa Biggs, says that Helper is a dishonest, degraded, and disgraced man, much to be regretted, a native of the state, yet he is an apostate son, ruined in fortune and character and catering to a diseased appetite at the north to obtain a miserable living by slanders upon the land of his birth.

Now Helper’s a southerner. So he ultimately feels compelled to go to Congress to attack the man who said that of him, which shows you that even though he’s writing this anti-slavery track, he’s a southerner at heart. He feels the need to defend himself. And he shows up with a gun and a knife and starts a fight. Ultimately, Biggs isn’t there, but there’s another north Carolina Congressman Burton Craige, who supposedly supplied Biggs with information. And they end up having a fight, a physical fight, and one calls the other a puppy, and the other calls the first one a coward, and they begin a fist fight.

And another Congressman sees this happening and writes about it, and notes that he looked first at Craige and at Helper and thought Craige was a bigger man. So if they were going to fight, it was fine, because Craige would win and Helper wouldn’t. But then he realizes there might be a knife or a gun in Helper’s pocket. So he jumps out of his chair and stands behind Helper to grab him back in case he pulls a weapon. It’s a very southern moment in Congress, these armed men fighting each other over their personal reputation, but it’s over this pamphlet that certainly is not typical of the south in any way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The book itself is real interesting because of the land boom and the rising prices of enslaved people in the American south. In the late 1850s, a number of white men are very aware that the system is not serving them, and they are starting to fall away from the democratic party. They’re starting to think maybe they should turn against the very wealthy enslaver who run the Democratic party and who are running the American south, and this document, which is not very interesting. I mean, the sales were slow at first in part, because obviously, it’s very interesting as a historian, but it’s page after page, after page of charts from the census to show that the south is not in fact doing as well as people claim for it to be, but it is itself a really incendiary document because if poor white guys are reading this, and starting to say, wait a minute, maybe we don’t want to be supporting enslavement. It does have the potential to bring down the Democratic party in the southern states.

So before of the election of 1860, a number of Republican Congressmen who are part of this new Republican party, they sign onto this book because it’s kind of a no-brainer for them, the idea that white men will want to embrace a system that enables them to rise. That’s really what the Republicans stand for. And when they do that they start to sign on in ’58 and ’59, and then of course, when John Brown launches his raid on Harpers Ferry in October of 1859, the southern Democrats tried to argue that Republicans who are backing this book were really trying to get people killed. It’s incredibly explosive.

Finally, a Democratic representative in Congress, a guy named John Clark of Missouri says that nobody who had endorsed Helper’s book was fit to be the speaker of the house of representatives. He stands up and he says, did gentleman expect that can distribute incendiary books, give incendiary advice, advise rebellion, advise non intercourse in all the relations of life, spread such works, broadcast over the country and not be taken to task for it. I presume the south has sufficient self respect, that it understands the effect of its institutions well enough, that it has its rights and dares to maintain them. Well, at the same time, the Republicans are arguing for the first amendment for the right of free speech, and Benjamin Franklin Wade, who is going to become known as a radical says, has it come to this, in free America? That there must be a censorship of the press instituted, that a man cannot give currency to a book containing arguments that he thinks essentially affect the rights of whole classes of the free population of this nation. I hope not. And I believe not.

A number of states start to pass laws forbid the ownership of the book or the distribution of the book. Three men were lynched for owning copies of the book. And the newspapers start to call for burning of the books. The Raleigh Evening Standard, for example said, we would again, remind postmasters of their duties in this respect. Let every copy of Helper’s book and every copy of the New York Tribune, and every document, Frank, that is signed for distribution through the post office, by Seward, Wilson, Burlingame, John Sherman, all people who were famous as abolitionists, and other abolitionists, which may come to their offices,] be committed to the flames. And what’s interesting about that is not only the idea of stopping the distribution of these things and calling attention to the idea that northerners were theoretically trying to undermine the south. But that when that happens, northerners see this as an attack on their constitutional rights.

And that’s perhaps a really important piece here of the concept of banning books and of the concepts of pushing back against banning books. We have the first amendment because the founding guys believed in guaranteeing that people had access to different ideas. And when that starts to get taken away by people banning uncle Tom’s cabin or abolitionists literature, or hidden Helper’s book, other Americans look and say, wait, that’s my constitutional right to have access to that because that’s what forms a democracy.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s a literal and important strategy. We talked about it recently, in a recent episode we talked about John Quincy Adams, who was anti-slavery when after his presidency he went back to the house. And one of the things that he does to fight slavery is right along the lines of what you’re talking about here, Heather. He assumes northerners are not going to get worked up about slavery in and off itself, but they’re going to get very upset if they feel that they’re right of petition is being violated.

It’s their sense of their rights being violated that will get Americans engaged and involved and angry and willing to take action. And in a sense, this is the same logic, that if you can get people to understand their fundamental rights are being attacked in some way, that’s going to affect people in a really deep place, as Americans, or at least it should. For more Cafe history content check out Time Machine, a weekly column by our editorial producer, David Kurlander, inspired by each Now & Then episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You can receive the Time Machine articles through the free Cafe brief email. Sign up at cafe.com/brief. So for you and me, Hinton Rowan Helper looms large, because of just how incredibly important this book was to the coming of the civil war. But the one that really jump to mind when we talked about book banning, was the Scopes trial.

So we’re going to jump forward here into the 1920s, which again is no accident. We’ve gone from the 1850s, which were incredibly roiled, of course, by the crisis of human enslavement. We get the 1920s, which are roiled by any number of controversies in society, not least by the teaching of evolution.

So in 1924, there was a man named John T. Scopes, who was a law major from the University of Kentucky. And he was hired as a football coach and a physical science teacher in Tennessee. In April of 1925, he subs in to teach biology when the regular biology teacher was ill. The curriculum that the class was using had a textbook in it called Hunters: Civic Biology, which included discussions of human evolution.

Now at the same time, the Tennessee state legislature passed a law called the Butler act. The Butler act outlawed the teaching of evolution, and the Tennessee house of representatives approve the Butler bill by 71 to five votes. The Butler act says, “That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals, that is a teaching school, and all other public schools of the state which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible. And to teach instead, that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

Joanne Freeman:

In may of 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union begins to put notices into area newspapers, asking teachers who had taught evolution to participate in a test case of the new law. So now there’s going to be a direct action taken challenging this law, and, Scopes, who’s pressured by friends who are pro evolution and who are engaged in this fight, he agrees, even though he personally can’t specifically remember whether he even taught evolutionary principles, he’s a substitute. And he happened to use this textbook at the precise moment where it made sense to step forward and challenge this banning.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’d like to point out here that also significant here is the timing of this, because this is the 1920s, the ACLU is founded in 1920, and it is founded to push back against the US government, which had way overstepped in the red scare after world war I. The American Civil Liberties Union is designed to make sure that the federal government does not overreach into people’s lives unconstitutionally, and they’re clearly trying to establish some lines for what a government can and cannot do. So this is a really big deal for the ACLU to jump into the Scopes trial.

Joanne Freeman:

And then their name, they’re protecting civil liberties, which is a sweeping way, again, of talking about fundamental rights in a democracy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Do we have the right to learn things or not?

Joanne Freeman:

To learn them or even to be exposed to them, to read them, to see them, to think about them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So that we get to weigh them in a democracy to decide whether or not we feel that they’re worth can considering as we move forward.

Joanne Freeman:

So former populist presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who at the time is 65 years old, and his health is failing. He agrees to take on the prosecution’s case. And in recent years, he had pivoted to take creationism as his central political plank. And he gave very famous speeches with titles like “The Menace of Darwinism.” And “The Bible and Its Enemies.” His anti evolutionary principles were grounded in his populism. So he cited the application of social Darwinism. He linked it with imperialism and class warfare, as much as he referenced the Bible.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan. Prairie avenger, mountain lion, he was supposed to be the voice of the people. And it’s such an important moment because the Republican party had been grabbing hold of social Darwinism as an excuse for the idea that, yeah, the Robert Barron should be on top. And then there should be some white collar workers, and then everybody else should be the little peons running around and doing other stuff.

So the leap from I’m going to defend the people to I’m going to defend creationism and the idea that God made every man equal, makes a lot more sense if you recognize the uses to which social Darwinism was being put at the time, because I remember learning about that and thinking what happened to William Jennings Bryan?

Joanne Freeman:

So the American Civil Liberties Union brought in a celebrity of their own to go up against Bryan, Clarence Darrow, who had rocketed to fame for his defense of the well off teenage, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who had kidnapped and killed a 14 year old son of a wealthy man as a way of having a perfect crime that would prove them as uber men, that would allow them to live out Nietzsche and ideas about men and their power.

So Darrow had managed, rather and probably, to help the two men avoid the death penalty. So he’s on one side, Bryan is on the other, in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, and reporters flocked to Dayton. There were spectators in courthouse, there were food vendors. There were religious figures meandering around outside. It was quite a spectacle in and of itself. Apparently there was a performing chimpanzee there to entertain the crowd. You can always count on people to find a way to make a buck in any way that they possibly can. There were cartoonists, there were a newspaper journalists, there were photographers. It was an enormous big deal.

And Darrow focused his arguments on the slippery slope of creationism suggesting that suppressing Darwin’s works could quickly lead to rising factionalism and religious in-fighting. He said, “If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session, you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon, you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Darrow was a great showman in the courtroom and his most famous gambit during this particular trial was his decision to put William Jennings Bryan on the stand himself, and Bryan did it. And it’s a very famous moment. But also again, those of us who knew Bryan in his younger days find really sad in a way, because he’s a broken old man, and he should never have taken it upon himself to defend the Bible as the word of God. I’m rooting for evolution here as I root for the idea of the free exchange of ideas under all circumstances. But it’s just so sad to me to watch this, because Darrow puts Bryan on the stand, and Bryan is, as I say, a broken old man.

So Darrow says to him, “I will read it to you from the Bible.” And he reads, “And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou has done this thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of field upon thy belly shall thou go and dust shall thou eat all the days of thy life.” Do you think that’s why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly? And Bryan says, “I believe that.” Darrow says, “If you have any idea how the snake went before that time?” Bryan says, “No, sir.” Darrow says, “Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?” Bryan said, “No, sir, I have no way to know.” And Darrow does this. He takes passages from the Bible and forces Bryan to defend them in a court of law. And he really reduces him to a figure of fun for a lot of the people watching.

At the end of the trial, Darrow, ultimately counseled Scopes to go ahead and plead guilty so that Bryan would not be able to deliver his closing. Scopes was found guilty. He was fined $100. The fine was overturned on a technicality and eventually the case was thrown out. Bryan died five days later. I mean, he really was broken by this. And following his death, his wife gave his closing statement to a friend of his, the president editor of the Chattanooga News, a guy named George F. Milton, who made the speech public on July 28th.

And in that closing, Bryan had tried to use Darrow’s defense of Leopold and Loeb from an execution, in that trial, Darrow had invoked the corrupting influences on the young men of Nietzsche. So Darrow had actually used how books could corrupt young minds to defend Leopold and Loeb, and then turned around and argued for the idea that in fact, it mattered for young people to be able to have access to those very same dangerous ideas.

By 1927, 13 states had been deliberating over whether or not they should have laws against teaching evolution, at least 41 bills or resolutions were introduced into the state legislatures. Almost all of them were rejected. The moment had changed, although Mississippi and Arkansas did pass laws against it. And the Butler act remained on the books in Tennessee until 1967.

Joanne Freeman:

The way that I found out anything about this, and I bet a lot of people listening out there. This is the way they found out about the Scopes trial. In 1955, playwrights, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, now that is a tough break, released Inherit the Wind, which was a kind of fictionalized version of this Scopes trial. Five years later, in 1960’s Stanley Kramer directed a much lauded film adaptation, with Spencer Tracy playing the Darrow inspired lawyer, Henry Drummond, and Frederick March playing the Bryan inspired lawyer Matthew Harrison Brady. And I want to offer just this little bit of Tracy as the Darrow character speaking during the trial, because it’s such a beautiful example of the Hollywoodization of what we just discussed. So this is what Tracy offers in the courtroom.

Spencer Tracy (archival):

In a child’s power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all you are shouted our men’s and holy, hollies, hosannas. An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of men’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes to the parting of the waters. But now are we to forego all this progress because Mr. Brady now frightens us with a fable? Gentleman, progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, all right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy. And the charm of distance.

Joanne Freeman:

I just love the way that, that distills part of the original speech, but makes it so much more dramatic and personal.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it’s such an important moment because this is ’55. It’s after world war II and the recognition that the authoritarians who rose during world war II had done so in part, by making sure that people only got their version of science.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a Hollywood film, but it’s a Hollywood film that’s touching on a really heated and vital issue.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then there is to kill a Mockingbird. In January of 1966 in Virginia, the Hanover county board of education banned the teaching of to Kill a Mockingbird, which was Harper Lee’s novel that won a Pulitzer Prize. This is in the suburbs north of Richmond. And the issue began when a prominent physician, a man named WC Bosher, who was a trustee of the county board of education. And the father of a student in Hanover county, was unhappy that his son was reading a book so he said anyway, about rape. And he reported to the school board that the book was improper for our children to read. He also said that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was a book that he would like to see banned, because he said that its depiction of the despotism of a regimented society, was a very seductive and suggestive piece of literature.

So this is interesting though, because this is 1966 in Virginia. And in Virginia, in the 1960s, there was a backlash to the Brown versus board of education decision in which a number of Virginia counties that actually closed their schools, this is a moment in Virginia that is enormously fraught over issues of race and racism, and that the book to Kill a Mockingbird is all about how a society deals with those issues.

Joanne Freeman:

The Hannover county, Virginia board of education bans to Kill a Mockingbird in response, the Richmond news leader offers to send free copies of it to the first 50 school children who requested a copy, and the books are paid for, I just have to include this detail because it’s so good. They were paid for out of the Beetle Bumble Fund, and it’s a Dickens character. It’s a newspaper fund taking its name from that character, Beetle Bumble and Dickens: Oliver Twist. It’s a fund that’s formed for the purpose of “redressing the stupidities of public officials,” which I just love.

So over the next week, editorials criticizing the school board’s choices are throughout the news leader. For example, there’s a mother in Hanover county who says, “Values are formed when one confronts and wrestles with truth. Hiding the see me side of life is false protection, sound instruction based on free choice of reading material is one way to develop character. We seem to be sadly lacking both at home and school in such instruction.”

There’s an editorial in that same magazine that says, off and on in recent years, we’ve detected encouraging signs that Virginia was emerging from the pecker wood provincialism.” That’s a newspaper statement there. “And in grown morality that H. L. Mencken, in a famous phrase attributed to this Sahara of the [inaudible 00:40:44]. But if this dimwitted committee of the state board of education is fairly representative of the wisdom that prevails in high levels of state education policy, Mencken’s old indictment stands reconfirm today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet there were others who thought this was fine to go ahead and ban to Kill a Mockingbird. One woman said, “To put so much emphasis on the fact that the author of to Kill a Mockingbird was award of the Pulitzer Prize does not impress me, Martin Luther King was award of the Nobel peace prize, what irony.”

So finally on January 14th, 1966, Harper Lee herself wrote to the Richmond News leader. She had her own take down of the decision to ban her book. She said, “Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School board’s activities. And what I’ve seen makes me wonder if any of its members can read. Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that to Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom, more than two syllables, a code of honor in conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all southerners. To hear the novel is immoral has made me count the years until 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of double think. I feel however that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism, therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beetle Bumble fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hannover County School board in any first grade of its choice.”

I think what we’re seeing here is a number of things about how banned books become the contest of change. And one of the things I think that’s important that we haven’t talked about with it is what it actually means for inclusion to ban a book. So when you talk about, for example, the banning of Hinton Helper’s book, you could really do that in the south, because there wasn’t really an anything to compete with it. There wasn’t radio, there wasn’t TV, there wasn’t social media. By the time we get to Scopes, banning the teaching of evolution is really a statement about who is included and who is excluded. And by the time you get to Kill a Mockingbird, in the 1960s, it’s even harder actually to keep those ideas out of the hands of young people. And then we look at the present and really in our era of social media, banning Maus is absolutely not going to keep it out of the hands of people who can literally read a pirated copy on the internet.

Joanne Freeman:

It sold vast amounts. There were more copies available than there had ever been before.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And you at what it says at the community level is these are the people that are welcome in our community, and you are not welcome to be represented in our community, certainly with LGBTQ youth, for example.

Joanne Freeman:

And the bans say, we, the people doing the banning, have the power to make this decision and enforce it. These decisions about books and what people can and can’t read, they’re about inclusion and exclusion. They’re about people performing these power gestures. We will ban this as you just said, Heather, people are going to be able to get these books in any number of other ways.

The ban itself is significant, is wrongheaded, is anti-democratic. But part of what’s happening right now is these performative moments in which certain people are on the one hand, claiming that they have the right and the power to decide whether other people have access to, and then throwing this into the atmosphere as a political calling card to bring people who will have an emotional response to this, to their side.

So even as we, you and I, Heather, can sit here and rail against what banning books means, and the many ways in which that’s anti-democratic, part of what we’re looking at here is people of a particular political persuasion making a power play that says they have the right to make these decisions, and in doing so, they have the right to say who is included and who is excluded among the national we.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I love the fact that your founding guys would have something to say about the exclusion of the 800 books that have been proposed or even of Maus in terms of what that means for civil liberties and for the United States.

Joanne Freeman:

Regardless of the book. And so that’s a sweeping statement, the vital importance of the spread and access that people have to information so they can weigh ideas, think about ideas, decide what they think and act accordingly. That is one of the founding elements of a functioning democracy. And once you begin channeling off ideas and preventing people from seeing things or preventing people from saying things or channeling off aspects of the past that you don’t want people to think about anymore, you are no longer encouraging people to think and sort through ideas. You’re giving them limited access to ideas with the hope that they will have a particular outcome.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the conversation does not end here. We’re going to pick up on this theme again next week. So stay tuned.