The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Michael Schaller
At the end of March, following instructions from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a special committee at the U.S. Naval Academy removed nearly 400 books from the Nimitz Library. The targets supposedly ran afoul of President Trump’s executive order terminating policies he deemed part of “DEI” (diversity, equity, inclusion). Working all night, the committee yanked, among other books, Maya Angelou’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and Linda Gordon’s highly-regarded study of the Klan’s revival during the 1920s, The Second Coming of the KKK. Among those volumes left available for aspiring Midshipmen were “The Bell Curve,” co-authored by Charles Murray, which argued that Blacks had lower intelligence than whites and a 1924 screed by a then-obscure racist, Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
In recent years, several states, including Arizona, adopted laws allowing parents and concerned citizens to remove “controversial” books on sexuality from school and public libraries. Other provisions, like those in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma, prohibit schools from adopting textbooks that make any racial or ethnic group feel “uncomfortable” or “guilty.” Thus, enslaved Africans transported to American were reclassified as “immigrants.” As for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks’ 1955 arrest in Montgomery, Alabama? According to a new Florida textbook “one day” while riding the bus, “she was told to move to a different seat. She did not.”
Sadly, government purges of libraries are not new, even if the targets have changed from communism to sex and race. Though largely forgotten, in 1953 a pair of government officials, later parodied as “junketeering gumshoes,” traveled through Europe purging the State Department’s U.S. Information Agency Libraries (again a target of Trump’s DOGE cuts) of allegedly subversive literature.
Following Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy’s claims that “Reds” in the State Department had “lost China” to communism and subverted other U.S. interests, the incoming Eisenhower Administration fired numerous career diplomats and pledged to purge leftist literature from government libraries. Early in 1953, McCarthy announced that some 200 USIA libraries in 64 countries had stocked their shelves with subversive books. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles issued a directive that these libraries remove books by “controversial persons … Communists, fellow travelers, et. cetera.” Unappeased, McCarthy complained that books by radicals such as Henry David Thoreau and John Steinbeck remained available.
To remove this threat, McCarthy dispatched his top aides, Roy Cohn (Yes! That Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man who helped purge gays from government service, and, later Donald Trump’s political mentor) and David Schine on a tour of European capitals. In each city, they scoured USIA libraries for contraband, removing books by 75 authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. With Dulles’s permission, embassy staffers torched some of the suspect books in actions reminiscent of recent Nazi book burnings.
At home, some local officials followed suit by banning “lurid” comic books like Wonder Woman for promoting homosexuality. The Indiana textbook commission banned “Robin Hood” for promoting what they called “communist propaganda.” For more obscure reasons, the mayor of San Antonio ordered “Moby Dick” and “The Canterbury Tales” removed from city libraries.
Today’s culture warriors, like McCarthy, were more performative artists than serious ideologues. As one contemporary quipped, the senator “couldn’t find a communist in Red Square” nor distinguish “Karl Marx from Groucho.” But he understood how to mobilize fear and resentment for political gain against institutions of government, education, and entertainment. Today’s attacks on libraries, universities, and government agencies by the Trump administration hark back to some of the bleakest moments in American history. To quote the “radical” Mark Twain, history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
