American History Revised (30 page)

The whole issue of “black slavery of blacks” is a troublesome one: how could blacks have carried on slave-trading after others had abolished the practice? The answer is simple, and quite similar to the Europeans’ experience, though it took longer to take hold. In Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, there grew the concept that only non-Europeans could be enslaved. Slavery was viewed as a punishment worse than death. Eventually, by the beginning of the 1800s, the European concept expanded to all peoples, and so Britain and other European nations abolished the practice for everybody.

The same logic applied in Africa, but within a different definition of race. Unlike Europe, immunity from enslavement was given only to those who belonged to
one’s own tribe or nation; blacks did not view themselves as “Africans.” Rather, they were members of a tribe. Says the late Harvard historian Nathan Huggins:

Adds the Afro-American intellectual Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University:

Even in America up to the Civil War, many free blacks had black slaves. A black in America today is not necessarily a soul brother of a fellow black. Were he to examine his roots, he might find his soul brother to have been his enslaver.

1885
This was the year of
Huckleberry Finn
, acclaimed by Ernest Hemingway as America’s greatest novel: “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

When it came out, however,
Huckleberry Finn
was savaged by critics, to the point that it was banned by the Concord, Massachusetts, public library as “trash … suitable only for slums.” Fortunately the library ban heightened public curiosity about the book and increased the book’s sales dramatically. “They have expelled Huck from their library as ‘trash,’” retorted Twain. “That will sell 25,000 for us, sure.”
*

Public libraries weren’t the only ones to censor free speech. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a famous address to the Harvard Divinity School that renounced organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation; he was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.

Subsequent books banned in America after
Huckleberry Finn
included not only books of the far right or the far left, but
also mainstream books like the
American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary (Seventh Edition)
, Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
, William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
, Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
, John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
and
The Grapes of Wrath
, and Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass.
Foreign works that felt the censor’s wrath included Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
and
Hamlet
, and Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels.
During World War II, the government forbade the military from distributing any news or books “containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of [a federal] election.” Also banned by the U.S. Army was
The Republic
by Plato, a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Beard’s books on American constitutional government. In 1982 James Bamford published a book on the National Security Agency,
The Puzzle Palace
, drawing upon reams of publicly available information. The book became a celebrity, and even made the cover of
Newsweek.
The NSA was not so amused, however, and tried to stop publication of Bamford’s book. The book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, refused.
The Puzzle Palace
, wrote Bamford, “is the only book in history to have been totally unclassified as it was being written, yet top secret by the time it was published.”

Children’s books under the gun included
Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Mother Goose
, and
Tarzan.
Even
Robin Hood
was banned: the story of a man who took from the rich and gave to the poor—obviously a Communist.

Today, with the rise of “political correctness” on college campuses, book-banning has reemerged from its hibernation since the 1950s. Gone are the Communists, as are the various racial and ethnic minorities who feel offended by characterizations in certain books and want these books eradicated. Today,
Huckleberry Finn
is under a new attack: racism. A number of Afro-Americans now accuse America’s greatest novel of depicting their race in an unfavorable light, not because of what it says about them, but because they only play a minor role in the book’s lineup of major characters. Such is the treatment of great literature in today’s ideological wars.

Anybody who doesn’t think censorship hasn’t returned to America need only look at the curious case of Gore Vidal. One of America’s most prolific authors since 1946, with some twenty-five books and five hundred essays and magazine articles to his credit, Vidal needed only scribble in his sleep and book publishers would line up at the door. At least that’s the way it used to be, until 9/11.

Many people blame the Patriot Act for the recent fear of censorship. Actually, the problem began with Bill Clinton, not
Bush. Sensitive to being soft on military matters, Clinton had responded to Osama bin Laden by passing an Anti-Terrorism Act that wouldn’t pass a first-year course at Yale Law School, it was so vaguely worded. The act defines as illegal and worthy of punishment any actions that “appear to be intended toward violence or activities which could intimidate or coerce a civilian population; or to influence the policy of a government.”

Influence the policy of government? Aren’t most political speeches and pamphlets written to “coerce the population” or “influence the government”? What else was Samuel Adams doing, stirring up the rebels against the British in 1774?

Gore Vidal’s mistake—if it can be called that—was that he spoke out against the patriotic jingoism of post 9/11 and said some unflattering things about America that later, as the war in Iraq dragged on with no end in sight, seemed fairly reasonable. Vidal’s essay, “September 11, 2001 (A Tuesday),” was turned down by
Vanity Fair
and
The Nation
for its “anti-American sentiments.” Both magazines had been longtime supporters of Vidal. Subsequently, Vidal packaged the article with several earlier essays into a book; again, no takers in America. He then turned to a publishing house in Italy, which published it under the title
The End of Liberty—Toward a New Totalitarianism.
The book was soon translated into twelve different languages and became a European bestseller. Finally a small independent publisher in America took it on, under the title
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated
, and it became a U.S. bestseller, as did Vidal’s sequel.

1888
One of America’s most remarkable traits is its enormous amount of private philanthropy, whereby people who have attained great wealth are expected to pay back society by making charitable contributions. No country in the world has produced the foundations America has, nor is the percentage of charitable giving so great. Observed the British politician James Bryce in his 1888 classic,
The American Commonwealth
, “In works of active beneficence no country has surpassed, perhaps none has equaled the United States.”

The history of American philanthropy reveals not only enormous amounts of money, but remarkable creativity in using it. How money is given away, by setting a powerful example, can be just as important as the amount dispensed. The history of American philanthropy has many wonderful stories. Here are a few for today’s super-rich to ponder, hopefully with a sense of modesty and humility.

Andrew Carnegie gave enormous gifts for schools and libraries. His most interesting gift, however, is a little-known one, for the simple reason that it was rejected
by the president of the United States and so never saw the light of day. At the end of the 1898 Spanish-American War, many luminaries such as presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, ex-president Grover Cleveland, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain were appalled at the prospect of the United States hanging on to the Philippines after “liberating” it from Spain and paying Spain $20 million in compensation. Equally appalled was Andrew Carnegie. “Is it possible that the American republic is to be placed in the position of the suppressor of the Philippine struggle for independence?” Carnegie asked. Backing his words with deeds, he went to President William McKinley and offered to reimburse the U.S. its $20 million in return for Filipino independence. Carnegie was turned down, and so America embarked on a futile guerrilla war costing hundreds of American lives and ending with ten thousand Filipinos dead.

Nathan Straus was a Russian immigrant who founded Macy’s, the world’s largest department store. But his true passion was children’s health: for more than twenty years he financed milk stations so that needy children could get pasteurized milk, and saved the lives of almost 450,000 children. Observed Admiral George Dewey, “If all the little children whose lives Straus saved could mass themselves … he would have the most splendid memorial ever made to man.” Straus died a bachelor in 1931, leaving an estate of only $1 million.

That’s all that was left of his great fortune. His will stated, “What you give for the cause of charity in health is gold, what you give in sickness is silver, and what you give in death is lead.” In believing that the true philanthropist should give away his money while alive, Nathan Straus was following a particularly American view of philanthropy.