Leftist Writing Expunged From The Norton Reader Between 1973 and 1980

I think there will eventually be a Part 2 of this post, and perhaps a part 3, 4 and 5 as well. I have 4 copies of The Norton Reader, obtained over the years at thrift stores or lawn sales or giveaways. I have the 2nd and 10th unabridged editions, published in 1969 and 2000, and the 3rd and 5th Shorter Editions, published in 1973 and 1980. I've spent a lot of time thumbing through the 5th Edition, Shorter, and being disappointed. I've spent the time because in some important ways -- the thinness and strength of the paper of the pages, the size and heft of the volume -- it's Goldilocks Just Right for me, while in a more important way -- content -- it's very disappointing, very heavy on right-wing bullshit.

I had to come here right away and write this post because today I finally got around to checking on the changes between the 3rd and 5th Shorter Editions, and almost right away I saw that Eldridge Cleaver (American Black revolutionary), Adrienne Rich (feminist), Huey Newton (American Black revolutionary, one of the founders of the Black Panthers), Simone Weil (critic of the traditional Catholic Church), Dee Brown (historian of US crimes against Native Americans) and George Jackson (American Black revolutionary) are in the 3rd and not the 5th. Some time between 1973 and 1980, someone saw to it that these six writers were removed from the Shorter Edition, while the 5th edition has some of the aforementioned right-wing nonsense which is not in the 3rd, like Ben Stein asking, "Whatever Happened to Small-Town America?" (Can you imagine, now, in 2016, someone claiming in 1980 that small-town America had disappeared, or claiming, as Stein does, that no travelers were ever fleeced in America's small towns, as depicted in that Leftist plot, the TV show "The Rockford Files"?) and some men's-rights bullshit from Herb Goldberg.

I just betcha I'm gonna find some further evidence of a lurch to the Right between 1973 and 1980 in the Norton Reader, 5th Edition, Shorter, read by who knows how many American schoolchildren. (That's what makes this historically significant: the huge numbers of students who have read selections from the various editions of the Norton Reader.) I mean, the above instances took me about 5 minutes to spot. Stay tuned. Finding more examples of this shift to the right, and then assessing whether things moved back Leftward by 2000, may turn out to be much easier than finding out just exactly who decided to make these changes and why. But you know me -- I'll try.

Sagan And Bronowski On Animal Intelligence

In the Norton Reader, 5th edition, shorter, Carl Sagan's piece "The Abstractions of Beasts" is separated by only a single page containing some insignificant scribbles by Henry David Thoreau from "The Reach of Imagination" by Jacob Bronowski. The title of Sagan's piece is explained in its first sentence:

"Beasts abstract not,” announced John Locke, expressing mankind’s prevailing opinion throughout recorded history.

(It may have prevailed somewhat less in some other cultures than in Western Civilization but anyway) Sagan then goes on to convincingly disagree with this prevailing opinion. Perhaps not quite as uniformly prevailing now as when Sagan's book The Dragons of Eden, containing this piece, was published in 1977. The studies of Jane Goodall and the sign language skills of several apes which Sagan describes in the piece have in the meantime become extremely famous.

To my surprise, Brownowski's piece, published in American Scholar in 1967, does not deviate at all from the prevailing opinion that human imagination is special and different from anything possessed by any other species. Sagan describes the shortcomings in studies which had agreed with the prevailing opinion, concluding that human brains contain something unique, such as when researchers raised a human and a chimpanzee infant together, and actually thought that if the chimp were as smart as the humans, it would speak at around the same age as the human. Sagan gives due credit to Beatrice and Robert Gardner for pointing out that these studies ignored the differences between human and chimpanzee pharynxes and larynxes. As well as mentioning that the chimp, overcoming enormous physical difficulty, actually could say "Mama," "Papa" and "cup," which was news to me and which I find amazing.

Perhaps if Bronowski had lived long enough to read Sagan's piece he would have changed his mind about a few things. As it is, his piece records the failure of some experiments to demonstrate animal intelligence, and he asks, "Where is it that the animal falls short?" Unlike Sagan, he appears to have given no consideration to the possibility that it was the experiments which fell short in finding what intelligence was there in the beasts. In a piece entitled "The Reach of Imagination," his own imagination ironically does not reach far enough to question whether the experiments were sufficiently well conceived and performed to do justice to whatever intelligence the tested animals might have had.

You've Got Less Than 700 Pages --

-- to contain your selection of the most exemplary expository prose ever written, to be published in 1980 and to represent in a way the erudition of the entire world up until then -- and you've chosen to include 5 pieces by Thurber.

No Nietzsche. No Marx or Santayana. No Bellow, Russell, Aristotle, Confucius, Homer, Livy, Bollinger, Kant, Voltaire, Cervantes, no Manns, neither Thomas nor Heinrich nor Klaus nor Erika nor Golo, no Twain [PS, 30. January 2016: I'm very pleased to say that I was mistaken: Mark Twain, cleverly disguised under the name "Samuel L Clemens," DOES in fact appear in the Norton Reader, 5th edition, shorter, dispensing some delightful "Advice to Youth" on pp 436-438.] or either of the James boys, not a single Adams or Lincoln, no Freud, Wittgenstein, Gibbon, Hume, Rousseau, Heidegger, Runciman, Rabelais, Grimmelshausen nor Garcia Marquez, because you felt it necessary to include James Thurber

Five.

Times.

No. It won't do, Norton Reader, 5th edition, shorter!

This will not stand!

No Thucydides! None!

Yeah, Thurber's good.

Kinda.