Several days after posting “Presidents and Banned Books, I came across an extended quotation from Dwight Eisenhower’s address at Dartmouth in 1953:
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend
[y]our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. . . .
“We have got to fight [communism] with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. 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’re accessible to others is unquestioned, or it’s not America.”
-President Dwight D. Eisenhower
from a commencement address at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953.
