Tennessee State Representative Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood) joined Tuesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss his bill that would designate the Aitken Bible as one of Tennessee’s official state books.
Bulso’s bill, HB 1828, would designate a list of official state books as the state currently does not recognize any works, fact or fiction, as official state books.
During his Tuesday interview with Leahy, Bulso (pictured above) said the list of books included in his bill are all books that are “particularly relevant to Tennessee, either because the author was born and raised in Tennessee, or the work has some special connection to Tennessee.”
“I started, obviously, in the Revolutionary War period because Tennessee became a state, as we all know, on June 1 of 1796. And at that time, George Washington was very late in his second term as president, and was just about to deliver his remarkable farewell address to the American people, which really, I think, defined us as a nation at that time. And so we put on George Washington’s farewell address to the American people, along with Alexis de Tocqueville’s work, Democracy in America, which drew a lot on Washington’s writing,” Bulso said.
“But also, a lot of folks don’t know that in 1782, the U.S. Congress actually authorized a printer in Philadelphia, James Aiken, to print the very first American Bible, which had not been printed ever on this side of the Atlantic because all of those had been imported from Great Britain prior to the Revolutionary War. And so this particular work, this Bible of the American Revolution, also called the Aitken Bible, is really a work of history, and I think will help define us as a people as to what the values and beliefs that we all shared at the time the country was formed,” Bulso added.
In addition to the Aitken Bible, the following books would be designated as official state books of Tennessee if Bulso’s bill was to become law in its current form:
- “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
- “Farewell Address to the American People,” by George Washington (1796)
- “Democracy in America,” by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835 and 1840)
- “The Papers of Andrew Jackson,” collected by the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- “Roots,” by Alex Haley (1977)
- “A Death in the Family,” by James Agee (1958)
- “American Lion,” by Jon Meacham (2009)
- “The Civil War: A Narrative,” by Shelby Foote (1958-1974)
- “Coat of Many Colors,” by Dolly Parton (2016)
Acknowledging controversies behind some of the titles on his list – including plagiarism allegations behind “Roots” -Bulso said he tended to “overlook whatever imperfections there might be in any of the authors in the list and just look at the work of literature itself and determine whether it actually says something about Tennessee or a Tennessean who was influential.”
“I mean, there obviously are imperfections, perhaps, with any of the books listed in the ten, and the points you’re making are certainly valid with regard to plagiarism and that sort of thing, but it still stands out as an enormously influential work,” Bulso added.
Bulso said State Senator Paul Rose (R-Lauderdale) is sponsoring the bill in the Tennessee Senate.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Gino Bulso” by Gino Bulso.
