The textbook wars: when does a 'censor' become a 'positive pressure group'? Ask Holt Rinehart - the pressure to impose a liberal agenda on the publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Holt Basic Reading textbook products

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Stephen Bates

It has become one of journalism's autumn perennials: Book-burners are conspiring to relegate our children to ignorance. Read a bit further in the articles and, almost invariably, the would-be censors turn out to be conservatives.

Most book protests do indeed originate with the Right. Contrary to censorship experts, however, that's not because conservatives alone seek to inject their views into the classroom. Liberals are no less eager to shape schoolbooks; they just go about it differently.

A fuller accounting of both sides' efforts and impacts is now possible, thanks to a unique trove of information: 2,261 pages of internal files from the schoolbook publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Subpoenaed during the mid-1980s lawsuit Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, these documents chart the evolution of Holt Basic Reading, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade textbook

series.

The memos and reports (supplemented with interviews) offer an uncommonly revealing glimpse into the secretive world of textbook development. They show that activists from both sides inundated Holt editors with complaints - some valid, some preposterous, and most in between. The difference is in how their complaints were treated.

Rocky Start

Though Holt Basic Reading became a rousing success, dominating the reading market for years, it had a rocky start. The first edition was barely off the presses in 1973 when a Texas group charged that it lacked sufficient "stories with heroines," and the self-styled Task Force on Sexism called for its prompt "elimination." As the date for California's textbook adoptions neared, a Holt sales representative predicted that "we may squeeze through this time with only a minimum amount of changes, but by the next adoption, we will not be so fortunate."

There, of course, has been some criticism of sexism - and we are guilty to a point," senior author Bernard J. Weiss conceded in a 1974 memo. He and his co-authors, along with staff editors at Holt, had been working on the books since 1967 - before the strong emergence of the Women's Movement," as one memo noted. In the books and accompanying film-strips, consequently, women and girls were "generally relegated to the background."

In the background, moreover, females rarely strayed from stereotypic niches. The workbook for the first-grade reader declared that books called "Dolls and Dresses were "for girls," and asked who should read Trains and Planes; the right answer, according to the teachers' edition, was boys. Illustrations showed boys running, playing rambunctiously, and working with tools, while girls baked cookies, drew pictures, and cut out paper dresses. During development and production of the series, former Holt executive Thomas J. Murphy recalls, "nobody thought about how sexist the damn stuff was.... Women designers, women editors, women authors - nobody."

The depiction of race and ethnicity raised hackles too. In California in 1974, the Standing Committee to Review Textbooks from a Multicultural Perspective (that's right: multiculturalism in 1974) detected racism in such phrases as "the afternoon turned black," "it's going to be a black winter," and "the deputy's face darkened."

The multicultural committee also discerned an offensive Christian bias in the books. "Generally, the story of creation as told according to the Judaeo-Christian teachings is serious and presented in a factual way," the group charged. "Other non-Christian teachings about the origin of man or creation are treated as being highly imaginative, strange, and consequently false. Religious holidays are exclusively Christian."

"In a revision we need to do all that is financially possible to correct this situation," wrote Barbara Theobald, a staff editor assigned to the series. Using materials borrowed from "one of our editors, Ms. Virginia Vida, [who] is active in the Women's Liberation movement," Miss Theobald drafted new guidelines for the 1977 edition of the series.

The 1977 changes, Mr. Murphy says now, constituted "a very political revision. We were counting heads as to whether we had 50 per cent females, whether we had every minority group represented."

Subsequent guidelines grew more elaborate. Opening with an epigram from Walt Whitman - "The Female equally with the Male I sing" - one version said that men should not be "brutish, violent, crude, harsh, or insensitive," and women should not be "fearful, squeamish, passive, dependent, weepy, mechanically inept, frivolous, shrewish, nagging, [or] easily defeated by simple problems." Girls should work with electricity, study insects, and solve math problems. Boys should read poetry, chase butterflies, and pay "attention to personal appearance and hygiene." Forbidden words included manmade (use synthetic), workmanlike (use competent), plainsman (use plainsdweller), statesman (use diplomat), and letterman (use student who has won a school letter).

The guidelines were equally punctilious when it came to race, ethnicity, and age. Blacks must not be "in low-paying jobs, unemployed, or on welfare," but rather "in professions at all levels." American Indians should be "involved in the American mainstream" rather than on reservations, and they too mustn't be "in low-paying jobs, unemployed, or on welfare." "Unfortunately," Miss Theobald noted in a memo, "the reality for the Indian in our society falls into all of the avoids.") Asian Americans and Hispanics must speak English. Jews must not work in "stereotypical occupations," such as "diamond cutters, doctors, dentists, lawyers, classical musicians, tailors, shopkeepers, etc." Older people should not be depicted as living in nursing homes, wearing glasses, using canes or wheelchairs, or "in rocking chairs, knitting, napping, and watching television."