THE DRIVE AGAINST CULTURAL FREEDOM                                                                     «1?

crusade for peace—everybody lay down his arms and they'U take
over." ^^^

In 1954 the proud purgers of literature scored one of theh most
resounding triumphs when they pressured the Girl Scouts of
America, with an enrollment of 2,000,000, into major revisions of
the 1953 edition of the Girl Scout Handbook. An article by Robert
Le Fevre, a Florida newscaster, had initiated the controversy.
Le Fevre charged that the Handbook promoted "socialized medi¬
cine" (because it contained a paragraph describing the work of
the United States Public Health Service), spoke favorably of the
League of Women Voters and, worst of afl, had a suspicious "in¬
ternationalist" tone.

The issue snowballed to ominous proportions when the Le
Fevre article and another piece critical of the Handbook were
entered in the Appendix of the Congressional Record. The wor¬
ried Girl Scouts quickly decided to issue a revised Handbook
with a number of "corrections" to "clarify" certain passages. Be¬
fore this could be done, however, the IlHnois Department of the
American Legion passed a resolution condemning the Girl Scouts
on the ground that the Handbook contained "un-American" litera¬
ture. The IlHnois Commander especially criticized favorable refer¬
ences to the U.N., "in view of the fact that the United Nations
Charter was the handiwork of that arch tiaitor Alger Hiss." ^^^

The Girl Scouts then immediately printed and sent out a leaflet
to correct the 100,000 copies of the old edition of the Handbook.
This leaflet Hsted the sixty changes that were to go into the forth¬
coming impression of August 1954. The corrections eliminated
the phrase "citizens of the world," all mention of the League of
Women Voters, any reference to housing as an activity of the
United States Government and much of the material on the
United Nations, including any reference to the Declaration of
Human Rights.

The "clarifications" also altered the phrase "one world" to "my
world"; stiuek out the word "world" entirely in more than twenty
places; substituted "Tea—India" for "Tea—China"; and replaced
"Service is your way of making this a better world in which to