The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

to be satisfied, if you haven’t the courage to look at these things and do your best to help correct them. . . . It is not enough merely to say I love America, and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner. He concluded his rambling remarks in a clear rebuke to the close-mindedness of the McCarthyites: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are 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 that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?”