Eisenhower's warning echoes in today's Naval Academy book ban
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At the center of the sort of liberal arts education Annapolis provides — along with offering a course called Ship Hydrostatics and another called Stability and Port and Harbor Engineering — is the process of expanding students' horizons and minds, not restricting them.
An entrance to the US Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Md.
Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Removing books about the Holocaust and the Black experience in the United States strikes at the heart of the academy's
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Maya Angelou's autobiography, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,' will be inaccessible on the academy's library shelves. Indeed, one of Annapolis's most accomplished graduates was a prodigious author and poet. He was Jimmy Carter, and he celebrated Angelou's work and appointed her to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year. And how seriously is the nation's security endangered by the presence on a tucked-away library shelf of the great former Globe writer Wil Haygood's 'Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World'?
The absurdity of removing books about race and diversity from the Naval Academy comes into sharp focus by extrapolating the notion into other institutions of higher education. Boston College and College of the Holy Cross aren't likely to remove books about Judaism, or indeed the Old Testament. Brandeis University isn't about to strip books about Christianity from its library. Swarthmore College boasts about celebrating its Quaker roots, affirming that they 'anchor and inform' how its students learn and work. Its course catalogue includes a course on the hot and cold wars of the 20th century.
Perhaps the defense secretary ought to examine a speech by one of the great graduates of West Point. He traveled to Hanover, N.H., in the spring of 1953, a time, like our own, of great ferment in higher education and with the winds of intolerance, stoked by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, swirling on colleges campuses. And there, one of the 59 members of the US Military Academy class of 1915 — known as the class that stars fell onto —who would become a general, gave a remarkable commencement address.
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'Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
'How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.
'And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn't America.
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Words to live by, in 1953 and 2025.
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