Battle of the Books

Strife is familiar enough to West Virginia, a state with a history of chronic coal-mining wars. Early in September trouble erupted again. Pickets closed coal mines and truck terminals in the Charleston area and surrounding Kanawha County and in five neighboring counties, keeping 6,000 miners out of work. Beatings and shooting broke out on the picket lines. Construction on the Appalachian Power Co.'s massive new plant came to a halt. Protesters held mass meetings and disrupted public bus service in Charleston, and at the height of the furor a quarter of Kanawha County schoolchildren stayed out of their classrooms. What triggered the turmoil in West Virginia was not the usual labor dispute, but subject matter and language in public school textbooks that outraged the state's conservative Christian American Parents Association.

The dispute has been simmering since April, when Alice Moore, a member of the Kanawha County school board, objected to many books chosen for the fall term by the teachers' Textbook Selection Committee. Then the Rev. Marvin Horan of the Leewood Freewill Baptist Church took up the crusade, and opposition to the books spread among the county's strict fundamentalists. They took exception, among other things, to Sigmund Freud's Character and Anal Eroticism, selections by Pulitzer-prizewinning Poet Gwendolyn Brooks and Authors Dick Gregory and Eldridge Cleaver, and a profile of Poet Allen Ginsberg featuring a description of a prostitute, all of them for use as supplementary texts in high school English classes. Also attacked was a collection of myths that appeared to challenge the literal interpretation of the Bible, to be used in junior high school classes. Others found an E.E. Cummings poem with lines like the one referring to pubic hair as "shocking fuzz of your electric fur" too erotic. At an open meeting in June, jeers, shouts of "Communist!" and threats drowned out the few who spoke in favor of the books.

To quiet the opposition, the board removed the Cummings poem, the book by Freud and other particularly controversial texts. But, referring to a 1970 state regulation that requires all textbooks to reflect racial, religious and cultural pluralism, it kept the others.

Fragile Force. The book protesters, who represent scores of small, white fundamentalist congregations, rejected the compromise. Parents marched outside schools with signs reading, "When the books go out, the kids go back in." Early demonstrations were confined to shouting and picketing at schools and mines. But when violence flared during the second week of protest, County School Superintendent Dr. K.E. Underwood closed the schools while he negotiated a truce with the protest leaders. Two days later, Horan agreed to a 30-day moratorium on using the books and the appointment of an 18-member citizens' review committee. But when school resumed, nearly 1,000 shouting demonstrators, led by other preachers, submitted a list of new demands, including immediate removal of the offending books, Underwood's ouster and the reinstatement of workers dismissed for striking illegally.

At the end of the third week of the dispute, schools were in session under the protection of sheriffs deputies. Miners began trickling back to work after two pleas by United Mine Workers President Arnold Miller that they accept the compromise settlement. Earlier, coal operators had voiced suspicions that the book dispute was a trumped-up excuse to strike at a time when the union was bargaining for a new contract. Miller announced that a union committee would investigate the charge and would have the power to bring disciplinary action against any U.M.W. member found in violation of the union constitution. Officials calculated that each day the strike continues, the state loses 60,000 tons of coal production, $220,000 in miners' wages and $60,000 in taxes. But the children, their education disrupted, may be losing even more.

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