On the Tradition of Institutional Censorship in the United States
The Emblem of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded 1873. The symbol depicts a police raid on a distributor of “obscene” literature. An officer leads the distributor away while another man burns the books in question.
Last month, I wrote about the ongoing war on libraries here in the South and throughout the United States. Begun in the senate, S.B. 390, which would drive the ALA out of Georgia, has moved into the house, where a passing vote will send it for the governor’s signature. According to Youth Today, at least two more pieces of legislation proposed this term target libraries and librarians. S.B. 394, “the Restricting Explicit and Adult-designated Education Resources (READER) Act … would add a ‘restricted’ category for school materials of content deemed harmful to minors. Older students would need parental permission to access the ‘sexually explicit content.’” And, S.B. 154, like a similar bill approved by the House of Representatives in West Virigina, would criminalize librarians accused of “distribution of harmful materials to minors.” As of this writing, S.B. 394 and S.B. 154 both await votes in the state senate.
These bills, and other bills like them, represent a concentrated effort to undermine public libraires and education, to restrict and criminalize speech, and to silence and threaten minority voices. They are not unique to the South. They are not unique to the United States. They are certainly not unique to our moment in history. Indeed, since widespread adoption of the printing press, censors, moralists, and politicians have sought to stem the tide of information, often citing similar concerns as their contemporary counterparts. As Kaitlin Jean Kojali demonstrates, the fifteenth-century humanist Filippo de Strata “blamed the literature produced by printing presses for widespread moral degradation, and conveyed particular concern for children, who were being corrupted by overly sexual and impure texts” (4). A Benedictine monk and theologian, de Strata addressed his Polemic against Printing to the Doge (Duke/elected leader) of Venice, Nicolò Marcello, as a plea that he regulate the press:
They shamelessly print, at a negligible price, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths …. Cure (if you will) the plague which is doing away with the laws of all decency, and curb the printers. They persist in their sick vices, setting Tibullus in type, while a young girl reads Ovid to learn sinfulness. Through printing, tender boys and gentle girls, chaste without foul stain, take in whatever mars purity of mind or body; they encourage wantonness, and swallow up huge gain from it.
Closer to home, we know that reactionary moralism has always driven censorious attacks on literature. Consider the 1920 trial of Joyce’s Ulysses for running afoul of the Comstock Act, which prohibited the “Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” An outgrowth of the same temperance movements that led to the prohibition of alcohol and abortion, the Comstock Act of 1873 aimed to regulate so-called obscene literature, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, and other items of “immoral purpose.” Spurred on by the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, congress nevertheless remained unable to prevent the production of these materials without running afoul of the Constitution. So, rather than regulate the press, they went after the distributors. The Comstock Act “declared to be nonmailable”
Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance; and Every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and … Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made … and Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing.
In other words, congress outlawed the distribution of “obscene” material via the mail, and it was the prohibition of distribution that led to later censorship trials that considered the question of a works obscenity. To return to Ulysses, for example, the editors of the Little Review, Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap, were charged not with producing but distributing obscene material after their magazine printed the “Nausicaa” episode, which depicts Bloom’s elaborate masturbatory fantasies. Found in violation of the Comstock Act, Anderson and Heap were fined $100 and ordered to halt the serialization of Ulysses.
A post office ruling of obscenity in 1959 also upheld the earlier restriction of the unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the United States, with Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield declaring the work an obscene violation of the Comstock Act and prohibiting it from the mail. According to Summerfield, “Any literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by the pornographic and smutty passages and words, so that the book, taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work.” Apparently, folks traveling with the book, which had been privately printed in Italy, saw it confiscated under the Comstock provision that anyone who “knowingly … [aids] in the circulation or disposition” of an obscene work could be liable for distributing prohibited materials.
U. S. courts, including the Supreme Court, have consistently refused to adopt blanket definitions and thus prohibitions of obscenity, choosing, by and large, to leave the matter to lower courts and case by cases bases. Frustrated, since the late nineteenth century, by the supremacy of the First Amendment, censors have thus turned to regulations like the Comstock Act to restrict speech without technically interfering with the freedom of speech.
As in the cases of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, many of the most famous censorship cases we recall amount to legal challenges like these: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was restricted by U. S. Customs in the 1930s; Customs also prohibited the distribution of Ginsberg’s Howl in 1957; and, in 1959, the U. S. Post Office determined the first issue of the magazine Big Table, which included excepts from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, to be obscene.
Institutional measures like these that prohibit the distribution of literature have been often used as an end run around the First Amendment, which isn’t even to mention the various broadcast and communications restrictions that prohibit speech by limiting the means and manner of the distribution of “obscene” material. Because the Supreme Court continues to reject blanket definitions of obscenity, though, states remain free to construct their own definitions and enact their own laws in response to violations of state standards, which is what happened in Virginia in 1960. The Code of Virginia defines as obscene
that which, considered as a whole, has as its dominant theme or purpose an appeal to the prurient interest in sex, that is, a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, excretory functions or products thereof or sadomasochistic abuse, and which goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters and which, taken as a whole, does not have series literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
If a book (or other work) is deemed obscene in Virigina, it is the distributors of the material who faces the consequences
any person who publishes, sells, rents, lends, transports in intrastate commerce, or commercially distributes or exhibits the book, or has the book in his possession with intent to publish, sell, rent, lend, transport in intrastate commerce, or commercially distribute or exhibit the book, is presumed to have knowledge that the book is obscene.
Those persons, of course, can then be subject to criminal charges under the law, which is exactly what petitioners were hoping when they brought charges against booksellers for selling Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a Memoir and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury in June of 2022. A judge ultimately rejected the attempt to class these books “obscene” and penalize the booksellers, but that ruling didn’t stop school board members in Rockingham County, Virgina, from voting to remove Kobabe’s memoir from libraries in January of this year.
Library censorship of the kind sweeping the nation—legalistic attempts to restrict library services, funding, and affiliations—then is yet another attempt to find a way around the First Amendment, to prohibit speech by regulating the mechanisms of its distribution. Considering the Comstock provisions, it is also no surprise to find these challenges coinciding with renewed attacks on abortion rights in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade as regulators again turn their attention to the distribution of abortifacients by mail. Moreover, as the Rockingham vote shows, library laws are an attempt to solidify the chilling effect associated with all such free speech challenges: When books are prosecuted, no matter the results, communities, authors, and readers take note and tread with care, undue and otherwise.
Works Cited
Kojali, Kaitlin Jean with Paul Dover. “The Survival of Manuscripts: Resistance, Adoption, and Adaptation to Gutenberg’s Printing Press in Early Modern Europe.” Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023, https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=kjur.
de Strata, Filippo. Polemic against Printing. Translated by Shelagh Grier, edited and introduced by Martin Lowry, The Hayloft Press, 1986.