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Five score years ago, a poor white boy known as Huckleberry Finn rafted down the Mississippi River and into the American imagination. For the better part of the following century his story, as told by Mr. Mark Twain, has been regarded as a classic work of American fiction. Poet T. S. Eliot is said to have read the book at least once each year throughout his life, and novelist Ernest Hemingway declared, "All American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . . . It's the best book we've had." Twain's book even provided one of the formative themes for James Joyce's difficult Irish masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake.
During this same century, Huckleberry Finn has repeatedly been banned from library shelves, removed from classrooms, and challenged by censorious voices for promoting improper or indecent conduct and for being insensitive to matters of race. As early as 1885, the book was banned in Concord, Massachusetts, as "trash and suitable only for the slums." In 1905, the book was taken from the Children's Room of the Brooklyn Public Library because "Huck not only itches but scratches"; and in 1969, it was deleted from the required reading list at Miami-Dade Junior College, Florida, because it "inhibits learning" by black students. During the first week of 1989, newspapers reported that author Alex Hailey was defending the book against would-be censors in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Small wonder that Huck Finn dismisses his opportunity to be civilized: "I can't stand it. I been there before."
While this summary of the book's adventures in American society undoubtedly strikes most people as amusing or even ridiculous, beneath the laughter lurks a serious threat not merely to the book but to a basic premise of Constitutional law that is customarily interpreted as guaranteeing intellectual freedom for all citizens. The Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, assumes that democracy requires a free and informed citizenry capable of conducting inquiry into all manner of topics, no matter how thorny the subject nor unsettling the conclusions. And, says the First Amendment, Congress shall make no laws abridging this freedom.
What the Constitution does not and cannot pledge is that all topics of inquiry will be polite and decent or pleasant to learn. Surely the framers of the Constitution knew, more thoroughly than we may suspect, that democracy can require thinking the unthinkable and that many subjects may, by their very nature, "create blocks" that "inhibit learning." As recent revolutionaries, they knew too that unless it were expressly forbidden, any government would move, sooner or later, to secure its continued existence by controlling the minds of the people; and so they expressly prohibited the federal government from making this move.
Now censorship, to put it mildly, is a vexatious issue. From the viewpoint of those who advocate the removal of books, magazines, and other materials from library shelves, reading lists, school curricula, or commercial book stores, their goal is not censorship but an entirely different, much more noble end: the protection of virtue, the family, the innocent minds of children, the one True Faith, "democracy," the American Way of Life.
It is perhaps instinctive for librarians, teachers, publishers, and civil libertarians to respond to any complaint about the content of a work as the beginning of censorship, a foot wedged in the door. Their role is also noble: to protect freedom of reading, viewing, and thinking and, by extension, freedom of the press. But they are forced also to defend themselves, their selection, and their professions: they are never so pure of heart as are the censors. Thus they hope to ward off censors by adopting anti-censorship statements or holding public hearings. And yet these procedures are susceptible--to timidity, when a book's thesis is revolutionary or controversial, or to corruption by special interest groups who convert the public hearing into a forum for censors.
For schools, libraries, even book stores, the question of what to select and what to bypass depends ultimately upon human judgment, preferably informed judgment. Notwithstanding the argument of some absolutists who see any process of making choices as a form of censoring that which is not chosen, there is--or should be--a profound difference between judgment and censorship. Judgment reviews the individual work in relation to its field (How well does this convey the history of organized labor in our state?), while censorship operates from an external set of standards (This gives favorable treatment to labor unions that are in conflict with capitalist goals; therefore, it subconsciously teaches socialism or even communism). This reliance upon external standards is particularly visible in the efforts of people who want to banish Romeo and Juliet from high schools because it "glorifies teenage sex, drugs, and teen suicide"--undeniable problems for modern teenagers, but hardly relevant to Shakespeare's play.
Censorship implies, moreover, an atmosphere of coercion and the threat of governmental force; for while the First Amendment forbade Congress to restrict freedom of the press, it did not mention state, county, or city governments, nor such governing bodies as school boards. All of these, as well as various federal bureaus--Customs, for instance, or the Postal Service or the U.S. Information Agency--have attempted to restrict access to publications; and some have gone through lengthy court battles before conceding that the First Amendment applies also to them.
While we can distinguish clear-cut instances of informed judgment from blatant cases of censorship, there stretches between the two poles a vast gray realm which may involve bias rather than judgment. Does the exclusion from almost all standard art histories of Sofonisba Anguissola, a gifted and influential Renaissance artist, result from the judgment that she is not sufficiently important to merit one or two paragraphs? Or does it rest upon the prior assumption that there were no great women artists in the Renaissance? Is this censorship or editorial decision?
Then there is the matter of parental supervision of reading. In past years, it was expected that parents would keep an eye on what their children selected for leisure-time reading. Most parents, it was assumed, would pronounce certain works off-limits, not infrequently as "trash," "filth," or "a waste of time." And, it can safely be assumed, most children violated their parents' rules, just to see what was so awful. Quite often the pronouncement was pre-determined by moral strictures of a religious persuasion. Now so long as this rule governs only the household, the parent is behaving legitimately and properly; but when this rule is extended to other people's children in the classroom or community, censorship has arrived.
Where the sensibilities of impressionable children are concerned, civil libertarians and other well-meaning folk can easily become censors themselves. Anyone who attempts to revise or suppress "Little Black Sambo" because it is racially offensive is as much a censor as the person who opposes "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" because it stresses a devil figure--the troll who lives under the bridge.
Much perplexity has resulted also from the once-standard test of whether a work is "merely prurient" or has "a redeeming social value," for judgment in these cases requires a firm separation of rational faculties from emotional and sensory responses, an exercise that may be superhuman or schizophrenic, but does not reflect the normal working of most human minds.
Censorship operates upon the assumption that no matter how complex a work nor how various the readers' responses, one point of view and one response take precedence: "My judgment shall be your judgment." Other opinions need not apply.
It often appears that the majority of censorship cases in the past ten to fifteen years have focused on the subject of human sexuality, particularly as presented in health and hygiene texts for the schools and in books directed to adults. But historically, the first target of censors has always been the broad field of inquiry and knowledge that we call the Humanities--more specifically, works of literature, philosophy, ethics, religious studies, history, and other scholarly disciplines which take as their subject the human conditions and the relationship of humankind to the natural world and the divine.
Proponents of censorship have always assumed that such works may be dangerous, a threat to their view of order and propriety. In describing the ideal Republic, Plato states:
Our first business will be to supervise the making of fables and legends, rejecting all which are unsatisfactory; and we shall induce nurses and mothers to tell their children only those which we have approved.
Much the same concern animated pre-Columbian Aztec Emperors, who destroyed earlier records to rewrite a history more in keeping with the nation's imperial grandeur, and Spanish missionaries, who burned Mayan codices in order to found a new and Christian history for the New World.
In Plato's perspective, the state is a super-parent teaching the weaker real parent, who in turn teaches the child state-approved "truths." The same metaphor of parent-child appears in the instances of Aztec and Spanish censorship, but now the child is an entire nation, adults as well as children.
The destruction of Mayan codices by zealous missionaries demonstrates what is at stake when censors ban the humanities. The humanities are dedicated to raising questions, exploring possibilities, supposing alternatives to that which seems to be true. Through exercising the imagination and adding to one's store of knowledge, the student of the humanities strives to achieve wisdom. The end of censorship, however, is a peculiar form of ignorance, perhaps best summarized in the old adage, "What you don't know won't hurt you."
Thus censors decide it is best for the public not to know what Benjamin Franklin really thought and said and did, and so they expurgate his Autobiography. To perpetuate the thesis that America is "God's Chosen Country," they excise whole chapters from our histories or insist upon specious insertions in the name of a "balanced view." Depending upon the era in which they work, censors have deleted "racy" or "boring, overly-Catholic" stories from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, thereby distorting our understanding of the poet and his poem. They have banished Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice because it is anti-Semitic, Macbeth because it deals with witchcraft, and Romeo and Juliet because it offers a poor role model for teens. They have beheaded historians, burnt translators of Holy Scripture at the stake, denied theologians entry to classrooms, and offered rewards for the assassination of novelists. To protect tender sensibilities, they want to strike The Diary of Anne Frank from reading lists because it is "too depressing . . . a real downer."
The obvious and painful truth is that what we don't know will hurt us, and it will hurt even worse if we have been taught something other than the real facts of life. If we are taught, as Plato and modern censors would have it, that wrongdoers are never happy, that good and just people are never miserable, then we are not prepared for life in this less-than-best of all possible worlds. If we cannot learn to imagine what injustice does to the human spirit, if we cannot sympathize with the downtrodden, or suspect our own tendencies to tyrannize others, then we cannot deal with the world as it actually is. We are condemned to stand aside or follow orders given by those who have assumed power over us.
"I cannot approve a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed," wrote John Milton in l644, to oppose an act of censorship before the British Parliament. Though Milton named his plea for freedom of the press and of thought for the high court of justice in ancient Athens (the Areopagus), he drew also upon the traditions of Christian theology to define the terms of his argument. For Milton, virtue was an attribute or power to be exerted--exercised to the point of breathlessness--in combat against evil. But to censors, virtue is a state defined by its isolation from the ways of the world. As a state or condition, it is, alas, powerless; it must depend always upon the kindness of others, and it must be hedged about with more and more restrictions, omissions, excisions, or unverified conclusions if it is to endure.
And thus we come to the basic flaw of censorship: What begins as a protective embrace of fragile truth ends in the all-encompassing embrace of wishful thinking or, indeed, falsehood.
For all the trouble they cause, censors do have a firm grip on one truth that defenders of intellectual freedom are inclined to forget: that the written, printed, or broadcast word possesses a unique, self-authorizing power. As any teacher knows, an error printed in a textbook is far more powerful than the spoken, handwritten, or even typewritten correction made in a classroom. As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, in 1380, what people cannot know from experience, they assume on the basis of authority; and by authority he meant the word as written in books. Nowadays we must add, "or as spoken by those to whom we have accorded power." Censors recognize, and fear, the power of the word. The defenders of intellectual freedom and the humanities owe it to themselves to rediscover and cherish this power, for this power is the virtue of the humanities that has enabled them to endure.
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. -John F. Kennedy February 26, 1962
Courtesy Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
"Teen-Age Sex, Drugs, and Suicide" Courtesy Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
"Suitable only for the Slums" Courtesy Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Santo Domingo y los Albigenses, by Pedro Berruguete Courtesy Art Resources, New York City
Courtesy Ben Sargent
Santo Domingo y los Albigenses (detail) Courtesy Art Resources, New York City
--Antonio Ferrer Artist's impression of the "God Squad," a self-named group of students and parents in a California community, who challenged the "suitability" of many books.
A Humanities Exhibition
TEXAS HUMANITIES RESOURCE CENTER Austin, TX
made possible by grants from Rio Grande Valley Freedom Newspapers Texas Library Association Texas Humanities Alliance Texas Center for the Book
and matching grants from TEXAS COMMITTEE FOR THE HUMANITIES
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