DAVID PARKER: No one needs to read more than three books

“There is at least one man in Georgia who believes a library is an evil influence and who would bar the doors of the world’s literature to the people of the state, if he could.”

This quotation, from an education magazine, is not about one of the sponsors of SB 365, a bill in the General Assembly that would require public schools in Georgia to let parents know when their children check out books from the school library. And it’s not about the senators who sponsored SB 226 two years ago, which streamlined the process by which books can be banned in school libraries.

In fact, the quotation is not recent at all. It comes from a hundred years ago, and it referred to Hal Wimberly, a representative from Laurens county.

Wimberly’s moment of fame came in August 1924. The Georgia House was debating a bill that would allow counties to fund public libraries. Wimberly spoke in opposition to the bill. “Read the Bible,” he said. “It teaches you how to act. Read the hymnbook. It contains the finest poetry ever written. Read the almanac. It shows you how to figure out what the weather will be. There isn’t another book that is necessary for anyone to read, and therefore I am opposed to all libraries.”

A majority of the House voted with Wimberly against the bill, but his comment was singled out for criticism. Home, School and Community, the official magazine of the Georgia Education Association and the state’s PTA (and the source of the earlier quotation), labeled it an embarrassment that gave Georgia a “black eye.” Later, Richard Hofstadter used Wimberly’s comment in his book “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” (1963).

Wimberly is an interesting character, but he’s just one in a long list of Georgians who has tried to ban books and limit libraries.

Beginning in the 1890s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy warned against textbooks that failed to give the “Confederate” view of history. Georgia’s Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian-general of the Daughters and their strongest voice for censoring, said to “reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, … that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, … that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel or unjust.” The UDC wanted to ban books to promote the Lost Cause, the idea that the Confederacy had been right.

Others censored for religious reasons. Georgia never had a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in the schools (as Tennessee did), but there was certainly religious-based anti-evolution sentiment here. Edward Young Clarke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, promised “to drive out of the schools all proponents of evolution, atheism or revolution.” In 1926, he announced a campaign to remove “‘tainted’ textbooks” (“tainted” with Darwinian science) from Atlanta schools.

Clarke’s campaign was largely unsuccessful, but his idea persisted. In 2002, the Cobb County Board of Education required a sticker in biology textbooks warning that evolution is an unproven theory, not a fact. (A federal district court ordered the removal of the stickers in 2005.)

In the 1950s, Cold War fears led to the banning of Frank Magruder’s “American Government,” the most popular civics textbook at the time. Critics complained that the book was “socialist” because it spoke highly of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the work of the United Nations. In 1951, the Georgia Board of Education called it “un-American” and ordered all copies removed from Georgia schools.

In the early 1970s, Edwin Fenton’s “The Americans: A History of the United States” was banned by the state Board of Education for its presentation of the war in Vietnam. The book used what Fenton called “inquiry learning” — “the systematic examination of alternative solutions to a problem,” presented through primary sources. But one member of the board complained that “the dialog on the military draft would cause people who didn’t have an opinion prior to reading it to tend to shape an anti-draft opinion.” In other words, the more people learn, the more likely they are to criticize certain American policies.

In a letter to the editor, Becky Holman thanked the Atlanta Constitution for its coverage of the Fenton issue and said, “That so many Americans are afraid to think independently can be blamed on authoritarian materials as well as on teaching methods. … Mr. Fenton has stated very well the advantages to ‘inquiry learning,’ which I would call simply ‘learning.’ Every teacher who believes in democracy should agree with him.”

Historians like to quote Hal Wimberly because of his flashy comment about the Bible, the hymnbook, and the almanac. But he was not just a flash in the pan. Georgia has a long tradition of censorship, of people trying to ban books and limit libraries, and that tradition continues today.