Religion: Children’s Prayers

A useful person to shrewd publishers is a book-censor. Sure as death & taxes, a guilty volume will be publicized, will sell widely thereafter, openly or ‘legged. Such success would be repugnant to Publishers Farrar & Rinehart, who by purchasing Cosmopolitan Book Corp. last month jumped into the first rank of their trade (TIME, Oct. 5). Under their imprint appears little bawdry. Nevertheless, upon one of their books last fortnight was visited censorship. Last week the book began to sell rapidly. Entitled Peggy and Peter: What They Did Today ($2.50), it is a picture book for children, representing the activities of a pair of moppets and a Cairn bitch named Sally, all of whom posed for Photographer Lena Towsley. Before publication, a number of women scanned the volume, discovered a photograph which they disapproved. It showed Peggy & Peter (see cut) saying their prayers. The ladies objected. Puzzled but agreeable, Publishers Farrar & Rinehart deleted the photograph from the published volume.

Explained Mrs. Catherine Maltby Blaisdell, wife of Professor Thomas Charles Blaisdell Jr. (economics) of Columbia University: “If such a picture were put into the hands of my children, I should be in for a bad half hour trying to explain what prayers were and why they did not form a part of their routine. I would not bar the book from the house to save myself this trouble, but I think it is vastly improved by the omission of such a picture, for a great many children today are brought up without ever hearing of God and religion. Mine are among them.

“To introduce a small child to the idea of an omnipotent Father may easily rob him of his self-dependence. He may form the habit of leaning on some person or power instead of growing up in the belief that he alone must meet and solve his problems as they arise. One might jeopardize the whole future happiness of a child by telling him that he is accountable to God for what he does and not to his own conscience.”*

Said Publisher Farrar: “It’s a new kind of censorship to me.” His two children, John Jr., 4½, and Alison, 2½, he admitted, kneel each night and say “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. . . .”

* “The great trouble,” once said the late Thomas Alva Edison (see p. 52), “is that preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible for others to do anything with them.”