LETTER: Re: Book Banning in 2026

[Written in response to the governor's signing of an anti-censorship measure recently at the Franklin Public Library.]

To the Editor:

There can be no doubt in a democratic community of minds, in our free republic, that after looking back over centuries of censorship, that the banning books is a terrible and intellectually dishonest thing to do. Book banning is a clear sign that forces of political and intellectual oppression are hard at work undermining free speech and more importantly, free thought. Nothing can be better in 2026 for the intellectual health of a community than a “Ban on Book Bans.” I am very pleased that our local library, The Joseph Gordon Ray Library, has taken the time to mark this noteworthy event. There is no doubt in my mind that Massachusetts is an intellectually healthy place, and that is why I have loved living here in The Commonwealth of Massachusetts for well into my 83rd year of life so far.

We have seen the forces of organized religion ban books going back to the days when Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei’s publications on the nature of a sun-centered, or heliocentric, theory of our solar system were banned, because they were at odds with the Catholic Church. We must remember that book-burnings in Nazi Germany were regular events at Hitler’s rallies, and on other occasions in the 1930’s. Free ideas freely expressed are ever the enemies of political oppression. Anybody of high school age and older should be allowed to read all books in print so that they can judge for themselves the worth of that book.

People should know what is in books as diverse as: The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Constitution, Plato’s Republic, The Federalist Papers, The Bible, Summa Theologica, The Talmud, The Koran, Imitation of Christ, The Book of Mormon, Mein Kamph, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Analytics of Confucius, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Naked Ape, The Human Zoo, Before the Mayflower, and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as well as other books, of both controversial and non-controversial nature, in print. It is for members of a free society to decide the merits of what they should read. The days of book-bans and book-burnings should be forever over as intellectually dishonest acts against the very essence of a democratic siciety.

From the beginnings of civilization, banning of “information dangerous to the governing elements of a state”, quite frequently a theocracy where the rule of religion was the rule of law, banned books on thoughts or systems of governance unfriendly to “the ruling power and the ruling class”. For example, the leadership of the Catholic Church and many other Christian Churches, in long-ago days when the science of astronomy was being refined through the application of new technologies and systems of scientific investigation, held that the earth, and not the sun, was at the center of our solar system, because God put his supreme achievement “Man” there on this planet called earth.

The Church fought this new heliocentric thinking based on the evidence of the human eye. Here the rule of Occam’s Razor that states, “That the obvious answer is most likely the correct answer is not always true. Many individuals, some in positions of influence both secular and ecclesiastical, were of the opinion that the earth was flat. This was again based on the evidence of the Bible of the human eye. Galileo used a contemporary telescope, made in the Netherlands, where huge progress had been made in the science of optics by the likes of: Hans Lupperhay, working on the development of the telescope which Galileo had used in the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Century, to make his observations of the transits of planet Venus and to study ships at a great distance making port which clearly showed evidence of the earth’s obvious curvature.

There are famous stories that when Galileo set –up his telescope, which he had made based on the Dutch model, to observe these scientific phenomena, churchmen would not allow secular authorities to look through them to make observations, because such things were impossible, and these individuals may be deceived by the Devil if they allowed him to trick them with this imported Dutch instrument of obvious deception.

Before much time had passed Galileo was hauled up before the authorities of the Church, the Holy Office or Inquisition, and condemned for his heretical teachings. The only way Galileo could save himself from torture and the fire of purification was to recant his teachings. This he did. He watched his works, principally Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, burned by The Holy Office, or as it was better known, The Holy Inquisition. Galileo spent the last decade of his life, from 1632 to 1642, under house arrest, but from time to time, he did get to smuggle out some of his ideas to more liberal minded parts of the world.

The Church banned the teaching or study of the Copernican heliocentric theory of our solar system until 1758 as both absurd and heretical. In 1758, Pope Benedict lifted the ban on the study of Copernicus and Galileo and their respective works supporting a heliocentric theory of the solar system, but their books still appeared on the official Index of Condemned Books until 1835. This Index still exists today as a list of condemned books which Catholics cannot read.

It was not until 1939 that Galileo was recognized by the New Pope, Pius XII, as “A Hero of Research”. It had only taken Galileo 307 years to become respectable in the eyes of the Holy See. But still, he was not vindicated. In 1979, Pope John Paul II set-up a commission to study the Churches’ Actions in treating “The Galileo Matter in 1616.” Just a scant thirteen years later, Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, who headed-up The Holy Office, reported that the Church, “Had turned toward vindication of Galileo.”

I am not aware of what the Church has done since that time in the “Galileo Matter”. At least his works are not still on the Index of Condemned Books which is still the ultimate in the area of book banning. But there is some hope. Only after a mere 360 years in 1992, as I have stated The Good Cardinal Ratzinger had said that it was O.K. to study Galileo! Not much had been done since then, but such things cannot be hurried I guess. I am pleased that Pope Paul VI put an end to the Index of Banned Books in 1966. After the Second World War in 1948, Pius XII saw the last publication of the Index, but books were added until 1966. I was twenty-two in that year and used to refer to the Index as my reading list! As a matter of fact, since most of my required college reading could be found there, it was in fact the reading list of most science majors as well as students of history and the Liberal Arts!

Book burnings and censorship is a very bad thing. Millions of books were burned in Germany during Hitler’s reign of terror against free thought in the thirties and 1940’s. Sympathetic book burnings were also held in other parts of the world including the United States. Earl Hamner, whose books of his growing up in Virginia during The Great Depression were the basis of the television series, The Waltons. The hero of the series was the very wise folk-philosopher and guardian of truth, John-Boy Walton, who was really Hamner.

The series was very provocative when it came to the basic study of individual and community ethical behavior. In that respect, I think that this television series was very healthy and a positive influence on society from the point of view of good ethical democratic behavior in a very challenging period of our history as a nation. In the “Book Burning Episode” the village folks decided to answer Hitler’s book-burning by having a book burning of their own. The much beloved chief telephone operator in the village on Walton’s Mountain was herself of German origins and fell under suspicion as a result. As memory serves, she also possessed several books in German, thus making her a suspected alien personality in the community where she had been a respected and beloved community member for some long-time.

Private homes and the library had been searched-out by the Book-Burners. A large holding of books had been routed out. This puzzled me, because I was of the opinion that books of any sort would be rare in that community! At the pregnant moment, Our hero Jon-Boy Walton shows up and demands to know what these people are thinking and doing. He is informed that this was an anti-German [Read Nazi] Book-Burning!

Literate Jon-Boy starts looking at the titles of the German Books being consigned to the punishing flames. “Do you know what this book is?” shouts Jon-Boy to the crowd. They collectively look at him in a stupid way, and he answers his own question. “It’s The Bible!

They gasp at the sacrilegious act they had almost committed. “Do you know what this one is? John-Boy asked. Again they just look at him like the mob they were of ignoramuses. “It’s a book by Thomas Mann, a great German writer who is no friend of Hitler. He now lives in California. This book is a first edition of Death in Venice! It’s a masterpiece. Should we burn that? And on it went something like that. Once again John-Boy shows the community that they have become that which they profess to hate through ignorance and racial and cultural prejudice. This is the real price of book-banning and book-burning.

I am glad that our local library is a source of community pride, and a bastion against prejudice and a place of free thought. My thanks for this great community institution go back a hundred and twenty-some years to the Ray Sisters who gave our beautiful library to the town and before that to Dr. Franklin himself and his gift of 116 books to The Town of Franklin back in 1786 for a parochial library as a sign of his favor, because we were the first community in the new United States to honor him by naming our town after him. I am happy to live in a community where book-banning and book-burning is not a favored practice today, or for the foreseeable future. Just for the fun of it, look up The Index Liberorum Prohbitionorum and check out how many dozens of these books you have either read or studied either for pleasure or for high school or higher academic course work. I think that you will be surprised.

James C. Johnston, Jr. 

Retired Franklin Educator