Book Review 5 || The Censors and the Schools

While walking through the local rec center with a friend last Fall, I found this book on a free-to-take bookshelf. Written in 1963, The Censors and the Schools recounts the wave of right-wing censorship against school textbooks and classroom instruction in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was nice to read this book, some of which covered ground I became familiar with when writing my master's thesis, some of which was completely new to me. The book presented me with some new research avenues I hope to explore in the future.

Textbook Controversies

In their book Censors and the Schools journalists Jack Nelson and Gene Roberts, Jr. explore various textbook controversies around the United States, particularly during the height of the Second Red Scare. They want to understand the process by which textbooks are challenged and under what conditions textbook challenges are successful. According to Nelson and Roberts, textbook challenges were initiated locally, using templates created from national censorship organizations. Groups like the National Council for American Education, founded by anti-Semite, fascistic Allen Zoll and Guardians of American Education attacked textbooks and made broad accusations of communist subversion in both K-12 and higher education.1 Some, like the Daughters of the American Revolution made lists of objectionable textbooks. Such works were spurious, based on trivialities like comparing the number of lines a Republican and Democratic president received in the text. On the basis of such works, and with the ever present fear of communist subversion, locals pressured schools across the country to drop textbooks, and pressured textbook publishers to modify their publications. These attacks were most successful when they were made in the vacuum of sustained media attention. When groups were exposed for their lack of expertise, connections to far-right individuals and groups, or lack of substance, they would fail to censor textbooks, or collapse as an organization completely.

Textbook censorship has been around since Reconstruction, when veterans of the Civil War in both the North and the South sought to tell different stories about the conflict in their schools.2 Modern censorship of the form described above, however, began with the censorship of the Rugg textbooks of the 1940s. Written by Columbia professor Harold Rugg over the course of twenty years, the textbooks covered social science material for high school and middle school students. The books came under fire from national business groups first, but opposition spread throughout the early 1940s. Many of the books were ultimately banned, and censors would continue to refer to them, negatively, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Opposition next turned to the Magruder series of textbooks which became popular in school classrooms following World War II. Coinciding with the beginning of the Red Scare, censorship efforts against the book cast it as subversive and Communist. As in later controversies, the ammunition used against the books stemmed from a national source – the Educational Reviewer of Lucille Cardin Crain. Locals outraged about the supposedly leftist lean of the textbooks demanding schools cease to use them, often successfully. The Reviewer and its backer, the Conference of American Small Business Organizations, came under Congressional scrutiny. This ultimately limited the impact of the publication.

Of course, as usual, these groups did not view themselves as censors. Indeed, they viewed themselves as protecting America from communist subversion. E. Merrill Root was an English professor whose Brainwashing in the High Schools was one of the many books which gained national prominence and was used to raise objections to textbooks. Root viewed himself as merely correcting the record, rather than replacing scholarly evidence with mere pro-American propaganda. Root in particular believed that there was a vast Communist conspiracy, of which colleges were variously active participants or unwitting pawns, to turn American into a Communist country. His opposition to textbooks stemmed from his belief that students were being indoctrinated into Communism. Interestingly, one can find examples of this pattern of thought today, in which colleges and universities are accused of turning students left-wing.

I hope to explore more about textbook controversies during this time. Root’s book seems to be worth exploring, as does Rugg’s autobiography of the events surrounding censorship efforts against his textbooks. Try as I might, many of the primary sources referenced in the text are not easily forthcoming. I have been unable to locate the DAR’s Textbook Study, for instance, that resulted in numerous local challenges. I also wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of those old textbooks!