Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.
In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.
“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”
Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.
“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”
In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.
It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living 50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.
When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.
While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.
After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.
I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”
The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places. “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association. “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”
The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”
You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists
The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”
You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22
soundingsjohnbarker 