Robin Hood Becomes a Communist

Nov. 13, 1953

Robin Hood is the quintessential, swashbuckling, English-speaking hero. He’s a rebellious figure with an impeccable moral compass and the will and ability to enforce it. The wrong he seeks to right is — as one might expect from an English hero — the undue collection of onerous taxes.

It’s a charming story that most of us grew up reading or watching. More importantly — and the reason it’s such a vital member of the English canon of fairytales — it has resonated down the ages with man’s instinctive desire for justice.

As the story goes, Robin Hood takes from the rich and gives to the poor.

But in 1953, that didn’t resonate well with the American political narrative. You see, taking from the rich to give to the poor is wealth distribution, and in the convoluted complexities of modern economic and political ideologies wealth distribution is, without question, a communist idea.

In a country whose global rival was the poster child of communism on the world stage, anything that even remotely suggested wealth distribution was not acceptable in society — especially in American schools.

On Nov. 13, 1953, Mrs. Thomas J. White, who served on the Indiana Textbook Commission, called for the removal of the Robin Hood story and any mentions of Robin Hood from Indiana public school textbooks.

She believed that Robin Hood was being used to indoctrinate children into communist ideology. There was, she argued, “a communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.”

This was the second American Red Scare — the age of John McCarthy — and while there was certainly a political element to it (political figures had a habit of accusing each other of communism when they disagreed) there was also a deeply culture side of it.

Artists like Paul Robeson and Arthur Miller struggled to sell their work once they had been accused of subscribing to elements of the ideology, and parents and teachers were very interested in keeping communism far away from American children.

But accusing a fairy tale hero of being a red-flag-waving communist activist was going a bit too far.

The living sheriff of Nottingham decried the calumny aimed at the famous outlaw, while the communist commentators in the Soviet Union welcomed the change, astutely observing that the “enrollment of Robin Hood in the Communist Party can only make sensible people laugh.”

White’s response? “Because I’m trying to get communist writers out of the textbooks, my name is mud. Evidently I’m drawing blood or they wouldn’t make such an issue out of it.”

In a live culture war, people tend to second guess the stories they’ve been telling for generations. They find evidence of modern ideas in ancient tales even though the men who told those tales centuries ago had no concept of the particular modern idea.

It’s one of the dangers of fighting a cultural ideology. It encourages reading things from a modern lens when we should, as a matter of practice, put aside our modern views and just enjoy a good story.