The American Jewish Congress disclosed yesterday that the Xerox Corp. agreed to withdraw 3,000 reprints of an 1895 English edition of “Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes” following its complaint that two of the verses contained anti-Semitic and anti-Negro stereotypes. George Soll, chairman of the AJCongress’ commission on law and social action, made public a letter to him from Xerox’s public relations manager, Thomas D. Anglim, who apologized on behalf of the company’s president, Peter McColough, for publishing the offending rhymes and promised that “this volume will be withdrawn and will no longer be available from us.” The same promise was contained in another letter to Mr. Soll from Arnold Zohn, president of the Arno Press, which is the co-publisher of the Xerox “Legacy Library Facsimile” edition.
One of the verses to which the AJCongress objected began with the lines, “Jack sold his gold egg/ To a rogue of a Jew/ Who cheated him out of/ The half of his due.” The other began, “Ten little Nigger boys went out to dine;/ One choked his little self, and then there were nine.”
In a letter addressed to Mr. McColough, Mr. Soll noted that at the time Mother Goose verses originated, anti-Semitism and racism were traditional in some quarters but today “it is generally understood that they are destructive of human values and even of human lives.”
New York Times reporter Henry Raymont said today that “Officials of other Jewish civil rights agencies privately expressed dismay over the AJC action.” He said an official of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League “who asked not to be named, declared: ‘We’ve stopped worrying about the classics years ago. There are more pressing issues these days.’ ” Mr. Raymont also quoted Edward E. Booher, president of the American Book Publishers Council, Inc. as saying “the whole thing seems silly and not a very wise precedent.”
Xerox’s Mother Goose edition was printed by duplication rather than by setting type and is part of a four volume edition. A publisher’s forward acknowledged that some parts “are strange and hard to understand today, and some of its statements are deplorable when they are not confusing.” In most modern editions of Mother Goose, “The 10 Little Niggers” have been replaced by “10 Little Indians.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
