As further evidence the 1950s were not as easy-going and tolerant as has often been described. A goodly amount of hotly contested issues were very much a part of American society during that decade. One of those issues was one of the censoring of books in schools. This report, broadcast on December 7, 1959 as part of KABC-TV News, reported by Lew Irwin shed some light on what was getting to be a rather common issue in the world of higher education throughout the 1950s, coming to a head in the early 1960s.
The smut charge against some of the-literary-works of Walt Whitman and Ezra Round, two of ‘Americas greatest poets, is in for another airing. The Board of Education yesterday ordered Supt. Ellis Farvia to review and report back to them on an alleged banning of a book at Venice High School “But Jarvis says the book is not banned and never has been. The book in question was An Anthology of American Verse containing controversial poems by Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. School Principal Walter Larsh took the book out of circulation after Mrs. Theodore Herin of 824 Broadway in Venice, complained it ‘was a filthy book unfit for teenagers’. She was backed in her action, by A. S. Roberts, president of the Venice Civic Union, and two unnamed Baptist ministers. It was a clear case of censorship,” Wilbur Jerger told the board, Jerger, president of the Pacific Park Democratic Club, led A protest movement in the community to have the book reinstated.
Jerger asked again yesterday to reinstate the book and make it clear he wont go along with book banning. The board voted unanimously for the reviews by Principal Larsh said in statement issued this day that the book was confiscated because the students bought it for class use in violation of the education code. He said the poems objected to by Mrs. Herin were not included in class assignments and that the question of suitability did not enter into the matter.
The action of Principal Waiter Larsh of Venice High School In banning The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse” from an 11th grade English classroom reverberated among teachers. The book, available at drugstores and newsstands for 50 cents was withdrawn on the complaint of Mrs. Theodore Herin, who was backed, she said, by two Venice ministers and the head of a civic organization. She contended three poems by Walt Whitman and one by Ezra Pound in it were unfit for 11th graders. Connoisseurs in the realm of censorship might be interested in the fact that there are more than 500 poems in the collection, arranged in alphabetical order according to author, and unless a person knew what he was looking for he would do considerable reading before getting to Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman. Incidentally, the four poems Mrs. Herin considered obscene were not among the 50 assigned by the teacher, Mrs. Florence Russell.
A UCLA Professor was quoted as saying, “Im stunned and delighted by the thought that a student could be suspected of reading beyond an assignment. But now a teacher doing a decent job of teaching American literature is under fire and a first class anthology has lost the approval of a high school principal.
And so it went in December of 1959.
