His first action on reelection was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theater owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the city’s institutions of any works that were less than “100 percent American.” Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to decide which books were objectionable enough to be discarded, but he admitted when pressed that he had read none of the books that he was proposing to burn—it
