A Tennessee school board’s banning of “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust, is the latest development in this school year’s exhausting battles over K-12 curriculum. Across the South, states have adopted legislation that prohibits the teaching of events or ideas that, to quote Oklahoma, Texas or, soon, Florida law, could make any student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex.” The legislation has been used to challenge hundreds of books.
The racially focused censorship campaigns prove that the students the legislation seeks to protect from guilt or discomfort are our nation’s most privileged: White children.
And while the banning of “Maus” has generated a response in scale with the book’s stature, it reveals anew a fundamental truth: This political project of creating happy White children depends on the silencing of other children’s histories and truths.
If these censorship campaigns can seem discordant with how democracies should think and perform, the political investment in happy White children as a symbol of a heathy democracy has a long history. Nothing emblematizes this history more poignantly than the case of children of Nazi scientists in Texas schools.
In 1945, in the waning days of World War II, the United States recruited 178 scientists who had created the V-2 missile for the Third Reich to build missiles for its military. The program was called Operation Paperclip. At the same time that Congress restricted the number of Jewish refugees the nation would receive, the War Department relocated the scientists and their families — including 144 children — to Fort Bliss in El Paso.
The scientists and their spouses warned their young children to expect hostility and to be seen as the “enemy” entering into American schools. But these fears went unrealized. Instead, the children were warmly welcomed by El Paso residents, teachers and the local press, which, in articles, emphasized the children’s self-discipline, high aptitude and delight at attending American schools.
Educators supported these depictions. One school principal testified, “I cannot concern myself about whatever [the parents] are or have been,” for the children, in her estimation, “have a happiness here they have never known.” Genocide, colonization and war, she suggested, could be erased by a typical American school experience.
This happiness was made possible by American law and custom.
At Fort Bliss, the scientists and their families were invited to eat at cafeteria tables, swim in pools and attend movie theaters that law prohibited Black soldiers, who themselves had just returned from the war, from using. Off base, the Paperclip children were assigned to “American” schools attended by White children, while the majority of the city’s Mexican American children were segregated in “Mexican” schools.
Over 60 percent of the El Paso student population were citizens of Mexican heritage. But the Paperclip children came to know almost none of them.
The terminology of “American” schools for White students and “Mexican” schools for Mexican Americans was common parlance in the mid-century American Southwest. It captured, as poignantly as anything could, both the project of racial school segregation and schools’ role in determining social citizenship. In being assigned to “American” schools, the scientists and their children received the message that they were more potentially American than actual U.S. citizens.
The Paperclip children’s treatment as White Americans-in-the-making meant that they were destined for a school experience in which they would be interpreted as happy and where they would have greater reason to feel happiness, in better resourced schools with teachers who often thought more of them than their Mexican American counterparts.
Take, for example, language instruction. Both the Paperclip children and many Mexican American students entered elementary school with little exposure to English. In the extracurricular crash courses that the Paperclip scientists hired El Paso teachers to offer to their children, the students were rewarded with ice cream and praised by the teachers for not speaking German.
By contrast, Mexican American students were slapped, put in closets and given demerits by teachers for speaking Spanish in school, even on the playground. Corporal punishment for speaking Spanish was public school policy across the Southwest. Served almost entirely by White teachers who spoke little Spanish, El Paso’s youngest Mexican American students were prohibited from speaking the only language they knew and then characterized in teachers’ reports as “anti-social,” “supersensitive” and “impossible to interest” for doing so.
In social studies, at “American” and “Mexican” elementary schools, students carved battle scenes out of soap, painted tableaus of Santa Anna’s surrender, crafted “Indian” jewelry out of macaroni and reenacted signal moments in White achievement. Through these exercises, children learned that democracy was inextricably bound to a history of White supremacy.
All along, journalists and educators such as Swann noted how happy the Paperclip children were.
For children who had only known war, there was a certain happiness in moving to the United States, even as they lived in military barracks surrounded by barbed wire. But, just as teachers’ characterizations of Mexican American students as un-American in demeanor justified their second-class treatment, the complex emotional reality of the Paperclip children’s experience mattered less than that observers interpreted them to be happy.
The insistence on the children’s happiness served a number of purposes. As a publicity tool, it worked to excuse military policy that made Nazi servants into allies and exonerated parents who — whatever their crimes — created happy and healthy children. Most of all, it served White Americans, children and adults alike, by justifying a concept of White belonging that came at the cost of other Americans’ well-being.
Schools shape the experience of being American for all of the nation’s children. The story of the Paperclip children is the story of how race is taught, by schools and by law. But this one-of-a-kind story encompasses a much wider truth. For this reason, it is an urgent one to return to today.
Happiness or emotional well-being has often served as political shorthand in America for safeguarding social and economic privileges, even when that privilege is as basic as recognition or social citizenship. The battles may change, but this fact remains the same. Today’s legislation and censorship campaigns tell us little about young people’s needs or experiences but a great deal about the anxieties and self-interests of the adults who crusade for them.