“Mail Call” by Alvin Lavon Smith Jr.

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At almost 85 years old, the Library Bill of Rights is seeing another round of attacks.

The American Library Association (ALA)—founded in 1876 to professionalize and improve library services across the country—first published the statement in 1939 in response to the news of Nazi book burning and the suppression of information overseas. It asserted that library resources should be provided for the “interest, information, and enlightenment of all people,” and that libraries themselves should challenge censorship and “partisan disapproval” at every turn.

American librarians championed this code during the buildup and entry into World War II. But after the war, librarians went from fighting to defend these principles abroad to fighting to defend these same principles on the home front as they worked to stop book bans and book burnings in their very own libraries during the Cold War.

Now, as librarians and other educators find themselves once more tasked to fight for the public’s right to intellectual freedom, this period of history reminds us that they’ve long been on the front lines of the conflict between censorship and free speech in the U.S., a legacy that dates back to when the first public libraries were established.

The nation’s earliest libraries had high hopes for enlightenment that often fell woefully short. They were subscription-based, meaning that only those who could afford them were allowed to join. Similarly, college libraries, like the one at Harvard, were just for students and faculty. Only as immigration and the population soared in the 19th century did government-funded libraries that served working-class Americans begin to open. Though these libraries frequently held foreign newspapers and books so that patrons could check the news in their home countries, their librarians also pushed assimilation efforts to Americanize new immigrants.

The U.S. government participated in its own acts of censorship during this time. The Comstock Act of 1873, meant to curb the nascent movement of women’s reproductive healthcare, affected both the publishing industry and libraries. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded by Anthony Comstock and his supporters, was particularly hard on libraries, forcing New York public libraries to withdraw classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover from their collections. All the while, Black patrons often found themselves without library access, especially in the Jim Crow South.

In the 20th century, censorship continued with German, Italian, and even Irish works and newspapers banned and locked down at the urging of both the government and concerned citizens. At the same time, amid the growing threat of fascism abroad, U.S. libraries at this time emerged as a great symbol of democracy. In addition to the passage of the Library Bill of Rights, during the lead-up to World War II, librarians publicly championed free speech in other ways—soliciting book donations, buying war bonds, and even participating in an on-the-ground effort to save materials from war-torn Europe.

Then came the postwar whiplash as public libraries got pulled into Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s coercive campaign to fight anything he deemed “communist” and “anti-American.” As part of his Cold War witch hunt, McCarthy opened up an investigation into Voice of America, the U.S. foreign-language broadcasting company, alleging it had capitulated to communism. He attacked the VOA’s overseas libraries, which were meant to represent American ideals and information abroad, and called for a list of authors that he had condemned as communists to be stripped from the shelves. Any librarians who refused faced inquiries into their own personal lives and histories.

In response, librarians convened a meeting with publishers in May of 1953 to discuss how they could defend libraries and authors against censorship and censure. Among those present: the Librarian of Congress, Luther Evans, who had just been named the head of UNESCO; Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution; Cass Canfield, chairman of Harper Brothers Publishing; and Bernard Berelson, a representative of the Ford Foundation.

During the meeting, this influential group ideated the Freedom to Read statement. Building from the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read statement was meant to send a clear message: that librarians remained defenders of democracy, and that they would not back down in the face of controversy and censorship. The meeting bolstered librarians’ coalition of support and affirmed their united front against McCarthy and his acolytes, who’d already begun attacking local schools and public libraries in the continental U.S. for housing “dangerous” and/or “inappropriate” material.

Among the Americans who took up McCarthy’s cause was a San Antonio housewife named Myrtle G. Hance. A member of the Minute Women of the U.S.A., whose stated mission was to remove “supporters and sympathizers” of communism from schools, Hance took it upon herself that same year—1953—to comb through the San Antonio Public Library’s shelves, where she “uncovered” 500 books containing communist materials. In response, San Antonio mayor Jack White (whose wife was also a Minute Woman), demanded that those books be branded with a large red sticker, so that readers would know they were “dangerous.” Another city official went further—calling for the books Hance singled out to be burned.

It was the chief librarian of San Antonio who prevented this from happening. Julia Grothaus, who’d served in her position for two decades, argued that Americans could not understand, let alone fight, a thing if they did not know anything about it first. Local writers, journalists, and civic organizations rallied behind Grothaus’ position, as did the Public Library Board of Trustees, who would not rubberstamp the mayor’s call for her resignation. Despite Mayor White’s attempts at retaliation, Grothaus and her allies did not yield; the books in San Antonio would not be labeled and would not be burned.

What happened in San Antonio happened in other communities across the country, as organizations like the Minute Women stoked the public’s fears of communism. Librarians resisted in various ways to varying degrees of success. Then, on June 14, 1953, they received major support from President Eisenhower, who offered a highly publicized message bolstering free speech during his Dartmouth College commencement speech. Addressing the new graduates, the president told them, “Don’t join the book-burners… Don’t be afraid to go to your library and read every book.”

The press interpreted the president’s words to be a direct rebuff of McCarthy. The following day, McCarthy’s actions against the VOA’s overseas libraries made the front page of the New York Times when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles confirmed that 11 books abroad had been taken and destroyed. The ALA moved quickly to capitalize on the president’s support and the public’s attention. Shortly thereafter, the Freedom to Read Statement they’d come up with that May was signed off on by the ALA and the American Book Publishers Council and officially published. Still in effect today, it states that “the freedom to read is essential to our democracy.”

Seventy years later, the conflict over censorship and free speech continues to play out in libraries. 2023 is on trend to set the record for the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries. That means it would break last year’s peak, in which there were 1,269 demands to censor over 2,500 library books. In the summer of 2022, lawmakers in Florida also passed HB 1467, which requires books to be approved by a media specialist trained by Florida’s Department of Education. Educators and librarians found in violation of the law could be charged with a third-degree felony. Other states, like Missouri and Utah, have since published similar laws that punish librarians for “explicit” content.

Librarians and other educators are fighting back against the assault on free speech. Earlier this year, the Florida Education Association (which includes librarians), along with the Florida Freedom to Read Project, filed suit against the Florida legislature to challenge its censorship agenda. And after conservative lawmakers in Arkansas proposed Act 372, which sought to “protect children from indoctrination” by allowing librarians to be brought up on criminal charges if they were found with items “harmful to minors,” the Central Arkansas Library System took the lead in filing a federal lawsuit to question its constitutionality. A judge agreed, and the act has been blocked—for now.

Libraries have always offered more than just books. At their center, they offer a community space with safety to explore identities, histories and cultures. As librarians past and present know, the loss of this intellectual freedom would be catastrophic to American culture and democracy. Which is why, over eight decades since the Freedom to Read Act was first passed, in 2021 the ALA put forward a new statement that condemned acts of censorship and intimidation, and promised to continue to defend patrons’ constitutional rights, and the freedom to speak, publish, and read. It ended with a direct reflection on the Freedom to Read Act, proving that the fight goes on.

The post How Librarians Became American Free Speech Heroes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ban this column! Please!

It might seem strange to call for the cancellation of one’s own newspaper column. Besides, who needs to squelch such a piece when media audiences are declining already?

But my request is no stranger than the logic driving efforts to ban books that children might read—in California, and in schools and libraries around the country.

Surveys, in the U.S. and around the world, show children and teens are reading fewer books, and enjoying their reading less, than in decades past. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found the percentages of American 9- and 13-year-olds who read for fun are at their lowest levels since 1984. And that shouldn’t surprise us, given all the hours that young people spend on their screens.

Yet, bizarrely, this moment has become the time for culture warriors, mostly on the right, to demand the banning or removal of books. They have targeted more than 2,500 titles, according to the American Library Association. Even more gobsmacking are the reasons parents and others seeking these bans cite: They want to prevent kids from learning about some of the most talked-about issues in our society—especially anything related to identity, gender, sexuality, or sex.

Of course, the true reasons for banning books go beyond misguided notions of childhood protection. Book bans are tied to organized efforts to demonize LGBTQ+ people, and to score political points by appealing to resentment of educational elites.

You can see both strategies in play at the Temecula Valley Unified School District, whose board of education overruled district staff and voted to ban a social studies textbook, part of the elementary school curriculum, which touched on gay rights topics. In doing so, board members called the late San Francisco supervisor and gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk a “pedophile.” They later fired the popular district superintendent.

State government answered this culture war blast with a bomb. Gov. Gavin Newsom denounced the board members as “malicious actors” and threatened “legal repercussions.” State Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation. And the state legislature advanced a bill that would make it harder to ban textbooks, setting up an appeal process at county boards of education.

Such official action, reinforced by local teacher and parent protests against the board members, was understandable. But the top-down reprimands also felt like a missed opportunity—to provide children and young people a compelling reason to pick up a book and read.

When it comes to bringing the fascinating California drama of gay rights to life, we can do better than a textbook. If I were the governor or attorney general, I’d slow down the public denunciations—which mostly seemed to gain more publicity for the board members—and instead send every household in Temecula a copy of Randy Shilts’ terrific 1982 biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street.

Yes, we should challenge book bans. But, even more urgently, we should seize upon them to get people reading. A number of librarians are doing just that—setting aside special shelves and stacks of banned books. So are booksellers: The best-known banned books have seen big boosts in sales.

Bans can make books dangerous—and fun again. As the novelist Katherine Marsh recently wrote in the Atlantic, this era of standardized curricula eschews the most captivating books, with unforgettable characters. Instead, teachers hand students short excerpts and ask for literary analysis. How appallingly boring.

If we want to engage students, we should have them read books that grab their interest—whether because they’re forbidden or messy or find beauty in surprising circumstances. And special attention should go to steering students toward readable and compelling books about love, gender, sexuality, and sex, which are elemental, humanity-affirming aspects of life.

If such reading encourages actual sex, as the book banners fear, our society might be better off for it. Just as book reading has declined, so has sex among people, especially young adults, in the U.S. and around the globe.

According to UCLA, the percentage of Californians ages 18 to 30 who reported having no sexual partners in the past year jumped from 22 percent in 2011 to 38 percent in 2021. People are increasingly isolated, and isolation poses a public health problem. Sexual activity—the form of human connection upon which our species depends for its survival—can boost mental and physical health, happiness, and quality of life.

Your columnist is old enough to remember when books and sex, and the leisurely enjoyment of both, were what summer was all about. This time of year was for shedding our American Puritanism—and our clothes, and giving in to desires for beach reads and romance. (If only Americans could repurpose their puritanical fears of sex into righteous limits on guns and the violence they cause.)

So, this summer, let’s screw the censors. Read some good books—see lists of the most banned titles for ideas (I recommend The Perks of Being a Wallflower). And while you’re at it, get cozy with a person, too.

And if you don’t have a book lying around, perhaps you and that special someone might find reading this column romantic. Especially once it’s banned.

The post This Summer, Let’s Screw Book Bans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nonetheless, conservatives and Republicans in Congress have seized on the report as only the latest evidence of overall liberal media bias against their cause. Sen. John Thune, the Republican chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, has demanded answers from Facebook and, no doubt, will invite Mark Zuckerberg and/or his minions to explain themselves.

But the deeper issue is undeniably real: Facebook is the dominant member of a small number of giant entities—corporate and governmental—that are gaining control over the flow of news, freedom of expression, and a lot more in our digital lives. Yet the conservatives who dominate the Republican Congress and big-business groups have done their best to thwart policies that would encourage the kind of competition we need to challenge that increasingly centralized control.

Almost no one wants to address the fact that Facebook is becoming a monopoly in the antitrust sense of the word. No, it doesn’t control all conversation. But Facebook is by far the most widely used venue for these conversations, and its power grows daily. Along with Google, it dominates online advertising; Facebook especially does so on mobile devices, which are the way many people connect to the Internet. If you offer news and information online, you have almost no choice but to play on Facebook’s field, because so much of your audience is there. (In some parts of the world, Facebook essentially is the Internet, because mobile devices are pretty much the sole means of online access and in some cases the company has made deals with local telecommunications companies and/or governments.)

Facebook has been buying everything that presents even a whiff of competition: Instagram, WhatsApp, Occulus, among others. This is smart—no one can dispute that Zuckerberg and the others on his team are brilliant technologists and strategists—but it’s also a red flag. As Zuckerberg famously said several years ago, he wants Facebook to be “like electricity” in terms of ubiquity and people’s needs. Well, electricity is a utility. And we regulate utilities.

Monopolies and cozy oligopolies never turn out well in the long run for anyone but the monopolists or cartel members. They end up controlling markets and do their best to thwart genuine competition. It’s their nature.

Which is why capitalism, plainly the best system when it’s working right, needs rules to promote competition. It’s why we have antitrust laws and other processes, including regulation, designed to blunt the dominant companies’ normal predations. Yes, the dominant players tend to capture the regulators, but that’s a failure of function, not of pro-competition theory.

Yet Republicans in general think the government should play little to no role in promoting competition. They consider antitrust inquiry and enforcement to be counterproductive, at best—except, of course, when a powerful constituent (a corporation, usually) is in danger from predatory behavior.

That attitude accounts for the GOP’s cheerleading for corporate dominance of Internet access. Republicans in general are fine with the idea that one or two companies (say the leading cable provider and another telecom) should control access in most communities, and utterly opposed to a remedy—what we call network neutrality—to ensure that people at the edges of networks, not dominant Internet service providers, should decide what information they want and at what priority.

I don’t want the government to tell Facebook what it can publish, and don’t look forward to much more than posturing from Thune and his compatriots. But I do want the government to start paying extremely close attention to the way the company is becoming a monopoly, and what it means for freedom of expression when a single company has so much power over what people say online. I want government to use antitrust and other pro-competition laws to ensure that Facebook doesn’t abuse its dominance in a business sense. I want government(s) to promote open technology and communications, and fierce competition at every level. Kudos to Zuckerberg for making Facebook so appealing to millions of users; that’s an amazing achievement. But we can’t allow Facebook to leverage that success to block the emergence of alternatives to its service, or use its market power to influence or alter the content of publications and others trying to communicate with Facebook users.

We all need to wake up to the potential threat Facebook poses to freedom of expression. Once you are in its enclosed online space, it is the corporation’s terms of service, not the First Amendment, that determines what you can say. If it decides to downplay speech it doesn’t like, Facebook has the right to do so.

So I’m glad that conservatives are concerned, even if the allegations prove overblown. (On Tuesday, Facebook modified its outright denial from Monday to a “we’re looking into it” stance; stay tuned.) I’d be even happier if conservatives realized that government does have a role in promoting genuine competition—and that we’re in uncharted information-freedom territory under the new control freaks of Silicon Valley.

The post Why It’s So Funny That Republicans Are Upset With Facebook for “Censoring” News appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.