Book Burning

by lpmcgill

In celebration of Banned Books Week, I took a dive into the Seattle Times’ archives to see what I could come up with on the subject of banned books.

Intellectual freedom in America took a big hit in the 1950s. McCarthyist paranoia swept the nation and supposed dangerous communist infiltrators were perceived to be all around us. People were blacklisted, books were banned and burned, all because of a political philosophy they may or may not have supported. All of this, in spite of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which should guarantee Americans the right to say and print whatever we want, believe in any religion or none, and associate with whoever we please without government interference.

Often these suspected communists and subversive texts were anything but. A Seattle Times column from June 17, 1953, says the practice of banning books was tarnishing America’s reputation abroad.

The column’s writers decried the U.S. State Department, allegedly in fear of Senator McCarthy’s wrath, banning these books and many others from Information Service Libraries: “Washington Witchhunt” by anti-communist writer Bert Andrews, about alleged Soviet agent Algier Hiss; “Union Now” by Clarence Streit, which essentially espouses a democratic world government; and “Rising Wind” by Walter White, in which the anti-communist NAACP president exposed the discrimination against black soldiers during World War II. They also banned The New Republic and The Nation from shelves, two of America’s oldest political magazines.

It’s hard to see the communist subversion inherent in two books by anti-communists and one book about a possible way to strengthen democracies against autocracies, but these aren’t even the most absurd.

The most ridiculous, in my view, has to be the banning of the works of Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual founders of the United States. He donated his royalties for Common Sense to Washington’s army, and yet 177 years later, those ideas came under attack by the government of the nation his ideas helped create

I’ll end with this thought, from the American Library Association‘s statement on the freedom to read, first adopted the same year this column was printed:

“Freedom has given the United States the elasticity to endure strain. Freedom keeps open the path of novel and creative solutions, and enables change to come by choice. Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.”

-The “Freedom to Read” Statement, adopted by the American Library Association in 1953. 

Read Banned Books.