S1. Ep 2: Dirty Books

From BBC Radio 4, this is "Things Fell Apart - Strange Tales from the Cultural Wars". I'm John Ronson, a writer living in America, the land where cultural wars begin. And by cultural wars, I mean almost everything that people yell at each other about on social media. We want to take mass off our children. That should be our choice. You are a white privileged male, you husband and wife, sweet and family. I can't help what I am. I was born like this. I'm not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure. What I'm saying is it doesn't make them a woman, it happens to be an opinion. These wars can obsess us, it can consume our lives and tear families apart. I was curious to learn how things fell apart, and so I went back in history to find the origin stories, the pebbles thrown in the pond, creating the ripples. I had no idea what I would find, but I've uncovered some strange and unexpected tales of real consequence. This story is about how in a cultural war, complicated, interesting people can get stripped of their nuance, their intentions and weaponized. I have some very sad news for all of you, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. This was America in the spring and summer of 1968. From 175,000 people, from all walks of life, marched from the White House to the Capitol. The kids are now moving back into the street, they are fighting and pushing and shouting. The demonstrators were protesting racism in the South and the Vietnam War, and some were advocating for a new way of living too, one that rejected the conformity of the 1950s to find meaning in other ways. Some people want to swim naked in the lake, they swim naked in the lake, other people want to smoke dope, that's good. The cops want to come down and beat our heads, that's it. But in a different part of America, that same summer, a woman named Alice Moore moved with her church minister husband and their four children to the quiet town of St Albans, West Virginia. So Alice, how does the story begin? Why did you move to West Virginia? St Albans was recognized in a national magazine as being the most churched town in the United States, so I was very pleased with that. We moved to a very nice, wholesome community and I was just very proud to be living there. And all was well for a few months until something unexpected happened. Alice saw in the local paper that their public schools were, for the very first time, to have a sex education program. So I decided I'm going to go to the Board of Education, ask if I can see the program. And they took me to a room where they had all their materials, there was this cutaway of a woman's body showing her internal organs, and they had a similar slide of a man's body. And the teacher was to demonstrate sex taking place between these two figures. So of course that I thought was totally inappropriate. So Alice complained to the superintendent of schools. And he said to me, I'm sorry Mrs. Moore, but there's nothing you can do about it. And my response to him was, we'll see about that. Alice saw sex education as a warning shot, given how the counterculture was running wild in places like New York City, where most of the school textbook publishing houses were based. So she and her friends decided they needed someone on the inside to influence how their children would be educated. And I had to go home and tell my husband I just signed up to run for school board. And I got hard to believe what I'd done. Alice might sound like she'd just fallen into it, but in fact she was focused and driven from the start. The board members basically just took care of business, setting salaries, hiring bus drivers and teachers. But I had no interest in things like that, I was interested in the education of children. Back then, West Virginia's public schools taught books like Dick and Jane, stories about all white Christian communities. But in June 1974, Alice's fears were realized. A proposed new set of school textbooks arrived, 325 of them ordered from on high by the West Virginia State Board of Education. None of us had ever read any of those books, so I suggested that we would not purchase the books until we had actually had an opportunity to review them and decide that this is what we wanted. And so Alice got to work. I had all 325 books delivered to my house and I started reading them. They were language textbooks, 30 for elementary and secondary school and nearly 300 optional supplementary ones for college bound high school seniors. What they were offering was a whole new way of learning. I'm just going to take these books and read portions of them. Later after I finish, you're welcome to come up and go through the books. This is an old cassette recording of Alice's addressing parents in 1974. It's a little muffled and crackly, but worth listening to because nothing like this had happened before. Christian evangelicals like Alice tended to live separately from secular society, attending their own churches, consuming their own media. But there had never been textbooks like these before in places like West Virginia and so Alice went through them one by one, making her case. There is nothing in this book from beginning to end in any way to trace Christianity except as hypocritical, as failure, Christianity is referred to in a very disparaging manner. Some 2000 people had showed up to this meeting. They were about to huddle outside in the rain and peer through the windows. They were learning that their children were about to be taught that angels didn't exist. Well the Bible says there are angels in heaven and there is not a book in existence today that can be more burnally relied upon than the Bible. Alice was unhappy too with the way the textbooks depicted war. Everything in here is on the horrors of war, never indicating that a war might be justified. Marriage. The next story in here is by Jermaine Greer, the female eunuch and this one she urges that women should refuse to marry. And a new method of thinking called contextual ethics. Whoa, that really upset them and they talked about contextual ethics a lot. What they're trying to teach you is that there's no answer here, there's only lots of questions. This is the Reverend Jim Lewis, a local Episcopal minister. Jim had been completely in favor of the new textbooks and he says he found Alice's objections ominous from the start. She really took over the school board. She was so committed to this agenda. There was a feeling that she had that these people were trying to take your children away from you. It was a deep passion, they're teaching your children situation ethics, they use the term. Which basically means allowing people to make their own minds up about stuff. Exactly, and there might, by the way, there might be two sides to something, it's not all black and white. They hated that understanding. God said it, I read it, that settles it. Alice's crusade was being filled not only by belief, but by suspicion. Why have the New York Publishers chosen West Virginia? Why introduce the books there? They're thinking this backward hick state, they thought they were going to come in there and they could get their books sold and spread them across the country and we simply weren't capable of opposing them. There was definitely an attempt to start changing society that year. Alice's pressure campaign had begun. She was invited onto local TV to read an offensive passage from one of the textbooks. She said she wanted to choose something that everyone would agree was objectionable, so she picked a poem about a bus journey where a spontaneous orgy breaks out because the world is about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. Everybody changed partners and started making love with each other and the bus was a quiver with these white bodies. It sounds like he was one of the beat poets like Alan Ginsberg. You would know. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about it. The next page says, "Every day people started making love on the bus and the world has still not come to an end, but in a way it has." What does that last line mean? Don't ask me. You're the expert on this. Maybe the last line is the poet saying that it's not a good idea for everybody to have sex on the bus. That was not it. Maybe the last line of the poem is agreeing with you. Oh, no. He was not. What age of children? Which grade was going to be taught that poem? Who cares? That should not have been in a school under any circumstances. In the days after Alice and I talked, I kept thinking about that poem. While I'm endeavouring for the series to not be a part of the cultural wars, I was sure my interpretation was right and I felt compelled to prove it to her. After some digging, it turned out that the poem was written by the BBC's own Roderick MacGough. On the next day and every day, in every bus, in every street, people pretended that the world was coming to an end at lunchtime. It still hasn't, although in a way it has. The end of the poem is saying, well, you can't really just give way to your feelings without consequences, really. So it was a moral tale, really, for me. So that last line really is you and Alice agreeing? Well, yeah, yeah, in very much so. Well, I think it would be fairly straight, really, I suppose, very moral, all those things. Too much permissiveness can be a bad thing. Yes, well, yeah, I thought it was, really. I feel bad about proving Alice wrong by producing my BBC colleague, which probably comes over as a little elitist, but I e-mailed her the news anyway. She replied with disarming charm that she was 'sending this to all my children who will find it as hilarious as I do. Special thanks to Roger McGoff for helping me, however unintentionally, get my message out to parents 50 years ago'. But the truth is, Alice really didn't seem interested in learning about the writer's intentions back then. For her, ambiguity, nuance, double meaning, those were luxuries for the privileged. Alice only cared about the impact the writing might have on the students, and her recital of the poem on TV had just the impact she'd hoped for. That's what really woke things up. I started getting letters from people saying please don't back down, please don't stop. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Alice didn't stop, her following grew. They organised protest marches and then a boycott of the schools. This was one of Alice's biggest supporters, the Reverend Marvin Horan, an evangelical Christian minister from Campbells Creek, the mountain community at the heart of the protests. They picketed businesses, holding placards that read 'I have a Bible, I don't need those dirty books' and even Hillbillies have constitutional rights. I don't go back to work, neither do my children go to school, and all these books are taken out, the books must go, we can win! And they did win, for now. The school year began and the textbooks weren't there. All the supplementary texts will be removed from the classrooms during this review period. Things just blew up here, literally blew up. Here's the pro textbook pastor, Jim Lewis again. My children were in the schools and they had books taken from them and over 90,000 books were taken out of the school system, books that had been approved by our county. And then the books were placed outside of Charleston in a warehouse and then that's where they were when the school year began. Jim says something else, something unspoken, was being unleashed here. And it was epitomized by the many times Alice talked about Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Black Power Group, the Black Panthers. In here they quote Eldridge Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver was rapist, convicted of rape. He was a high ranking officer in the Black Panthers, which called for the violent overthrow of our government. Now, this is the kind of man that they put in these books and I have an example of some of his writing that is just pure filth and I can't read it. Alice was referring to passages like, "At the nth degree of the ultra-feminine scale of psychic lust stands the walking phallus symbol of the super-masculin menial." Cleaver's quotes were quite strange and his criminal record was disturbing. But Jim says, "Eldridge Cleaver's works were talked about, but I can tell you that I don't feel the text, which I saw nothing about Eldridge Cleaver, but Eldridge Cleaver's name was mentioned frequently." In fact, Eldridge Cleaver was featured in just one optional book for advanced high school students, despite the anti-textbook side sometimes making it sound like he'd basically written the entire curriculum. Plus, Eldridge Cleaver's misdeeds don't explain why Alice's side was campaigning against esteemed black authors like Langston Hughes, the great chronicler of the Harlem Jazz Age. And those were really strange to me because we thought that Langston Hughes had already been accepted in the American canon of literature. That was nothing about Langston Hughes' writing that felt threatening. This is the Reverend Ron English who was asked by the Board of Education to represent the African American community in a hastily convened emergency textbook review committee. They'd be the ones to decide the textbook's fate. I don't think that the issue was Langston Hughes. Ron partly blames the textbook controversy on the geography of the area, how Alice's support came mostly from poor mountain communities, places known as the hollers. They call them hollers because you can holler from one area and the mountain reverberates to sound and it travels to another area. Well, that means that people really communicated by way of what they heard, not by what they read. And was that like the main form of communication in the hollers? Exactly. More than reading? Absolutely. The books were never the issue because you didn't have a lot of literacy in Alice. But the word got around that if you are supposed to protest, then you did that. By the way, if you're thinking of this as a failing exclusive to places like West Virginia and hollers, this exact same problem is currently so widespread across Twitter the company is introduced to prompt to remind users to read an article before sharing it. But let's get back to our story. What are you trying to do here? We're trying to show that we are willing to go to jail so our children won't have to go to the public schools. Are you willing to provoke an arrest to make that point? They felt like they had been ignored or disregarded or disrespected. That feeling of condescension, it really kind of has with African-Americans who felt the same thing in terms of what fired them up into a protest. Not being heard, not being considered, not being respected. So in a strange kind of way, I could relate to that. It could have really helped build bridges between the two communities, that common ground. It could have, had it not been for the overlay of racism. I should say that Alice vehemently denies that racism played any part in her actions. Do you remember an author called Langston Hughes? Yes, I remember these names. I don't know what Langston Hughes wrote exactly. I can't tell you about the different characters, I can tell you some of the things I objected to. I know there was one thing about some black man who decided he was going to shoot up the cops. Why would something like that be in a book? Why would he be suggesting things like that to children? Do you remember the writer Dick Gregory? Yes, I remember the name Dick Gregory and I don't remember specifics about Dick Gregory, but I can tell you some specifics about the examples that they did using those high school books where the black panthers were boasting about killing the pigs. I want to pause this story for a minute to tell you about Dick Gregory, another writer who had been opposed by Alice's side. When I mentioned him to Alice, she moved immediately to black panther violence, but Dick Gregory was committed to non-violence, plus his story is too interesting to be relegated to the bleak world of the unambiguous. He started out as a stand-up comedian. It was a glorious day, we all walked out to that integrated swimming pool, we got up on that diamond board, they blew the whistle, we jumped and they drained the pool. Most black comedians that had broke that color barrier, they had to do things that were demeaning, they had to wear large clothing, make exaggerated facial expressions, shuffle around with their feet and dance. They couldn't make a white audience feel intellectually inferior, or even feel as if they were being entertained by an equal. This is Dick Gregory's son, Christian. What my dad did, as he would describe as a flat foot comedian, sat there on a bar stool, cigarette and cocktail in hand. I sat down, the blonde waitress walked over to me, I said, "I like two cheeseburgers." She said, "We don't serve color people down here, I said, "I don't need color people nowhere." Dick Gregory was a sensation in the early 1960s. He appeared on The Tonight Show 23 times. He was a household name until he gave it all up. In 1964, he abruptly quit at all to become a full-time civil rights activist, organizing voter registration drives in the South. My dad felt that it was not okay for him to be comfortable in his hotel room every night after a show and turn on the evening news and see his people being brutalized, and he was simply sending a cheque. He was already struggling a bit with just how white his world had become. White agent, white manager, white lawyers. He took the civil rights movement so seriously that didn't he at one point sit you all down and tell you that the family came second to the movement? Yes, he made that very clear, and it wasn't just a one-off, he would tell us that quite frequently. Whether it was me getting in trouble for goofing off in school, he would come home very upset and say, "You're taking me off of the front line of this movement," and I made it very clear that this family and his own life was second to the movement. My little silly auntie is taken away from the civil rights movement. That's too much weight to put on a kid. Christian says that publishers were always trying to convince his father to write a memoir, and finally, in 1964, he agreed. But on his own terms, terms that included some very contentious language. They thought it was going to be this funny Dick Gregory talking about American history, but really being funny. And I think they were shocked when he submitted the book and the title of the book was Nigger. His belief was, "This white system has called me this my whole life," and I think he had the foresight to know that this word was someday going to cause significant embarrassment to white people. This was the memoir that would, ten years later, end up on Alice's banned list of books. But back to our story. A few months into the textbook protests, since September 1974, the Ku Klux Klan showed up in town to pose for photographs on the steps of the Capitol building, alongside one of the anti-textbook leaders, the Reverend Marvin Horan. I've said to her, "Alice, how did you deal with the fact that Marvin Horan, one of your leaders, he was on the steps of the Capitol with a Klan member, right there with Klan? How did you reconcile that? Christian, you are," and she said, "Well, Marvin did that. We didn't have anything to do with that. Well, that was too slippery for me, much too slippery." Nothing worse could have happened from the standpoint of the protestors side of things. We didn't have borders, we couldn't keep people out of the area. I never saw a Klan's member, but you know as much about that as I do, because I never saw one of them, I wouldn't have gone anywhere around them. But Jim did see them. My own life was threatened at one point. On Christmas, there were stickers on the church door you'd been visited by the Ku Klux Klan. I was advised by police that I should get out of my house and get a motel and do it under a John Doe. Things were turning. Alice was also getting death threats, she had to be protected by bodyguards around the clock, and then a shot was fired by a pro textbook man named Bill, who was in the park with his family when he was startled by a crowd of Alice's supporters. He heard a lot of violent talk, and he got very frightened and discharged a weapon he didn't point at anybody, but it was out of incredible fear. Bill was really upset about a lot of things, not just textbooks. The bullet hit a man in the crowd. He survived, but still, a shot had been fired. It was a disinhibiting moment for other people who wanted things to turn violent. With All County, West Virginia, there was violence today in the continuing demonstrations against the use of controversial textbooks in the schools. On October the 18th, someone from Alice's side fired five shots at a school bus who was beginning its morning run. There were no children on board, and the driver was uninjured, but Jim says that wasn't the point. It was at raised the temperature, trying to scare us all with violence, to intimidate people. And of course, it grew into something awful when they bombed the school. Shattered windows, chairs scattered about. What was left of Mrs. Katherine Albright's first grade room at Midway Elementary School at Campbell's Creek, West Virginia. A U.S. Treasury agent and Kanawa County Sheriff's Officer speculated the damage was the result of dynamites set off before sunrise. It was a piece of dynamite, it was dynamite or something like that. I don't know about, you know, Molotov cocktails, I've never made one in my life. I don't even know exactly what they are. I'm assuming, because I think this was maybe a Coke bottle with some gasoline in it. The levity in Alice's voice reminds me of how some progressive journalists who cover the story tend to skip the first shot, the one fired by the pro textbook Bill. It's human nature to want to underplay the violence perpetrated by your side. Eventually, four months after the boycott began and dazed by how far things had spiralled, the protests began to fizzle out. Marvin Horan, the preacher who posed with the clan, was jailed for three years for inspiring the bombing, and the textbook review committee made their decision. The books would be returned to the schools, and so Alice lost, except in a way she didn't. I think we won the battle. What actually happened was that 80% of the parents were saying, "No, my child cannot use those textbooks." That made the books unusable. Years later, a friend of mine, someone who was a custodian at one of the schools, was telling this interesting story about, you know, I had to go down to the basement and remove a bunch of boxes of books, and they had never been opened. And he said I took them down to Creed, and they were all burned up. Now, I know some people listening to this will think, well, that's not good. You know, there's a lot of connotations about book burning. Well, what do you do with thousands of books that you're not going to use? What do you do with them? You have to get rid of them. And so Alice didn't lose, except in another way, she did. Those values that were in the books that you didn't like, do you think that the values of those disputed authors have become influential? Well, they do surveys around the country to see what the Christian attitudes in the country are. And today, the last poll that I heard was down to 27% of the people in the United States literally take the Bible as a word of God. I make an appeal for parents, get your children out of public school, homeschool them, get them into private Christian schools. That's the only hope for saving America. As it happens, one book on Alice's band list continues to cause turmoil in schools today, but for very different reasons. At the end of my interview with Dick Gregory's son, Christian, he told me a story about his father's contentiously titled memoir. In 2016, a dean at an American university had a visit from a student who wanted access to more books by black authors. She turned around and she had the autobiography of Malcolm X and she had Dick Gregory's nigger and she handed both of them to the young ones and said, "These are from my personal collection, but the young black student was so outraged by the title of my dad's book that the dean was fired over it." Eventually the dean was suspended and then chose to resign, after students staged a sit-in and got a hashtag trending on Twitter. The dean declined our interview request, but she wrote to us that it was, quote, "heartbreaking" that she was no longer in a position to share Dick Gregory's writing. The textbook war has garnered headlines in the '70s, she wrote, but they rage on in surprising, divisive ways today. So it causes more of an uproar today than it did then, which was what my father intended for it to do, to cause people the discomfort that he had endured for his lifetime. Well, I mean, it works. I haven't said the title of the memoir, what's doing this interview? Quite honestly, if I could rename the title of the book, I would because there's so much inside of it that will literally change your life to read that I hate to think that there's some folks that won't even pick it up just because of the title. In most ways, the dean's resignation isn't a modern-day echo of the 1974 textbook wars, given that the person who objected was a black student and not a white Christian conservative. But they do share one thing. Just like how Alice wasn't interested in the intentions of writers like Roger McGuff, it didn't matter what the dean was thinking when she handed Dick Gregory's book to the student. What mattered was the impact it had. How this shift from intention to impact came to dominate social justice and the culture wars is something for later in this series. But next time, a rare watershed moment of harmony in a brutal culture war. Things fell apart was written and presented by me, John Ronson and produced by Sarah Shebbia. The assistant producer was Sam Peach. The music was composed by Phil Jannell. The programme was mixed by Bob Nettles. The editor was Philip Sellers. It's a BBC audio production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. From the makers of the Battersea Poltergeist, a new podcast series for BBC Radio 4, Uncanny. Do you believe in ghosts? No. Have you seen one? Yes. Real-life stories of the supernatural, told by the people they happened to, presented by me, Danny Robbins. There was a very strong sense of pure evil. Subscribe to Uncanny on BBC Sounds.