Highlights Archives
Exercise Your Freedom, Read a Banned Book
Imagine going to your local public or school library and finding that classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mocking Bird — even new books like Harry Potter — are unavailable due to challenges made by parents, community members or administrators. For 22 years, Banned Books Week has raised awareness of censorship issues and celebrated the freedom to read. Banned Books Week is being observed through October 1 by the American Library Association.
Book banning is nothing new. Although the most challenged materials in the last 30 years have been books for children, books of all kinds have been censored throughout history. In 1497, for example, Dante's The Divine Comedy was burned on religious grounds, while, in the 18th century, the Vatican placed the works of Jean Jacques Rosseau on its Index of Prohibited Works.
Why do books get banned? Most would-be banners act from what they consider to be good intent — protecting themselves and others from perceived wrongs and preserving particular values and ideals. But even well-intentioned efforts have detrimental outcomes, denying us the freedom to choose and think for ourselves.
Censorship can take a variety of forms. During World War I, anti-German sentiment was unleashed in many Wisconsin communities that had previously been more tolerant of ethnic differences. This photo shows the charred remains of German language textbooks burned in Baraboo in 1918, after some citizens lashed out all things German.
One of the first efforts to censor schoolbooks in Wisconsin came in the 1920s. Senator John Cashman of Denmark introduced a bill to ban history textbooks that made uncomplimentary references to the nation's founding fathers and told history from an "un-American" point of view. After his impassioned speech and some brief hearings at which educational experts testified, Cashman's bill died a quiet death.
So-called "un-American" books came under fire again in the 1950s when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's researchers found that the Overseas Library Program contained 30,000 books written by "communists, pro-communists, former communists and anti-anti-communists." After the list was published, those books were banished from the library. Private hearings with authors of the "suspect" books produced some of the most compelling words from many of the country's most renowned writers. Poet Langston Hughes, for example, when asked to shorten his responses, replied "I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than to save time."
Book censorship of all kinds — even book burning — continues today. Celebrate the freedom to read by reading a banned book this week.
:: Posted September 26, 2005
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