Of course, this isn’t the first time politicians and citizens have mobilized to ban books. During the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and his allies launched various censorship campaigns, and some Americans even participated in book-fueled bonfires. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, politicians and mobilized parents, along with conservative organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Corps, hauled “subversive” books from library and store shelves. , intimidated librarians, teachers, and store managers into not being able to read those books. supply them.
But beyond the common unrest trend, Cold War-era book banning campaigns and today’s campaigns differ significantly in strategy and effectiveness. It was part of a larger, coordinated campaign that used federal and state governments to restrict the arts. In fact, one of his most successful efforts was the removal of books from the Foreign Libraries, a network of American libraries under the jurisdiction of the State Department that served as cultural diplomacy.
But through it all, youth literature has often escaped censorship, and in fact has become more diversified and focused on youth as an audience, in anticipation of what we now call “young adult literature”. is now guessed.
This is because McCarthy-era book bans often focused on mass-adopted textbooks as the easiest way to control what students read. I was most concerned with two issues. The two often went hand in hand when civil rights activists were accused of holding communist beliefs. Social studies textbooks, in particular, were removed from classrooms throughout the 1950s and sometimes ceased publication altogether.
After McCarthy’s downfall, censorship loosened racial standards in northern states as the civil rights campaign expanded in the 1960s. Yet, thanks to strong textbook and school boards, books questioning segregation remained unpublished in the American South. The Detroit children began to meet the black Larry and Debbie of Dick and Jane, while the New Orleans children , continued to read only about white children.
In every country, parents were less likely to object to books that were part of their education than recently published textbooks written by liberal university professors they had never heard of. Therefore, students in grades 7 to 12 continued to read novels in their English classes (“Silas Marner,” “Great Expectations,” and “The Red Badge of Courage” were the three most commonly taught). I read plays and poetry. High school students read Macbeth and Julius Caesar more than any other literary work. In other words, adolescent literary education consisted of literary classics steeped in familiar civic and ethical messages about hard work, integrity and self-sufficiency, and many of the students’ parents also attended school. I read it sometimes.
But the extraordinary attention to textbooks, combined with the often traditional literary curriculum, really created a space in which liberal writers could thrive. When Hughes was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, he had just published a book for boys, The Negro’s First Book. And was about to start his “Famous Negroes” series. Both are forward-thinking ideas about black achievement and racial equality for the age group now called “tweens.”
Even when the State Department ordered Berlin’s House of America Library to burn or delete Hughes’ poems for subversive ideas about race and capitalism in the early 1950s, he remained under the censorship radar. I went on to write a juvenile biography containing many of the same ideas that flew open. Young American eyes on racism. Works like “The First Book of Negroes” shaped the thinking of many young readers on democracy and civil rights, as confirmed by the letters young people wrote to writers like Hughes.
This trajectory was followed by other writers as well. Although some publishers have cut ties with the criticized authors, many, including Knopf, Harpers, and Golden Books, have published books that challenge their political and scientific orthodoxy. did. While censors were preoccupied with monitoring what teachers now called “class texts” or “whole-class reading,” students were exposed to an ever-wider range of newly written books. I could access it myself. And they did.
What we are experiencing today is fundamentally different in many ways. This is one of the key historical interventions. It is in the last 40 years that he has created young adult literature as a genre. According to his recent PEN report, Banned in the U.S., from July 2021 to March 2022, nearly half of her 1,145 books pulled from school libraries and classrooms will be young adult It was a book. Of the 10 most challenging books of 2021, all but three were published after 2015. At the same time, sales of LGBTQ young adult literature have skyrocketed over the past two years.
But Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and Alex Gino’s “George,” This is a fact guided by curriculum standards, the economics of textbooks, and teachers’ frequent discomfort in teaching textbooks.Instead, the books that are most often challenged are those that students read voluntarily, even when accessing them from school or classroom libraries.The ban targets books read by young Americans. I want It’s reading, not the text the teacher told them they had to do.
As a result, teachers and librarians have found their sights refocused, even though today’s campaign is more genuinely a direct attack on adolescents’ right to read.
They represent a different kind of crackdown. Much more personal and potentially more damaging in many ways. This is not only due to the nature of what is prohibited, but also how and why students seek out these books. Killing this urge in young readers could be unprecedented in its cost as well.
This essay, the third in a Freedom to Learn series sponsored by PEN America, provides historical context for the debate over free expression in education today.
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