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."
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