Banning books has been around for thousands of years, while Banned Book Week has only been around since 1982 — a long time in one sense, but barely the blink of an eye in another. Yet the last three years have seen a dramatic intensification of book banning that can only be understood by appreciating the longer history, as well as the eye-blink.
The first Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang reputedly burned hundreds of them in 213 BCE, though his successors may have actually been responsible. In 8 CE things were clearer. Roman Emperor Augustus banished the poet Ovid from Rome for writing erotic poetry, which undermined his agenda of “moral reform.” These two despotic acts defined the central motivations of book bans down to the present day: authoritarian political and social control.
In America, Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, a harsh critique of Puritan customs and power structures, published in 1637, is the first known banned book, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was the premier banned book of the 19th Century. Two decades later, Congress passed the “Comstock Act,” prohibiting the mailing of undefined “pornographic” materials—sparked in part by a desire to silence magazine publisher Victoria Woodhull, the first woman ever to run for US President. It remained in full force until 1957, when the Supreme Court, in Roth vs. The United States, narrowed the definition to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.”
In the aftermath, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in the number of book bans and a rise in more explicit art, ala Ovid. Then Reagan was elected.
“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Chris Finan, Director of American Booksellers for Free Expression told Literary Hub in a 2016 interview. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” As a result, “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” to books made by school boards and libraries.
The American Library Association helped launch Banned Book Week in 1982 in that sort of atmosphere. Book bans may have been encouraged from above, but were mostly one-off affairs, distinct efforts by distinct individuals to ban a specific book. That picture is changing dramatically.
When the ALA released its preliminary report on 2023 book bans on Sept 19 (covering Jan 1 to Aug 31), the mass effort was clear:
- As in 2022, 9 in 10 of the overall number of books challenged were part of an attempt to censor multiple titles.
- Cases documenting a challenge to 100 or more books were reported in 11 states, compared to six during the same reporting period in 2022 and zero in 2021.
Whereas, “In the past, most challenges to library resources only sought to remove or restrict a single book.”
Texas is the state where mass-challenges are most striking. ALA reports 30 book ban attempts targeting 1120 titles, compared to 38 attempts targeting 78 titles in California. Florida falls in between, with 22 attempts targeting 194. But all these figures should be seen as low-end estimates—not least because the atmosphere of intimidation has caused a lot of defensive banning by scared administrators, teachers and librarians. But also, it’s just hard to keep up.
For example, in August, The Tampa Bay Times—covering a somewhat different period, beginning July 2022, reported 1,100 complaints of which 700 came from two counties representing less than 3% of Florida’s population, and about 600 of those came from two people, “a Clay County dad and an Escambia County high school teacher,” the Times reported. “The data illustrates how a tiny minority of activists across the state can overwhelm school districts while shaping the national conversation.” It’s previously been reported that the dad is just getting started. He claims to have a list of 3,600 books he wants to ban. Of course, what enabled them was Florida’s laws.
PEN America has painted a similar picture, with more structure, in which can be seen the malign influence of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s successor, mainstreaming book bans under the Orwellian banner of “freedom,” with his “Don’t Say Gay” law, echoing Emperor Augustus and his “Stop WOKE Act,” echoing Emperor Huang. Other states have followed Florida’s lead. According to PEN America, this past April, during the first half of the 2022-23 school year 31% book ban instances were connected to “newly enacted state laws in Florida, Utah, and Missouri,” while another 25% were “connected to political pressure from elected or appointed officials” clearly following in DeSantis’s footsteps, and another 20% were “connected to organized advocacy groups,” more than half of which involved Moms for Liberty, an Orwellian group DeSantis has clearly courted for support.
Of course, DeSantis was just following in Trump’s footsteps, and Trump really got things rolling in at least two major ways, both of which have authoritarian conspiracist roots. As with his embrace of birtherism, Trump never has much interest in the details of such conspiracies, which he leaves to others, but he leans hard into their essence—pushing the core message of a nefarious all-powerful, all-menacing alien force threatening “real America.” This core message, in turn, drives the vicious personal attacks that have increasingly played a role in book ban battles across the country.
One was his inspiration of, and later endorsement of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims Democrats are involved in a massive pedophilia and child-trafficking conspiracy that Trump is secretly fighting. It was originally presented as the real inside story of the Muller Trump/Russia investigation: Muller and Trump were actually working together, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of Democrats were about to be arrested en masse. Of course it was absurd, but the theme of labeling Democrats and their allies as pedophiles and “groomers” has become a central tenet of rightwing politics that’s driving much of the attacks on gay culture, which in turn plays a large part in book bans as well.
The other was Trump’s racist attacks on Black Lives Matter protests and the 1619 Project. A chief promoter of this push-back was conservative propagandist Chris Rufo, who constructed the misleading frame of “Critical Race Theory” to crusade against, calling it an expression of “cultural Marxism,” which itself is an antisemitic conspiracy theory, whose chief promoter since the 1990s has been William Lind, a major figure in the conservative Free Congress Foundation. At bottom, the conspiracy claims that a handful of Jewish intellectuals is responsible for all the social unrest from the 1960s onward—the feminist movement, Black Power, gay liberation, everything that conservatives hate. Rufo has become a key figure in DeSantis’s battles to reshape education in Florida—which in turn is being copied or echoed in other states as well. Book bans, again, are a down-stream consequence of this conspiracist crusade.
The good news is that pushback is growing, too. In June, Illinois became the first state in the nation to prohibit library book bans, when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill into law. “Book bans are about censorship, marginalizing people, marginalizing ideas and facts. Regimes banned books, not democracies,” Pritzker said at a bill signing ceremony at a Chicago library. “We refuse to let a vitriolic strain of White nationalism coursing through our country determine whose histories are told, not in Illinois.”
On September 26, California followed suit with a similar law, under which the state will fine schools that block textbooks and school library books for discriminatory reasons. In a video of the bill-signing, Governor Gavin Newsom said its “Remarkable that we’re living in a country right now in this banning binge, this cultural purge that we’re experiencing all throughout America and now increasingly here in the state of California where we have school districts banning books, banning free speech, criminalizing librarians and teachers….We want to do more than just push back rhetorically against that, and that’s what this legislation provides.”
One thing is for certain: book bans today are just one facet of a larger pitched war between rising authoritarian forces and those defending real American freedom. After all, what could be more essentially a freedom than to be able to actually read the free press?