UpDate - Vol. 11, No. 17, Page 9
January 23, 1992
Special interest groups involved in censorship; From 'Wizard of Oz' to texts

     Special interest groups with large pocketbooks are censoring
America's grammar and secondary school anthologies before they are
published, Joan DelFattore, associate professor of English, said in
a lecture in Lewes last Wednesday.
     These groups, which are particularly strong in Texas and
California, represent ultra-conservative fundamentalists and
ultra-liberals, and they have altered the textbook versions of
classic stories read in grade schools and high schools across the
country, DelFattore told about 75 people gathered in Cannon Lab at
the Marine Studies Complex.
     Among the seemingly endless list of works that parents and
special interest groups, such as the Washington, D.C.-based
Concerned Women for America, have objected to are Dickens' A
Christmas Carol, The Wizard of Oz, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
and the Shakespearean plays, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and
Juliet.
     Speaking as part of the University by the Sea Lecture Series,
DelFattore said the "problems" special interest groups have
identified in those works include the "promotion of junk food"
(sugar plums and other sweets in Dickens), "Satan worship" (witches
in The Wizard of Oz), the "negative depiction of free enterprise"
(the capitalist grape growers in Steinbeck) and anti-Semitism,
teenage sex and the association of violence with religion in
Shakespeare.
     Obviously, these varied objections come from different
quarters.
     Protestors on the far right tend to be religious
fundamentalist-extremists, DelFattore said. Especially active in
Texas, such people vigorously pursue the censoring of a much
broader range of literature than left-wing protestors, she said.
Protestors on the far left often object to more specific issues,
like the treatment of a particular minority by a book.
     Ultra-conservatives have objected to a line in Romeo and
Juliet that refers to burning heretics at the stake, as it suggests
that religion has a negative side. As a result of lobbying efforts
by these right-wing extremists, no American high school anthologies
of Shakespeare's play include the reference, DelFattore said after
her lecture.
     Ultra-liberals, on the other hand, have objected to such
stories as Patricia Zettner's "A Perfect Day for Ice Cream," which
describes a child's birthday party. Because of pressure from
California protestors, Houghton Mifflin changed the title to "A
Perfect Day."
     The reason such groups exert such influence is because
publishers must meet the demands of state education boards, she
said. In Texas and California, state education boards, as well as
interested citizens, review advance copies of soon-to-be published
textbooks and tell the publishers precisely what they must change
if they want to sell their books in those states. Directions for
censoring textbooks are commonly as explicit as, "Omit picture,
page 100" or "Delete second line, paragraph 12, page 150."
     Publishers usually only print one version of elementary school
readers and high school textbooks, DelFattore said. Since Texas and
California represent about 20 percent of U.S. textbook sales, the
version demanded in those states is typically distributed to
students across the nation. On rare occasions, she said, a
publisher will print a Texas-only edition of a textbook.
     The censorship of textbooks is not limited to literature,
DelFattore said. History books have been censored to leave Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal off a time line of important dates in U.S.
history and to reduce the discussion of slavery's significance in
the Civil War. Psychology, home economics, biology and mathematics
books are also censored, she said.
     She said that the work of long-dead authors is in the public
domain, allowing publishers to censor the individual works that
make up elementary and high school anthologies. Living authors
often give the right to final editing to their publisher, she
added, allowing for further censorship.
     DelFattore said that 23 states, including Texas and
California, operate an adoption program, under which school
districts must choose books from a state-approved list or pay for
the books themselves. People who don't like any given book go to
the state education boards and express their views, she said. As
elected officials, board members usually comply with protestors'
wishes by including or excluding the books from the state list.
     Delaware does not have an adoption program, allowing districts
to choose any available textbooks. Still, she said, quiet
censorship goes on in the First State.
     "People think censorship only happens in Texas and
California," she said, "but it happens in Delaware too, only in
more subtle ways, like parents pressuring principals to change the
curriculum, and he or she quietly encouraging the teacher to drop
a book in question.
     "In one unsuccessful censorship attempt, in the Appoquinimink
School District," DelFattore said, "a parent objected to Shell
Silverstein's poetry in the fifth-grade reader. The parent said a
scene in which a child acting in a grammar school play hides her
head in a toy oven was promoting child suicide. In the story, the
little girl was hiding her head from the teacher because she was
giggling and didn't want to be caught."
     DelFattore said her research into textbook censorship began in
1985, when she was teaching a summer course for high school English
instructors. During a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, she said, it
became obvious that the anthologies two of the instructors were
reading from contained edited versions of the play.
     As it turned out, DelFattore explained, "Big chunks of the
play had been taken out of the text without any indication that
anything was missing. It was the sexual material that had been
removed. The publisher seemed to think that if you don't tell
students that 16th-century teenagers sometimes slept together, they
won't have any idea."
                                        - Stephen M. Steenkamer

In 1987, English Prof. Joan DelFattore began in earnest her
research into American textbook censorship. The result is a
240-page book, entitled What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook
Censorship in America. Yale University Press will publish the book
in August.