Book Banning Spreads to the US Military
Will efforts to curb it be successful?
Censorship has a new Bad Conduct Medal.
News of book bans has been legion in the last few years. School libraries, college libraries, and county public libraries have grappled with the relentless efforts of conservative actors to purge collections, control programs, and hold librarians accountable. In some cases, entire libraries have been shut down.
Now the battle has moved to a different front: US military academies. On May 9, the Pentagon ordered West Point, as well as the Naval, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine Academies, to identify materials from their libraries concerning race, gender, and other “divisive” ideas that could be considered “incompatible with the department’s core mission.” Academy officials must then “appropriately sequester those materials,” review them, and “determine an appropriate ultimate disposal.”
Assisting in this effort will be a newly created Academic Libraries Committee “comprised of knowledgeable leaders, educators, and library professionals” from across the Department of Defense. The order was communicated by a memo signed by Timothy Dill, acting deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. It is the most aggressive effort so far to rid the military of diversity and equity programs, policies, and materials.
How did we get here?
Four months ago, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the president signed three executive orders:
- Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (EO 14168),
- Restoring America’s Fighting Force (EO 14185), and
- Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling (EO 14190).
On January 29, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum ordering the creation of a task force to oversee the elimination of “any program, element, or initiative that was established to promote divisive concepts . . . or gender ideology.”
Within a week, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), a system of schools that serves over sixty-seven thousand children of active duty military and DoD civilian families, began revising its operations. Books were removed from libraries, flyers disappeared from bulletin boards, and student organizations such as the Pride club were disbanded. At one school, a portrait of Michelle Obama was taken down.
A joint statement from the American Library Association and the American Association of School Librarians condemned these acts, arguing that they “erase history and silence the voices of Americans whose lives reflect the diversity of our nation.”
Soon, the liquidation spread to military academies, starting with the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, which removed 381 books from its library that focused on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Two weeks later, the army and air force libraries were told to do the same. (Many of the books have since been returned to the shelves.)
The American Historical Association denounced the removals, insisting that they “deny students the opportunity to develop the very skills officers need if they are to learn from the past and the respect not only for their colleagues in the military but for all people with whom they interact as representatives of our nation.” In a New York Times essay, Graham Parsons, a professor of philosophy, announced his resignation from West Point, citing the school’s capitulation to the Trump administration’s “brazen demands to indoctrinate, not educate.”
This isn’t the first time that the US military has suppressed literature. During World War I, ALA’s Committee on Mobilization and War Service Plans, a group that worked with the War Department to provide books and periodicals to soldiers at home and overseas, sent lists of banned books — i.e., books that were pacifist, pro-German, or pro-socialist — to military camp librarians, warning them to stay away from such materials.
During World War II, the War Department targeted Armed Services Editions — pocket-sized paperbacks designed for service personnel in the field — under the Soldier Voting Law, which made it unlawful for such books to feature “political argument or political propaganda of any kind.” One book was banned because it included a portrait of President Franklin Roosevelt.
A number of President Trump’s orders and initiatives have been challenged in court, including these military book bans. On April 15, the ACLU sued the DoDEA on behalf of twelve students who claim that their schools have
systematically removed books, altered curricula, and canceled events that the government has accused of promoting “gender ideology” or “divisive equity ideology.” This has included materials about slavery, Native American history, LGBTQ identities and history, and preventing sexual harassment and abuse, as well as portions of the Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology curriculum.
Over two hundred books were removed, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and works by book ban mainstays Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Kurt Vonnegut. The suit argues that, by losing access to these materials, the students’ First Amendment right to receive information is being harmed.
American soldiers spend every minute of every day fighting for our freedom. That their own intellectual freedom, as well as that of their families, would sustain heavy fire is a regrettable irony.
Here’s hoping those freedoms are restored, and soon.
Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries.
#librarymarketers: Enjoy this story? Want to use it for your library newsletter, blog, or social media? This article is published under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International and is free to edit and use with attribution. Please cite EveryLibrary on medium.com/everylibrary.
This work by EveryLibrary is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
