5.16.2006

Kunitz vs. State Library Trustee in 1940

A great man, Stanley Kunitz, has passed away.


Kunitz, Stanley J. "Anti-American Way." Wilson Library Bulletin, 15:258-59, November 1940. K216

In his column, "The Roving Eye", Kunitz is concerned with the intellectual climate of America when a state library trustee objects to too many "anti-American" books in our libraries; the Librarian of Congress "indicts our post-war writers, including himself, for telling the truth, the awful truth, about the war they lived through"; President Butler of Columbia University "warns his faculty, in extraordinary assembly, that professors and students not in sympathy with his pro-war stand should resign"; the chairman of the New York State Economic Council organizes a movement to ban the social science textbooks of Professor Harold O. Rugg.
[as reprinted in Freedom of the Press]