something for the readers among my readers
Encountered via a passing mention in this week’s commute audiobook, David Hadju’s The Ten ¢ent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, an excerpt from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s commencement address at Dartmouth College in 1953:
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
In the midst of a book all about the wild-eyed witch hunts by The Powers that Be in the 1940s and 1950s directed at crime and horror comics of the era as root causes of juvenile delinquency and the downfall of civilization, it was nice to see that the man in the oval office managed to retain a level head.
