The Day They Came to Arrest the Book

by Nat Hentoff

  “I can see it already.” Barney turned to Maggie Crowley. “They’ll have a shot of Mighty Mike’s closed office door.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I think he’ll find some time in his busy schedule to talk to them. If he stays behind that door all day, it’s going to look as if he’s ashamed to come out.”

  “I’m going down!” Barney said.

  “They’ll find you.” Maggie smiled as she took a lipstick from her purse. “But go ahead if you like.”

  “Miss Crowley,” he said at the door, “do you think this is going to be a national story?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “I think this is a first. The Holy Bible under suspicion, along with such a known felon as Huck Finn. You may be all over the map, Barney. By the way, you might tie your shoelaces.”

  That evening, Barney’s father, leaning forward and grinning, watched the television interview with Barney. His mother was saying softly to the Barney who was on the screen, “That’s right. You said it just right. Lost your comb again, I see.”

  Then Mr. Moore filled the screen. Calm, smiling amiably, he spoke of the precious American heritage of free speech and free press—reaching all the way from George Mason himself to the school proudly bearing his name.

  “Of course, I did not for a moment contemplate even the merest notion that this article could not be printed,” Moore told the interviewer. “This is America, is it not? How fortunate we all are that we live under a system that encourages the clash of ideas and opinions so that each of us can determine for himself or herself who is speaking the truth, and who is not.”

  “What a liar!” Barney said to the TV set.

  “Shush,” said his mother.

  “But what about the charges made against you in the article?” the television reporter asked the principal. “That you have been censoring books behind the scenes for several years. That you wanted to take a Charles Dickens novel off the shelves. That you were even considering ripping out pages from the Bible, and that, as a matter of fact, you did tear out a section from one Bible in the school library.”

  Mr. Moore had the smile of a newborn babe. “As I said, it is only in the open marketplace of free speech that the truth will prevail, and so I am delighted beyond measure to have this chance to answer your incisive questions. These charges, as you put it, come from a woman, a decent woman, who misinterpreted certain things I may have said and came to erroneous conclusions. This was not malicious on her part. She is devoted to books, perhaps so passionately devoted to them that the people and events in those books are more real to her than the constantly complex flow of real life.”

  The principal’s smooth voice grew deeper. “But I do not hold anything she has said against her. Not at all. All of us, at one time or another, jump to mistaken conclusions; and I have every expectation that eventually my dear friend Mrs. Salters will remember these events of the past much more accurately. In any case, I certainly wish her well in all her future endeavors.”

  “But, Mr. Moore,” the television reporter persisted, “in what specific respects are her charges against you inaccurate?”

  The principal smiled even more benignly. “I do not think that this is the time or the place for me to embarrass that good woman. No, I prefer to stand on my record of devotion to the First Amendment and to our school as the sanctuary of free inquiry.”

  “But, Mr. Moore,” the reporter continued, “are you saying that nothing Mrs. Salters accuses you of actually happened?”

  “Young man”—Mr. Moore sighed—“this has been a hard day for Mrs. Salters. She is not accustomed to being in the public eye, and so—”

  “She did refuse to be interviewed on camera.” The reporter nodded. “In fact, I understand she will give no interviews at all. All she’d say on the phone is that she had told your school reporter all there is to tell, and there was nothing more to add.”

  “Yes, yes.” Mr. Moore sighed again. “This is all too much for her, and I surely do not want to place any more of a burden on my old friend than she has already placed on herself.”

  A commercial came on.

  “I can’t believe this!” Barney said to his parents. “He got himself out of it like he was cutting butter. That reporter didn’t lay a hand on him. Only poor Mrs. Salters got hurt. Mr. Moore made it sound as if she was sorry she’d said anything in the first place. As if she was a liar.”

  “Why do you suppose she’s not giving any interviews?” Barney’s father asked mildly.

  “I’m not sure,” the boy said. “I guess maybe Mr. Moore is right—she’s not used to all of this. And I guess she does feel she has nothing more to say. Dad, do you think he’ll get away with acting as if none of it ever happened?”

  “Nope,” his father said. “He smiles too much when he lies. It’s like he’s giving a commercial, and after a while, nobody believes those people. Besides, it’s going to get to the folks around here that Moore isn’t really answering Karen Salters’s charges. So then you begin to figure: Why is that? Well, either the charges are true or they’re not. So it follows that he’s not answering her charges because they’re true. An honest man would get angry and say she’s a liar. But Moore can’t do that because he knows that if he does call her a liar, she’ll sue him—and win. Folks around here aren’t stupid. They’ll see through that unctuous hypocrite.”

  “Maybe,” said Barney’s mother. “Or else they’ll run that unctuous hypocrite for Congress.”

  On two other channels that night, Barney saw Mr. Moore magnanimously pardon Karen Salters in practically the same silken words as on the early news.

  He also watched Carl McLean state bluntly that whatever had happened at George Mason High School in the past—and he was in no position to judge the merits, one way or the other, of Karen Salters’s story—nothing had changed with regard to the present confrontation about Huckleberry Finn. The review committee’s decision was unsatisfactory, McLean said, in that it did not remove the book, root and branch, from the school. It would not do to keep the book on a restricted shelf. Racism, even on a restricted shelf, is infectious. The school board must do the decent, democratic thing and close off every avenue of access to Huckleberry Finn at George Mason and then at all our other schools.

  The next day, Barney’s story in the school paper—along with follow-up interviews with Mr. Moore and Mr. McLean, among others—dominated the local news in the Daily Tribune. During the next few days, much of the Tribune’s letters page was also devoted to a fiery debate over whether books can actually harm students and, if so, which books. In addition, there were some readers who asked, with varying degrees of sarcasm, what lesson was being taught to young people by censoring what they can read.

  “I can only conclude,” said one such letter writer, “that we are preparing our students for the Russians’ eventual take-over of this country.”

  A slight majority of the letters, however, supported constant surveillance of school books. And a goodly number of citizens commended Mr. Moore—with regard to the charges of past censorship by him—for having had the courage to see that his students were exposed only to books that would keep them healthy in mind and body. That way, as adults, they would have the strength of will and clarity of mind to resist the insidious aggression of Communist ideas.

  Within three days, television crews from NBC and CBS were in town. For some weeks, both networks had been preparing reports on the censorship wars in public schools around the country; and when Barney’s story about Karen Salters was picked up by the wire services—thereby appearing in newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities—NBC and CBS came to an identical conclusion. George Mason High School was essential to their forthcoming reports. As one network news official said to a correspondent. “It’s as if Mark Twain had written the script.”

  At this point, ABC’s Nightline, a half-hour late-evening news program, also decided to descend on the high school. And once more, Mr. Moore smilingly for gave his critics; Mr. McL
ean spoke forcefully about the vicious effects of stereotyping black people; and Barney said that if students were to be deprived of a true American classic like Huckleberry Finn, not a single other book would be safe. Including, he added solemnly, the Bible.

  “Are you a regular reader of the Bible?” Nightline’s host asked.

  Barney paused. “Not as regular as I ought to be, sir. I just hope I won’t be told I can’t read it now.”

  The interviewer looked at Barney quizzically. “Who would tell you that?”

  “Well,” Barney said, looking worried, “since Mr. Moore was thinking the Bible ought to be censored, I don’t know if my parents would want me to be reading it.”

  “WHAT!” Barney’s father, watching in the living room, exploded.

  “What a terrible thing to say!” Barney’s mother was shaking her head. “My God, he’s made us look stupid! Clear across the country! Us!”

  When Barney came home from the studio a half hour later, his father moved to the door as soon as he heard Barney coming up the steps. “What the hell do you mean we won’t let you read the Bible?” Mr. Roth said.

  Barney’s face reddened. “Gee, it just seemed a good thing to say right then. You know, to show that once a book is in trouble in school, it’s in trouble everywhere.”

  “This is not everywhere,” Barney’s father said angrily. “You’re getting to be like Mr. Moore. Point a camera at you and you lie.”

  “I still can’t believe what I heard,” Barney’s mother said. “I’ve never been so shocked in my life. My own son making a fool out of me—on national television.”

  “I’m sorry,” Barney said sheepishly. “I’m terribly sorry. It was a dumb thing to do. I was just thinking of scoring a point. I want us to win. But I really wasn’t thinking at all. I won’t do anything like that again.”

  “I hope so,” his father said. “I wouldn’t like to see a stranger take your place.”

  The next evening, on the state’s public television network, Kate appeared on the set in the Roths’ living room. She looked so crisp and so damn passionate, Barney thought, as she said, “Freedom is a seductive word, and it can be such a dangerous word. In the name of freedom of thought, should schools be allowed to put poison in children’s minds by making them prejudiced against blacks or Jews or Orientals? Does freedom of thought mean that in a school anything can be said by a teacher? Does it mean that anything can be said in a book that is to be used in school?

  “If schools don’t teach what is right”—Kate looked right into the camera—“then what are they for? And if they are supposed to teach what is right, then, of course, they must have the authority to say that certain books are wrong and harmful and cannot be allowed in the classrooms and the library. You may call that censorship, I suppose, but then you’re playing with words.”

  Kate then looked at the host of the program. “Would you be allowed to insult and humiliate black people on this show?”

  The host tried a smile. “It’s not a question of being allowed to. I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Would you be allowed to?” Kate persisted.

  “Well,” the host said, “it is certainly not the policy of this—”

  “Then why should it be the policy of George Mason High School?”

  “Oh, God!” Barney groaned. “She’s so damned smart.”

  “I trust that’s not meant as a compliment,” his father said.

  Toward the end of the program, Deirdre Fitzgerald appeared on screen. Slumped in her chair, she looked tired, but when asked to respond to Kate’s charge that freedom can be dangerous, Deirdre sat up straight, abruptly brushed the hair out of her eyes, and said:

  “Oh, of course, freedom can be dangerous. It is dangerous. But the alternative is worse, far worse. Look at all the countries around the world where the people are told by their government what they can say and what they can read, and what they can’t. All the countries where people are afraid that their very inner thoughts might become known and get them into terrible trouble.

  “It was to prevent us from ever being in that state of despair and bondage”—Deirdre’s voice was low and intense—“that those who created this nation chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in all the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot read. And their faith has been justified—the faith of those people who wrote and voted for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We still are free. And that’s what this fight is all about. Are we going to stay free?”

  “But what about that young woman’s statement,” the interviewer asked, “that schools exist in order to teach what is right, not what is wrong, and that therefore some books do not belong in a school? Even if this means restricting freedom?”

  Deirdre Fitzgerald leaned forward. “I believe that all ideas, no matter how outrageous or unpopular, should be explored in a high school—”

  “Oh,” said the interviewer, “you would censor books in an elementary school?”

  “I would use my head,” Deirdre said. “I’m really not a nut, you know. I wouldn’t give a second-grader calculus and I wouldn’t give her a book by Judy Blume. Not all of her books anyway. But by high school, students should be examining all kinds of ideas if their education is supposed to be preparing them for the outside world. But this doesn’t mean that the ideas being explored are to go unanswered.

  “Earlier in this program,” Deirdre went on, “Kate was saying that the state must teach what is right and therefore must exclude from the classroom and the library all ideas that are wrong, that might poison students’ minds. Well, with all respect to Kate, this is the educational philosophy of dictatorships. It must not be ours. In our system, it should not be the role of teachers or librarians or principals to restrict ideas but rather to illuminate and analyze them, good and bad, so that students learn how to do that for themselves for the rest of their lives. I mean, so that students will learn how to think for themselves. That is teaching what’s right, because it’s teaching independence of thought.”

  “Tell that woman”—Barney’s father, looking at the screen, said—“that she’s letting us down as a librarian.”

  “What!” Barney was outraged.

  “That’s right. That woman ought to be running for President. Of the country, I mean.”

  XV

  After all the coverage on television and on the wire services, the troubles at George Mason High School continued to be a national story—in the news magazines, on National Public Radio, and in daily newspapers where syndicated columnists warred with each other on the issue. Some insisted that a community had every right—through its elected school board—to insist that the values of the majority of the people living there be taught in the classrooms and be reflected in the books in the school. And that anything contrary to those values could properly be kept out of those schools. If the majority found Huckleberry Finn offensive for any reason, out he should go.

  Others countered that while, of course, local public schools should teach the values of the local community, they should not exclude all other viewpoints from the library and the classrooms. To do that would be to impose an un-American orthodoxy of ideas on the students—let alone on the teachers and librarians. And one columnist quoted a Supreme Court justice: “The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained [as students] through wide exposure to the robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues.’ ”

  In many cities and states, moreover, call-in radio shows were also ablaze with listeners hooting at the very notion of censoring the Bible and Huckleberry Finn while other listeners—inspired, they said, by what was happening at George Mason High School—pledged the
mselves to start a crusade that would clean up the public school classrooms and libraries where they lived.

  Back at the center of the storm, while the townspeople had at first enjoyed all the attention from outsiders, there was soon a growing sense of discomfort and embarrassment at being under this particular kind of national scrutiny.

  “It’s very distressing,” Reuben Forster, chairman of the school board, said to his wife one evening. “We must look like a bunch of flatheads to the rest of the country. From now on, people will think of this town as the place where they arrest books.”

  “Come now,” his wife said, “you’re exaggerating terribly. You can’t arrest a book!”

  Reuben Forster put his pipe down because it was giving him no pleasure. “I’ve been thinking about this a good deal, my dear. Once a book is not allowed to circulate freely, once a book cannot move freely from one reader to another, it’s just as if the book had been arrested and had its liberty curtailed. It’s all very distressing. How are we going to get new businesses, new plants, to come here if we look as if we’re some backwater village from the nineteenth century?”

  The Daily Tribune, in a series of editorials, took a similar view. “There is a difference between publicity and notoriety,” one of the editorials said, “and this town is becoming notorious wherever anybody can read. We’re getting a reputation for narrow-mindedness that is going to make us the laughingstock of the country unless we do something about it.”

  Not all the townspeople, by any means, agreed with the editorial writer; but many of them did. In the letters column of the Tribune, there was now a clear, rising increase in the proportion of readers who wanted no action taken against Huck Finn. Wrote one indignant citizen: “If I want my child to study Huckleberry Finn in school, where are my rights as a free American citizen when some group of vigilantes acts to limit access to the book not only to their own children but to all kids at George Mason High School?”