I’ve been stirred from my normal torpor by a comment left on my old post about how my dad started writing editorials for the now-defunct St. Louis Star-Times by a grandson of the man who gave him the job. Here’s another of his editorials.
Mrs. Ellwood J. Turner, corresponding secretary of the Daughters of Colonial Wars, wants a social science textbook barred from Philadelphia schools on the grounds that the book aims to give children an “unbiased point of view” and is therefore “un-American.”
It is just such blind support of the Fatherland that has led’ to the suppression in Germany and Russia of all books save those approved by the government. It is just such a philosophy which destroys perspective and prepares the way for dictators demanding absolute obedience from slaveminded citizens. American history and government are not so ugly, as Mrs. Turner apparently believes, that children will become unpatriotic through studying them objectively.
Patriotism built on hokum is not worth its cost. It is an un-American sort of love for one’s country. How much better it is to junk the old adage, “My country right or wrong,” and train the youth of America instead to recognize wrong and work for its extinction!
I don’t have the precise date for this editorial. It was written sometime around 1940.
Wow, very nice! Could have been written today.
That’s the way it struck me, too. A lot of them are like that.
From here on out I’ll probably post them at the rate of about one per week.
BTW, that’s the way he spoke.
Dave –
Keep ’em coming.
Don
Mrs. Ellwood J. Turner is my Great-Grandmother. Her first name was Elizabeth. She must have been a terrible woman, as my mother would never let her see me as an infant. She died when I was about 2 in 1976. Her Husband Ellwood, was a member of the PA House of Representatives and elected Speaker in 1939.
Thanks for posting this interesting article.