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Spectator's Journal
A Conservative Free Zone
Don’t look for conservative books in the Library of Congress’s summer book exhibit.
“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size,” Barry Goldwater explained in 1960s Conscience of a Conservative. “I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”
The Arizona senator dreamed that such rhetoric would become a staple of stump speeches. And it has. The Conscience of a Conservative became not only a most unlikely bestselling political book — Shepherdsville, Kentucky isn’t exactly the capital of publishing — but it transformed a party, bequeathed one of the 20th century’s most consequential presidencies, and animates a political movement more than a half-century later. It’s hard to imagine the Reagan presidency, the Contract with America congressional takeover, or even the Tea Party without Goldwater’s slim volume.
Yet The Conscience of a Conservative failed to make the cut of the Library of Congress’s “Books That Shaped America.” In fact, no explicitly conservative book — not Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, or Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind — did.
Congress may be divided between a Republican House and Democrat Senate. The Library of Congress boasts liberal uniformity.
The 88 highlighted books, exhibited at the Jefferson Building this summer, includes Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, and W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk.
The exhibit features more Communists than conservatives. About as close as the compilers get to throwing conservatives a bone is Atlas Shrugged, a book loved by conservatives written by an author who despised them.
One fully gleans that this is a book list by people who don’t read them when encountering the bizarre inclusion of The Words of Cesar Chavez, a posthumous collection of speeches so utterly lacking in influence that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry despite being the sole book on the list published after the web encyclopedia’s launch. On the other hand, its three Amazon reviewers uniformly awarded it five stars — so the Library of Congress isn’t alone in its starry-eyed assessment.
Perhaps the most preposterous inclusion is Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s quackifesto Family Limitation, which is neither a book nor, thankfully, very influential. The 1914 pamphlet suggests the anti-malarial medicine quinine, which in large quantities can cause uterine paralysis, to prevent pregnancy. Elsewhere, Family Limitation prescribes laxatives as a method of birth control: “A very good laxative (though it is a patent medicine) is Beecham Pills. Two of these taken night and morning, four days before menstruation, will give a good cleansing of the bowels, and assist with the menstrual flow.”
Like so many with laxatives on the brain, Margaret Sanger was full of, well, you know. Women heeding her advice got full of babies.
The utterly unreadable Upton Sinclair makes the list with The Jungle. The activist-author explained in Appeal to Reason, which first serialized The Jungle in 1905, that he had written a “Socialist novel” to show “the workers their way of deliverance.” Therein, the American dream is shown as a nightmare. Unforgettably, a worker falls into a lard vat to become another’s breakfast. The propagandist claimed this aspect of his fiction for fact. “Naturally, this was a hard matter to prove,” he later maintained, “since in each case the families had been paid off and shipped off to other parts of the world.”
True believers truly believed.
Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male certainly shaped America. The Indiana University zoologist bedded interview subjects, paid a friend to pretend to be his statistician, and demanded sexual access to his fellow researchers. Kinsey relied on pedophiles to compile data on small children, who, Kinsey assured readers, experienced sexual climax through a “loss of color,” “violent cries,” an “abundance of tears,” and other manifestations of terror rather than ecstasy. Prison inmates constituted about a quarter of the study’s sample group, dramatically skewing the results to portray the abnormal as the norm.
Kinsey showed Americans a picture of his perversions and told them that they were looking in the mirror.
The “Books That Shaped America” misshapes America. The Library of Congress imagines a center-right nation distinct for such cultural markers as faith and free enterprise as an aggressively ideological crusader state on par with Jacobin France.
It’s not just that the politicized exhibit excludes worthy conservative books. The race-class-gender-sexuality obsessed compilation continually mistakes journalism for literature. The nonfiction showcased leans heavily toward “art as a weapon” and away from “art for art’s sake.”
About the Author
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America. He blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (14) | Leave a comment
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Pecos Pete| 7.6.12 @ 7:00AM
Betcha "Atlas Shrugged" didn't make the list.
callmeishmael| 7.6.12 @ 11:57AM
it helps when you actually read the article
Gr0w1er601| 7.6.12 @ 10:00AM
So much for (dare I mention it) 'diversity' of word and thought.
PsychoDad| 8.6.12 @ 1:34PM
Diversity? Diversity? The entire spectrum of thought is there, from left to far left, what more could you want?
Bill84728| 7.6.12 @ 11:01AM
And the Band Played On? Unsafe at Any Speed? Who reads those books? How many people read them back when they were first published?
Petronius| 7.6.12 @ 11:04AM
The Librarian of Congress chose books that shaped our elite rulers. If you want to know why, there's a wonderful book which explains them. Read The Great Roob Revolution, by Roger Price; Random House 1970. I shouldn't have to keep telling all y'all.
THKrupp| 7.6.12 @ 11:27AM
I completely disagree. This list contains most of the renowned writers from the USA. Most of these books or people have had a profound impact on major portions of the American populus. Even if you disagree with the premise in The Jungle, you cannot dispute that the book that brought us food safety inspections has not had an impact. Heres a few of the more conservative entries that Mr Flynn forgot to post:
Benjamin Franklin, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity"
Benjamin Franklin, "Poor Richard Improved" (1758) and "The Way to Wealth"
Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" (1776)
Noah Webster, "A Grammatical Institute of the English Language" (1783)
"The Federalist" (1787)
"A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible" (1788)
Benjamin Franklin, "The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D." (1793)
"New England Primer" (1803)
William Holmes McGuffey, "McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer" (1836)
Henry David Thoreau, "Walden;" or, "Life in the Woods" (1854)
Horatio Alger Jr., "Mark, the Match Boy" (1869)
William James, "Pragmatism" (1907)
Zane Grey, "Riders of the Purple Sage" (1912)
Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (1936)
"Alcoholics Anonymous" (1939)
Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957)
Mike G| 7.6.12 @ 11:49AM
"Yet The Conscience of a Conservative failed to make the cut of the Library of Congress's "Books That Shaped America." In fact, no explicitly conservative book -- not Whittaker Chambers' Witness, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, or Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind -- did."
I don't understand how Mr. Flynn can claim this issue is politicized. The list is "Books That Shaped America". Why would any thinking person include a conservative title in a list of books that helped shape today's America? When was the last time the federal government shrank? Certainly not in the four decades since I cast my first vote. The country has been, lamentably, moving left for those four decades and longer. Maybe that book can be included in such a list after the next American Revolution. I don't think it will qualify for such a list in my lifetime.
JD| 7.6.12 @ 12:28PM
Exactly right, except that it's been more than four decades.
RCV| 7.6.12 @ 1:37PM
This column is utter nonsense. Review the list. The overwhelming majority of books are neither liberal nor conservative, but cultural classics - Charlotte's Web, Little Women, Scarlet Letter, The Joy of Cooking, Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Lewis and Clark's Journey.
But in addition to Atlas Shrugged, the list includes Tom Paine's Common Sense, The Federalist, the Horatio Alger stories and Bradbury's Farenheit 451.
It's a well-thought out and broad-based list. Sorry that Mr. Flynn's favorites weren't there.
Skippy| 7.6.12 @ 5:09PM
As far as political/social commentary, Daniel is correct, judging by the books his detractors here are citing.
Al Adab| 7.6.12 @ 7:49PM
For whatever reason we may rightly note that with only a few exceptions only those works which shaped LeftThink are included. Undoubtedly because LeftThink is the predominate political and social view of today the books listed are influential.
BTW Atlas is not Conservative in the Movement sense and while it may be so in its economics, its morals are libertarian and its proposal, not unlike Plato, is totalitarian.
Von Mises Jr| 7.7.12 @ 9:06AM
This is just another example of the Orwellian "Ministry of Information."
Today's "Winston Smith" is shredding history by weeding out great works that the intellectuals disagree with just as Winston sent old news that conflicted with today's news down the "Memory Hole."
For shits and giggles, search Bob Bea and the Gulf Oil Drilling Report from two years ago. The report was fraudulently revised by Salazar and the EPA to conclude the opposite of the scientist conclusion in order to impose a drilling ban. But if you search the web, you might conclude it was one of those "nothing to see here" if you can discern anything from the query.
Petronius| 7.7.12 @ 11:45AM
We know that the kids aren't reading much of anything as their heads are never away from their iwhatevers. There is a slight advantage to Silent Spring getting trumped by Angry Birds.