SOURCE: Steinle, Pamela Hunt. “The Catcher Controversies as Cultural Debate.” In In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character, pp. 106-39. Columbus, Oh.: Ohio State University Press, 2000.

[In the excerpt below, Steinle examines the various reasons cited for withdrawing J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye from school district curricula in the 1950s through the 1980s.]

Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? … Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag.

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The arguments over The Catcher in the Rye lead a sort of rhetorical double life: as the singular statements of individual participants in a localized controversy and, synchronically, as repeated expressions of particular themes and viewpoints in an overarching cultural debate. On the level of controversy, varied and often impassioned statements of opinion are addressed to a geographically specific community at large or, on occasion, in challenge and retort to the statements of another individual. Characteristically disorganized, the explicit intent of the localized dialogue is simply to gain support for either the banning or retention of the novel on any number of grounds rather than the establishment of a communal evaluation (pro or con) of the novel.

Consideration of the dialogue as a cultural debate requires a much broader analytical perspective. In this view, the context encompasses all localized controversies over The Catcher in the Rye across time, and participants are identified according to their position regarding the novel. This brings the commonalities, parallels, and paradoxes entangled in the arguments of the two broad “opposing parties” into high relief. If this conceptualization was wholly external to the arguments over Catcher, it would run the risk of reifying the dialogue: imposing a structure or a reality on the arguments that is not apparent to the actual participants and, hence, not genuine. However, the debate concept is rooted in the participants' own sense of polemic, and as the participants themselves frequently remarked about the relationship of their local controversies to conditions outside their community, it is instead a mode of clarification. The following arguments over The Catcher in the Rye, then, are drawn primarily from local controversies that occurred in California (1960-61), New Mexico (1968), and Alabama (1982-83), yet are structured for consideration as a cultural debate.

I selected these communities for in-depth study on the basis of their extended controversy (minimum duration of two months) and because they represented different time periods and regions of the United States: Marin County, California (1960-61); Albuquerque, New Mexico (1968); and Calhoun County, Alabama (1982-83). Public dialogue was culled from local newspaper articles and opinion letters, school board minutes, and lengthy participant interviews. The participant interviews, conducted in 1983, range from those of recall, reflection, and evaluation of a time past (Marin and Albuquerque) to expressions of immediate concern in Calhoun County. On occasion, I have included dialogue from controversies in other communities, based on newspaper accounts as reported in the American Library Association's Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (hereafter NIF).

Although censorship of The Catcher in the Rye began as early as 1954 through its inclusion on various lists of “dangerous” books,¹ it was not until the early 1960s that Catcher became the focus of extended localized controversies. From 1961 to 1982, seventy-six communities across the United States generated enough controversy over The Catcher in the Rye to warrant media attention and consequent reporting in the NIF.² For sixty of these controversies, accounts in the NIF were sufficiently complete to suggest the normative experience and boundaries of attempts to censor Catcher.

Fundamentally at issue was the status of the novel within the school system. At the point of initial censorship activity, The Catcher in the Rye was a required high school literature reading in twelve schools, and a recommended reading in thirty-six schools out of the sixty. In eleven cases, Catcher was simply identified as “in the school system” or in the school libraries; in one further case it had been previously banned as part of a “dangerous” list and was being reconsidered for return to the high school library.³

At the close of censorship activity, Catcher remained a required reading in only two high school literature classes, a recommended reading in twenty-two classes, and became a restricted book (student access subject to written approval by a parent) in four school libraries. While the final status of Catcher was either unknown to or not pursued by the NIF editors in seventeen cases, in a full fifteen cases Catcher was banned outright from the library as well as the classroom. Of these fifteen schools, Catcher had originally been a required reading in only two classes. The defenders of Catcher did achieve a small victory in the one case in which Catcher had been previously banned: it was reinstated as a library holding, albeit on a restricted basis. Overall, the trend was toward decreased access, as Catcher was “demoted” one level from its initial status (from required to recommended to restricted to banned) as the consequence of censorship activity.

In the media reports of the Catcher controversies, a pattern of guarded anonymity was evident—although whether this was the decision of reporters or the request of participants is unclear in most cases. Complainants initiating the censorship controversy were identified largely as they categorized themselves: as parents, citizens, ministers, educators, and—in two cases—students.⁴ Reporting of the often heated public discussions also identified participants categorically, with some identification of individual parents and ministers among those seeking to ban Catcher. Among the complainants and Catcher's defenders alike, the commentary of individual administrators was often cloaked in media attributions to “the school board” or “members of the school's administration” except for the occasional identification of a specific individual in the course of issuing a policy statement or a final decision. Meanwhile, actual statements in defense of the novel were most often quoted from the arguments of individual teachers and parents.

A procedural pattern for censorship activity was also evident in the controversy reporting, with common elements and conduct that varied in few cases. The typical scenario was as follows: an initial complaint to the school board or librarian, broadening into a community controversy through the web of personal relationships on both sides. Direct discussions with the teachers who assigned or recommended Catcher were generally evaded and their suggestions for individual alternative readings were ignored, as the complainants' interest was in a communitywide ruling. Indeed, they expressed their objections in terms of concern for all adolescents, not just the children in their charge.

An overview of the Marin County, California, controversy illustrates this pattern. The Marin controversy opened with a twenty-one-signature petition and letter of complaint against the use of The Catcher in the Rye as a recommended reading for high school students, filed on 15 November 1960 with the Marin County High School District by the Reverend Thomas Grabowski of Marin Baptist Church.⁵ “I guess it began with a letter of protest,” Michael Reed, a senior administrator for the district, recalled. “I went to see him [Rev. Grabowski]. One of his parishioners' children had brought the book home and it had come to his attention.” Initially trying to find some ground for compromise, Reed found that Grabowski's position was “absolutely non-negotiable.” “By that time he had made up his mind that this was a bad book and there was no way that I found to deal with the book effectively,” as Reed understood him, “other than to accept his decision that it should be pulled from the schools, which, of course, our school district never did.” When the school district refused to remove Catcher or restrict the use of the novel, Reverend Grabowski found an experienced ally for his side. “Mrs. Keefe joined the Reverend Grabowski one week later or three weeks later,” as Reed remembered the chain of events, “and by that time she had identified a number of books also, so our controversy that year was really a four book controversy.”⁶

Kristen Keefe was a concerned parent who had led a previously unsuccessful censorship attempt in the Marin County School District in 1954, circulating a list of fifteen books that included The Catcher in the Rye.⁷ In December of 1960, Mrs. Keefe sent a twenty-one-page letter defending Rev. Grabowski's position to each board trustee. The Marin County School Board received nineteen letters supporting the retention of Catcher, and the controversy received frequent attention in the local press.⁸ Consequently, on 19 December 1960 the regular meeting of the Marin County Board of Trustees was devoted in large part to the book controversy. Minutes of the meeting show that “approximately 250 citizens interested in discussion concerning a petition to remove certain books” were in attendance and “an overflow crowd had assembled to hear the book discussion.” The “main room and foyer” were reported as “filled to capacity” and a public address system had to be installed because “a group of about sixty persons stood outside the open windows.” In addition, representatives of a local radio station were recording the proceedings and “a press table had been set up for reporters representing local and San Francisco newspapers.”⁹

The 19 December meeting was to be only the first of four Marin County District Board meetings to be dominated by the censorship controversy. Nearly twenty-five years later, the sizzling tensions among those gathered were almost palpable, as Michael Reed described “a number of very hot school board meetings … people standing in the aisles … people leaning through the windows … and they were very hot and heavy.”¹⁰

Shauna Butler, a secretary in the Marin County School District, took the minutes and recalled “some very impassioned statements” from the audience that captured the tenor as well as the heated climate of the crowded meetings. One statement impressed in her memory was made by citizen Linaus Tyla, “a very dramatic sort of man”: “He said, ‘I can remember the books burning in the streets of Berlin,’ and, I mean, it just sent the chills over you; it was something.”¹¹

In the midst of the fracas, the board of trustees, itself far from unbiased, attempted to maintain an atmosphere of order and respect while resolving the issue. Michael Reed explained that the school board was “determined the books were not going to be removed from the shelves, at least not without study.” The school board formed an adjunct committee of English teachers to review the books, followed by the appointment of a citizens' committee that “contained at least one minister on it, the Episcopal minister.”¹²

The minister, Reverend Jonathon Menjivar, had previously written to the board in support of The Catcher in the Rye; the other members of the “citizens' committee” were the aforementioned Linaus Tyla, Michael Reed, two Marin County District English teachers, and Mrs. Matthew Hester, representing the Marin County High School PTA. After reading the books for themselves, the citizens' committee found them to be educationally sound and recommended their retention. Perhaps recognizing the lack of impartiality or balance on the committee, Michael Reed emphasized that “the Board succeeded in treating these people [complainants] with respect,” acknowledging “they were concerned about their children” and reiterating the Board's effort to “treat their feelings, their concerns, their anger with respect. The people whose concern was religious and moral, I know it was our goal to understand and respect them.”¹³

While the tone of Catcher's defenders here may be patronizing, it did not go unnoticed or unreflected upon by the school board members themselves. Reed himself identified and struggled against the undercurrent of paternalism as he later discussed the school board's “protection” of students and teachers from direct involvement in the controversy:

The alert ones [students] were aware but we tried to keep the controversy away from the school. We were … playing a role in the school district then that probably the school district would not play now. It was probably something that some teachers now would call paternalistic. But we felt strongly that this was an administrative problem, that the job was to keep teachers' names out of the newspaper, to put the focus on us as the party of ultimate responsibility. … We took the role that we have authorized the use of these books, we are responsible for the use of these books, we are responsible for explaining why these books are used or justifying whether to use them or pulling them out.¹⁴

Finally, there was the perception that forces beyond or outside the local community were the actual source of upheaval. Much of this perception was an outgrowth of the earlier 1954 censorship controversy led by Kristen Keefe. “It was as if they had procedures for doing this, they had lists and a way of going,” said Shauna Butler of Keefe's initial attempt at censorship.¹⁵ Yet in neither case, 1954 nor 1960-61, was an organized group ever actually identified or confirmed beyond the level of suspicion and rumor. Attendance lists for the 1960-61 board meetings did include a few individuals who gave addresses outside Marin County, but their reasons for attendance remain unclear. Verbal statements recorded in the meeting minutes, letters, and petition signatures were those of Marin County residents or individuals representing large organizations (i.e., the ACLU, Episcopal Diocese) or of special expertise (i.e., Dr. S. I. Hayakawa of neighboring San Francisco State College).¹⁶ Nevertheless, Kyle Russo, another senior administrator at Marin County High School, saw a commonality between the 1960-61 Marin controversy and controversies elsewhere, and he believed that it “wasn't just a group of local parents before the school board. It was organized through basically conservative groups; you could see the same type of arguments being presented across the country.”¹⁷

Indeed, the commonalities between controversies over The Catcher in the Rye across the country were numerous, but explanation of those commonalities did not depend on the presence or influence of “outside” organizations. Instead it was, as Shauna Butler remarked, “a rather classic thing that appeared to be happening elsewhere”¹⁸—“classic” in the focus on The Catcher in the Rye, in the quick association with a few other books, in the local and then widening media attention, the unusually high attendance at school board meetings, the impassioned discourse, and in the controlling power of the school board.¹⁹ Furthermore, where the later controversies in Albuquerque and Calhoun County deviated from the normative process, their participants acknowledged that they were aware of an understood sense of appropriate order to the public protest and defense of a book.

Consider the Albuquerque controversy, which began in an unusual fashion, with participants quickly attempting to redirect its course into the standard channels. The Albuquerque controversy was initiated in mid-May 1968 by the complaint of a high school student who objected to reading The Catcher in the Rye. In the first place, students as complainants in school book controversies are highly irregular. More unusual was the fact that this concerned young man took his complaint not to his teacher, librarian, or an administrator (all of whom arguably had a relationship to the assignment of the book), nor to a parent who might understand his concern, but took it first to his minister. Reverend Bradley Parsons, pastor of Albuquerque Baptist Church, recalled that the student “came to me and said that he had a book he had been assigned and wanted me to take a look at it, that he did not want to read it or do a report on it. He had marked several sections with slips of paper.”²⁰

Next, Reverend Parsons's handling of the student's complaint went outside the typical procedure—to the immediate discomfort of those who later came to defend Catcher. Kathleen Reynolds, supervisor of the Albuquerque Public School Library, criticized Reverend Parsons's tactics when he “went to the newspaper” and “omitted all channels.”²¹ When I spoke with Reverend Parsons, he recounted the sequence of events in the Albuquerque controversy:

I had a daughter in Albuquerque [high school] at the time, and knew Tim Yates, the principal, so I called him at home, and I told him I was surprised that The Catcher in the Rye was being assigned, and had he read it? He said yes, he had, and asked what's wrong with it, took the general line that kids are exposed to these things and it shouldn't be a problem. I said I was surprised at his attitude; he said I had caught him at an inconvenient time. I asked if I could meet him at his office in the morning; he said he would be very busy … I said “I'll be there waiting,” 'cause I was quite upset.

Well, that night, during the services that evening, I made the simple reference to it, to my shock at the type of book assigned and at Tim's reaction, and that I was going down to the school in the morning. At the end of the evening services, several parents expressed their concern and their desire to go with me, and when I got there in the morning, there must have been, oh, thirty parents. Yates was quite jolted—someone had called one of the television stations and they came down and interviewed me. Things became very public from the television station getting into it.²²

Responding to accusations by the school board and others in the community that he had evaded the “proper channels,” Parsons first stated that he never could find out what the proper channels were for book removal. Yet in his own explanation of his refusal to complete the recommended American Library Association complaint form or address the Albuquerque Board of Trustees, he acknowledged that he was familiar with those “channels” but found them unsatisfactory: “I learned what the proper channels were—passing the buck until finally public interest waned; don't know that it was ever resolved. Never did really meet with any Board, finally just got disgusted with the whole thing; their channels put you at their mercy.”²³

Reverend Parsons's frustration was, of course, exactly the response that the American Library Association (ALA) had in mind when the approved book-complaint forms were designed. In this case, the school board was able to refrain from formal engagement in the controversy because of Parsons's circumvention of the process, with The Catcher in the Rye remaining on the shelves of the library and on the list of recommended high school literature. Nearly fifteen years later, in Calhoun County, Alabama, another minister publicly protested the use of Catcher in the classroom and also evaded the ALA complaint process—again to the probable detriment of his cause. The Calhoun County controversy was one of very few in which the school board staunchly supported the censorship of the books involved, fighting to keep them off the shelves.

The Calhoun County controversy began typically and quietly enough. School board member Bo Brackett explained that it began “because a child was assigned one of the books to do a book report on, and the parent got a hold of it, saw some of the things that was in it; that was a parent that was concerned enough to look at what my child is reading, and that's where it began.”²⁴

Unfortunately, from Brackett's perspective, the parents took the complaint not to the school board but to their pastor, Reverend Wesley Crane of Calhoun County Baptist Church. Reverend Crane then openly preached against seven books, including The Catcher in the Rye,²⁵ and, joined by two other pastors, led approximately fifty church members to petition for removal of the books. The problem, as Bo Brackett saw it, was not the potential removal of the books but the considerable media attention that had been drawn to Calhoun County over the matter before the school board was addressed:

Now, we [school board] have a good working relationship with the church people. I think the pastors that got together and did all this, really raised a ruckus, I think they went about it in the wrong way. They should've come to the board; we've got a policy on how to report something that you think is offensive and a means by which they could've come to us, instead of getting up in the pulpit, and holding the book up, and preaching a sermon on it. I think they erred there. … I think, had they come to us first, and said, “Hey, I don't like what's in this book, I don't like for my child to be reading that book, how about takin' a look at it,” I think we would have done that objectively and probably have made the same decision that we made anyway.²⁶

When Crane and his supporters did turn to the Calhoun County Board of Trustees, the board's actions paralleled those of the school board in Marin County: appointment of a citizen committee to review the books and give their recommendation. Once again, paternalism on the part of the school board was apparent in the board's selection and approval of the citizen committee. According to board member Brackett, the makeup of the committee was a “couple of school principals, couple of school teachers, someone that was on the PTA, you know, just a good mixture of people.”²⁷

Objective and balanced in appearance, the two principals on the committee had in fact voluntarily removed the books before the petition was actually filed, and only one of the two teachers came to the defense of even one of the seven books in question (Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath). Hence, the recommendations of the citizens' committee in Calhoun County, as in Marin County, reflected the values of the school board rather than the possible range of community opinion. The outcome in Calhoun County was the restriction of all seven titles to student use only with written parental approval. By the close of the controversy, however, four of the books (Doris Day: Her Own Story, Francis Hanckel's The Way of Love, The Catcher in the Rye, and Steinbeck's East of Eden) could no longer be located in the school library holdings and their replacement was not ordered.²⁸

The most striking commonality that emerged in my interviews with controversy participants was the extraordinary level of passion and personal involvement. To some degree, the passionate atmosphere lent credence to stereotypical notions of censorship controversies. In her recollection of the 1968 Albuquerque controversy, Kathleen Reynolds described the private meetings in homes and churches where “offensive words” were listed and counted, and passages from The Catcher in the Rye were read aloud “to sort of get the steam up.”²⁹ Shauna Butler of Marin County had a similar memory of the California protesters. “There were things going on about this group where they met together in order to divide their strategies and so forth,” she recalled; “there was a lot of talk about that they met together and read excerpts to one another to, you know, get ready.”³⁰

The minutes of the December 1960 meeting of the Marin County Board of Trustees supported Shauna Butler's recollection. “Someone has compiled a list for us and this [“God's name taken in vain”] is used 295 times in the book,” Reverend Grabowski, leader of those protesting The Catcher in the Rye, stated. “The Board has received copies of this from Mrs. Kristen Keefe,” he continued. “She has checked it all out. Someone has told me she has all this on a big chart.”³¹

In Calhoun County, parent Jenny Thigpen described similar behavior at the censorship meetings held by local ministers. “There were two or three meetings, night-time meetings with sixty to seventy people each meeting and provided transportation,” she said, gatherings where many of the participants “consulted lists of words, passed the marked passages, and went on, with screams about books and vile filth in classrooms.”³² A reporter for the local newspaper covered two of the meetings in Calhoun County and her articles supported Jenny Thigpen's observations. “Our object tonight is to get some opinions,” a minister proclaimed to the crowd at one meeting, and the reporter recounted their response: “Several ministers and county residents took the floor to complain about school library books and were greeted with choruses of ‘Amen!’”³³

These images of the arousal and manipulation of public sentiment, however accurate, fail to convey the sincere engagement of most controversy participants whose level of personal commitment and involvement was genuine and extensive. In the Albuquerque and Marin County controversies, participants on both sides (in interviews given with little advance notice) were able to give detailed recitations of the order of events and often exactly “who said what to whom” from fifteen and twenty-three years before. Participants interviewed in all three controversies often had kept newspaper clippings or other documents, if not personal files, which they volunteered for my review. Only one of the interview participants had kept similar clippings or files on other topics or community events. Alabama participant Jenny Thigpen was typical: a housewife, mother, and entrepreneur with her own seasonal weed abatement business in Calhoun County, for her interview she brought out two boxes of clippings, letters, photocopied school board records, and a cassette tape of one of the public meetings.

The degree of personal involvement was costly for several participants. Michael Reed, a teacher and administrator during the Marin County controversy, was reluctant to be interviewed because “it was kind of a traumatic experience for all of us; I suppose I've put a lot of it behind, in my mind, I don't really have any desire to keep reliving it, that particular experience.”³⁴

Although he saw it as “behind him,” Reed expounded on the 1960-61 controversy for an hour and a half in his actual interview, with little prompting on my part. Yet he had more than usual reason to put it behind him. He believed that the strain of the controversy led to his first heart attack—although even then his participation did not end. “Within a week after the completion of the citizens' reports I went to the hospital with a coronary,” Reed explained, “and while I was recovering from this, a committee of three would meet at my house and developed a book selection policy.”³⁵

Adding to the cost to his physical health, Reed felt his reputation in the community suffered as well. He spoke of a neighbor's change of view: “This lady had read something in the Independent Journal that prompted her to say to my wife: ‘I always thought Mr. Reed was a very nice person but this had really damaged me,’ what she read in the paper about The Catcher in the Rye. I'm sure she never read the book, but, there must be something morally wrong with me.”³⁶

Reverend Bradley Parsons, leader of the movement to censor Catcher in Albuquerque, actively sought much of the public attention he received, but in one instance he also felt his personal reputation was damaged. Recalling a guest lecture at his daughter's high school, he said, “I was asked to come and speak to a double class at Albuquerque, as to why I objected to the book. After I spoke at Albuquerque, I received 15 to 20 unsigned letters from, I perceived, various students—the gist of which was, ‘How could such a wonderful girl like Sally have such a crumb for a father as you,’ which reflected to me that even if they knew Sally to be a wonderful person as she was, how that they could see me as a crumb when they didn't know anything about me other than my thoughts on the book.”³⁷

There were other consequences for those involved in the Catcher controversies. At one point in the Marin County controversy, Independent Journal columnist Dorothy Simpers closed her “I-J Reporter's Notebook” with the observation that “the book controversy apparently produced its share of family squabbles, too. The board received two letters on the subject from a man and wife. One was for banning the books; the other was opposing.”³⁸

Anticensorship parent Jenny Thigpen felt that her then eight-year-old son paid the price for her activism in Calhoun County. At a time when other boys in his mixed elementary/junior high school were caught with switchblade knives and simply had the weapons taken away, David Thigpen was given the choice of “a paddlin', 3 written pages, or a parent conference” for playing with a rubber band in class. On a second occasion, David's school file was “marked for gambling in school” when a teacher overhead him say “I bet” to another student.³⁹

That David was persecuted for his mother's anticensorship position does not appear to have been paranoia on Thigpen's part. Barbara Beasley Murphy, author of one of the seven challenged books, No Place to Run, came to meet with the Calhoun County Board of Education in late January 1983. Fourteen “concerned parents” (against censorship) initially supported Murphy; however, all but one parent eventually dropped their support due to fear of retribution in loss of jobs or damage to their image in the community.⁴⁰ “Jenny Thigpen … was the only ‘concerned’ parent with me at the end of my stay when I finally confronted the Calhoun County Board of Education,” Murphy later reported to the Authors Guild. “It was a few minutes before midnight and she and I alone heard the board members' silent response and took in their billboard expressions.”⁴¹

.....

What is it about The Catcher in the Rye that generates these controversies with their “steamed up” and personally committed participants? The mildest objections to Catcher cited in the censorship reports of the NIF were often oblique: “I got nothing from it. I felt I missed the point. This book isn't fit for our students,” was the objection of a school board member in a 1971 Roselle, New Jersey, controversy.⁴² The local sheriff in Camden, South Carolina, decided Catcher was “not fit for a 16-year-old to read” when a high school girl brought the book to his attention.⁴³ In other controversies, Salinger's novel was simply labeled as a “dirty” book or “smut.” Regarding a 1964 controversy over Catcher and From Here to Eternity in Molalla, Oregon, the NIF reported: “The school board, at a meeting earlier this week with about 150 parents, clergymen, civic leaders and students, heard the two novels and four others branded as ‘filth’ and ‘muck.’”⁴⁴ Similarly, in Coventry, Ohio (1961), Reverend Carl Narducci led a drive to remove Catcher from the local high schools, stating, “I am grieved that my daughter [a high school senior] has to have this kind of thing in school from a teacher who tells her she must read this smut and be graded on it—or else. … [I] intend to see who in the world recommends this kind of smut for our kids.”⁴⁵

The claims that The Catcher in the Rye is “unfit,” “smut,” “filth and muck” are a likely reference to the language used by Holden Caulfield as the narrator of the novel. In all of the controversies that generated the more explicit objections to Catcher, “obscene,” “profane,” or “vulgar” language was a common and often central objection. From Marin County's Kristen Keefe, who counted 295 occasions in which “God's name was taken in vain,” to the letter of complaint filed with the Shawnee Mission, Kansas, school board in 1972 noting 860 “obscenities”; and the 1978 complaint of senior citizen Anita Page from Issaquah, Washington, who counted 785 “profanities,” to the simple complaint of Middlebury, Vermont, parent Donald Desrocher Jr. (1982) that “there's a lot of filthy language in it,”⁴⁶ Salinger's use of language in Catcher was regularly attacked as evidence of the novel's unfit character.

Objectionable language was in fact the precipitating challenge to the use of The Catcher in the Rye in the schools of Marin County, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Calhoun County, Alabama. In Marin County, Reverend Grabowski stated the primary objection of his group of petitioners: “The use of God's name or the name of Jesus Christ used in a derogatory manner is offensive to a cross section of the tax payers of our district. … We do not believe it is right to spend the taxpayers' money to purchase books which use profanity and teach disrespect to God and Jesus Christ.”⁴⁷

Marin High School administrator Michael Reed recalled that parent Kristen Keefe had prepared an eleven-page document in which “she had gone through, page by page, and every time Holden had said ‘shit,’ she noted it, and I've forgotten how many ‘shits’ she had by the end of the book.”⁴⁸ In a cover letter to the document, addressed to the Board of Trustees and retained in the files of the Marin County District Office, Keefe summarized her analysis of The Catcher in the Rye:

I found no pages to be without objectionable material in Catcher in the Rye. I found only 22 pages of Of Mice and Men to be free of objectionable material. No newspaper, radio or television station could duplicate any three complete pages taken at random from the first named book without being subject to fine and possible imprisonment and removal of license. It is doubtful if they could use any one complete page of this book without at least some expurgation. Yet this is assigned classwork in our schools. The common term now used for such type material is, I believe, prurient. Furthermore, blasphemies against God average a little over 3.1 per page.⁴⁹

The initial complaints about Catcher in Albuquerque were comparable. “The book contained continuous blasphemy, the taking of God's name in profanity, oaths,” Reverend Bradley Parsons said. Defining his objections, he explained that “the book followed a general course of seduction and adultery, with sprinklings of coarse vulgarity, saturated with profanity.”⁵⁰

In Alabama, Calhoun County board member and parent Bo Brackett was less specific than Mrs. Keefe or the Reverends Grabowski and Parsons, but the nature of his complaint was similar: “It's not the story, it's the words, the phrases used in the book to describe different things. People felt, and I do too, that you could use some other adjective. … The thing that gets people is what words and things are in there to describe things; even if they are everyday things of life, they could still use substitute words to get the story across just as well.”⁵¹

Would the novel work “just as well” with “substitute words”? Consider for a moment the following passage—selected as one of the more mundane passages in my reading of The Catcher in the Rye. The conversation is between Holden Caulfield and Ward Stradlater, his roommate at Pencey Prep. Stradlater is behind in his homework and wants Holden to help him out by writing his English composition for him while he reads for history class.

“I'm the one that's flunking out of the goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. The thing is, though, I'll be up the creek if I don't get it in. Be a buddy. Be a buddyroo. Okay?”

I didn't answer him right away. Suspense is good for some bastards like Stradlater.

“What on?” I said.

“Anything. Anything descriptive. A room. Or a house. Or something you've lived in or something—you know. Just as long as it's descriptive as hell.” He gave out a big yawn while he said that. Which is something that gives me a royal pain in the ass. I mean if somebody yawns right while they're asking you to do them a goddam favor. “Just don't do it too good, is all,” he said. “That sonuvabitch Hartzell thinks you're a hot-shot in English, and he knows you're my roommate.”

(28)

Arguably, the swearing throughout this passage could be deleted or replaced—gosh, darn, son-of-a-gun—and the content of the exchange between Holden and Stradlater would remain intact. However, in this passage as with much of the novel, Holden's language lends the authenticity that is a requirement of successful first-person narration. In an early study of Catcher for American Speech, one author defended the linguistic accuracy of Holden's narrative as “an accurate rendering of the informal speech of an intelligent, educated, Northeastern American adolescent” and argued that “no one familiar with prep school speech could seriously contend that Salinger overplayed his hand in this respect.”⁵² Another academic critic ventured even further in his support of Catcher: “As a matter of fact, Holden's patois is remarkably restrained in comparison with the blue streak vernacular of his real-life counterparts. Holden's profanity becomes most pronounced in moments of emotional tension; at other times his language is notably tempered—slangy, ungrammatical, rambling, yes, but almost boyishly pure.”⁵³

Even if the offending descriptive language in The Catcher in the Rye were to be replaced at the cost of authenticity, the passages most offensive to those protesting the novel would remain intact. Consider the following passage in which the phrase “Fuck you” is the object of Holden's concern and action: “I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another ‘Fuck you’ on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world. It's impossible” (202).

The irony of censoring Holden's own frustrated attempts to “clean up” his environment was apparently lost on those who attacked The Catcher in the Rye. Yet it was clear in the interviews with controversy participants that the lack of recognition of such irony was not so much the result of differing readings of Catcher as the lack of complete readings by some of the objecting readers. In Marin County, Kyle Russo recalled that “the book was more condemned for language, words, than for things to do with the story per se.” The Marin County school board, in the process of defending the novel, effectively made Catcher a required reading for censorship participants. “We did not allow the use of word counting or single paragraphs out of context,” Russo explained, “but saw to it that the book was evaluated on its merits.”⁵⁴

Librarian Kathleen Reynolds remembered that the “kick off point” of the 1968 Albuquerque controversy “was the language.”⁵⁵ Indeed, Reverend Bradley Parsons, who led the protest against Catcher there, told the local Tribune that he had not read the novel: “I just glanced at the pages underlined by a sophomore at Albuquerque High School. It was so nauseating to me I didn't bother to read the book.”⁵⁶ Reynolds brought up the Tribune article in her interview and, recalling her reaction to Parsons's statements at the time, she exclaimed, “My next impression was ‘My God, this man says he's a youth pastor and he's never seen the book, never heard of it.’ If he never read the book, how could he comprehend that voice!”⁵⁷

Parsons actually had defended his lack of interest in comprehending Holden's “voice” when he told the reporter: “I don't figure there's anything worth wading through that filth for to see if I can get the good out of it to offset it.”⁵⁸ The Albuquerque school board, like the board in Marin County, required a full evaluation of a protested novel from the complainant. Consequently, Reverend Parsons's refusal to read The Catcher in the Rye and file a completed complaint form with the school district allowed Catcher to remain in use.

In Alabama, parent James Seckington also spoke of the protestors' limited familiarity with The Catcher in the Rye. “They didn't try to read the book, they didn't try to understand it; they just, uh, page numbers were brought out at one of those meetings that the preachers led,” he observed, and “they passed the book around and had the pages folded and the words underlined, and that's all they did, they just inspected the book.”⁵⁹

Reinforcing Seckington's observation, Calhoun County board member Bo Brackett somewhat apologetically told me, “the thing is that I, I have not read any of the books, I was going to but I just don't have the time.”⁶⁰ Nor were any other complainants in Calhoun County able to say they had read even one of the seven challenged books—including the ministers Wesley Crane, Peter Walker, and Donald Langford, who led the protest. The Calhoun County Board of Education made its decision to restrict the seven books solely on the basis of the recommendation of the board-appointed Central Complaint Committee (CCC). The CCC, in turn, based its recommendation not on its own readings and evaluations but on high school librarian Annie Aldrich's negative evaluation of A Clockwork Orange and teacher Georgia Baldwin's positive assessment of The Grapes of Wrath. A negative (anonymous) evaluation of Barbara Beasley Murphy's No Place to Run was appended to the CCC minutes; the missing evaluations of The Catcher in the Rye and three other books were justified by the notation in the minutes that they could not be found in the county libraries at the time.⁶¹

By contrast, those controversy participants who defended The Catcher in the Rye often did so on the basis of their independent reading of the novel, occasionally offering their explication of the text. Albuquerque librarian Kathleen Reynolds explained that while “I am sure that The Catcher in the Rye, to some students, is, you know, ‘gulp,’ because it's not within their background,” she believed that “Holden's just a typical person, in some ways a very typical human being and, in another way, he's a very caring person.” Pointing out that “you know, the whole title of ‘I'm going to be the catcher in the rye,’ out here, protecting people—which, in a way, the censor is the idea to protect,” Reynolds then referred to the passage in Catcher where Holden himself acts as a censor, attempting to erase the “Fuck you” he finds written on his sister's school building.⁶² When Holden imagines his sister and “all the other little kids” getting a “cockeyed” explanation of the phrase from “some dirty kid” that would worry them, he tells the reader, “I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it” (201). In Reynolds's opinion, the relationship between censorship and the protection of childhood innocence was clearly drawn in the text itself.

In the Marin County controversy, Michael Reed defended The Catcher in the Rye based on his own reading as a teacher and an administrator. Yet he recognized the genuine concerns of many parents and his argument implies that even if complainants gave Catcher a full and considerate reading, their objections would stand. “I'm sure his … church followers would find it easy to support him in regard to the book,” Reed said, referring to Reverend Grabowski and his flock. “I don't think they would have wanted a child like Holden, who used terrible words like piss, shit, things like that.” Reed then listed his understanding of the parental protests. “They'd tell you that in the first place, you shouldn't talk like that; second place, you shouldn't use those kind of words in a book; third place,” he continued, “remember that children are reading that book and they can't figure out the subtleties,” then added sympathetically, “I'm not sure I would have wanted Holden to be my child.”⁶³

Reed's ranking of first-, second-, and third-order objections in his hypothetical construction of the censor's argument is, in fact, accurate. A common exchange in each of the Catcher controversies went something like this: the protesting participant objected to the offensive language in the novel, to which a defending participant responded that the language, while distasteful, was certainly not unfamiliar or particularly shocking to late adolescents and much less so to adults. Consistent with Reed's second-order objection, the protesting participant then countered with a distinction between the tolerance of offensive language “in the street” or “daily life” but the unacceptability of finding language “of that kind” in literature—or in libraries.

“Even though it's street talking that goes on and most people have heard all of the words, we didn't feel it needed to be in the library,” Alabama parent and school board member Bo Brackett argued. “I've heard all those words, and more, but I just don't think they should be in our libraries, of our public schools, and I think that people around here don't want them in our libraries.”⁶⁴ Brackett's comment reveals an assumption that libraries are the supposed repositories of “proper” cultural knowledge rather than collections reflecting the range of highbrow and popular materials. In a similar manner, protesting parent Kristen Keefe contrasted the language boundaries of the media and the dictionary with the boundaries of literature and classroom discussions. The Marin County District school board minutes recorded the following exchange between Mrs. Keefe and defending board member Courtney Dean:

Mrs. Keefe spoke. “Do you honestly, in your hearts, feel that material that cannot be read on television or printed in newspapers because we have laws against so doing; do you believe that teachers should read these books out loud in mixed classrooms? That has been done. Are these the best books that can be chosen for students at this age level?”

Mr. Dean responded. “In my personal opinion I think a book is written for a purpose and not just to be smutty, that if it is written to give information, to teach or to provide a moral, it is a good book.”

Mrs. Keefe asked, “How does a teacher explain to a mixed class words that are not found in the dictionary?”⁶⁵

Dean's statement and Keefe's response raises the question of whether or not children can figure out the “subtleties” in a given novel—the third order of the censor's objections pointed out by Michael Reed. Although Kristen Keefe did not take the issue further in the preceding exchange, it is an argument she had already made at some length in her earlier letter to the Marin County School Board. “I do believe that young people SHOULD be informed as to the temptations and evils that life often sets before them,” she wrote, “but there is a world of difference between enlightenment and advocacy.”

Significantly, the relationship between the type of language used in a novel and the question of what was being taught in the novel, its “message” or impact on the reader, was the critical nexus of each controversy. While participants may have been unfamiliar, hesitant, or unable to articulate their interpretation of the novel, the language used in The Catcher in the Rye was graspable, concrete. Consequently, arguments protesting the novel often exhibited broad leaps from the highlighting or counting of offensive words to the understood meaning of the novel. Based on her documentation of “foul” language in Catcher, Keefe argued that “our young people are not dogs to be trained by rubbing their noses in filth,” and then jumped to ungrounded assertions that reading Catcher would damage adolescents “by destroying their desire and will to be good citizens or their faith in principles and the good character of others, by portraying evil as the norm.” Angered by and staunchly refusing to consider counterarguments that reading controversial literature could “possibly be called education in the true intent of the word,” Keefe concluded that “to shock a young person, who is passing through the most sensitive and idealistic years of his or her life into insensitiveness only defeats constructive ends.”⁶⁶

Indeed, the moral implications of the novel's message to students lay at the very marrow of the controversy. Speaking of the censor's arguments in the 1960-61 Marin controversy, high school administrator Kyle Russo explained that “the theme was that the use of such language would be weakening to the moral fiber of the students, making them susceptible to communism.”⁶⁷ In a parallel example in 1978, a protesting participant in an Issaquah, Washington, controversy followed her listing of the number of “hell's,” “chrissake's,” and “horny's” with the conclusion that “it shouldn't be in our public schools … [Catcher] brainwashes students [as] part of an overall Communist plot in which a lot of people are used and may not even be aware of it.”⁶⁸

School administrator Michael Reed recalled comparable interpretive leaps from specific language use to broader meaning in the Marin controversy, but he further distinguished between the basis of the arguments of two central participants. Generally concurring with Russo's assessment, Reed drew a distinction between the essentially civil concerns of Kristen Keefe, and Reverend Grabowski's defense of his faith. “Mrs. Keefe was the one with the communists under the bed. She saw The Catcher in the Rye as an attack,” he recalled, “on American values, Christian values; un-American and unpatriotic, hence, the kind of things the communists would support and encourage to undermine the fundamental values of our country.”⁶⁹

By contrast, Grabowski, who initiated the Marin controversy, “was probably more concerned with the moral part,” in Reed's judgment.⁷⁰ Actually Reverend Grabowski's concern was a spiritual one. “Words convey ideas and thoughts and you can't get away from what is implanted in you. What you take in you will give out,” he held; “that is the type of experience you are going to use.” Alluding to the 295 occasions in which Holden “takes God's name in vain,” Grabowski warned, “If this continues, there is going to be a great disrespect for God, a personal God people believe in and honor and worship.”⁷¹

The distinction between a spiritual concern and a moral one proved to be a fine point across the Catcher controversies. In a 1965 controversy in Waterford, Connecticut, Baptist minister Duane Sweet shifted from a position of spiritual concern over profane language to a secular one as he closed his protest against Catcher with the statement that “I feel truly sad. I think if people like this kind of thing, it indicates a breakdown of moral standards. … We're not concerned with trivial curse words, but the entire philosophy which prevails.”⁷²

In the same vein, Justine Pas (secretary in 1968 to Tim Yates, senior administrator at Albuquerque High School) recalled the objections of the protesting parents in New Mexico under the leadership of Reverend Bradley Parsons. “They were dead set against that book being available; they didn't see there was anything to learn from that book,” Pas informed me. “I think that it was the language—that reading that type of book would make their children that type, that that kind of stuff was all right. They were concerned with the morals of it.”⁷³

Given the focus on language, and the leap from language use to the “message” or the meaning of the novel, it is difficult to determine exactly where or how the complainants found The Catcher in the Rye to be morally failing. In the Marin controversy, one parent simply stated that “speaking as a mother, reading books like The Catcher in the Rye is the same as feeding children poison in small doses.”⁷⁴ School administrator Michael Reed was more expansive in his reflective discussion of the protesting participant's concerns yet equally vague. As he saw it, the moral concerns resembled arguments regarding “creeping socialism” at the time. “If something had some ingredient of socialism in it, you had to oppose it because that was creeping socialism, and pretty soon you'd wake up one morning and it would burst upon you that we're now a socialist country,” he explained, and then drew his parallel to the attempts to censor Catcher: “Well, it went the same way with American values: you keep feeding the kids books that even though some people would say; ‘oh, its not all that bad,’ that fact that it was bad at all, that it was un-American, that it was unchristian, that it showed somebody doing something as a model—this was a subtle undermining of our kids' values; ‘creeping’ in that sense.”⁷⁵

Reverend Bradley Parsons, who led the protest against Catcher in Albuquerque, simply claimed that “school use of the book contributes to the delinquency of minors.”⁷⁶ Kristen Keefe had made the same claim in Marin County, but was a bit more specific in her charge that The Catcher in the Rye was “subversive,” containing “anti-religious material, immorality, slang, suggestive references to crime and delinquency.”⁷⁷ Intending to clarify her point, Keefe quoted the juvenile delinquency statutes of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which “make criminal any act which makes a minor lead an idle, dissolute, immoral life”; Catcher, she argued, “could be said to be a teenage primer to debauchery.”⁷⁸

Across the nation, charges of The Catcher in the Rye's moral reprehensibility resembled the claims of the complainants in Alabama, California, and New Mexico: “immoral,” “risque,” “scandalous lifestyle,” “pretty sexy,” “atheistic,” “brainwashing and against religion,” and “scarring to youth” were repeated complaints.⁷⁹ In the absence of participant explanation or exemplification of these claims against Catcher, the novel itself must be searched for the possible origins and explications of these complaints beyond the use of offensive language.

.....

In a strict sense, it is not difficult to see narrator Holden Caulfield as leading “an idle, dissolute, immoral life” for the course of the novel. If we understand idleness to be the absence of engagement in economically or scholastically productive work, or work directed toward a specific end, Holden can be seen as idle. Holden leaves Pencey Prep just before being formally expelled, explaining, “besides, I sort of needed a little vacation. My nerves were shot. They really were” (51). He decides to take the train to New York City, planning to stay in “some very inexpensive hotel” and “just take it easy till Wednesday. Then, on Wednesday, I'd go home all rested up and feeling swell” (51).

What exactly he will do while “taking it easy” is unclear to Holden himself. After his arrival in New York, the novel is a chronicle of Holden's activities across a 48-hour period characterized by an apparent aimlessness in which his only sense of boundaries or direction lies in the time and space constructions of other people's lives. The erratic and seemingly random manner in which Holden acts and makes decisions further suggests the absence of moral restraints.

Consider the following sequence of events in the short two-day period. Arriving in his hotel room, Holden's view from his window is into the window of one room in which a male transvestite is dressing and another room in which a heterosexual couple are laughing as they squirt water out of their mouths at one another. He leaves his room for the hotel bar, where he dances with and buys drinks for three women, then leaves the hotel bar for a nightclub in Greenwich Village, where he has three drinks. “If you were only around six years old, you could get liquor at Ernie's, the place was so dark and all, and besides, nobody cared how old you were,” Holden observed. “You could even be a dope fiend and nobody'd care” (85).

Holden leaves Ernie's to return to his hotel, where the elevator operator sets him up with a young prostitute. When the prostitute arrives, Holden talks with her and finds that he is not really interested in having sex with her. He sends her away, after paying her for her time, at which point she disputes as to whether it is five dollars or ten dollars “a throw.” The prostitute returns with the elevator operator, who threatens Holden, takes the additional five dollars, and then punches Holden, leaving him on the floor.

The next evening Holden is in yet another hotel bar, drinking with a past prep school student advisor. Their conversation focuses on male sexuality: how one can recognize a homosexual, and a rehashing of the heterosexual experiences of the student advisor. When the student advisor departs, Holden goes to visit his sister, sneaking into his parents' home so they won't know he is out of school. From his home, he telephones a past favorite teacher, Mr. Antolini, and arranges to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Antolini for the night. It is at the Antolinis' that Holden experiences what he understands to be a homosexual advance from Mr. Antolini, and Holden flees, eventually spending the night on a bench in Grand Central Station.

A reading of The Catcher in the Rye that focuses on Holden's involvement in circumstances that he in fact defines as “perverty” provides support for the claim that Holden is dissolute; hence the novel is in a sense a “primer to debauchery.” The sustained attention to sexuality—in the experiential world or Holden's imagination—further supports the claims that Catcher is “pretty sexy” or “risqué” reading. A reading that emphasizes immorality is directly challenged within the novel itself, however, as Holden continually evaluates his observations and experiences in the accompanying narration based on his own moral conscience.

Regarding his initial observations from his hotel window, Holden tells his reader, “I'm not kidding, the hotel was lousy with perverts. I was probably the only normal bastard in the whole place,” and even though he then admits, “and that isn't saying much. … In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw. Sometimes I can think of very crumby stuff I wouldn't mind doing if the opportunity came up,” this very admission leads Holden (and his reader) to a more complex evaluation. “It stinks, if you analyze it. I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all—and if you do like her,” he determines, “then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it” (62).

The hotel bar scenes fare no better in Holden's eyes. The first bar he describes as “one of those places that are very terrible to be in unless you have somebody good to dance with, or unless the waiter lets you buy real drinks instead of just cokes” (75-76). With the benefit of “real drinks,” Holden finds the second bar just as intolerable. “I certainly began to feel like a prize horse's ass, though, sitting there all by myself,” he confesses, adding, “there wasn't anything to do except smoke and drink” (86). Nor does the company of a past female acquaintance improve his disposition. “I couldn't even stick around to hear old Ernie play something half-way decent,” Holden says regretfully, because “I certainly wasn't going to sit down at a table with old Lillian Simmons and that Navy guy and be bored to death. So I left” (87).

In his incident with the elevator operator and the prostitute, it is Holden's morality rather than immorality that is emphasized. When the elevator operator asks Holden if he is “Innarested in a little tail t'night?” Holden says “Okay,” and tells the reader, “It was against my principles and all, but I was feeling so depressed I didn't even think. That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed you can't even think” (91). The arrival of the prostitute only adds to Holden's misery, demonstrating a moral tension that is held constant throughout The Catcher in the Rye. “I know you're supposed to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head,” Holden acknowledges, “but I didn't. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy” (95).

Holden, in a sense as Everyman, is posed between what he is “supposed to do” and what he feels to be right. In the midst of post-World War II American society in which what is “moral” has become what is “normal”—what one is “supposed to do”—Holden is out of place. Significantly, Holden's beliefs and actions are based on his own moral conscience; embodying sociologist David Riesman's “inner-directed” individual of pre-World War II America, in which choices and decisions are made on the basis of one's own inner “moral compass.” As a maturing adolescent, Holden's moral dilemmas are given the sharpest focus in matters of sexuality.

Midway through the novel, for example, Holden ponders his sexual virginity. “The thing is, most of the time when you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl … she keeps telling you to stop,” he says. “The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don't.” Declaring that he “can't help” stopping, he is nonetheless confused about “whether they really want you to stop, or whether they're just scared as hell,” reasoning his way to the question of individual responsibility, asking “whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you, not them” (92).

At a later point, Holden tries to discuss sexual morality with his prep school peer advisor, who was rumored to be widely experienced, “knew quite a bit about sex.” The student advisor tells Holden of his current relationship with an older Chinese woman, explaining that sex is more “satisfying” in the Eastern world since “they simply happen to regard sex as both a physical and spiritual experience.” Holden eagerly exclaims, “So do I regard it as a wuddaya-callit—a physical and spiritual experience and all. I really do. But it depends on who the hell I'm doing it with. If I'm doing it with somebody I don't even—.” Shushed by his advisor, Holden lowers his voice and continues, “I know it's supposed to be physical and spiritual, and artistic and all. But what I mean is, you can't do it with everybody—every girl you neck with and all—and make it come out that way. Can you?” Finding himself caught in a discussion of ethics rather than sexual exploits, the advisor evades answering Holden and tells him instead, “Let's drop it” (146-47).

Although sexuality is the most developed expression of moral tension in The Catcher in the Rye, Holden faces the same dilemma between what one is “supposed to do” or what is viewed as “success,” and his own sense of morality and social justice in other areas of his experience. In the course of the novel, Holden regularly routs out the “phony” aspects of American life and searches for the means of a genuine existence. In this sense, Holden can hardly be seen as idle; rather, in his quest for truth he is a contemporary Diogenes of sorts. That the nature of Holden's quest is missed by hostile readers may be at least partially explained by the untempered cynicism that occasionally dominates Holden's narrative. In the following passage, Holden ridicules the religious faith of a Pencey Prep alumnus who made a financial success out of the undertaking business:

The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddam Cadillac, and we all had to give him a locomotive—that's a cheer. Then, the next morning, in chapel, he made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down on his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God … wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I could just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.

(16-17)

The problem here is that the reader has no reason to extend credibility to Holden's evaluation of alumnus Ossenburger: his own cynicism short-circuits his exposé of Ossenburger's insincerity. Passages of this sort—and there are many—may serve to rankle the readers who identify with any one of Holden's targets, rather than cause them to reflect upon or consider the critique. However, the uncontrolled passages are outweighed by others in which Holden's evaluations are more disciplined in temper and balanced by his more empathetic reflections. For example, the morning after Holden has fled the Antolini home, he agonizes:

But what did worry me was the part about how I'd woke up and found him patting me on the head and all. I mean I wondered if just maybe I was wrong about thinking he was making a flitty pass at me. I wondered if maybe he just liked to pat guys on the head when they're asleep. I mean how can you tell about that stuff for sure? You can't. … I mean, I started thinking that even if he was a flit he certainly'd been very nice to me. I thought how he hadn't minded it when I called him up so late, and how he'd told me to come right over if I felt like it. And how he went to all that trouble giving me advice about finding out the size of your mind and all, and how he was the only guy that'd ever gone near that boy James Castle I told you about when he was dead. I thought about all that stuff. And the more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. I mean I started thinking maybe I should've gone back to his house. Maybe he was only patting my head just for the hell of it. The more I thought about it, though, the more depressed and screwed up about it I got.

(194-95)

One way to understand this passage is to see that Holden's confusion over the meaning of Mr. Antolini's actions is actually secondary to the larger moral question of whether or not someone's sexual preference—or, implicitly, any other single factor in the composite of social morality—ought to dominate evaluations of individual moral stature. Holden repeatedly struggles throughout Catcher to identify and evaluate individuals as unique, complex, and integrated beings, a struggle that is most evident in his criticisms of the “phony” symbols and processes of social stratification. Yet, as another passage demonstrates, Holden often finds himself defeated.

Holden tells the story of an earlier roommate, Dick Slagle, who had “very inexpensive suitcases” that he would hide under the bed instead of putting them on the luggage rack next to Holden's Mark Cross suitcases. “It depressed the holy hell out of me, and I kept wanting to throw mine out or something, or even trade with him,” Holden explains, leading him to “finally put my suitcases under my bed, instead of on the rack, so that old Slagle wouldn't get a goddam inferiority complex about it.” The next day, Slagle puts Holden's luggage back out on the rack because, as Holden later determines, “he wanted people to think my bags were his.” All the while, Slagle keeps “saying snotty things” to Holden about his luggage being “too new and bourgeois.” “The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs,” Holden concludes. “You think if they're intelligent and all … and have a good sense of humor, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do” (108-9).

In other examples, Holden's own perspective is clear and solidly defended even as he entertains oppositional arguments. On the question of religion, Holden distinguishes between his spiritual needs and his rejection of dogmatic theological explanations. At one point Holden admits to the reader, “I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it. I can't always pray when I feel like it.” “In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist,” he confesses. “I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.” The Disciples, for example, “annoy the hell” out of Holden because “they were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down” (99).

In contrast to his earlier mockery of alumnus Ossenburger's faith, Holden recounts an ongoing argument between himself and a past prep schoolmate, Arthur Childs. Childs is characterized as a devout Quaker, “a very nice kid,” who relies on the interpretations and teachings of the church for spiritual guidance, whereas Holden's position is one of personal quest and interpretation. Childs tells Holden that “if I didn't like the Disciples, then I didn't like Jesus and all. He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them.” Agreeing that Jesus did pick them but “at random,” Holden asks Childs “if he thought Judas, the one that betrayed Jesus and all, went to Hell after he committed suicide.” “Certainly,” Childs answers, and Holden sees his opening. “I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell,” Holden argues. “I think any one of the Disciples would've sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I'll bet anything Jesus didn't do it.” Here, Holden has the last word in a final aside to the reader: “Old Childs said the trouble with me was that I didn't go to church or anything. He was right about that, in a way. I don't” (99-100).

These passages could undoubtedly be used to support claims that The Catcher in the Rye is “against religion” or that it at least hints at the plausibility of atheism. That they have not been cited in the controversies may be a consequence of abbreviated readings; reading the phrase “I'm sort of an atheist,” for example, because it has been underlined and isolated rather than reading it in the process of following the story. In his recollection of the Marin County controversy, high school administrator Michael Reed remembered Reverend Grabowski “calling the book immoral” because “Holden Caulfield was not their kind of a child, who a parent in his church would want to own.” Holden was seen by the complainants as “kind of cynical, he had bad thoughts, got himself in an immoral situation in a New York motel,” and in his interview Reed pointed out that “the fact that it was a frustrating situation and really could teach was more than Mr. Grabowski might be able to see.”⁸⁰

The general lack of textual exemplification in the Catcher controversies may be equally a consequence of Salinger's narrative style: the preceding segments from the novel are lengthy and awkward to manage. Even when reproduced nearly intact, the rambling quality of Holden's “voice” makes a clear line of argument difficult. Thus, while the reading of a text can be seen to generate an individualized interpretation, the burden of explication may be too great for any individual reader to carry out—particularly in the case of a reflexive narrative such as The Catcher in the Rye.

This is true as well of the broader complaints against the overall perspective or point of view maintained in The Catcher in the Rye: they demonstrate familiarity with the text yet exemplification and explanation remain absent. In 1972, a school board member in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, argued for the elimination of Catcher because “it has widened the generation gap and confused moral values within families.”⁸¹ Likewise, in a Fort Myers, Florida, controversy (1980), Reverend Jack Gambill told the local school board that The Catcher in the Rye, as well as Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Joseph Heller's Catch-22, “should be banished from the library shelves so the teaching of morality and situation ethics will be removed from the classroom and returned home.”⁸² Somewhat more expansively, the NIF reported the following objection to The Catcher in the Rye, grouped with Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, in a 1964 Pennsylvania controversy: “The principal is quoted as saying … [that] the three books treat the society in which we live in such a way that students might tend to question it. For example, they tend to compare communism with democracy and atheism with Christianity in such a way as to cause high school students to question the values we as a society have set up.”⁸³

“To question the values we as a society have set up.” Here we finally have the crux of the debate over The Catcher in the Rye. From the literary critics to nearly every participant comment on the message or meaning of The Catcher in the Rye, everyone agrees that Holden's narrative is a purposeful questioning of American values. Participants then divide into the oppositional camps for or against Catcher on the basis of whether such questioning is a valuable and instructive experience for adolescent readers, or a dangerous and destructive one. On the side of value for such “questioning,” the Great Books, Little Institute at Franklin and Marshall Colleges, Pennsylvania, chose The Catcher in the Rye and Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman as the “topic books” for their annual meeting in 1964 because “both books follow the theme of the difficulties encountered by young people maturing in today's world.”⁸⁴ Similarly, a school superintendent in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, argued for Catcher's retention in a 1967 controversy because it “is about a 17-year-old youth trying to mature the hard way” and offered not only “a keen insight into the adolescent mind” but also “the American way of life.”⁸⁵

In the Marin County controversy, Dr. S. I. Hayakawa spoke of the value of The Catcher in the Rye for high school as well as college classroom use. While noting that “the effects of reading The Catcher in the Rye are usually negligible with girls,” Hayakawa explained that male readers aged seventeen to twenty years old “often find it a great help in gaining insight into their own feelings of rebellion.”⁸⁶ Correspondingly, Marin County District school board member Vincent Handy characterized Holden Caulfield as “a good boy but a confused and rebellious one,” agreeing with Dr. Hayakawa's observation, and extending the range of the audience which might benefit from reading Catcher. “I don't swear and I don't smoke and I don't like to read books of this type, but I read both of them,” Handy told those gathered at the Marin County meeting. “When I got through reading Catcher in the Rye I was a little bit disgusted.” “What is the purpose of this?” he said he wondered at first, “and then it dawned on me suddenly that it should be compulsory reading for every parent. It is just presented in a rough way.”⁸⁷

Discussion of the value of The Catcher in the Rye was not limited to the formal dialogue of the school board meetings. In her retrospective interview, Marin County school secretary Shauna Butler recalled almost continual informal discussion in the staffrooms of one of the high schools and in the district office. As faculty and staff came and went throughout the day, they joined in the running dialogue. “We spent a lot of time discussing these brilliant kids,” Butler said, referring to the adolescent characters in Catcher and in Salinger's Franny and Zooey, fictional adolescents who the faculty concluded “were capable of living in the world and understanding its complexities; that the search for truth and so forth is free.”⁸⁸

A comparable defense of The Catcher in the Rye was made by Tim Yates, as senior administrator of Albuquerque High School at the time of the Albuquerque controversy. “I think it's a case study in adolescent turmoil. I think it is a useful teaching tool to help kids see the pitfalls of adolescence,” Yates told one reporter in an interview for the Albuquerque Tribune. Admitting “I don't think it's a literary classic,” Yates felt that the use of Catcher in the classroom was nonetheless justified because “neither do I think there is anything in it that a kid won't face anytime he goes to the movies or turns on a TV set.”⁸⁹

In the Albuquerque controversy, editorial letters to the Albuquerque Tribune acted as a community forum in lieu of school board meetings. In large part favoring the retention of The Catcher in the Rye, letters ranged from those that classified Catcher as a literary classic (grouped with “all of our great American authors, Hemingway, Faulkner, Malamud”) to those that defended Catcher particularly for its critical view of contemporary American society.⁹⁰ “Since it has taken the Reverend Bradley Parsons seventeen years to discover Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (first published in 1951),” wrote Albuquerque resident Luke Benz, “perhaps he will get around to discovering some of the real obscenities of our civilization (e.g., racial prejudice, poverty, the war in Viet Nam) within the next seventeen years.” “How frightening it is,” Benz continued, “to realize that a clergyman so desperately out of touch still exists.”⁹¹

As I surveyed the secondary discourse and interviewed controversy participants, seeking to understand their positions and involvement in the Catcher in the Rye controversies, those who opposed Catcher were not so much “out of touch” as they were focused upon consciously protecting their sense of American values, perceived to be under question and challenge. In a 1971 controversy in Hinsdale, Illinois, The Catcher in the Rye (along with Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, and John Updike's Rabbit Run) was criticized as “pessimistic, morbid, and depressing,” with the local PTA literature subcommittee asking instead for more books with “positive, optimistic, uplifting standpoints.”⁹² Parent Ginney Desrocher “objected to the negative point of view” in The Catcher in the Rye, and concluded her argument in a 1982 Vermont controversy with the statement: “We look at the positive side, that's what builds character.”⁹³ Marin County parent Kristen Keefe had argued the same point at greater length in her 1960 letter of complaint to the Marin County District Board of Trustees:

The mind of a child is an unchalked slate. If we who push the chalk do not by examples write beauty and portray the satisfactions of having principle and character upon that slate, we are guiltier than had we left the writing to happenstance. If we do not point the way to the best, the worst will follow as night follows day, whether through intent by evil-doers, or by creation of a vacuum. This is to say, that I am equally concerned about the shortage of fine books upon our school library and classroom shelves as I am about the examples in use and here protected. Young people do not yet know all of what they believe. In fact, the modern world and our school constantly forces them to question the beliefs of their parents. They accept the authority of the school and this trust should not be lightly viewed by any trustee.⁹⁴

The notion of a modern or different world in which children are instructed in ways and materials that challenge their parents' sense of American values was also addressed by Reverend Wesley Crane in Calhoun County. Although he refused to be interviewed on any specific aspects of the 1982-83 school book controversy, Reverend Crane volunteered his personal view of what is at stake in book controversies in general:

I will say this. I'm still shocked at what our children can have access to, it wasn't there when I was there. No morals in our schools anymore; the teacher doesn't lay the Bible on the desk anymore and say, “We're an—(pause and audible exhalation).” Do you know where this is, ma'am? This is America, ma'am; do you get my drift? It's just communism; it's a movement that people don't care anymore, and I do. We do. It's not just something I've dreamed up. We're still an American people. People have forgotten the morals this country was founded on. Let's go back to the Constitution and read it. If we don't, then pretty soon it'll be rewritten and then that's the end of it.⁹⁵

The statements of those who oppose the use of The Catcher in the Rye in the classroom, then, reveal a primary concern over the protection of children from materials that either expose them to unpleasant “negative” facets of American life or encourage the child to question the traditional set of values. Of further concern is the time and educational effort spent on literature that takes a critical view of contemporary American society: replacing the reading of “classics” (or the Constitution) and presented without corresponding works supportive of traditional American values. Participant arguments as to whether The Catcher in the Rye is, or will be, a “classic” or is merely popular “pulp” fiction disclose the assumption that classic literature—at least for school use—is literature that supports the dominant cultural value system.

Both complainant Kristen Keefe and administrator Michael Reed, opposing participants in the Marin County controversy, addressed these concerns. In her 1960 letter to the Marin County school board, Keefe stated: “I am concerned also over the growing acceptance of the idea, that just because a book has sold well and popularly to the public, that it abracadabra can be misnamed a classic, or necessarily be taken for granted as a fit book for schools. There is and should be a vast difference between public and private adult selection, and selection for educational purposes for not yet adult minds. Few modern books will be remembered fifty years hence—unless they may be used to show the decadence of the age.”⁹⁶

Twenty-three years later, Reed voiced the same concern in his retrospective interview:

There was another argument, and possibly it is one with a kind of merit. And that is, what about all of the really recognized classics that aren't being taught because books, I don't know, in favor of contemporary books, junk, that probably will be long gone in five years; a “bestseller.” School time is a very valuable time, homework time is very valuable time. [There is] a whole argument as to whether children benefit most from a work of literature if they enjoy it, perhaps stimulating a desire to read more, or if they labor through it like generations of kids labored through Ivanhoe. In one case, they're exposed to a classic, or where they read something like The Catcher in the Rye which is more contemporary and something that they know they enjoy more.⁹⁷

The question of balance in developing a critical perspective on contemporary American culture was repeated in a letter to the Marin County school board from Reverend Jonathon Menjivar, Director of Education for the Episcopal Diocese of California. “‘Catcher in the Rye’ has been found a most helpful description of our contemporary culture. It may, indeed, have real value in bringing college students and adults to grasp some of the religious issues of the day,” Menjivar wrote in defense of Catcher's retention, adding that “we are not fearful of books which speak unfavorably of the Church or depict people using God's name in vain.” Menjivar then asked that equal time or more be devoted to contrasting materials, hoping for “an abundance of classical and current literature which portrays a richer view of life, suggesting the strength of the Church at its best and the fruits of faithfulness” to be included in the curriculum.⁹⁸

Reverend Menjivar implicitly identifies the actions of those seeking to censor The Catcher in the Rye as rooted not in strength of values or certainty of position but in fearfulness. This is the central basis of the split between those who defend or seek to ban The Catcher in the Rye: given that Catcher presents an intentional and fairly thorough questioning of American values, are American readers—be they adolescents or adults—able to sustain a positive view of their culture in reading it? In a similar vein, parent James Seckington of the Calhoun County controversy summed up his evaluation of Holden's experiences in the novel and what readers would gain from The Catcher in the Rye by saying that “people sometimes come into contact with the bad to know what is good.”⁹⁹

While Seckington's statement may sound more extreme than Menjivar's, both statements express the belief that moral values and character are not damaged by criticism and exposure to oppositional beliefs and actions but are in fact strengthened through the development of a critical perspective in place of “blind faith.” A crucial fact about The Catcher in the Rye—as opposed to interpretive readings of it—is that Holden does not criticize the historically central values of individualism, family, democracy, and equality: he critiques their faulty enactment in American society and lambasts the tautological replacement of morality with normality, and its corollary value for conformity. The painful irony is that the censoring participants, the very people who, as Michael Reed put it, would not “want to own a child like Holden,” contribute to the chasm between American values and experience that Holden as an idealistic adolescent is trying so desperately to bridge.

Nor do the censors recommend contemporary literature for students to read in place of The Catcher in the Rye. For all the protest that Catcher was taking the place of more positive, valuable, or character-building literature, not one actual title was suggested by objecting participants for student reading on contemporary American society. Based on her seventeen years of experience as a lead librarian in the Albuquerque Public School District, Kathleen Reynolds commented that “usually we get very little of that: you know the standard NCTE form—usually they have nothing else to suggest that follows that theme.”¹⁰⁰ In the broadest sense, the “theme” Reynolds speaks of is that of the process of transition from the world of childhood to adult society. In Catcher this process is viewed as a difficult and ambiguous one: the world of childhood is portrayed as one of idealism and innocence while adult society is characteristically “phony” and “perverty,” concerned with expedience over ideals and social status over moral action. This portrayal is undoubtedly challenging to educators, ministers, and parents as they seek to guide adolescents through this transitional stage. Whether such a bleak or critical portrayal is “necessary reading” is a different question.

First of all, it is not particularly true that those who wish to ban The Catcher in the Rye are unfamiliar with other novels following the theme of adolescent transition into contemporary American society. Instead, the problem is that the great majority of novels on this theme take the same perspective as Catcher—although perhaps not as successfully. The ALA regularly publishes a pamphlet titled “Best Books for Young Adults,” and in 1976 published a cumulative pamphlet, “Still Alive: The Best of the Best, 1960-1974,” which listed seventy-two titles frequently checked out of public and school libraries across the nation. Eighteen of these books are novels of the adolescent struggle toward participation in adult society: fifteen of the eighteen present that transition as one of difficulty and tension in ways that parallel some or much of The Catcher in the Rye.¹⁰¹ Two novels portray the transition as a positive and relatively straightforward gain for adolescents, albeit locating the sense of struggle or conflict in the context of nondominant cultural experience. The eighteenth novel portrays adult society as equitable and preferable to the childhood of the runaway heroine, characterized by neglect and victimization.¹⁰²

As might be expected given the continual attack upon Catcher, thirteen of the fifteen “negative transition” novels have been censored at least once and some repeatedly.¹⁰³ This highlights a critical gap between what young readers select for themselves based on interest and credibility, and what concerned (censoring) adults believe adolescent experience and interest should be. Correspondingly, controversy participants who defended The Catcher in the Rye differed, at bottom, from those who sought to censor the novel, not so much in terms of their conceptions of what “should be” but in their unwillingness to shield adolescents from “what is.”

Marin County controversy participant Michael Reed ended his interview with the statement, “We are talking about our children's morals, and things very close to our hearts: as we [the school board] understand the truth; as they [the protesting participants] understood the truth.”¹⁰⁴ Reed here repeats the earlier refrain of the educators, the librarians, and the New Right proponents. Yet we are closer to the nature and definition of “the truth” of contemporary American experience only by implication. The actual dialogue of the controversies over The Catcher in the Rye has identified what is objectionable as well as worthy in the novel. It is, however, through the interpretive framework of a cultural debate that participants can be seen to share a certain understanding of post-World War II American society, even as they disagree as to what version of that “truth” ought to be shared with adolescents. That this disagreement is rooted in doubt about the strength of the American character, present and future, has been suggested in the Catcher controversies themselves: that it is so is the argument of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Please refer back to chapters 2 and 3 of this study for my discussion of the early “listing” of Catcher. Censorship challenges to the use of The Catcher in the Rye in high school classes have continued unabated throughout the 1990s, with Catcher ranking second on the fifteen-year listing of “Most Frequently Challenged Books” as surveyed by People for the American Way for the period 1982-96 Catcher ranked eighth in 1995 and moved up to sixth place in 1996. To give some perspective to this ranking, Catcher's sixth-place ranking was determined out of a total of 664 challenges to books in public libraries, schools, and school libraries in 1996 that were reported to the OIF and/or received media coverage sufficient to come to the attention of OIF staff. OIF research “suggests that for each challenge reported, there may be as many as four or five which remain unreported”; as qtd. under “1996 in Review” on the ALA's Web site, March 1997

2. Based on my survey of the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom [hereafter NIF] (1960-82). My findings are in agreement with similar surveys reported in Woods, Decade of Censorship, and Symula, “Censorship of High School Literature.”

3. All of the findings regarding the sixty cases of censorship of The Catcher in the Rye are based on my survey of reportage in the NIF (1960-82) and, again, are borne out by similar findings in the surveys by Woods and Symula (ibid.).

4. Parents were the complainant in twenty-six cases, a “citizen petition” in seventeen cases, ministers in fourteen cases, educators in eleven (nine were school administrators, two were librarians), and students in two cases. Furthermore, in seventeen cases the complainant was not identified.

5. Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, Marin County High School District, 19 Dec. 1960.

6. Interview with Michael Reed, 28 Apr. 1983, Marin County High School, California. The three additional books were The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, Carson McCullers's Member of the Wedding, and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

7. Interview with Shauna Butler (secretary in the Marin County School District since the early 1950s), 28 Apr. 1983, Marin County, California. See also the Marin County Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, September 13, 1954. Although we are able to hear Kristen Keefe's direct voice through her correspondence to the school board and board meeting minutes, I was unable to interview her, because she had died in the late 1970s.

8. Marin County District Board of Trustees minutes, 19 Dec. 1960. For local news coverage, see the San Rafael Independent Journal and the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, Dec. 1960-Feb. 1961, both of which ran articles and updates on a weekly if not daily basis. Beginning 8 Dec. 1960, the controversy also received occasional attention in the San Francisco Chronicle in Herb Caen's regular column.

9. Marin County District Board of Trustees minutes, 19 Dec. 1960.

10. Reed interview, 28 Apr. 1983.

11. Butler interview, 28 Apr. 1983.

12. Reed interview, 28 Apr. 1983.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Butler interview, 28 Apr. 1983.

16. Marin County District Board of Trustees minutes, 19 Dec. 1960-6 Feb. 1961, and appended attendance sheets.

17. Interview with Kyle Russo, 28 Apr. 1983, Marin County High School, California.

18. Butler interview, 28 Apr. 1983.

19. In my review of school board minutes and across the numerous interviews I conducted in Marin County, Albuquerque, and Calhoun County as well as in my review of the reported controversies in the NIF, attendance at school board meetings during Catcher controversies ranged from 50 to 500 estimated “interested citizens,” with 200-300 representing typical attendance. The school board members I interviewed in all three communities estimated average attendance at all other school board meetings to be between 3 to 15 “interested citizens,” and occasionally 25-30 on particularly heated issues of finance or zoning changes.

20. Telephone interview with Rev. Bradley Parsons, 16 Aug. 1983, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

21. Interview with Kathleen Reynolds, 16 Aug. 1983, Albuquerque High School, New Mexico.

22. Parsons interview.

23. Ibid.

24. Interview with Bo Brackett, 19 Aug. 1983, Calhoun County, Alabama.

25. The other six books were Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, Doris Day: Her Own Story, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Barbara Beasley Murphy's No Place to Run, and Francis Hanckel's The Way of Love. As reported in “Alabama,” NIF, 32.1 (Jan. 1983): 7.

26. Brackett interview.

27. Ibid.

28. Central Complaint Committee Meeting minutes, 1 Nov. 1982, Calhoun County Board of Education.

29. Reynolds interview.

30. Butler interview.

31. Marin County Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, 19 Dec. 1960.

32. Interview with Jenny Thigpen, 19 Aug. 1983, Calhoun County, Alabama.

33. Jane Boutwell, “Parents' Protests Bring Removal of Alexandria Library Books,” The Calhoun County Star, 6 Oct. 1982, sect. 3A.

34. Reed interview.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Parsons interview.

38. Dorothy Simpers, “I-J Reporter's Notebook,” San Rafael Independent Journal, 29 Dec. 1960, sect. 1C.

39. Thigpen interview.

40. See Barbara Beasley Murphy's report to the Authors Guild, which supported her visit to Calhoun County: “Restricting Books in Alabama Schools: An Author Confronts Her Censors,” Authors Guild Bulletin, Spring 1983, 5, 13-14.

41. Murphy 14.

42. “Camden, S.C.,” NIF 19.5 (Sept. 1970): 73.

43. “Roselle, N.J.,” NIF 20.2 (Mar. 1971): 34.

44. “Several Molalla High Library …,” NIF 14.1 (Jan. 1965): 5.

45. “Attacks on Books in U.S. Schools During 1961,” Freedom to Read Bulletin 5.1 (Mar. 1962): 9.

46. See the earlier discussion in this chapter of Kristen Keefe's accounting and charting of offensive language in Catcher for the Marin County controversy. See also NIF issues, respectively: “Shawnee Mission, Kansas,” 21.2 (Mar. 1972): 40; “Issaquah, Washington,” 27.6 (Nov. 1978): 138; “Middlebury, Vermont,” 31.2 (Mar. 1982): 48.

47. Marin County District Board of Trustees minutes, 19 Dec. 1960.

48. Reed interview.

49. Kristen Keefe, cover letter to Board of Trustees, Chairman of the Board, Marin County Unified High School District (16 Dec. 1960), 1. The referenced document itself has disappeared.

50. Parsons interview.

51. Brackett interview.

52. Donald P. Costello, as qtd. in Corbett 442.

53. Ibid.

54. Russo interview.

55. Reynolds interview.

56. Mary Lou Jennings, “Minister to Take Protest on Book to School Board,” Albuquerque Tribune, 14 May 1968, 1.

57. Reynolds interview.

58. Jennings 1.

59. Interview with James Seckington, 18 Aug. 1983, Calhoun County Museum of Natural History, Alabama.

60. Brackett interview.

61. Central Complaint Committee Meeting minutes, 1 Nov. 1982.

62. Reynolds interview.

63. Reed interview.

64. Brackett interview.

65. Marin County Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, 6 Feb. 1961.

66. Keefe 1-2.

67. Russo interview.

68. “Issaquah, Washington,” NIF 27.6 (Nov. 1978): 138.

69. Reed interview.

70. Ibid.

71. Marin County District Board of Trustees minutes, 19 Dec. 1960.

72. “A School without Catcher in the Rye,” NIF 15.1 (Jan. 1966): 7.

73. Telephone interview with Justine Pas, 16 Aug. 1983, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

74. Marin County Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, 19 Dec. 1960. The parent was identified as Mrs. Clasby.

75. Reed interview.

76. Jennings 1.

77. Dorothy Simpers, “Tam Trustees again Refuse to Ban Books,” San Rafael Independent Journal, 10 Jan. 1961, sect. 4A.

78. Ibid.

79. Based on my survey of the Catcher controversies as reported in the NIF.

80. Reed interview.

81. “Shawnee Mission, Kansas,” NIF 21.2 (Mar. 1972): 40.

82. “Fort Myers, Florida,” NIF 29.3 (May 1980): 50.

83. “Censorship at Mt. Pleasant,” NIF 13.4 (July 1964): 50.

84. “Salinger Not Required,” NIF 13.5 (Sept. 1964): 62.

85. “The Catcher in the Rye,” NIF 16.3 (May 1967): 34.

86. Marin County Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, 19 Feb. 1960. Recalling the reader response of Sandra Christenson (as discussed in chapter 4) as well as popular culture references such as Julie Smith's New Orleans Beat (as discussed in chapter 1), Hayakawa's gender distinction may simply reflect his own assumptions.

87. Ibid.

88. Butler interview.

89. Jennings 1.

90. Albuquerque Tribune, miscellaneous letters to the editor, 17-28 May 1968. Quoted phrase is from the 22 May letter written by Albuquerque resident Roz Oakley.

91. Albuquerque Tribune, editorial letter written by Luke Benz, 17 May 1968.

92. “Hinsdale, Ill.,” NIF 20.3 (May 1971): 61.

93. “Middlebury, Vermont,” NIF 31.2 (Mar. 1982): 48.

94. Keefe 2, 4.

95. Telephone interview with Reverend Wesley Crane, 18 Aug. 1983, Calhoun County, Alabama.

96. Keefe 2.

97. Reed interview.

98. Reverend Jonathon Menjivar, letter recorded in the Marin County Board of Trustees Meeting minutes, 19 Dec. 1960.

99. Seckington interview.

100. Reynolds interview.

101. “Still Alive: The Best of the Best, 1960-1974,” American Library Association (Chicago). See particularly the plot summaries of the following eighteen novels: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Go Ask Alice; Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land; Alice Childress, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich; [Robert] Cormier, The Chocolate War; Blossom Elfman, The Girls of Huntington House; Robin Graham and Derek Gill, Dove; Hannah Green, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; Ann Head, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones; S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders and That Was Then, This Is Now; Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner; John Neufeld, Lisa Bright and Dark; Robert Peck, A Day No Pigs Would Die; Chaim Potok, The Chosen; Gertrude Samuels, Run, Shelley, Run!; Sandra Scoppetone, Trying Hard to Hear You; Jean Thompson, House of Tomorrow.

102. The two “positive” novels and the plot summaries given in the ALA's “Still Alive” list are Robert Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die (“Through his relationship with his hard-working father, 12-year-old Rob learns to cope with the harshness of Shaker life and emerges a mature individual”) and Chaim Potok's The Chosen (“Two Jewish boys growing to manhood in Brooklyn discover that differences can strengthen friendship and understanding”). The final novel is Gertrude Samuel's Run, Shelley, Run (“Runaway Shelley, a victim of family neglect and juvenile injustice, finally gets the help she needs through the concern of a sympathetic judge and the intercession of a kindly neighbor”).

103. As noted in Doyle, ed., “Caution! A List of Books Some People Consider Dangerous.” The exceptions are Dove by Robin Graham and Derek Gill (largely an adventure and romance tale) and John Neufeld's Lisa Bright and Dark in which the “heroine” is recognized to be insane.

104. Reed interview.

Primary Sources

The Primary Text

Salinger, Jerome David. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1951; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1964.

Case Study Interviews and Related Community Commentary

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Four interview meetings and one telephone interview were conducted on 16-17 August 1983.

Albuquerque Tribune, 17-28 May 1968 [miscellaneous letters to the editor].

Jennings, Mary Lou. “Minister to Take Protest on Book to School Board.” Albuquerque Tribune, 14 May 1968, 1.

Calhoun County, Alabama

Five interview meetings and one telephone interview were conducted on 18-19 August 1983.

Boutwell, Jane. “Parents' Protests Bring Removal of Alexandria Library Books.” Anniston Star, 6 Oct. 1982, sects. 1A, 3A.

Calhoun County Board of Education. Central Complaint Committee Meeting Minutes. 1 Nov. 1982.

Murphy, Barbara Beasley. “Restricting Books in Alabama Schools: An Author Confronts Her Censors.” Authors Guild Bulletin (spring 1983): 5, 13-14.

Marin County, California

Three interview meetings were conducted on 28 April 1983.

Simpers, Dorothy. “I-J Reporter's Notebook.” San Rafael Independent Journal, 29 Dec. 1960, sect. 1C.

———. “Tam Trustees Again Refuse to Ban Books.” San Rafael Independent Journal, 10 Jan. 1961, sects. 1A, 4A.

Smart, Anne. Letter to the Board of Trustees, Tamalpais Unified High School District, Marin County, Calif., 16 Dec. 1960.

Tamalpais Union High School District. Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes. 19 Dec. 1960-6 Feb. 1961.

References

Symula, James Francis. “Censorship of High School Literature: A Study of the Incidents of Censorship Involving J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.” Ed.D. diss., State Univ. of New York, Buffalo, 1969.

Woods, L. B. A Decade of Censorship in America: The Threat to Classrooms and Libraries, 1966-1975. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow P, 1979.