The Three Attacks on Intellectual Freedom
Updated at 9:21 p.m. ET on August 7, 2023
In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today. It argued for “the widest diversity of views and expressions” and against purging work based on “the personal history or political affiliations of the author.” It urged publishers and librarians to resist government and private suppression, and to “give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought.” The manifesto took on not just official censorship, but the broader atmosphere of coercion and groupthink. It concluded: “We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”
“The Freedom to Read” was covered in papers and on TV news. President Dwight Eisenhower, who that same month had urged the graduating class of Dartmouth College not to “join the book burners,”’ sent a letter of praise to the manifesto’s authors. In one of the darkest periods of American history, the manifesto gave librarians and publishers the courage of their principles. One librarian later wrote, “There developed a fighting profession, made up of dedicated people who were sure of their direction.”
This past June, the library and publishers’ associations “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles.