“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book….”
These remarks by President Dwight David Eisenhower at the Dartmouth College commencement exercises in Hanover, New Hampshire on June 14, 1953 were well received by the graduating seniors and the faculty. Eisenhower, by no means a political radical, knew full well the horrors of authoritarian regimes that banned the free exchange of ideas.
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Following his graduation from West Point, he rose to the rank of five star general. He ultimately fought fascism as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II.
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He had seen firsthand the prophetic reality of words penned by German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine in 1821: “It was just the prelude…Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.”
Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and public and school libraries and confiscated books they deemed “un-German.” The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the un-German Spirit.”
On May 10, 1933, the students — along with Nazi leaders — set ablaze over 25,000 volumes in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, “fired” up the crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers near the Berlin Opera House by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state,” and, “This is the end of Jewish intellectualism.”
Though most of the books torched that night were written by Jews, of the 200 authors, others included liberals, communists, and political dissenters. Targeted books included the works of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, bisexual writer Thomas Mann, German playwright Bertolt Brecht, physicist Albert Einstein, revolutionary Karl Marx, and many others including, yes, also German romantic poet Heinrich Heine.
Preceding this event by a mere four days, Nazi storm troopers invaded, ransacked, and padlocked The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexuality researcher.
The Institute conducted early sexuality and gender research, the precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States. Storm troopers carried away and torched thousands of volumes of books and research documents calling the institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
During their rampage of Europe, Nazis burned an estimated 100 million books between 1933 and 1945 in territories occupied by Germany.
At Dartmouth College that day in 1953, President Eisenhower continued his commencement address by asking the graduates to “not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America,” he reminded the gathering. “And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”
Current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could learn much from the great General Eisenhower in his defense of the diversity of the American experience and the American people’s opposition to the tyranny of authoritarianism.
Though Hegseth may not have ordered the literal burning of books, he has undertaken the cleansing of books that fall under his definition of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library including Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood; the classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by the great Maya Angelou; Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace, by Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Bob Filipczak; Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by (transgender author) Jennifer Boylan, and approximately 400 others.
Hegseth has been removing books about the Holocaust, the Black experience, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others in the United States. His actions violate the core of the academy’s professed purpose, which is to produce “professional officers of competence, character, and compassion in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.”
Prior to Hegseth’s arrival at the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), officials removed items from a display honoring female Jewish graduates. A display case located in the academy’s Jewish chapel previously held a collection of photos and possessions from female Jewish graduates of the academy, including a bronze star, military cap and insignias, as well as USNA graduation photos and tours in Iraq.
The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland was established on October 10, 1845 during the tenure of George Bancroft as Secretary of the Navy. It is the second oldest of the five U.S. service academies.
It educates midshipmen for service in the officer corps of the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps. Aside from courses related to the military, the school serves as a liberal arts institution for the broad education of its students.
The academy course listings include, among many others, one titled “Critical Conversations About Literature Renaissance Mind” and another called “American Literature, 1945-Present.” Graduates go on to serve on bases across the world to safeguard and promote U.S. values.
Since being sworn into his current position as defense secretary, in addition to his sweeping order to ban books, Hegseth has also either demoted or fired successful and highly qualified senior officers of color and women.
Maybe if he spent less time and effort in targeting and eliminating anything he considers under the general rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and if he dedicated more time to actually defending the country from real threats to its security, maybe he would not have fallen into the so-called “Signalgate” scandal, which involved a group of national security officials, including Hegseth, over a chat on the Signal messaging system about an imminent military operation against the Houthis in Yemen.
Just a suggestion.
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