Censorship: The ELA Exposed
Censored Works

Examples of Literary Works Altered on the New York State Regents English Literary Arts Exams in June and August, 2002

The June 2002 Exam

1. In a passage from "Surviving the Dust Bowl,"from the PBS series, The American Experience, the following material was deleted:

• references to trench warfare;
• an "extermination drive" to kill jack rabbits;
• Biblical references taken to suggest that the Dust Bowl was divine retribution;
• people spitting up clods of dirt "three to four inches long and as big around as a pencil"; and
• a rainmaker who used TNT and nitroglycerine.

The researchers found that among the 6th graders--who were 11 to 12 years old--puberty had a significant influence on the change to the pattern of sleeping late and rising late. Psychosocial factors such as academic and social demands had far less to do with that shift than the researchers had expected. But this pattern was only significant in girls. Carskadon and her team presume that the gender difference stems from a higher percentage of girls in the study group having matured more fully than the boys.

3. In a short story by Isaac Asimov, True Love, sentences were removed and changed from the original, without indication.

1. Day One, Part One (the "Listening" section):
The topic was the influenza epidemic of 1918; the passage was taken from an episode of the PBS series The American Experience.

Deleted material includes descriptions of illness, violence and death, such as:

• "death carts," the "death list," "mass graves," "A twelve-year-old boy was told by his doctor: 'Get on the waiting list for a casket.'"
• "blood-stained sputum" and "horrid, bloody pneumonia," "lungs that were swollen, filled with fluid, and strangely blue," "raging fevers and delirium and profuse nose bleeds," "they drowned in their own fluids"
• "Violence broke out. In San Francisco, a Health Department inspector shot a man who refused to wear a mask. In Chicago, a worker shouted, 'I'll cure them my own way!' and then cut the throats of his wife and children."

• "Flamboyant evangelist Billy Sunday thought the cause was as simple as sin."
• "Could this be the end of the world -- is this the Armageddon that the street-corner ministers are preaching about?"

• "federal officials continued to put Americans at risk"
• "The first reaction of the authorities was . . . flat-out denial"
• an anecdote about President Wilson reciting a light-hearted rhyme about the flu after deciding to send more troop ships to Europe

2. Day One, Part Two: The "Reading for Information" question came from an article in U.S. News and World Report on salvage of shipwrecks. The article was edited for length, which does not explain the deletion of the terms "male menopause," the "sex appeal" of an expedition associated with Blackbeard, or "an antique syringe, which Blackbeard's crew may have used to inject themselves with mercury, the cure du jour for syphilis in 1718."

Students are asked to write an essay about the merits of private salvage, but some of the information most relevant to this question was deleted. Several omissions are not indicated with ellipses, and the title of the article was altered from the original.

3. Day Two, Part One: The "Compare and Contrast" Essay: The exam uses the last two paragraphs of a six-paragraph essay by Aldous Huxley, Time and the Machine. The altered passage now begins with the sentence: "This brings us to a seeming paradox." Students cannot know what "this" refers to, without the preceding paragraphs. Compounding the problem, students are asked to answer a question about what the "paradox" refers to.

(Prior paragraphs were plainly deleted to avoid references to ethnic groups, such as: "Our notion of time as a collection of minutes, each of which must be filled with some business or amusement, is wholly alien to the Oriental, just as it was wholly alien to the Greek. For the man who lives in a pre-industrial world, time moves at a slow and easy pace...." )

4. Day Two, Part Two: The "Critical Lens." A comparison of the original quotation from Kafka, and the Regents' version, speaks for itself:

Original version:
"If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."

Regents version:
"If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."