Revisionism And The Reference Books
Dictionaries, books of quotations, encyclopedias: it's impossible to be a journalist without them. It's noon, the editor is on the phone demanding copy, and there you are, desperately trying to remember who came first, Charles Tupper or John Abbott. But as someone who relies heavily on reference books, I've begun to notice a disturbing trend: they're being corrupted by political correctness.
A few weeks ago, I was trying to track down the exact wording of a joke I'd heard attributed to Viscount Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister. I did what quote searchers have done for the past 130 years: I reached for John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. But since I happened to be out of my office, the Bartlett's I got was not my trusty old battered edition from the 1950s; it was a brand new book 'revised and enlarged.' Melbourne -- the wittiest prime minister Britain ever had, the man who explained cabinet government with the line 'it doesn't matter what damn lie we tell, so long as we tell the same damn lie' -- was nowhere to be found (although his great jab at the liberal historian Macaulay, 'I wish I were as sure of one thing as Tom Macaulay is of everything,' did show up in a footnote). Instead, the preface tells me, 'the present edition turns to old and recent works on ecology, and adds quotations from John Muir, Aldo Leopold and others.' Not to mention Helen Reddy, Steve Biko and four entries from Nikki Giovanni. (Surely you remember Nikki Giovanni, author of the immortal words, 'and if ever i touched a life i hope that life knows that i know that touching was and still is and always will be the true revolution'?)
I need to check dates even more often than quotes. So when a book company sent me a promotional copy of the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, I was grateful. Until I looked up the entry on Ronald Reagan. 'Although originally a Democrat and supporter of liberal causes, he became increasingly anti-Communist, and in 1962 joined the Republican Party as an extreme right-winger. ... His domestic popularity remained high throughout his presidency, despite charges of corruption against his aides and his inability to get much of his program through Congress.' 'See Carter, Jimmy,' the book suggested, so I did.
While Reagan was an extremist and a failure, here is what Cambridge has to say about the most inept president of the postwar period: 'As governor of Georgia, he expressed an enlightened policy towards the rights of African-Americans and women. ... He arranged the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (1979), and was much concerned with human rights at home and abroad. His administration ended in difficulties over the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan '
This sort of rank political bias is not common in reference works, even today. Much more common is the sort of anti-bias bias the author of the Cambridge encyclopedia promises in his introduction: 'We have been particularly concerned about the generally poor coverage given by biographical dictionaries to women, African-Americans, Aborigines, Maori and other minority groups, and have paid special attention to the coverage of leading personalities under such headings.' Which is how the otherwise obscure female mathematician Sonya Kowalevskaya, the Australian painter Emily Kngwarreye ('known as much for being an Aboriginal artist as a contemporary abstract painter') and the songwriter Nina Simone (both black and a woman) come to be listed alongside the great and the near-great, the famous and the infamous.
We don't hear the phrase 'political correctness' as much these days as we used to, because it has become so unremarkable. What the phenomenon is was best described by George Orwell, in words that -- fittingly -- are not included in Bartlett's, despite their familiarity. 'Don't you see that the whole aim is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words with which to express it.'
If Bartlett's insists Nikki Giovanni's words are immortal, while Viscount Melbourne's are forgettable, if Cambridge asserts Emily Kngwarreye is as worthy of mention as Caravaggio or Monet, it's because the editors of these books hope to make it harder for their readers to believe otherwise. But it's always possible to resist. Sell your new editions at the second-hand bookstore, take the money and buy an old Bartlett's or an old Columbia Encyclopedia. You'll lose the entries on Sarah Bagley (a 19th-century labor activist of whose life 'little is known') and Betsy Byars (novelist 'specializing in kitchen-sink dramas'). But you'll breathe in their pages the purer air of intellectual freedom.
Originally published in The Financial Post