Today’s post comes to you via Letters of Note, a stunningly wonderful blog that celebrates all forms of written communications, from letters to postcards to faxes to notecards. A post from 2012 showcases a letter from Kurt Vonnegut, author of, among other seminal works, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Perhaps Vonnegut’s most well-known work, Slaughterhouse-Five (published in 1969) tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant during World War II, who is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and is later abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Much of the book (though probably not the space-traveling bits) were taken from Vonnegut’s own experiences in during the Second World War, where he was taken prisoner, and locked with other POWs in a camp known as “Slaughterhouse Five” (Schlachthof Fünf) during the fire-bombing of Dresden. It’s a tricky story, told by an Unreliable Narrator, and uses the genre of science fiction to hide a number of painful and inconvenient truths and observations about the world that Vonnegut saw around him. It is also #29 on the American Library Association’s list of “Banned and Challenged Classics“.
One particularly infamous act against Slaughterhouse-Five took place in 1973, in Drake, North Dakota when 26-year-old English teacher Bruce Severy used the book in his class. The next month, Charles McCarthy, the head of the school board, demanded that all 32 copies of the book be burned in the school’s furnace, along with a number of other works, including those by Hemingway and Steinbeck. In an interview with the Minot Daily News, McCarthy stated “We didn’t approve of its obscene language…It might pass in a college, but not in this school.” Another board member named Melvin Alme said that after reading the book, he “didn’t think it should be read by anyone.” (You can read more about this here).
While many in the community were wary of the school board’s decision, it was the students who were the most active in protecting the book. They refused to give up their copies of Vonnegut’s book, or declared them lost to the library and offered to pay for them outright. Even after the school board authorized the search of the students’ lockers and sent a letter home to teachers demanding the books be returned, the students signed a letter to the board demanding the right to read, and saying that “We think it’s respectable and interesting, and better than what we’ve been reading”.
Not too surprisingly, news of this incident soon made its way to Vonnegut himself, who penned a letter full of dignified fury to McCarthy that deserves to be read by all, especially during Banned Book Week. The full text is below. You can also read it on Letters of Note here.
(And just as a side note…though this is a bit of history, according to the Vonnegut Library, in 2011, the Republic High School in southwestern Missouri banned Slaughterhouse Five, and now keeps its copies under lock and key, to this day, and only parents are allowed to check it out).
November 16, 1973
Dear Mr. McCarthy:
I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.
Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.
I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?
I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.
I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.
Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.
Kurt Vonnegut