On the outskirts of Hawkins, Texas, a couple found a problem in one of their kids’ school books. They didn’t have a background in education, but because they lived in Texas, their concern ignited a national movement and several decades of influence over what the rest of the country learned.
On the outskirts of Hawkins, Texas, a couple found a problem in one of their kids’ school books. They didn’t have a background in education, but because they lived in Texas, their concern ignited a national movement and several decades of influence over what the rest of the country learned.
Teaching Texas is a new audio documentary from Wonder Media Network that uncovers the surprising history behind America’s latest culture war.
WMN on Twitter: @wmnmedia
Grace Lynch on Twitter: @gracelynch08
Teaching Texas
Chapter 1: Under God
Transcript
GRACE
In 1961, a sixteen year old Jim Gabler comes home from school and grabs a world encyclopedia. He’d been assigned to learn the Gettysburg Address. So he finds an image of the Lincoln Statue on which the address is carved. But it’s not the easiest thing to read.
Luckily, right below the image of the statue, the book reprinted the speech. Only … in the text version they’ve left out the phrase, “under god.” Jim shows his parents the discrepancy and asks them a question that has since become famous, “where do you go to get the truth?”
That question was posed to Mel and Norma Gabler. A married couple with no background in education, in Hawkins, Texas, a town of less than 500 people.
Alarmed by what they saw, Mel and Norma started reading through their son’s textbooks. And found a frightening lack of the Judeo-Christian values they wanted their son to learn.
So Mel and Norma called their son’s superintendent to figure out how they could raise concerns over these textbooks.
Bill Martin:
And then in a comment that changed history, at least in Texas and lots of places, he says, “why don't you go to Austin? That's where you can have some impact.” And for the decade, since they have had few people have had greater impact on what American school children read than Mel and Norma Gabler.
GRACE
Last season, I explored Wisconsin’s outsized role in our electoral politics as the tipping point state. The state that pushes a presidential candidate over the finish line. This season, we’re turning our attention to another state whose grip on our country extends far outside its borders. This time, we’re looking at how Texas has, and continues, to shape American education.
From Wonder Media Network, I’m Grace Lynch and this is Teaching Texas.
This is a show about how we decide what’s taught in schools, the people behind the scenes of public education, and how their influence shapes our future.
Grace:
Oh I think that you're, you're, you're very clear. I just, I wonder, so this is obviously a, green, like a fake background, but it looks like a real photo.
Bill Martin:
It is a real photo of my office.
Grace:
So you're sitting in front of a photo of your office.
Bill Martin:
That's correct.
Grace:
Wow. Oh, this is just a slideshow.
Bill Martin:
No, this is, this is my, this is our living room and, uh, and this is out one of the windows.
Grace:
Wow.
[Bill continues quietly underneath]
GRACE
This is Bill Martin, who you heard at the top of the show. Bill directs the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. He’s been at Rice for over fifty years. As you just heard, Bill has taken the unusual, and wildly endearing, step of photographing different rooms in his house to use as Zoom backgrounds.
Bill Martin:
And here we are back here.
Grace:
And now we're back. Wow. That was a really, a really handsome tour. Thank you so much. I feel like I
Bill Martin:
You're welcome.
Grace:
I feel like I got to know you.
GRACE
Bill profiled the Gablers for Texas Monthly back in 1982. It’s one of the most defining, in-depth profiles of their work.
Bill Martin:
When I wrote this article, they were a big deal, and anytime they just made the papers and they were also in national television programs for having a, a considerable impact on education, particularly textbooks.
GRACE
Bill was one of the first people I spoke to for this show. His knowledge of the Gablers is as thorough as just about anyone’s. A lot of his research centered around religious fundamentalism and the impact it’s had on the political arena. That’s what drew him to the Gablers.
Because Mel and Norma weren’t just small town activists that achieved local or state acclaim. They’d go on to be nationally recognized, championed, loathed and feared.
Texas and the textbook publishing industry have a unique relationship. And that was a bird in the hand for activists who wished to bend education to their world view. For several decades, this couple from East Texas dictated what the rest of the country learned.
To get that story, we had to talk to someone who knew the Gablers before their rise. Before folks like Bill were coming around to interview them.
Jim Gabler:
I'm Jim Gabler. My, uh, parents were Mel and Norma Gabler.
GRACE
Yup, that Jim Gabler. Like, Gettysburg Address Jim Gabler.
From their obituaries, we knew Mel and Norma were survived by two sons. After some googling and a quick LinkedIn search, we tracked down a Jim Gabler with ties to Texas that seemed about the right age to support the famed origin story. From his headshot, I also felt pretty strongly I was looking at Norma’s son. So we cold emailed him. And lucky for us, he responded.
Jim lives in Phoenix now. He spent an impressive career as Chief Information Officer at a number of major hospitals across the country. He’s got a lot of stories about that. And he also has plenty to share about the early days of his parents’ activism. From Jim we learned that Norma’s fixation with textbooks stemmed from her own personal experience:
Jim Gabler:
First of all, my mother did not really have a high school diploma. And the reason was is because her parents also worked for an oil company and oil companies moved people around a lot. And they moved to another town in, in east Texas between her junior and senior year. And the requirements for that school were so different she couldn't meet 'em in the timeframe. So she got a certificate. Well, I think Texas at some point realized that this was a problem. And so what they did was they created a structure to adopt five textbooks in each area. And every school had to choose from those five. My mother's situation would've been a lot different if something like that had been in place.
GRACE
Mel’s interest derived from a slightly more nebulous adversary: Communism.
Jim Gabler:
I am not a, any kind of a fan of McCarthyism and all of the, those types of things. Um, but there were a number of things that grew out of that, of anti communism efforts. And there was actually a, a seminar put on in Hawkins, as small as it is.
GRACE
It’s also important to know that the Gablers were conservative Christians, who had a deep belief in traditional, biblical morals and values. Which is likely why they were so concerned by the omission of “under God'' in that Encyclopedia entry.
So we have Norma, scorned by her own education experience. And Mel, learning about the horrors of communism at the local high school auditorium. Together, they set out to make sure that their sons’ textbooks don’t lead them down a dangerous path to ungodliness, federalism, or anything else that challenged their views on American exceptionalism.
At the time when Mel and Norma got started, education in America was shifting. In the 1960s, textbooks were starting to portray a more diverse America.
Joan DelFattore:
So when I was in school, for example, we had Dick and Jane textbooks, Dick and Jane readers.
GRACE
This is Joan DelFattore.
Joan DelFattore:
And I remember in the first grade going through my Dick and Jane reader, looking for one image of a child with black hair and brown eyes like mine, and there wasn't even one. They were all blonde, blue-eyed.
Joan’s a former professor at the University of Delaware and author of the book, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read.
Joan DelFattore:
Now they were including other people. They were including Hispanic stories. They were including stories from Asian cultures, not just writing a white story and putting Asian people in it.
GRACE
In response to a narrative that included perspectives from other cultures, religions and ideologies, parents and activists railed against school boards across the country.
Joan DelFattore:
They wanted their children's textbooks to look like their textbooks, which looked like their parents' textbooks. And at the time I was doing this research, it was really just starting that it was significantly different, different enough to attract attention and make people really react to that. Back then, when those activists got up at the microphone, they quite often said, “whose country is this?”
GRACE
Joan’s book chronicles the textbook censorship wars of the 1980s and early 90s. It was a vast movement largely catapulted onto the national stage by Mel and Norma Gabler.
There were several reasons for Mel and Norma’s eventual celebrity in the world of textbook censorship. Some of this had to do with their own due diligence and preparedness. The other key factor was their home state: Texas.
Dan Quinn:
Unlike Vegas, what happens in Texas doesn't stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks. The market here is so big that publishers have traditionally written their textbooks to meet the Texas standards and then they repackage and sell those textbooks in other states around the country. Smaller states, too.
GRACE
That’s Dan Quinn. He was a textbook editor who later served as the spokesperson for Texas Freedom Network, an independent watchdog organization that looks at the Texas State Board of Education. And he’s right. Texas has a lot of power over our nation’s textbooks.
Like most incredibly mundane bureaucratic systems, the less sexy they appear, the greater impact they have. So let’s get into it.
The first thing you need to know is that most states purchase their textbooks on a district by district basis. So one school district could opt to use different materials than another neighboring district.
And there are other states that buy the same set of books for the whole state. These are called “adoption states.” Texas and California, with their sizable populations, are the most notable of these. But unlike California, which only adopts textbooks statewide for grades K-8, Texas adopts textbooks statewide for all grades, K-12.
This makes Texas the single largest market for textbooks in the country.
And for decades, Texas only adopted 5 new books a year, each time focusing on a different subject area. Which created an incredibly narrow and competitive market.
David Anderson:
From 1950, until the early 1980s, Texas had a five-book list and you would submit your books, you would go through the state adoption process, the state board would have their public hearings. And if you were approved you in essence, had your, your fishing license, uh, to go out to the schools and sell your program.
GRACE
This is David Anderson. He has been on all ends of this industry. He’s worked for publishers, for the Texas Education Agency, for independent school districts, and now as a lobbyist for HillCo Partners, where he reps all of these interest groups.
David Anderson:
In Texas, it was a very efficient process in that regard. Submit the book, make the list, go out school to school, get your adoptions. The districts would send their numbers in. The state would consolidate. They would order that number of books from the publisher, and then they would ship them to schools to start school that August or that September.
GRACE
Essentially, the Texas system was set up to be a one-stop shop for publishers. You start by submitting your textbook to the textbook adoption committee. If it got through the committee it went to the State Board of Education for approval. If the state board put your book on the list of five, you’d made a profit, all from one state.
And the kicker – you aren’t just selling that book to Texas. You’re selling it all across the country. Here’s Jim again.
Jim Gabler:
Publishers put together printing plates. So if they had to make a change to a textbook to be used in Texas, everybody else got it.
The actual technology of printing these books, particularly at the time, meant that standardizing the material was much more economical and practical. That way, the publishing company wouldn’t need a whole different set of printing plates for Texas, Illinois, Washington, etc. It was ideal to just use one set of plates for all of the textbooks used throughout the country.
Jim Gabler:
If a publisher had to make changes to his book to be accepted as in the top five, which they would be willing to do, then those were the books that were used elsewhere. So I think Texas had a disproportionate impact on other states as a byproduct of the limitations in the printing industry. Clearly all of these things combined to say that my parents were in a very unique position to say what is in textbooks.
GRACE
Unique indeed. Because making that top 5 list was so crucial, so essential for these publishers, they were quite keen to keep the textbook adoption committee and the state board of education happy. Dan Quinn told me that publishers would try to make textbooks the state board of education would approve. And in turn, the board wanted textbooks that activists, parents, and politicians would also all approve of.
Dan Quinn:
And of course, you know, that's an impossibility. There's just no way you're gonna create a textbook that's gonna meet everybody's approval.
GRACE
On its face, this might all seem fine. Shouldn’t textbooks be standardized? So what if Texas orders more books than anyone else?
But what this means is that whoever makes these decisions in Texas has a lot of power. And what piqued my interest so many months ago is how someone who doesn't have a background in education could put their thumb on the scale.
If, say, a quiet couple in East Texas could figure out a way to gain the ear of parents, activists, and politicians, and then influence the textbook adoption committee and the state board of education…well perhaps they’ll be the ones whose approval is sought in the end.
But back in the early 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler were still a long way off from being those two all-powerful influencers. First, they needed to figure out a way to have their voices heard.
In Texas, the state board would issue a proclamation each spring, which let people know which subjects were up for review. Then, anyone could go and review those books and file what’s known as a “Bill of Particulars” with any objections. After that, the committee would hold hearings.
Bill Martin:
Norma went to the hearing for the first time in 1962. And she went without Mel. She said, I'd never traveled anywhere in my life by myself. But Mel said, “honey, you've got to go.”
GRACE
So Norma made the four and a half hour drive to the state capital alone where she then testified in front of the textbook adoption committee to raise her concerns. Jim remembers that her early trips weren’t well received.
Jim Gabler:
The chair of the committee says, “tell me, Ms. Gabler, what right do you have to be here?” My mother bless her heart. At times you don't know how smart your mother is and other times you're impressed, but she said, you know, I have three reasons. One, the structure of the process allowed her to be there. Two, she paid taxes and taxes paid for the books and three her, she had kids and the kids were using the books.
GRACE
Norma and Mel didn’t let the committee questioning their right to be there dissuade them from trying again. Fortunately, they had someone on the inside who could help advise them.
Jim Gabler:
There was a, um, member of the state board of education that lived in Kilgore. He was a good friend of my parents. He was the one that guided them a lot through the process of how to do it. So the thing of going to Austin and how the process worked, a lot of that came from him and following through on it.
GRACE
It turned out following through was not the Gablers’ issue. While still holding down a full time job and tending to their 65-acre ranch on the outskirts of Hawkins, Mel and Norma slowly began to revolve their lives around reviewing textbooks.
Jim Gabler:
I still remember. I've never been very good at typing
GRACE
The Gablers dove into the work. And it was tedious work. Filing those “Bills of Particulars” that I mentioned earlier required them to comb through textbooks line-by-line citing their objections. That’s what all of Jim’s high school friends were typing after school.
While the Gablers waded through thousands of pages of submitted textbook materials, they started to spread the news of what they were finding. Here’s Dan Quinn.
Dan Quinn:
What the Gablers did for the first couple of decades was kind of like an old style acquisition campaign. So you do as much as you can to reach as big of an audience as you can to let them know what the problems are. And you hope that from doing that, you'll, you'll get your message out to a core group. The ones that you can really count on to take action, to be loud and obnoxious, very vocal about things, to show up at the state board and make elected officials lives hellish until you get your way. The Gablers would also do like little workshops to help teach activists at the local level. How do you review a textbook? What do you look for? How do you, how do you get attention to the problems that you find in that textbook?
GRACE
And if you couldn’t attend one of the Gablers’ workshops? No problem. They’d happily send you a comprehensive mailer explaining what they were finding in these textbooks. They sent them to churches, schools, people they thought would agree.
When they were first starting out, they created a twenty-page document with this information. And a list of a thousand people they wanted to send the document to.
But when they went to get all the copies of this document made, the printer wouldn’t collate the pages. So instead, the Gablers got twenty individual stacks of paper, each a thousand pages high.
One night, after Mel came home from work, the Gablers set out all twenty stacks on the table. They then walked around the table, picking up one page at a time, hand-collating the mailer. By the time they were finished putting together the thousandth copy, the sun had started to rise.
Bill Martin:
They were dogged, they had, they hired some assistants. They went through the books line by line word by word, and when they'd bring these things called bills of particulars, they were long, they were detailed.
GRACE
That’s Bill Martin again. Slowly but surely, the Gablers built public support for their work. They drove awareness to the power parents had to raise their voice with the state board of education. And with those “bills of particulars” — the line-by-line objections — the board couldn’t claim they didn’t know their stuff.
Bill Martin:
They didn't ramble. They had it down, and apparently because they were limited in time, they said they even timed their performances. They passed it off. They really had it down to, not a science, but a, but a real art, a performance so that they got their points in.
GRACE
I have talked to a lot of people about the Gablers. Every single one of them, regardless of their opinion on what they were advocating for, commended them on their preparation and hard work. No one had a negative thing to say about their work ethic. And it paid off. Their preparation, polished testimonials and proven grassroots campaigning gained credibility with the board.
Joan DelFattore:
What they were enunciating was very much what the textbook committee itself believed. So it wasn't as if the textbook committee was reluctantly giving them something because they had some sort of power. They were tapping into, um, the textbook committee itself. They were hitting the buttons, they were hitting the nerves that were relevant to the textbook committee.
That’s Joan DelFattore again.
Joan DelFattore:
A good deal of it appeared absolutely obvious to the textbook committee. And Mel and Norma Gaber were seen not as pressuring them, but rather as doing a public service. In fact, people would describe it that way in those terms, that they were doing a public service by taking the time and trouble to go through these textbooks and to save the busy people on the committee from having to do that and point out the places that we would want to know about. So it wasn't an adversarial relationship by any means.
Gaining the trust of the board meant that publishers had to take notice.
Bill Martin:
You really needed to make the list in Texas if you were gonna make profit. And it was a guarantee to make it. If it didn't make it, it could doom a book. It could doom a whole series of book to extinction. So publishers understandably want to make their books acceptable.
GRACE
Not only were they prepared and steadily gaining support — in these early days, Mel and Norma grounded many of their objections in solid, educational pedagogy. They were strong proponents of emphasizing basic skills in the classroom. Particularly reading. It’s an issue Bill really cares about too.
Bill Martin:
What I specifically noted then was the emphasis on phonics instead of just the look-see method and memorize what a word looks like. And I think you have alphabets, they have, they're there for a reason they have sounds associated with them. Phonics is great. And so we, we got along well talking about the importance of phonics.
GRACE
How we should teach children to read is still a topic of healthy debate amongst educators. And it’s not necessarily a partisan issue.
Mel and Norma were not fans of the look-see method that was rising in popularity at the time. They preferred phonics – as a more proven method for teaching children to read. To further substantiate their case, they occasionally brought in subject-matter experts to testify alongside them at the state board of education. In addition to being so well prepared, the Gablers had a flair for presenting their objections.
David Anderson:
I wanna say it was in the late 1980s, early 1990s in which the Gablers brought a scroll with them. And it was a roll of paper. And on that, they had identified all of the errors in the books from, from their review. And at the hearing, they threw that scroll out and it was probably 30 feet long. And they said, these are all the errors in the books.
That’s David Anderson again. The one who has worked in every corner of the textbook industry.
David Anderson:
My experience was that no one in the publishing industry wanted to have a book that had an error in it. But when you're talking about a 400 page history book that covers from early civilization in North America, up through the civil war and reconstruction, the probability of having something there that was incorrect or might have been viewed as not accurate from one perspective, it existed.
GRACE
The Washington Post later reported that the publisher was fined a MILLION dollars for the errors the Gablers found.
Some of the errors they’re identifying are the types of things David describes as casualties of human error. Misspellings. Incorrect dates. These are both reasonable, and things that absolutely should be fixed.
Sometimes, though, they found flashier errors.
David Anderson:
The criticism was that the book claimed that Harry Truman, uh, used the atomic bomb to end the conflict in Korea. Well, oh my gosh. If the book has said that, that's just awful. I mean, it's just egregiously wrong.
The thing is, that error only appeared in the teachers’ edition. At the end of the textbook chapter, there was a couple of review questions and the order of some of the answer key responses had been flipped in the teacher’s copy compared to the student version.
David Anderson:
Was it an error? It was an error in the book, but it wasn't a factual error, the way that it was presented and the way that it was covered in the press, because it was something that the student would never see. Should it have been corrected? Absolutely. The continuity editors never should have let that get by, but, oh my gosh, it made huge headlines that publisher wants students to know Truman used the atom bomb to end the Korean conflict. News to me. But that's the sort of thing that there were some people who were very critical of the textbooks who would look for things like that and present them out of context.
GRACE
Just for a moment, let’s appreciate how detail oriented these folks were. In their spare time, they compared the teacher and student edition of a textbook so closely that they caught the fact that in one answer key, the order of the questions and answers no longer perfectly matched up. That’s incredible.
Another “error” the Gablers brought attention to was a book that had more pages about Marilyn Monroe than it did George Washington. Jim remembers seeing a column about it that his mom wrote for The Washington Post, asking Americans if they were really ready to have Marilyn be the “mother of our country”.
From an objective standpoint…yeah. That seems a little out of whack. But here we start to get into a trickier area of criticism. Identifying an error or advocating for a proven pedagogy is one thing. Taking issue with a book’s emphasis…that’s a more subjective approach to the material.
The issues the Gablers raised were often subjective ones. Matters of worldview rather than factual inaccuracies. The complication here is that their opinions were presented alongside factual inaccuracies as if they were both equally objective.
David Anderson:
The Gablers were great believers and supporters of the, of the American exceptionalism, uh, concept. And so a lot of what they talked about reflected concerns that they had. There was content in the books in those decades that really did not support and highlight or spotlight American exceptionalism to the degree that an earlier generation of textbooks may have.
GRACE
This is where the legacy of the Gablers shifts.
Because of their ability to influence the nation’s textbooks, these two concerned citizens teetered over the edge from advocate to censor. No longer simply raising alarm but prescribing their values into the classroom.
Within a few years, Mel and Norma Gabler relocated roughly 30 miles east to the significantly larger town of Longview, Texas. They turned their passion into a non profit called Educational Research Analysts, which they ran out of their home. They hired a couple of assistants and continued to steer the ship as the ripples of their work extended far past their son’s textbook.
Jim told me that one reason his parents focused so much on textbooks was because textbooks were infused with authority.
If a child reads it in a textbook, they assume that information to be true. I think a lot of us assume that. I also imagine a lot of us don’t question who is determining what’s in these books. Or that they could be politically, or ideologically biased.
People have always tried to exert their influence on the histories kids learn. But it really matters who those people are. Joan told me a story from back when she was doing research for her book. Now, this story isn’t about Mel and Norma, but it features their acolytes at a Texas textbook adoption hearing. During a discussion of an American History textbook, a group of activists took the mic and protested the inclusion of the Holocaust in the book.
Joan DelFattore:
So during a break, I was at a water fountain and one of the Holocaust deniers came along. And I said to him, “you know, I grew up in Newark, New Jersey in the 1950s and there were still a lot of people who had numbers tattooed on their arms. So I think the Holocaust happened,” and he said, “Oh, it probably did. But if we can keep it out of textbooks long enough, it might as well not have.”
After that hearing, Joan followed up.
Joan DelFattore:
I went and got that American history book after there was that debate about the Holocaust. Cause I thought if they take the Holocaust out altogether, they're gonna get, and they have to know they're gonna get a pushback if they do that. So I went and got the book and what it said was, in about a paragraph, the Nazi party in Germany, objected to a lot of people and they put them in concentration camps and they killed a lot of them. And these were, homosexuals and Poles and Jews and Catholics and, and and and. So essentially what they did was to rephrase it in such a way that it didn't come out as Christians attacking non-Christians it came out as blurred. They essentially padded it to the point where it lost its significance. They certainly didn't say 6 million Jews.
GRACE
A group of fringe activists were able to water down the teaching of the Holocaust in textbooks that reached classrooms all across America.
The immediate impact is an inaccurate and misguided understanding of one of the most crucial events of the 20th century.
The political ramifications of this type of manipulation cannot be overstated. Dan Quinn told me about a driving political theory espoused by leaders of the very conservative Christian coalition in the early 90s.
Dan Quinn:
So his idea was that you shape the education of the next generation of voters. And that makes it a lot easier to influence how they're gonna cast their ballots. What are the issues they're gonna vote on? What's the worldview they're gonna have going into the polling booth?
And that’s where the Texas state board of education should not be overlooked.
Dan Quinn:
On more than one occasion, I heard a number of board members, essentially say the same thing. They would say, you know, Texas is really important here. We have the opportunity to, to shape what students around the country are learning in their classrooms, and that's gonna be important for on down the road. It makes political activism a lot easier when the people you're trying to mobilize already are grounded in the worldview that you have because of what you pushed into their public schools.
GRACE
Agreeing on facts these days is not our nation’s strong suit. As it turns out, it never really was. Joan heard protestors at textbook hearings demanding “whose country is this?” In today’s school board meetings, we hear similar cries.
And for many decades, it was Mel and Norma Gabler who answered that question. Who dictated what worldview should be portrayed in America’s textbooks. And set the stage for the mayhem we see today.
On our next episode, we’re taking a closer look at how the Gablers’ rise in prominence allowed them to infuse our nation’s textbooks with their ideology.
Joan DelFattore:
And to them it was very simple. There were, there were not two sides to this. You decide what you want the children to believe, and that’s what you put in the book, and why is that a problem?
GRACE:
Teaching Texas is created by me, Grace Lynch. It’s produced by myself and Adesuwa Agbonile. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Production assistance by Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer. Original theme music by Chelsea Daniel. Special thanks to Liz Smith for producing this episode.