You can ban a book, but you cannot destroy its contents
A brief history of book banning
It has been almost 600 years since Guttenberg created and utilized movable type and a mechanical printing press to revolutionize the world of book publishing – as well as the world itself.
Books suddenly became available to the masses. It remains one of the most pivotal innovations of all time in terms of influencing people and advancing ideas. The world never would be the same.
Admittedly, Gutenberg’s breakthrough, which occurred around 1440, almost certainly was preceded by similar inventions in Korea and China more than a century earlier. However, inventions in those countries at that time were not able to progress far beyond their original geographic boundaries.
Gutenberg would get the credit. By the end of the 1400s, his printing techniques were being used widely in Europe. Books were being created not one or two at a time by hand inscription but hundreds and thousands at a time by a newly arrived technology at a pace that could not have been previously imagined.
Book bannings and burnings were not unknown during the thousands of years of recorded history that preceded Gutenberg, but because there were relatively few books in existence, bannings and burnings were extremely infrequent. Now, however, the pace would pick up dramatically, in effect matching the increase in book publishing and distribution.
If there were books, there would be people who did not like a particular book. There also would be an organized group of some kind that would appoint itself as book monitor, deciding which books it would attempt to prevent people from reading. Most often, these decisions were based on groups wanting to protect their own existence. If an idea expressed in a book was critical of an institution or was deemed to threaten values that were common to a particular group, it would be banned or burned.
Organized religion would lead the way.
One of the earliest post-Gutenberg mass book burnings occurred in the mid-1520s and was organized by the Catholic Church of England. The Church burned thousands of copies of the first English translation of the New Testament. Church leaders believed that an English language version of the bible was a threat to their personal power. They wanted the bible to remain available only in Latin so that they would remain the only ones who could read it and, thus, could interpret it as they wished.
The Catholic Church, it turns out, had practiced book banning even before Gutenberg. For hundreds of years, church leaders had named books that its members were not allowed to read. Then, in 1559, about 75 years post-Gutenberg, a formal index of books considered dangerous to the faith and morals of Catholic Church members was created. It was maintained for more than four centuries before being dropped in 1966.
Works included in the list over the years included Paradise Lost by John Milton, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, and all works by Emile Zola, widely known for his writings about the falsely accused and wrongfully convicted French Army officer Alfred Dreyfus.
The first book to be widely banned in America was written by Thomas Morton in 1637 – almost 200 years after Gutenberg, but just 17 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Morton wrote a three-volume set of books entitled New English Canaan that was mostly filled with descriptive observations about the land, native animals, and plant life of New England. A brief section at the end, however, provided “a withering critique of the Puritans and the society they were building, including their treatment of Native Americans,” Colleen Connelly wrote in an article in the October 2, 2023 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
The Puritan government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony could not accept the idea that the Puritan way of life could be publicly and widely criticized. The book was banned. All but a few copies of it were destroyed. The author was exiled to an island off the coast of Maine.
Although Morton later returned from exile, he became a mostly forgotten author for a time, he eventually re-emerged. In the 1800s, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story about him that attracted attention. In 1883, the book was republished with notes by a descendant of the Presidents Adamses, who praised the unique scientific knowledge it provided about the landscape of early New England, Connelly wrote. It has been written about frequently since then, all the way to 2001 when Philip Roth suggested in The Dying Animal that Morton’s face belongs on Mount Rushmore.
There was a profound lesson in what happened in this situation. The book emerged from obscurity, and from being banned because it provided important information that people valued. The Puritans, in contrast to Morton’s meteoric rise over the centuries, lost political control in the New England colonies by the end of the 1600s and transitioned to the Congregational Church in the 1700s.
Bowderlizing Shakespeare
The word bowdlerize originated after Dr. Thomas Bowdler, a physician, published sanitized versions of Shakespeare’s plays in 1807. The revisions omitted about 10 percent of the original content that Bowdler and/or his sister, Henrietta Maria Bowdler, considered vulgar. This may be exactly what the Bowdlers intended, but when the word that grew out of their revisions and surname is used today, it is not necessarily taken in a complementary manner. The Bowdlers, meanwhile, are long gone. Shakespeare, in its original form, survives.
Mark Twain leaves his mark on book-banning
Mark Twain had been writing stories and books for 20 years and was widely respected as an author and humorist when the public library in Concord, Massachusetts decided in 1885 to remove his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its shelves. Library officials described the book as “rough, coarse and inelegant,” adding that the book was “more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” It was the beginning of a years-long chain of Huck Finn bannings by public libraries in America. The chief argument against the book became the allegation that its hero was a bad example of behavior for young readers. The same could have been said about various actions described in the Bible.
The bottom line to all of this, however, is that books can and will be banned by organizations that believe their ideas are superior to ideas expressed in particular books. But virtually every banned book will re-emerge at some point, often receiving more attention and wider popularity than they had received previously.
Books can be banned, but you cannot ban the ideas they contain.
Consider, for example, the nationwide book-burning in Germany on May 10, 1933. More than 25,000 books considered un-German were burned at a rally in Berlin, one of many across Germany on the same day. The books destroyed included those by Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. Nazi Germany collapsed 12 years later — not soon enough, but the authors it sought to bury include popular and respected authors yet today.
In recent years in America, the pendulum has swung toward increased book banning, just as it has at other times in history.
One of the major forces in book banning in America today has been school boards, which have broadly targeted many books relating to slavery, the racist history of America, and issues confronting those who support the LGBTQ+ community.
Which prompts a recall of an observation made by a popular author in 1897:
In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
--Mark Twain.
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This is so informative. Our sixth grade teacher read Mark Twain to us during our “cool down“ period after noon recess. Years later I learned it had been a banned book. At the time, I truly thought the days of banned books were over.
Illuminating.