Book Banning - A Short History

A few years ago, in this column, I wrote a column comparing some children's book series over time. One of them, of course, was the Harry Potter series, and I recall being surprised to learn that some parents objected to having the series in school libraries because of the "witches" and "wizards" mentioned in them, and the fears they had that their children would be influenced negatively by them. What I also found interesting was the contrast to the Philip Pullman "His Dark Materials" series, which didn't generate much discussion of a theological nature, though, like C.S. Lewis' "Narnia" series, was much more directly "religious," in the sense that Pullman took aim at religion/Christianity, whereas Lewis retold the Christ story in a positive and child-friendly way.

All of which is to say that there are books, and audiences, which generate a certain amount of concern, notably those dealing with religion and those aimed at children. 

But recently, and in times past, there have been periods of almost frenzied elimination of books from general access, and for sometimes incomprehensible reasons.

One book that is often limited is "Mein Kampf," by Adolf Hitler. It was actually first banned following Hitler's death, the end of the Reich, and the defeat of the Germans in WWII. When its Bavarian copyright lapsed in 2016, it could finally be republished and it became available again for study. Like many non-fiction books that cast a group of people as the villain, it has a clear and obvious flaw - and while that carries with it a risk, it also carries with it a warning. And therein lies the issue with book banning in general: do we try to keep such books out of the hands of the vulnerable, who might read them as a sort of religious text, or do we hold them up as examples of "wrongthink," and use them to demonstrate how words can be use to corrupt and destroy, and thus teach us how to think critically when confronted with their approach?

In the Western world, the first major example of "book burning" was in A.D. (C.E.) 8: Roman poet Ovid's Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). He was banished from Rome for writing it, and later, monk Savonarola (a rather extreme penitent) burned it, along with some other books, in 1497. The book was banned by U.S. Customs in 1928. It was, in essence, not much more specific than Cosmopolitan Magazine in terms of its degree of detail, but it was a guide to love, physical and emotional.  

In 35 A.D., Homer's The Odyssey was banned by Roman Emperor Caligula, as he felt the ideas of liberty expressed, though aimed at the Greeks and written 300 years earlier, were dangerous to his empire. So now we have two themes that book banners have found dangerous: sexuality and politics.

And, in 640 A.D., caliph Omar is reputed to have burned 200,000 books in the library of Alexandria in Egypt, saying, "If these writing of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed." And we have the third "big ban" - religion.

Over time, versions of The Bible, some of Shakespeare's plays (or scenes from them), Robinson Crusoe, some of the works of the Marquis de Sade, and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species have all been banned at one time or another, in one place or another. 

In 1885, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was banned in Concord, MA, as being "coarse and inelegant," and more lately, has been removed from school libraries for featuring the "n-word," which evidently is coarse and inelegant. 

In 1929, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was banned in the Soviet Union because of occultism, though one wonders if that refers to the books, or the writer, who was, in fact, interested in the occult, and had a very public rift with Harry Houdini over spiritualism, in which Conan Doyle's wife believed herself to be gifted.

Perhaps the most infamous book "banning" was actually a book burning, and took place in 1933, when the Nazi's set fire to thousands of books written by "Jews, communists, and others," and included books by Einstein, Freud, Hemingway, Helen Keller, Lenin, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Marx, Upton Sinclair, Stalin, and Trotsky, among others. 

As late as the 1960s, Hemingway's books were banned in Texas - though continued to be taught in other states in the U.S. - and this writer recalls being told about D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a book her class was about to study, having been brought up on obscenity charges as late as 1960 as proof of how much the 1960s changed the standards in both the US and Great Britain of what was "appropriate" reading material. 

During the 1970s, political books came under fire as CIA tell-alls became popular, but by the 1980s, things were getting silly: the London City Council banned Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny from London schools because the stories only featured "middle-class rabbits," and in 1983, Alabama wanted to ban The Diary of Anne Frank because it was a "real downer." Truth.

In more recent years, both fiction and non-fiction political material has been banned, along with material considered inappropriate to Muslim readers, and books that used words that were, in fact, used at the time of their writing - but are now considered offensive - have been removed from the shelves of schools rather than used as teachable opportunities. As with "Mein Kampf," there is always the risk of exposure: can the reader understand the difference between a bad idea examined, and a bad idea followed? And books like Harry Potter, as noted earlier, because of its focus on magic, witches and wizards, absent any context of the "Muggle" world (other than to acknowledge that it exists) have been called into question by parents anxious about their child's runaway imagination.

And so it always is with a book: a book is, in fact, a form of magic. When you read it, the world you step into will differ from the one that I experience, and what imprint it leaves on each of us will differ, depending on our age, what else is happening in our lives, whether the story and the writer's style resonates with us, and what we have been led to expect before reading. I read all the Nancy Drew books as quickly as I could find them - I have known young readers I could not cajole past the first chapter, much to my amazement. But then, I never liked Hemingway and argued with my 11th grade teacher about his genius - and I'm sure my 11th grade teacher knew a great deal more about literature than I. 

Certainly, libraries and book stores should come equipped with "warnings," at least as far as the maturity of the content is concerned. And that doesn't just apply to sexual content, but extreme political and social ideas, as well. At the very least, perhaps parental permission for a 10 year old to borrow or purchase something like Mein Kampf, or Fifty Shades of Grey would be wise. Historic context is probably a more difficult area to police - would it make sense to limit access to Little Women, or Gone With the Wind?

Think of all the world lost when Alexandria burned. There must have been at least one good cook book in the lot.