something that is controversial, it’s better to take it out.’ Since the late 1980s, many
other textbook publishers have joined Holt, Rinehart and Winston in this type of quiet
censorship (Delfattore 1992:120).
At the same time that conservatives attempted to censor the children’s books and
textbooks that they found offensive, some members of the political left also participated
in efforts to censor certain works of children’s literature. The leftists who sought to
censor children’s books generally had ties to the civil rights movement or the feminist
movement. These people often argued that children’s books with racist or sexist content
should not be made available to children. The Council on Interracial Books for Children,
for example, denounced numerous classic children’s books for presenting Africans or
African-Americans in a negative light. As a result of this campaign, many libraries
stopped circulating such books as Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, P.L.Travers’s
Mary Poppins, and Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Dr Dolittle (MacLeod 1983:35).
Another way in which leftists attempted to rid children’s literature of racist or sexist
content was by rewriting the passages that they found offensive. John Wallace, an
African-American educator, engaged in this type of censorship when he removed the
word ‘nigger’ from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and published his
revised version under the title The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adapted. Similarly,
Doug Larche rewrote many traditional nursery rhymes in an effort to make them less
violent and sexist. In his book, entitled Nursery Rhymes: The Equal Rhymes Amendment,
Humpty Dumpty is put back together by a coalition of horses, women and men, and
Little Miss Muffet puts the spider in the garden to catch insects (Rollin 1992:138).
The liberals and radicals in America were not alone: similar restrictions were
attempted in Britain (Barry 1992:234–238). A number of British feminists, for example,
launched a campaign to ban Roald Dahl’s The Witches from school libraries because
Dahl’s female witches are portrayed so negatively. During a discussion of this case, Dahl
made an insightful observation about the censorship of children’s literature:
It seems to me that in England more censorship pressures are coming from the left
than the right. We have a number of cities that are run by left-wing groups, and
these people often try to take certain books out of the schools. Of course, right-wing
people have been equally intolerant. It’s usually the extremes on either side that
want to ban books.
West 1988b: 73Dahl’s observation that censors tend to be extremists applies to America as well as
Britain. Throughout the history of children’s literature, the people who have tried to
censor children’s books, for all their ideological differences, share a rather romantic view
about the power of books. They believe, or at least profess to believe, that books are
such a major influence in the formation of children’s values and attitudes that adults
need to monitor nearly every word that children read. Because the proponents of
censorship invest books with so much power, they reject as too dangerous the idea that
children should be exposed to a wide variety of books and be trusted to make their own
selections. The people who seek to censor children’s books may be practising
THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 499