The latest example of what the politics of ethnic and sexual redress has done to the academy comes to us in two elephantine volumes from the D.C. Heath publishing company. Totalling nearly fifty-five hundred pages, The Heath Anthology of American Literature is a monument to the intellectual bankruptcy of the multicultural imperatives it champions. It is a systematic attempt to subject the study of American literature and culture to the strictures of affirmative-action thinking. For the editors of The Heath Anthology, questions of quality and of literary excellence—when they arise at all—take a distant back seat to the diversity quotient. If there are Zunis out there, some of them must have written something—or at least said something that someone else wrote down—and by God samples of those utterances must be dug up and placed alongside the works of Hawthorne and Melville, Wharton and James as exemplary products of American literature.

It seems grimly appropriate that The Heath Anthology had its origins in the annus mirabilis of 1968, that it began coalescing at a summer institute at Yale, and that it has enjoyed the support of such prestigious institutions as the Fund for the Improvement for Post-Secondary Education, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment. Paul Lauter, one of the anthology’s chief editors and clearly the moving force behind the project, explains the gestation of the book in tedious detail in an introduction that simply reeks of political rectitude. Noting that the anthology’s editorial board is “unique in its large size and in its diversity,” he boasts that “in its initial composition the board had equal numbers of women and men, minority and white participants,” that these estimable people “came from every part of the country, taught in virtually every kind of institution,” and so on.

What Professor Lauter does not presume to say—obviously these are secondary concerns—is that the editorial board of The Heath Anthology was the best qualified that could be assembled or that its members were literary scholars of proven accomplishment and critical judgment. Instead, he proudly announces that The Heath Anthology offers students “by far the widest sampling of the work of minority and white women writers available in any anthology of American literature” (“109 women of all races, 25 individual Native American authors,” etc., etc.). In other words, what he has given us here is not primarily a literary anthology but a kind of anthropological sampler: an agglomeration of texts chosen to represent not literary excellence but an approved ethnic and sexual “mix.” Consequently, while some of the headnotes for individual authors are responsible and informative (being written mostly not by the editors but other academics), in conception and execution The Heath Anthology is a disaster.

It is especially disastrous considered as a textbook designed to introduce students to the riches of American literature. Students will find only about seventy-five pages devoted to the work of Henry James, and a mere twenty—twenty pages—to the work of William Faulkner. But there is room for plenty of Zuni and Aztec poetry in English translation, a whole section of blues lyrics (“I need plenty grease in my frying pan ’cause I don’t want my meat to burn,” etc.), hundreds and hundreds of pages of third-rate popular literature by women, translations of the poetry Chinese immigrants scribbled on their barracks walls expressing, as the editors put it, “their outrage and humiliation at the treatment America accorded them.” The issue here is not whether we should strive to preserve examples of demotic culture; of course we should; the issue is whether every scrap of writing, no matter how vulgar, deserves to be hailed and studied as literature so long as it happens to have been produced by an approved victim group. Students get less than fifty pages of Edith Wharton in The Heath Anthology, but Professor Lauter and company make sure they are exposed, in the section of African-American folktales, to such edifying tidbits as “The Signifying Monkey,” which begins “Deep down in the jungle so they say / There’s a signifying motherfucker down the way.” This is the kind of mind-opening “literature” we are being asked to make room for in the canon.

It is hardly surprising that in many respects a more appropriate title for The Heath Anthology of American Literature would be The Heath Anthology of Anti-American Literature. A disgust with “mainstream” (i.e., European-based) American culture is a standard feature of the multicultural ethos, and it is especially prominent in the editorial commentary supplied by the general editors. Writing about the World’s Columbia Exposition that opened in 1893, for example, the editors tell us that “the Fair’s much-vaunted whiteness was [an] apt symbol of the continued dominance in the 1890s of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture.”

There are other extraordinary things in these bulky tomes. Early on in the first volume, readers are solemnly informed that Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame “was ethnocentric in his views.” No! Was he really? In a particularly large gesture, the editors even allow, regretfully, that the Indians “were, most likely, equally ethnocentric.” Then, too, we discover that the Puritans (who also suffered from a bad case of ethnocentricism) “implemented their mainstream ideology… by establishing texts that would effect their cultural ends.” The “mainstream ideology” of the Puritans? The “mainstream ideology” of that small band of dissenters who came here to escape religious persecution? Such vertiginous musings are par for the course in these volumes.

The Heath Anthology glaringly exemplifies one of the most corrupting aspects of the whole phenomenon of multiculturalism: namely, the attempt to obscure basic intellectual and aesthetic issues with a smokescreen of moralism. Like many forms of tyranny, multiculturalism pursues its goals by arrogating to itself the vocabulary of virtue. Armed with the rhetoric of “diversity” and “pluralism,” tipsy with sundry social resentments, partisans of multiculturalism run riot over “mere” literary values. Shouting about “openness,” they are closed to experiencing culture on its own terms. The idea that the study of literature is something inherently valuable, not simply another excuse for political activism, is as foreign to this way of thinking as is the notion that the criterion of literary excellence might be . . . well, literary excellence. The Heath Anthology is a shabby production, intellectually shallow, politically tendentious; it deserves the scorn of everyone who cares about the preservation and transmission of American literature.