Despite all the ink that’s been spilled over Salman Rushdie’s sensational book, The Satanic Verses, there is another First Amendment issue that hasn’t been addressed. That’s the issue raised by the decision of the largest bookselling chains in the United States, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton (plus its Barnes & Noble subsidiary), to pull the book off their shelves, deciding that devotion to free speech was less important than the safety of their employees.
After a week of apparently not knowing how to respond to the unprecedented death sentence announced by the Ayatollah Khomeini against the offending novelist, leading authors and authors’ organizations got their act together and denounced the cowardice of the book chains for caving in to terrorist threats. The booksellers were put on the defensive and then began to back away from their precipitous decision.
Meanwhile, most independent and locally-owned bookstores did not ban the book. They stuck to their guns and stood tall for free speech.
The really frightening part about all this is not the outrageous behavior of the Ayatollah. (Everybody knows he is a madman and an instigator of terrorism all over the world.) He alone does not have the power to interfere with free speech in America.
But the U.S. bookselling chains do. In the midst of the Rushdie incident we suddenly discovered that two book chains control about 30 percent of all book sales in the United States, and their joint action can substantially interfere with free speech in America.
Waldenbooks and B. Dalton/Barnes & Noble each have about 1,200 bookstores, including one in nearly every shopping mall. But there is as little difference in content among theem as there is between a Burger King “Whopper” and a McDonald’s “Big Mac.”
Up until a few years ago, bookselling in America was in the hands of thousands of locally-owned bookstores. No power on earth could have ordered 30 percent of them NOT to sell a book. If a handful had refused to stock a particular book, that would have been an insignificant ripple on the sea of printed materials in America.
Now we have had an ominous demonstration of how two executives at the top can, by the stroke of a pen, make a decision about book selection and sales that can bar a book from a vast segment of the reading American public.
It makes us wonder what other books have NOT been sold by the big bookselling chains. Censorship is not just a matter of pulling books off the shelves – it can be done more skillfully and silently by simply not putting them on the shelves in the first place, a sort of preemptive censorship.
It is common knowledge, for example, that books which run counter to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy are seldom for sale in bookstores or displayed on their racks. One particularly egregious example of preemptive censorship in the last decade is the deep-sixing of books that oppose or criticize the dogmas of feminism. Ask some of the writers who have challenged feminism, such as George Gilder, Michael Levin, or Nicholas Davidson.
When the manufacturing of automobiles settled down to three big companies instead of a dozen smaller ones, no harm was done to the consumer. Even if the big three decided not to sell a certain type of car, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.
But bookselling is different because deciding not to sell a certain book, or books that express a certain ideology, can effectively keep those ideas out of the stream of knowledge.
Over the same period of time that bookselling has become dominated by three big chains, a similar consolidation has taken place in the book publishing industry. Now, if you aren’t one of the handful of major publishers selling many titles to the big bookseller chains, you have small chance of getting “shelf space” or having your textbooks bought by the public schools.
We see this same type of control from the top in television. While we have hundreds of TV stations, most national news originates with the three network newscasts, and it is terribly easy for them to engage in thought control over issues by the way they select some news items and preemptively censor out others.
In education, we have always proudly proclaimed that we revere “local control of schools.” This must be maintained so that thousands of independently-controlled schools will compete with eeach other and cumulatively sustain freedom. The danger of national thought control is why we absolutely cannot permit the Federal Government to write or dictate curriculum, to set achievement standards, or to control national certification of teachers.
