Leaving Bad Impressions

The cover of the 2019 edition of Mackay’s classic, featuring the witch burning mania included in his 1841 study

In 1991, WC was trapped in a broken elevator in his office building with a woman who was obsessed with the alleged witchcraft in a series of Junior High School language arts books recently adopted by the local school district. “Do you know,” she told WC, “That if you photocopy the illustration at pages 119-120, and then hold it upside down in front of a mirror, you can see the Devil?” WC responded, “Yes, you probably can.”

The book burners are back, seeking to ban books from public and school libraries, making near-hysterical efforts to exclude books and topics from school curricula and threatening boycotts and worse of those who oppose their efforts. While lawyer war stories are fraught, WC offers this one because it shows how these things cycle through our national attention.

Back in 1988, as a part of the Fairbanks North Star School District’s regular review of its language arts curriculum, the District began looking for new language arts course materials. After an arduous, highly public evaluation and testing process, in 1989 the School District settled on the HBJ/Holt Impressions series. The books and other materials were purchased, and starting in the 1990-1991 school year, were used in language arts instruction across the School District.

Only then, after the process had been completed, did a small group of parents vehemently object to the use of the Impressions series. The series, the dissenters said, promoted witchcraft and satanism.

The School District bowed to these parents’ concerns and appointed a reevaluation committee. The committee made both a general review and considered specific objections that had been made. The reevaluation committee heard public testimony through three long public hearings and two deliberation sessions. And voted unanimously to retain the Impressions series. The Superintendent of Schools accepted the reevaluation committee’s recommendation.

The dissenting parents appealed to the School Board. There was no serious legal basis for the appeal; it was fundamentally an emotional issue for the dissenters. The night of the hearing Fairbanks was in the grip of a cold snap; the outdoor air temperature was about minus 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Bitterly cold. But the School Board meeting room was packed beyond capacity. The School Board took public testimony for nearly six hours from these concerned citizens that ranged from distraught to borderline insane.¹

The “star” of the dissenters’ case was a young man who described himself as a “recovering warlock” – he testified that “witches” were always female, that a male “witch” was a “warlock” – who identified the Impressions series as promoting satanism and witchcraft. When pressed for specific places where an Impressions book promoted satanism, the warlock witness couldn’t really describe any, but was passionate in his claims. With astonishing patience, the School Board heard out the “warlock’s” testimony and the irrational, unsubstantiated claims of a crowd of distraught parents. It was an appalling and embarrassing display of mass hysteria. Who knew there was that much crazy in Fairbanks?

At the end of those six hours, the School Board did the only thing it could logically and legally do: the board members voted unanimously to accept the Superintendent’s recommendations and retain the Impressions series.

And, weirdly, that was it. There were no recall attempts against the school board members. Very few parents elected to have their kids excused from using the Impressions materials. The number of home-schooled kids didn’t noticeably increase. It was as if some accumulated bubble of craziness had been popped.

Back in undergraduate school, in a class on Persuasion, WC was made to read Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackay’s book explores a series of case studies in manias that have afflicted Western civilization across the centuries, from the South Sea Bubble and Tulipmania to the Crusades and the Witch Mania. The common threads present in those manias were all on full display in the Impressions fight: monomania, will to believe, uncritical thinking and selective perception.

Five years later, when the language arts curriculum came up for review, the School District administration braced for another fight. It didn’t happen. New books were selected without a fuss, and certainly without mention of witchcraft or satanism.

At some point, the bubble of Trumpism is going to similarly pop. WC just hopes the Republic can survive in the meantime.

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¹ WC owes a vote of thanks to his law partner, LRV, who is a deacon in an Anchorage Episcopal church. LRV attended for WC, because an atheist wouldn’t have helped the client’s case. Had LRV known in advance the temperature inside and outside, he might have declined.