It's Time for More Tolerance

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
March 10, 1963 


   EXTREMISTS are detecting subversion and racial bias in everything but the seed catalogs and toothpaste commercials. Robin Hood and his merry men have taken their lumps, the minstrel show is under the gun, Aunt Jemima, the pancake-mix lady, emerges as a female Uncle Tom, and censors are sour on a lot of authors and historians.
   We seem in danger of losing our sense of humor, tolerance and proportion in the fields of human relations and democratic ideology. If rational consideration of disputes and weaknesses is stifled by hysteria and hyper-sensitivity, good fellowship will curdle into hostility and suspicion will stalk the land.

   TAKE the NAACP rumblings against the minstrel show. For years the minstrel show has been a waning institution. Since its heyday early in the century, it seldom has risen above bush league entertainment and is now all but dead.
   Absolute death would come sooner were it not for the promotion provided by periodic and self defeating NAACP protests. Silent disregard would seem a wiser reaction, even though Negroes, still chained to second class citizenship and discrimination, cannot be blamed for regarding minstrel shows as insulting and unfunny.

   TURN NOW to censorship extremes. A member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission has declared that Robin Hood and his comrades were straight followers of the Communist line. This constitutes quite a tortuous accusation. The legendary exploits of the rebel leader of Sherwood Forest predated the Communist manifesto by several hundred years and if Robin Hood and his lads, in robbing the rich and giving to the poor, took their cue from Karl Marx at least they did so unwittingly.
   If we must endure many more such stabs at censorship, Communist infiltration of the schools might well succeed. We cannot combat communism with lunacy.

   NEITHER can we combat it by rewriting history--a favorite Soviet practice--and attempting to show that every phase of this country's development has been ginger-peachy, with Uncle Sam always nobly motivated and the people always prosperous, well fed and uncomplaining.
   Our system is the best yet devised. The proof is in our living standards, freedoms, technological and scientific progress, industrial plants, educational facilities and individual opportunity.
   This, however, doesn't mean that it's faultless or that critics should not be heard. It doesn't mean that Carl Sandburg, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Hammerstein, John Steinbeck and other novelists, lyricists and historians are a baleful influence and that their works should be rooted out of school libraries.

   CRITICISM is good, controversy is good, and so is dissent. When we lack the steam to argue, find fault or seek fresh approaches to old problems, or when we suspect those we don't agree with of subversion and skulduggery, progress will stop and we'll yawn our way into oblivion.


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