Textbooks Under Fire

First Stirrings of Trouble.

Mel and Norma Gabler, citizens of Hawkins, Texas, began a crusade for textbook censorship in 1961 when their son brought home a history text that the Gablers examined and found filled with "unpatriotic and anti-Christian teachings." From a modest beginning in an Austin school board hearing that year, the couple ignited a firestorm of national criticism of educational publishing companies. At its height in the mid 1970s this protest affected the textbook selection process throughout the United States; most of the serious debates, however, were concentrated in the twenty-two states—mostly in the South and Southwest—where textbooks had to be approved by state, rather than local, authorities.

Objections.

The Gablers expressed the feelings of thousands of their supporters when they summarized their campaign as an assault on the "deviousness and danger of textbooks which are gradually but...