11/11/2023 0 Comments Dear freedom writerMost of the targets are politically on the left most present facts or express views about race, gender, and sexuality that the censors consider dangerous, divisive, obscene, or simply wrong. First-and likely the main concern of the signatories-is an official campaign by governors, state legislatures, local governments, and school boards to weed out books and ideas they don’t like. The attack on intellectual freedom today is coming from several directions. It’s worth asking why the American literary world in 2023 is less able to uphold the principles of “The Freedom to Read” than its authors in 1953. Few of them, if any, could produce as unapologetic a defense of intellectual freedom as the one made at a time when inquisitors were destroying careers and lives. And yet many of those institutional signatories-including the “Big Five” publishing conglomerates-often violate its propositions, perhaps not even aware that they’re doing so. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles. This past June, the library and publishers’ associations reissued “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. One librarian later wrote, “There developed a fighting profession, made up of dedicated people who were sure of their direction.” In one of the darkest periods of American history, the manifesto gave librarians and publishers the courage of their principles. President Dwight Eisenhower, who that same month had urged the graduating class of Dartmouth College not to “join the book burners,”’ sent a letter of praise to the manifesto’s authors. “The Freedom to Read” was covered in papers and on TV news. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.” We believe rather that what people read is deeply important that ideas can be dangerous but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. It concluded: “We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. It argued for “the widest diversity of views and expressions” and against purging work based on “the personal history or political affiliations of the author.” It urged publishers and librarians to resist government and private suppression, and to “give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought.” The manifesto took on not just official censorship, but the broader atmosphere of coercion and groupthink. I n June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today.
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