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

Holt editors sometimes acceded to conservative demands. In response to e Indianapolis protest, Barbara Theobald recommended getting rid of hate in most places, replacing the story that showed boys sleeping together, and eliminating some depictions of ill-behaved children. But she drew the line at having the children consult their parents before starting a business. This criticism, she declared, represented "an intrusion on an author's or publisher's prerogatives."

Conservative influences were evident elsewhere too. The in-house guidelines urged authors to avoid references to evolution, invasions of students' privacy, and "any subtle propagandizing for Communism." One memo warned that an illustration showing a mixed-race couple "would make some people very nervous." In 1980, Holt even brought in a prominent conservative critic to address the staff: Kris McGough of Columbia, Maryland, a Catholic mother who had testified before Congress, written a monthly column for the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, and served on Maryland's Values Education Commission.

Still, Holt people had only so much patience for conservative complaints, as reactions to the McGough talk demonstrate. One staff member wrote: "The Kris McGoughs, the John Birch Society, and other such groups do not want children to learn to think independently, to question, to evaluate because such processes threaten their control." Another declared that Holt shouldn't be "intimidated" by Mrs. McGough's "reductionist, simplistic, and reactionary" argument. Still another wondered what possessed people to "feel threatened by a question or an idea in a textbook." The staff never penned such sentiments when liberal critics came calling.

Another Holt staff member vented his ire when a small Texas newspaper, evidently inspired by the Gablers, published a negative item about a Holt book. "Is this article grounds for a suit for misrepresentation?" a regional sales manager wrote. "It sure as heck cannot do us any good. And I am tired of sitting back and taking it. Maybe CBS could do a news report on the Educational Research Analysts (The Gablers) of Longview, Texas, and expose their true qualifications as educators?" At the time, CBS Inc. owned Holt. (60 Minutes did air a feature about the Gablers, but it was relatively innocuous, and it didn't appear until nearly seven years after the memo was written.)

Holt editors viewed Mel Gabler, Kris McGough, and other conservative critics as fundamentally different from Twiss Butler, Jeanette Arakawa, and other liberal critics. In a 1981 speech, Barbara Theobald denounced the conservatives as the sort of "censors" one finds in "totalitarian societies." In the next section of her speech - a section entitled "Positive Pressure Groups' - she said: "At the other end of the spectrum we have other groups ... who seek to improve our educational institutions and textbooks in a positive manner." At Holt, critics who wanted books to feature more working women were "positive pressure groups"; those who wanted more homemakers were "censors."