The Day They Came to Arrest the Book

by Nat Hentoff

  “Yet I would wager that every person in that audience considered himself or herself”—Griswold nodded at Kate, who was not looking at him—“a true supporter of individual freedom. That freedom to question, to examine, that Mr. Dickinson described so beautifully, so stirringly, as the essence of being an American. It is a marvelous vision. But are those who hold it out to you being honest about themselves? Do they really want you to think for yourself! Or is it possible that they are as rigid, as prejudiced, as intolerant as Mr. Dickinson says groups with Morality and Decency and Americanism in their titles are? Is it possible that while they sing you songs of freedom, they are actually preparing you for their own orthodoxy, their own standard time to which everybody must march?”

  Kent Dickinson was looking at Griswold with puzzlement. Nora Baines was watching the tall, stooped man with reluctant admiration.

  “My assignment in this debate”—Griswold looked around the audience—“is to persuade you that individual freedom has gotten out of hand. Well, my concern is not quite that. It goes deeper. I put it to you that freedom has become less and less individual. Instead of people who are distinctively, proudly individualistic, we are increasingly turning into herds. Can you imagine a herd of independent sheep? Let me be more specific. Let us focus on sex.”

  Matthew Griswold paused, correctly anticipating a certain quickening of attention in the auditorium. “If George Mason High School is like most other high schools in the country, some of you go to bed on occasion with others. Usually others of the opposite sex. On the part of the young women involved, despite the independence movement among women in recent years, how much of that sexual activity is really a matter of individual choice? Or is not a good deal of it coerced by the herd? By fear of being considered old-fashioned, narrow-minded, out-of-it, by your contemporaries? Is this individual freedom or is it just a new way of covering up traditional female subjugation?”

  “What if a girl really wants to?” a male voice shouted from the back of the hall. “Would you approve of that?”

  “No,” Griswold said. “But I would have more respect for her if it really was a free choice. That it was not a better choice I would say was due to the failure of the school and of the young woman’s parents to teach her self-restraint. To teach her that while part of each of us is animal, the more civilized among us do not eat off the floor or yield to every urge to copulate.”

  Groans, male and female, in the audience.

  “Are those noises disapproval,” Griswold asked, “or mating sounds? Anyway, I would rather this debate had been called: ‘Is False Freedom Giving True Freedom a Bad Name?’ Let me give you another example of what I mean. Mr. Dickinson listed among the enemies of individual liberty those who are trying to bring God back into the public schools. I am one of those. Does that make me a friend or an enemy of free choice? Think about it. Can you be free if you are ignorant of the choices you have? Imagine yourself back in kindergarten, and the teacher gives you a yellow crayon and a purple crayon. Just the two of them. And the teacher says, ‘You may draw with whatever colors you like.’ Is that freedom?”

  Once more, Griswold paused. “This is a country,” he went on, “in which there are no penalties for not believing in God, for not attending church. And I would not have it any other way. However, if someone who has spent his childhood and adolescence in the public schools decides that he is an agnostic or an atheist, is that really a free choice? Or is it similar to the child in kindergarten who has been given only two crayons? How can anyone intelligently, individually, reject God without ever really having had a chance to know Him?”

  Dickinson was now writing furiously all along the edges of his newspaper.

  “Mr. Dickinson, and people like him,” Griswold continued, “accuse people like me of wanting to indoctrinate people like you, and he says that is why I am working to get God back into the schools. Has it ever occurred to you that you are already being indoctrinated, and have been since your first day in kindergarten? You are being indoctrinated with secularism. Godless secularism. How could it be any other way so long as there is a total absence of God in the public schools?”

  “Why does God have to be in school?” Barney asked. “There are churches out there.”

  “Good question,” Matthew Griswold said. “The answer is that school is just that—the place of learning. And no matter what happens or does not happen in your life outside this building, here is where you should be exposed to the most meaningful of man’s accumulated experiences—and that includes faith as well as science. Otherwise your education is incomplete. Remember, I am not talking about conversion to or immersion in any particular faith. I am saying that at the very least, you have the right to experience prayer, which may or may not then take you to some particular faith.”

  “What if I prefer not to?” said Luke. “By saying I won’t pray, why should I have to expose myself as an atheist if I don’t want people to know what I think about religion?”

  Griswold smiled with anticipation of his own answer. “Exactly the point made by my good friend Mr. Dickinson. If we had prayer in the schools again, the argument goes, those youngsters who would prefer not to pray would be too embarrassed to say so. Or if they did gather up their courage and leave the room, they’d be made fun of by their peers.”

  Holding the lectern with both hands and leaning into the microphone so that he could almost whisper and still be heard clearly, Griswold said:

  “Are we speaking about America? A nation created and nurtured in dissent? A land where, as Mr. Dickinson told us so eloquently, everyone is free to challenge the most deeply rooted beliefs and principles? Are you saying, is Mr. Dickinson saying, that the best way to educate the young people of this country in our tradition of independence is to coddle them? To say: ‘Oh, the poor dears are too soft, too weak, to stand up for what they believe in, and what they do not believe in.’

  “Good gracious.” Griswold stepped back from the microphone and raised his voice. “What a marvelous way I am offering for a youngster to learn that he can cope with being a minority of one or two or three if he chooses not to pray. What a marvelous way for him to learn how satisfying it is to openly fight for his principles rather than slink away. So I tell you, young man, that bringing God back to the schools may not only greatly illuminate the lives of many students, but it may well greatly strengthen the dissenting spirit of others, who will exercise their right to say no to prayer. And they will do so boldly, enjoying the feeling of being publicly courageous. You see, young man, nobody loses when God returns to the schools.”

  Maggie Crowley leaned over to Nora Baines and whispered, “I see what you mean. I never saw curve balls like that. Your head could come off trying to hit them.”

  “He’s a cutey, all right,” Nora Baines said. “I hear he may run for the school board.”

  “Lovely,” Maggie Crowley said. “I always did want to be a cab driver.”

  “Let me answer another point made by Mr. Dickinson,” Matthew Griswold was saying. “He tells us the Supreme Court agrees with both him and Thomas Jefferson, and not at all with me, that prayer can come into the schools without the Constitution crumbling into dust. Well, I would remind you that in the past the Supreme Court upheld slavery and then, after the Civil War, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation. What I am saying, of course, is that the Supreme Court has sometimes been dreadfully wrong. And in time, it has recognized the error of its ways. So it will in regard to prayer in the schools. So long as the prayers are not of any particular religion and so long as no one is compelled to pray, God—as the Supreme Court will yet come to recognize—can lawfully coexist in our schools with Judy Blume.”

  “What about censorship?” someone on the edge of the auditorium asked. “Where are you on that?”

  “I mentioned before”—Griswold stopped for a sip of water—“that there is no true freedom without a prior knowledge of choices. Now that should lead me to say that you ought to have access to every ki
nd of book there is—no matter how trashy, pornographic, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, antifamily, sexist.

  “But”—he leaned forward again—“we must remember once more that this is a place of learning. And that means, for instance, that in order not to pollute your fine young minds with ignorance and superstition, your teachers do not tell you that the earth is flat or that two and two are nine or that Hitler was a terribly misunderstood man of enormous gentleness and compassion. No self-respecting school would teach any of that.

  “Why, for another example, there are a number of books currently available that actually say there was no Holocaust, that there were no concentration camps, that no Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Under our Constitution, no one can stop such books from being printed or from being read. But must such books be taught in a public school? Is it unconstitutional for the school board to say, ‘No, these lies about the Holocaust will not be taught here.’ ”

  In the first row Gordon McLean was saying, “Yeah, but they’re teaching some other lies here.”

  “Let me make one obvious point,” Griswold said, “just so we’ll all be clear what the issue is. Your teachers, your principal, are responsible for what goes into your heads—at least in this building. Once you’re an adult, you can poison your mind any way you want to. But so long as you are in this school, books must be selected for you. Or as Supreme Justice Hugo Black—one of Mr. Dickinson’s heroes—has said, students have not yet reached the point of experience and wisdom that enables them to teach their elders. Therefore, in teaching you, your elders are expected to show their experience and wisdom. But occasionally some teacher or librarian does make a mistake and selects a book that will miseducate you, that may poison you. And when that happens, those mistakes must be corrected. By members of the community, if need be.”

  “Who appointed you the censor?” Luke asked.

  Griswold laughed. “As a free American, I made a choice some time ago to do something about getting harmful books out of the schools, just as I would if you had rats in the basement of this school and nobody in charge here was doing anything to get rid of them. It is a citizen’s privilege, and his responsibility, to pitch in and help when something’s gone wrong with anything he supports with his taxes. That right is open to your parents and to anyone else in the community. We can all appoint ourselves, young man, and we should.

  “But it doesn’t stop there,” Griswold went on. “Just as the President of the United States himself is accountable to everyone who votes, and just as the President can be kicked out if we don’t like what he’s doing, so it is with our very own school board. If they ignore my complaints about certain books that ought not to be in the schools, why, the next step is for me to try to get enough voters to agree with me so that we can change the school board in the next election. That’s called democracy.”

  Nora Baines and Maggie Crowley exchanged meaningful glances.

  “Wait a minute.” Kent Dickinson rose from his seat at the table. “You haven’t dropped the other shoe yet, Matt. You’ve said that there is no true freedom without knowing all the choices there are. Okay, but you’ve just told these students that they have no freedom to read what you don’t want them to read. So you’re limiting their knowledge of the choices they have. What happens to true freedom then? It seems to me there’s a big hole in your logic.”

  “There’s a hole in my logic”—Griswold smiled—“only if you’re not used to thinking logically. It is one thing to say that students should know there is such a choice as religious faith—whether or not they elect to make that leap into faith themselves. But it is quite something else to say that students are entitled, as part of their formal education, to absorb, under the authority of the school, pornography, tributes to sexual promiscuity among adolescents, books that talk about kikes or niggers—”

  “That’s right!” Gordon McLean shouted.

  “—or books that contain blasphemies against God, who cannot speak for Himself, in the school. If students want any of that filthy stuff, they can still buy it outside of school, God help them; but to permit anything and everything, no matter how false and vile, in the curriculum and in the school library, violates every sensible definition of education. The students are here to become part of the continuity of human learning, civilized learning—not the diseased and vicious muck of man’s ignorance.”

  Mockingly, Kent Dickinson silently applauded Griswold. “One thing that bothers me,” Dickinson said, “is that you and I might disagree about what’s diseased and what’s healthy.”

  “Tell me, my friend”—Griswold turned toward Dickinson—“would you allow a book saying the Holocaust never happened to be taught in this high school?”

  “Damn right,” said Dickinson. “You take one of those books and you put it alongside the true record, and not only will kids get a stronger hold on what really happened by checking the lies against the grisly facts, but they’ll learn something else that’s terribly important. They’ll learn the lengths to which anti-Semitism, or any bigotry, will go to deny the undeniable. It’s very useful for young people to have some experience with that kind of pathology.”

  “Well, sir,” Griswold said, “you just give that little lecture to the Jewish parents in this school if any teacher or librarian is pathological enough to assign one of those books.”

  “Your argument doesn’t hold together, Matt.” Dickinson sat down again. “You don’t help people learn to be free by narrowing their choices.”

  “Freedom,” Griswold said to Dickinson, as if he were speaking to a slow pupil, “is indeed something that has to be learned—unless we’re talking about chaos. And human beings become ready for different degrees of freedom at different ages. That is why we put the young of our species in schools. These students, here, even now, even though they are in high school, have not yet learned enough to be able to responsibly evaluate all the different pernicious choices in the kinds of books I say must be kept away from this school—as any carrier of infectious diseases must be kept away.”

  “So what you’re saying is”—Dickinson looked up at Griswold—“God can come into the schools now, but later for a book in which a boy and a girl go to bed together.”

  Griswold smiled, “That is indeed what I am saying.”

  “How much later for pulling back the covers?”

  “Oh,” Griswold said, “if God comes first, they’ll know when it’s time to do that.”

  IX

  While the debate was still going on downstairs, Mr. Moore, in his office, was taking a phone call from a member of the school board who had just been visited by a delegation of angry black parents.

  Seated in front of the principal’s desk, Deirdre Fitzgerald looked at the wall of photographs and imagined how she might brighten up the display. A Tenniel Alice in Wonderland drawing of the March Hare’s Mad Tea Party with Alice, the Hatter, and Mr. Moore as the Dormouse being stuffed into the teapot. She giggled.

  “Yes, I hear you, Mrs. Harmon.” The principal looked somberly at Deirdre. “I understand how agitated they are. Yes, we certainly are going to review the book. At my request, Mr. McLean has just sent in the form that starts the procedure, and I shall appoint a review committee before the day is over. Yes, I shall keep you informed. Thank you so much for calling.”

  Mr. Moore put down the phone. “Well, Miss Fitzgerald, I trust you’re settling in nicely.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Deirdre said. And waited.

  “Well, I expect you have heard something of the excitement about Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Fitzgerald”—the principal leaned forward—“how many copies of the book do you have for general circulation?”

  Deirdre paused and thought. “Let’s see. The order for Nora Baines’s class turned up somewhat short, so after I filled the rest of it from the copies we had, I think there are maybe two or three still downstairs.”

  “Miss Fitzgerald”—the principal smiled at her—
“we don’t want any more furor over this book than we already have, do we?”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  “I think,” Mr. Moore said slowly, “that for the time being, while all this is being worked out, it would be a good idea to collect whatever copies you have and put them under your desk. If anybody asks for them, they’re out.”

  Slowly, firmly, Deirdre shook her head from side to side. “As I understand the situation, although the complaints have been specifically directed against Huckleberry Finn in Miss Baines’s class, she is continuing to use it during the review procedure. That’s the rule here, I’m told. So why should the book be removed from the library?”

  Mr. Moore scratched his ear with irritation. “The complaint form I received this morning from a parent concerns the presence of the book in the library as well as in Miss Baines’s class.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, Mr. Moore,” Deirdre said calmly, “but you haven’t answered my question. I can’t justify removing the book from my shelves while it’s still being taught in nineteenth-century history. And it’s properly in use in that class because according to this school’s procedures, a book is presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

  “Well, well, well,” the principal said sourly, “I know whom you’ve been talking to. Look—” A large smile suddenly appeared on his large face. “My concern, and I am sure it is your concern as well, is to minimize the tension, the divisiveness, the unpleasantness of this unfortunate situation. It would help me greatly if I were able to assure the black parents, while the review is going on, that as a gesture of good faith, we have taken steps to see that no black child will be offended by accidentally coming across the book in the school library.”

  Deirdre stared at him but said nothing.

  “If it is decided, Miss Fitzgerald, that Huckleberry Finn does belong in our school, why, of course, you’ll put it back on the shelves. What I am suggesting is just a gesture. A small extra step of understanding to show the black parents that we care about their feelings, their very strong feelings, on this matter.”