Education: Textbooks

In the lobby of Austin’s Hotel Driskill fortnight ago, some 75 agents for U. S. textbook publishers sucked at and crushed out innumerable cigarets, talked in strained voices. They were waiting for the Texas State Board of Education to award contracts worth millions of dollars for 29 books for Texas schoolchildren. Of all the agents, none paced the floor more nervously than those of Manhattan’s Harcourt, Brace & Co. and Chicago’s Row, Peterson Co. Everyone knew that the fiercest schoolbook contest of the year in Texas was between these two, for the adoption of a seventh-grade history of the U. S.

Largest single purchaser of textbooks in the U. S., Texas buys books for all elementary schoolchildren in the State, spends some $2,000,000 a year. Its “adoption” of a book means it will buy that book exclusively for five years. Of seventh-grade histories, it was estimated, Texas would purchase some $234,000 worth all told.

For this particular prize, two publishers began to prepare a year ago. Harcourt printed a revised edition of its best seventh-grade history. Row, Peterson entered the lists with Building Our Nation. For twelve months Harcourt’s young agent, P. K. Burney, a former high-school principal, drove furiously night and day over Texas’ vast distances, covered 50,000 miles, wore out one car and bought another. Like the two agents of Row, Peterson, Paul Baker and Raymond Franklin, Agent Burney visited teachers, principals, superintendents and members of the State board to win friends for himself and his book.

When the board met fortnight ago, both books had been approved by a State textbook committee of educators. Harcourt’s price was lower ($1.06 to $1.17 bid by Row, Peterson), but the board has leeway to judge quality. While the seven board members deliberated behind closed doors, it was reported that Board President Ghent Sanderford, former Governor James Ferguson’s man, favored the Harcourt book, that another member was equally strong for an agent of Row, Peterson, a former local school superintendent who had helped nurse him through three years of tuberculosis.

Thrice the board balloted on seventh-grade history. Then into the lobby where waited some 75 agents strode dark, rawboned President Sanderford and blond State School Superintendent L. A. Woods. Superintendent Woods began to make a speech. “Read us the adoptions,” grimly cried the bookmen. Slowly the superintendent read them off. For seventh-grade history pupils: Row, Peterson’s Building Our Nation.

Last week it was Texas school officials’ turn to be nervous. While some agents went home to rest and others moved on to the next big State adoptions in Oklahoma in December, in Austin the Texas House of Representatives voted additional funds to a House committee which, after finishing the first audit ever made of the State education department, will soon begin an investigation of textbook adoptions.

Industry. What happened in Texas was a normal incident illustrating the operations of a high-pressure, highly personalized, important but little-known U. S. industry. Whereas it is an unusual fiction book that sells 100,000 copies, textbook publishers do not count a book a smash hit unless it sells a million. The famed Mc-Guffey Readers are estimated to have sold 134,000,000. No modern book approaches this, but the Elson Readers have climbed to some 50,000,000 copies since 1910, are still going strong.

Total sales of textbooks in the U. S. last year were about $50,000,000. Less than a score of the nearly 100 companies publishing textbooks handle most of the business. The big four are Ginn & Co. (Atwood’s Geographies, Muzzey’s Histories), reputedly the biggest, upon whose world-wide offices the sun never sets; American Book Co. (McGuffey’s Readers), said to have controlled 90% of the textbook business in the late igth Century; Scott. Foresman & Co. (the Elson Readers), noted for its scholarly salesmen, and the Macmillan Co., leaders in the college field. Each of these companies is believed to sell between $4,000,000 and $7,000,000 worth of texts a year.

Who Writes Them? Textbook authorship is not an independent profession. Most of the writers are teachers and superintendents, who turn out books in their spare time, get 5 to 8% in royalties, supplement their incomes greatly by this means if they are lucky (one book in four is a hit). Often superintendents and supervisors capitalize their influence by writing textbooks, with the result that their books monopolize the local market. A few cities forbid their educators to collect royalties on books sold in their own school systems.

Who Buys Them? About 65% of U. S. public school children get free textbooks. Twenty-three States require, 22 authorize schools to furnish them free. One-half the States buy them by the Texas State adoption method, but on the basis of school population, three-quarters of the textbook market is “open territory,” where school boards offer teachers a choice from an approved list in each subject. This system reduces the opportunities for favoritism or graft, into which a few tepid legislative investigations have been made.* Textbook publishers are suspicious but reticent, refuse even to make public sales figures. But American Book Co.’s blunt, dynamic president. William T. H. Howe, a raconteur and scholar, insists the business is much cleaner today than it once was.

Two States, California and Kansas, print their own textbooks. But in California a political battle over State printing has raged for years. The State printer claims to have saved California taxpayers $360,000 on textbooks in the past two years; publishers declare California textbooks are inferior.

Sectional Censorship. Chief affliction of U. S. textbook publishers is not greedy politicians or cutthroat competition, but censorship. Religious, racial, political, economic groups keep an eagle eye on schoolbooks, are quick to howl at what they consider irregularities. After Gary’s School Superintendent William Wirt in 1934 charged that New Deal Brain Truster Rexford Guy Tugwell was a revolutionary plotter, Oak Park, Ill. and Kansas City dropped like a hot potato a book of which Professor Tugwell was coauthor, Our Economic Society and Its Problems, and its sales have fallen off one-third, according to Harcourt, Brace, its publishers. There are fighting words, especially in the South, that a textbook dare not use. To please North and South, publishers get out books on “evolution” but do not use that word, speak of “development.” The Texas textbook committee once refused to approve a biography of Thomas A. Edison lest they be attacked by a Fundamentalist Baptist, Rev. J. Frank Norris, who hated and feared that atheist inventor. In Louisiana an Elson Reader was banned because of this Mother Goose couplet:

The gentleman rides gallop-a-trot, gallop-

a-trot;

The farmer rides hobbledehoy, hobble-

de-hoy.

The objectors cried this implied a farmer was no gentleman.

*Most sensational probe was that in Texas in 1926, during Governor “Ma” Ferguson’s term, when a school superintendent testified an American Book Co. salesman had asked him how he would like to have his $3,600 salary doubled. During the NRA textbook code hearings, however, a publisher estimated $500,000 was spent by the industry in an unspecified period for dinners for book buyers. Most agents and educators still see nothing wrong in an agent reporting openings for better jobs to teachers and officials to whom he hopes to sell books.