Books Banned on Political Grounds Dee Brown. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. 1970. Challenged in Wisconsin in the 1970s as being “slanted” and “un-American.” John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. 1939. Banned for language that was profane, vulgar and obscene, taking God’s name in vain, and reference to sex. Consistently challenged since being published. Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726 (England); 1809 (United States) “Denounced on all sides as wicked and obscene.” Jonathan Swift was seen as mocking religion. William Steig. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. 1969. In 1969 it was awarded the Caldecott Medal for the best illustrated children’s book of 1969 and in 1971 there was a national campaign to remove the book from school and public libraries. Reasons cited for the challenge stemmed from the insulting significance of “pig” as applied to a law officer. Victor Hugo. Les Miserables. 1862. Listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic Church from 1864 until 1959. Condemned for being anti-clerical. Frequently challenged for moral reasons, it was burned in 1954 in Guatemala as a “subversive” book. Abba Eban. My People, The Story of the Jews. 1968. In 1983 this was one of 49 books barred from the Moscow International Book Fair including Keeping Faith: Memories of a President by Jimmy Carter. Nat Hentoff. The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. 1982. In 1990 parents in Albemarle County Virginia challenged the book because of the approach to teaching the first amendment and the challenge to authority. William Lederer. The Ugly American. 1958. Objected to by Senator Fullbright in 1959 as portraying Americans overseas as “boobs or worse.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Banned in the south because it was potentially dangerous to the system of slavery. Others were offended by the idea of equality. It was also censored for undermining religious ideals. George Orwell. Animal Farm. 1945 (England); 1946 (United States). Animal Farm has been one of the most often censored books citing that Orwell was a communist, and objections to the works “masses will revolt.” Peter Matthiessen. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. 1983. This book covers the Wounded Knee incident of 1973 and the Oglala shoot-out of 1975 when the Lakota rebelled against the treatment they had been receiving from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI. The governor of South Dakota, William J. Janklow, charged the book was libelous and derogatory. He called bookstores and asked them to remove it from their shelves. The governor and an FBI agent went to court for libel and the bookstores sued over the interference of the governor. The bookstore attorneys argued that the courts “had never required booksellers to investigate the accuracy of the books they sell”. Janklow and the FBI cases were dismissed. The judge ruled that to not allow people to criticize the government was a violation of the first amendment.