Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts introduced a bill called The Books Save Lives Act.

Ayanna Pressley: Let me make it plain, book bans are discriminatory and harmful and Congress must unite against them. As a child who endured sexual abuse, when I read Maya Angelou's, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it was the first time in my life I knew I was not alone and it helped me move forward. When I say the books save lives, I mean that.

Brooke Gladstone: It came on the back of a similar bill introduced to Congress last week by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and two Florida Democrats, Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost.

Maxwell Frost: I'm proud to introduce the Fight Book Bans Act legislation that will help our school boards and school districts overcome these relentless attacks on our civil rights and civil liberties and academic freedom.

Brooke Gladstone: His state is in the vanguard of those seeking to remove books that address American identity and inequality from school library shelves.

Speaker 5: Florida makes up 40% of book bans in the country last year according to Penn America. The recently released report shows a 33% increase in book bans this past school year compared to the year before.

Brooke Gladstone: The proposed legislation would provide funding to local school boards to help them fight the cascade of challenges to the considered choices of school Librarians. These challenges to make some books inaccessible is the predominant definition of book banning, but those advocating for the bans claim they're doing nothing of the sort.

Speaker 6: Conservative groups are on record saying that the term banned books is being tossed around too loosely saying that the number of books being taken off shelves is being exaggerated.

Tiffany Justice: No one is looking to ban books. The Moms for Liberty certainly isn't.

Brooke Gladstone: Tiffany Justice, a founder of Moms for Liberty, the most high profile of those conservative groups.

Tiffany Justice: You should write the book, you should print the book, you should publish the book, you should sell the book. The book should go to the public library in your community if taxpayers want to pay for it. We're not advocating for banning anything. Just because a book is printed doesn't mean that it belongs in a children's library.

Brooke Gladstone: Moms for Liberty has been framing their book-banning efforts as a fight for parental rights, a rallying cry that's gained traction among some conservative lawmakers and candidates.

Speaker 8: The conservative group Moms for Liberty held a summit in Philadelphia with speakers ranging from former President Donald Trump to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The parental rights group wants to flip school boards across the country and elect far-right candidates. When it launched during the Pandemic, Moms for Liberty was billed as a grassroots organization, but they've become a national player in Republican politics.

Brooke Gladstone: When put to voters at the polls about a month ago, what seemed like a winning issue for culture Warriors turned out to be not that.

Speaker 9: Moms for Liberty-backed candidates across Iowa and the country performed poorly in school board elections.

Speaker 10: All four candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty in one Minnesota district lost to Democrats. In Iowa, 12 of the 13 candidates backed by Moms for Liberty were wiped out. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won against at least 11 candidates aligned with the Moms for Liberty platform. In Virginia, three Moms for Liberty candidates lost by a lot.

Speaker 11: Book-banning is unpopular. Who knew?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, a historian who happens to follow what happens to conservative women's groups like Moms for Liberty would've known. There's a century-long track record.

Adam Laats: It's almost eerie how similar the claims are.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Laats is a professor of education and history at Binghamton University.

Adam Laats: From the 1920s on, there's been a call campaigning on the platform of parents' rights that parents should have the ultimate right, not just to approve of what goes on in public schools, but also to veto what could go on in public schools, and that's been Moms for Liberty repeating this long pattern.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's pursue the pattern and start with Alice Moore. She was a leader of one of these movements that bubbled up in the '70s in West Virginia.

Adam Laats: Her claim was that she was just a mom over and over, especially conservative women who have exerted a lot of influence like Phyllis Schlafly and Alice Moore. The Moms for Liberty, they say, "Hey, don't worry, we're just moms." Alice Moore took that line, although when she ran for school board to take charge of what she saw as a too-progressive school board in Charleston, West Virginia, she had been an engaged conservative activist for years.

Brooke Gladstone: Her platform was blocking books and fighting for parents' rights. What did she end up getting done?

Adam Laats: Well, Alice Moore was in a minority. She got outvoted to block the books. Other conservatives in the area said, "Well, if the books are going in, our kids are staying out." For about three weeks, maybe longer, it looked as if, and this is what the New York Times called it, Alice Moore had flipped the script for the entire nation in terms of what would go on in public schools, because she had taken on these national textbook publishers and groups like the Heritage Foundation, which was just starting at the time, called it, "Finally, what conservatives have been waiting for. We're taking schools back over."

Brooke Gladstone: Moore warned that she was fighting books that would force white kids into feeling guilt and anguish about America's racism. This was back in '74. She railed against public schools' alleged progressive agenda, destroying our children's patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority, confidence in their parents, déjà vu all over again. She was inspired by another activist 10 years prior, someone named Norma Gabler.

Adam Laats: Mel and Norma Gabler. Norma was the powerhouse, but again, she pretended she wasn't. She always referred to herself as just a housewife. She was a full-time activist with eight employees running these textbook inspections. She brought the school publishing industry to their knees by exploiting one of Texas's rules. Texas had a rule that they had a board to approve textbooks but had to be open to public comment and without limit of time. Norma did her homework, read textbooks that no one else had really read, and the textbook publishers sought meetings with Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas, and said, "What do we have to do to get your thumbs up on these books?"

Brooke Gladstone: What was she objecting to?

Adam Laats: She thought the textbooks had an anti-American slant.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Adam Laats: They said in 1961, their son was doing his homework and he said, "Hey, my textbook says that the people who wrote the Constitution didn't get rid of slavery because some of them were slave owners. They thought that their son and America's sons and daughters if they read the simple facts about America's founding, that would make them anti-American.

Brooke Gladstone: I know from my own past reporting that textbooks that are influenced by activists in Texas can change the books for the entire rest of the country because it's such a big market.

Adam Laats: It's not quite as true now, but certainly in the early 1960s when Norma Gabler was beginning her campaign, it was absolutely true. Texas and California together would determine what publishers would make available for the entire country because publishing technology was such that it was prohibitively expensive for them to make different books for different regions. Certainly, when Norma Gabler was able to sit at one committee meeting in Texas, one person was able to simply put her thumb on this chokehold of the entire American educational system.

Brooke Gladstone: In our backwards trek through the history of these movements, let's go to the 1920s. The Daughters of the American Revolution, they directly you say, inspired the advocacy of Norma Gabler. Their campaign was to keep America's public schools fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. Didn't they claim back then almost 200,000 members?

Adam Laats: Yes. In the '20s, the national leadership were fervent anti-communist activists, and they took their primary role as education.

Brooke Gladstone: I was struck by a leader of the group in the '20s, Anne Rogers Minor. She said that, "We want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question."

Adam Laats: Right. The Daughters of the American Revolution line was that the purpose for public schools was to take every single student of whatever background, put them through a very structured course in what they called patriotic education. You needed to actively teach kids that America was the best country on earth and it had always been the best country on earth and its system, capitalism, was the best on earth.

Brooke Gladstone: They were behind the book bannings between the '20s and the '50s. You wrote that the organization spiraled wildly out of control of its national leaders and led to its ultimate loss of power, and it had something to do with a baby squirrel.

Adam Laats: [laughs] It did. The Daughters for American Revolution didn't have a ton of control over local members, and one member from the Mississippi State Chapter infamously objected to a children's book that had been used for a while in Mississippi public schools about bunnies and kittens and squirrels. The squirrel story was what this Daughter of the American Revolution objected to. In the book, the squirrel asks for a nut and it gets a nut. The Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution insisted that this book be banned because it was sneakily teaching children to be communists that welfare was something to rely on instead of your own labor. It just became this laughing stock.

[laughter]

Yes. Brooke, for example, I don't know if you've ever read And Tango Makes Three.

Brooke Gladstone: No.

Adam Laats: It's a picture book for kids, two male penguins who have adopted a baby penguin at a zoo, but because it's two male penguins, this is one of the books that groups like Moms for Liberty insists is not safe for children. I think it's the same kind of thing where it's like, if the kids can't read adorable stories about baby animals, it causes the deflation of the brand of groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution or Moms for Liberty.

Brooke Gladstone: I just wonder how these groups initially so successful lose control.

Adam Laats: Pulling a fire alarm in a crowded theater it works, everyone runs, but it's dangerous. Once people say, "Well, why did you pull the fire alarm?" Alice Moore kept saying, "I'm not racist, but I don't like these books with Black authors." When she talked about the dangers of Black authors, the Ku Klux Klan shows up in West Virginia to support Alice Moore's mission and she didn't want their support. There were protests in the street and people were holding signs up, "We don't want those N-word books." You say you're not being racist, but the people who are supporting you are certainly racist.

Brooke Gladstone: It didn't end with signs though, did it?

Adam Laats: Oh, no, no. The dangers of saying that people are after your children can get out of hand really quickly. The school board building got bombed. The school board members got beat up during a meeting. The school superintendent, he moved his family out of town and he slept in a different place every night. He had received so many death threats. Two people were shot, one person was pushed down a set of stairs, elementary schools were firebombed. No one was hurt, but still to fire firebomb an elementary school, I don't think it's fair for the Alice Moore's or the Moms For Liberty to say, "Hey, we told people not to be violent." If you are calling teachers groomers, telling people that these textbooks are going to hurt children, it's predictable that people are going to react with violence.

Brooke Gladstone: You noted that McClan's local leader, he used the same words as Moore. He promised to return patriotism and Christianity to our schools, and she may have denounced it, but the damage was done. How does all this history help us better understand the trajectory of Moms for Liberty? What's a lesson here?

Adam Laats: It's difficult for people trying to build their brands or ambitious politicians or even journalists to resist this low hanging fruit of school politics because it's easy to get people motivated with these scare tactics.

Brooke Gladstone: Then what happens?

Adam Laats: You force feed this politics of fear into headlines and it terrifies people, but after people have enough time to evaluate these charges and to see what goes on in their actual schools that their kids actually attend, the charges are false. They pulled the fire alarm, but there wasn't a fire. Then what happens is you've discredited your organization.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, it's hard to control the message and it's hard to duck embarrassment.

Adam Laats: The rapid growth you have Moms for Liberty in different chapters doing things that humiliate the rest of the organization, like famously quoting Hitler on their newsletter.

Brooke Gladstone: What was Hitler saying that they felt the need to share with the rest of us?

Adam Laats: Something along the lines of whoever controls the children, controls the nation or something like that. They were trying to say, "Hey, we're fighting against ideas like this, against progressive control of our children."

Brooke Gladstone: Another way in which Moms for Liberties seems to echo the history of other groups is that it attracts bad actors. In the case of Moms for Liberty, they were backed up by ranks of Proud Boys.

Adam Laats: I see Proud Boys and other right wing militias showing up at school board meetings and exerting a very menacing presence, standing with sunglasses in the back of the room. When you look at the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan showing up to support Alice Moore, the Ku Klux Klan showing up to support The Daughters of the American Revolution in the '20s. Over and over again, it's irresponsible to say that people out there, including teachers, are trying to hurt children, and then when violent groups show up to stop the harm, it's not a legitimate position to say, "We didn't tell anyone to harm anyone."

Brooke Gladstone: Are you saying that the steam has gotten out of the "public school poses a danger to your child" movement?

Adam Laats: The steam will never go out of the idea that public school is a danger to your child. There's always going to be this low-hanging fruit in the culture wars to say, "The schools are dangerous, it's all connected. If you vote for me or if you click like and subscribe, I can explain it all to you in one word." That claim has for 100 years driven school politics, and it will continue to do so.

Brooke Gladstone: You say this is a chronic condition in the US. Why?

Adam Laats: It comes down for school politics, to a question of pronouns, not he and her, but we and they. The United States has always relegated these unsolved questions about who we are to schools and to teachers to answer because the rest of society doesn't have a clear answer.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean we don't have a defined sense of our collective identity?

Adam Laats: We don't. People like Alice Moore, Norma Gabler, The Daughters of the American Revolution, Moms for Liberty, they're able to say, schools have to tell America that America is the greatest. That's the job of schools.

Brooke Gladstone: Under the guidance of groups like Moms for Liberty, they have taken on the mantle of determining what our identity is.

Adam Laats: They have. They feel they deserve the right to do so. The rest of us, however, just don't agree.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, Adam.

Adam Laats: It's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for calling.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Laats, Professor of Education and History at Binghamton University, who recently wrote in Slate, Moms for Liberty is riding high. It should be aware of what comes next. Coming up, it's not really about the books, it's not really about the school boards, it's about something a whole lot bigger. This is On The Media.

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