Says Professor James Harvey Robinson, author of “The Mind in the Making”: “No publisher of text-books for the schools would venture to permit a writer to give children the best and most authoritative knowledge that we have today.” Says Mr. Aaron Sapiro, attorney for the Farmers’ Co-operative Societies: “The text-books we now use are censored by political and social factions.” Says Mr. William McAndrew, member of the board of education in New York: “The text-books which are supposed to discuss our civic problems do not know enough to keep a women’s whist club from financial and moral bankruptcy.”
I have a letter from Mr. S. M. Dinkins, principal of a private school at Selma, Alabama, who tells me about his experience with a text-book, “Problems of American Democracy,” by Professor R. O. Hughes. Mr. Dinkins found this book so unsatisfactory in its attitude toward modern questions that he wrote to the professor, and received in reply the statement: “I know my publishers would be pleased to learn that my readers cannot tell from my book what my own opinions about many questions really are.” Mr. Dinkins was so much troubled by this that he wrote to the publishers, Allyn and Bacon of Boston, to ask them if that could possibly be true; it took Mr. Dinkins two months of continuous letter-writing before he finally got from the publishers a reply to the effect that school authorities would not adopt any other kind of book, and publishers had to meet the demand; they did not care to publish a book that would not sell.
That many college professors have taken up the role of “Mr. Facing Both-Ways,” adjusting their opinions to the demands of the school bosses and school-book publishers, is amusingly shown in the pamphlet published by Commissioner Hirshfield. He takes some American history text-books and gives us in parallel columns the statements which were made before and after the patriots got to work. For example, here is Dr. W. B. Guitteau, director of schools of Toledo, Ohio, who published a text-book in 1919, with a preface urging the international point of view:
Throughout this book, therefore, special emphasis has been placed upon the relations of the United States to other countries, in order that the young citizens who study it may realize more fully the importance of our world relations and our world responsibilities.
But then the hundred percenters got after Dr. Guitteau, and he brought out a new edition of his book in 1923, and started his preface with this statement:
Recent events have demonstrated that our teaching of history should emphasize more than ever before the peculiar and characteristic genius of American institutions, and the permanent and outstanding assets of American democracy.
Or take Professor Everett Barnes, who published an American history book in 1920, in which he described the battle of Bunker Hill as follows:
The courage shown on both sides was wonderful. To march, as those British soldiers did up to the works, so near that each one felt that the man who was aiming at him could not miss, required a nerve as steady as was ever shown on battlefield since men began to kill each other.
But then the super-patriots landed on Professor Barnes, and there was a new edition of his book in 1922, in which the incident is told as follows:
The courage shown on both sides was wonderful. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” said the American commander, who knew that their supply of ammunition was small, and that his men did not have enough bayonets to be used successfully in meeting the charge of the British.