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Sectional Censorship. Chief affliction of U. S. textbook publishers is not greedy politicians or cutthroat competition, but censorship. Religious, racial, political, economic groups keep an eagle eye on schoolbooks, are quick to howl at what they consider irregularities. After Gary's School Superintendent William Wirt in 1934 charged that New Deal Brain Truster Rexford Guy Tugwell was a revolutionary plotter, Oak Park, Ill. and Kansas City dropped like a hot potato a book of which Professor Tugwell was coauthor, Our Economic Society and Its Problems, and its sales have fallen off one-third, according to Harcourt, Brace, its publishers. There are fighting words, especially in the South, that a textbook dare not use. To please North and South, publishers get out books on "evolution" but do not use that word, speak of "development." The Texas textbook committee once refused to approve a biography of Thomas A. Edison lest they be attacked by a Fundamentalist Baptist, Rev. J. Frank Norris, who hated and feared that atheist inventor. In Louisiana an Elson Reader was banned because of this Mother Goose couplet:
The gentleman rides gallop-a-trot, gallop-
a-trot;
The farmer rides hobbledehoy, hobble-
de-hoy.
The objectors cried this implied a farmer was no gentleman.
*Most sensational probe was that in Texas in 1926, during Governor "Ma'' Ferguson's term, when a school superintendent testified an American Book Co. salesman had asked him how he would like to have his $3,600 salary doubled. During the NRA textbook code hearings, however, a publisher estimated $500,000 was spent by the industry in an unspecified period for dinners for book buyers. Most agents and educators still see nothing wrong in an agent reporting openings for better jobs to teachers and officials to whom he hopes to sell books.