How the Culture Wars Have Divided Bucks County

The Spring/Summer 2023 edition of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal explores the explosive issue of book banning and censorship, which resurfaced in the county as the result of a growing conservative Christian movement. Writer Daniel Dorian in his article “Banned! The Culture Wars Come to Bucks County” reports that within eight months a new Republican majority on the Central Bucks School Board enacted a new library policy that critics claim is censorship of books falsely alleged to have a corrupting influence on children, notably books with sexual references or gay and lesbian themes.
The policy appears to reflect a drive by a Florida-based parental group, Moms for Liberty, which has spread to 200 chapters nationwide, and which has targeted books it calls racially divisive. It also maintains that schools should not be permitted to teach gender identity. “This is not a ban,” says Rose Busick, a parent of three from Warrington. “This is not a censorship. This is common sense.” Busick says what she calls inappropriate books have no place in a school library.
But Central Bucks School Board member Karen Smith, dissenting from the conservative majority, calls the new policy excessive, and that all the targeted books, some sixty of them, have been “reviewed by professional librarians, professional associations, and are found to be appropriate.” The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a complaint against the Central Board alleging widespread discrimination and hostility toward LGBTQ+ students.
Also in his article, Dorian traces the earliest origins of censorship, concluding with the words of Oscar Wilde: “The books the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
The new issue of Neshaminy includes an original ghost story, “Castle Valley,” by Bucks County icon Henry Chapman Mercer. It appeared in Mercer’s only collection of fiction November Night Tales, published in 1928. Accompanying the story is scholar Tom Sparrow’s article on Mercer’s place in literary history. Sparrow notes that while Mercer was no stranger to publishing, all of his earlier publications related to archeology, anthropology, ceramics, and history. While Mercer’s weird fiction has its moments, Sparrow says that Mercer was decidedly a minor figure in the world of genre fiction, despite his publisher’s claim that he was an equal to Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce.
In a memoir, veteran reporter Jennifer Lin writes about her early acquaintance with the celebrated Bucks County illustrator Ben Solowey. She was twelve years old when her mother took her to meet the artist, then in his seventies, at his studio on a 34-acre farm in Bedminster, which he bought in 1936. Solowey was a notable portraitist of the American theater who sketched the likes of Laurence Olivier, Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Noel Coward, and countless others. The Solowey studio has been kept intact by his nephew and curator David Leopold, and can be visited today.
The issue also profiles Bucks County artists Harry Boardman and Tim Gibson as well as horror and sci-fi author Chuck Wendig. Poetry by Jill Lupine, Lois Perch Villemaire, and Joseph Brunetti. Don Swaim’s short fiction about a deadly bear chase in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Original art by Pat Achilles plus stories by Daniel Sean Kaye and Carl Reader.
The Spring/Summer 2023 issue of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal, published by the Bucks County Writers Workshop and the Doylestown Historical Society, can be obtained at the DHS, local bookstores, and online from Amazon.com. The journal welcomes submissions. Information at https://neshaminyjournal.org.