Long before the film Fahrenheit 451, starring Michael B. Jordan, was made in 2018 (the original came out in 1966), Ballentine Books published Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction novel, which became one of the most debated books in American history. The themes of the book had found their way into earlier short stories by Bradbury, including Bright Phoenix and The Pedestrian. Bright Phoenix involved a librarian who ran afoul of the “Chief Censor.” The Chief Censor reminds me of a certain Florida Governor.
Ray Bradbury has acknowledged multiple influences, including book burning in Nazi Germany, ideological repression in the Soviet Union, and McCarthyism. Senator Joe McCarthy used his position to purportedly root out Communism. McCarthy was the Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. From those positions, he accused State Department officials of being Communists along with Hollywood film directors dubbed “The Hollywood Ten,” who he accused of promoting a Communist ideology. McCarthy went overseas and pulled books from State Department libraries, removing hundreds of titles from 46 authors.
It’s ironic but unsurprising that a novel about book burning and bans would have been banned several times since its debut. In Apartheid South Africa, it was banned in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given “third-tier status” by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida, meaning it was pulled from shelves for “vulgarity.” In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, blocked out all the vulgar words until parents protested to have them reinserted. In 2006, the parents of a tenth grader in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be pulled because one of the burned books in the novel was The Bible. In 2018, a different Florida school tried to have it banned; a review committee ultimately retained the book but allowed parents/students to opt out.
The name Fahrenheit 451 comes from the temperature at which books burn. In the book, firefighters lost much of their original purpose as most buildings as Bradbury imagined them in futuristic 2049 weren’t flammable. They were repurposed into burning books and the buildings where they were hidden (I guess some were flammable, after all). The government condemned books as sources of confusing and depressing thoughts that only complicated people’s lives. That sounds like current government officials believing certain books indoctrinate others and have no educational value. Bradbury himself attributed the book to concerns about censorship; he said this in a 1956 radio interview:
The book’s protagonist, Guy Montag, is a firefighter who meets a teenage girl, Clarisse, whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit cause him to rethink his purpose. He begins reading and collecting books until he’s found out and forced to burn down his own home. Guy ultimately fought with his co-workers, burning his supervisor alive and knocking the others unconscious. He also destroyed the eight-legged mechanical hound that aided the firefighters in sniffing out books.
Guy flees to the countryside, where he meets up with a group of exiles. The exiles were intellectuals who’d memorized books in preparation for the day when books no longer existed.
More so than at any time since the 1950s, certain types of books, particularly about or produced by marginalized communities, are in danger of being eradicated from certain spaces like school libraries. School boards and state governments have become ideological, and censorship has become the goal and not something to avoid. Fahrenheit 451 is a warning worth revisiting at this time. Maybe we can avoid the devastating ending of the book. You’ll have to read that for yourself, assuming it’s still on your library shelves.
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This post was previously published on The Polis.
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