The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962 by Allan O. Kownslar

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962 by Allan O. Kownslar Angela Valenzuela The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962. By Allan O. Kownslar. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. 338. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.) The focus of this important text by Allan O. Kownslar is the momentous debate over social studies textbooks that took place in Texas from 1961 to 1962. Unprecedented, the fiery exchange took place before the Texas State Textbook Committee, the State Board of Education (SBOE), and the Fifty-seventh Texas Legislature's House Textbook Investigating Committee over fifteen texts under consideration for adoption by the SBOE. The argument pitted conservatives who staunchly opposed adoption against liberals, who provided unequivocal support. Making use of numerous resources, including newspaper clippings and editorials, archival data, and transcripts of public testimonies that were delivered throughout the battle, Kownslar successfully resurrects an important story that reveals deep ideological contours in Texas politics that continue to reverberate. His purpose is to lay bare a treasure trove of evidence for an audience of "serious readers who wish to examine objectively the various sides of this textbook issue" (5). I commend Kownslar for helping to describe the foundation for Texas's subsequent textbook and curriculum battles, including the monumental social studies standards debate in 2010 and a more recent textbook battle over the place of Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies in the state curriculum that played out on televisions in living rooms throughout the country. In Kownslar's book, conservatives largely consisted of organizations like Texans for America, the Minute Women, the Texas Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the John Birch Society. The best-known figures to emerge in this movement were Mel and Norma Gabler, whose nonprofit interest group, Educational Research Analysts, claimed to find errors, secular humanism, and censorship in textbooks and achieved national and international celebrity as a result. At the other end of the spectrum were high-profile liberals like attorney Maury Maverick Jr., folklorist J. Frank Dobie, historian Paul F. Boller, and Bexar County State Representative John C. Alaniz. Conservatives sought to preserve a world view critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal, school integration, civil rights, and educator John Dewey's movement to make the curriculum relevant to children's lives through interdisciplinary approaches. Quick to call unpatriotic those who disagreed, conservatives took issue with texts that provided any treatment or mention of communism or required students, in a point-counterpoint fashion, to compare it to America's form of government. Not only did conservatives believe that students' minds were impressionable and ill-equipped for critical thinking, they also believed [End Page 239] such content could sway students toward communist or socialist ideals. They further presumed that teachers' lack of expertise on communism was an insurmountable hindrance, making the subject unviable as K–12 curriculum. Fearful of societal decay, the Gablers, in particular, wanted texts that extolled the virtues of the American, nuclear family in conventional, patriarchal terms, while they opposed pay equity, women's rights, homosexuality, and gay marriage. Conservatives also targeted libraries with an attempt to ban not only nationally recognized writers like William Faulkner, Carl Sandberg, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, and Willa Cather and the scientist Albert Einstein, but also Texas authors like Dobie and Boller. Conservatives called for special emphasis being paid in history textbooks to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which asserted rights for the people and the states, and opposed placing educational emphasis on the United Nations, which they considered unduly influenced by the Soviet Union. In contrast, liberals sought to incorporate critical histories, addressing "the role of the Muckrakers or the Progressive era, massive unemployment during the Great Depression, [and] the denial of rights to racial minorities" (89). Maury Maverick Jr. meanwhile asserted that the state must not adopt the conservatives' "censorship tactics of a Fascist Spain or a Communist Russia" (138). All of the debated textbooks were ultimately adopted by the State Board of Education. The battle nevertheless brought to light a deep clash of values between those fearful of democracy, equating it to "mob rule" (88...