The new documentary, "Trumbo," is terrific. Based on a play by Dalton Trumbo's son, it draws heavily on the writer's wonderful letters, which are read by Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, Paul Giamatti and Joan Allen. Trumbo was one of the Hollywood 10, directors and writers who were fired for refusing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1947. The letters provide a vivid picture of Trumbo's life during the 13 years he was blacklisted.
Also, ABFFE has chosen as its book of the month, Barry Siegel's "Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, A Landmark Supreme Court Case and the Rise of State Secrets" (HarperCollins). This book is the perfect combination of a great writer (as a reporter for the LA Times, Siegel won a Pulitzer for feature writing) and a critical issue--the growth of the state secrets doctrine. For more, check out our interview with Siegel.
Contact: Jen Hammond
Program Coordinator, OIF
(312) 280-4223
jhammond@ala.org
NEWS
For Immediate Release
June 10, 2008
Christopher M. Finan receives Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award
CHICAGO –Christopher M. Finan has been chosen the winner of the Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award, presented by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) of the American Library Association (ALA). Finan was selected for his book “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act” (Beacon Press Books, 2007).
The award is named for the late Idaho University librarian Eli M. Oboler—famed as a “champion of intellectual freedom who demanded the dismantling of all barriers to freedom of expression.” The Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) presents the award every two years for the best published book.
“Christopher Finan demonstrates that free speech has had its share of ups and many more downs,” said Frederick J. Stielow, chair of the Eli M. Oboler Award Committee. “His highly readable journalistic account charts a tumultuous history from World War I into the immediate post 9/11 years. First Amendment principles were largely absent and the control shocking at the start of his narrative. They took time to evolve, but continued to suffer in a balancing act against calls for social order and fears of terrorism. His conclusion joins the spirit and concerns of the namesake of the Eli Oboler Award. Free speech can only survive through the determination of individuals and organizations to maintain the true ideals of America.”
In addition to being an author, Finan is president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the bookseller's voice in the fight against censorship. He has been involved in the fight against censorship since 1982 and is chair of the National Coalition Against Censorship and a trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation.
Formal presentation will be at the IFRT Awards Reception on Saturday, June 28, at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif.For more information, see the award Web site at http://www.ala.org/ala/ifrt/ifrtinaction/ifrtawards/oboler/oboler.htm.
Beacon Press, an independent publisher of serious non-fiction and fiction for over 150 years, announced today that it will publish a series of books about the history of freedom of speech in the United States. The Beacon series will explore the widespread denial of free speech during the first 150 years of our history; the emergence of an organized fight for free speech in the years after World War I, and the many battles that have been fought over free speech in recent years. “Beacon Press publishes books that try to change the way that people think about fundamental issues. We believe that exploring the history of free speech is essential to ensuring that our understanding and respect for the First Amendment continue to grow,” Beacon Director Helene Atwan said.
The new series will consist of books of approximately 65,000 words and is intended mainly for a popular audience. Potential authors include historians, journalists, and people who work for the growing number of organizations that defend free speech.
The series
will be edited by Christopher Finan, a free speech activist and historian, and
Brian Halley of Beacon Press. Finan is the president of the American
Booksellers Foundation of Free Expression and the author of Beacon’s From
the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in
America (2007). Finan will have primary responsibility for soliciting and
reviewing proposals. Halley will acquire and edit the books.
Beacon has
played a distinguished role in the fight for free speech. It published the
first full-edition of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, just months after the Nixon
administration tried unsuccessfully to block the publication of excerpts by the
New York Times and Washington
Post. Nixon retaliated by subpoenaing the bank records of the Unitarian
Universalist Association, the owner of Beacon Press. Beacon has also published
many fiercely independent authors, including Howard Zinn, Paul Robeson, Herbert
Marcuse, James Baldwin, Ben Bagdikian, Lani Guinier, Leslie Feinberg, Cornell
West, and more recently, Stacy Mitchell.
Authors
interested in submitting proposals for the new free speech series should
contact Chris Finan, finan@mindspring.com.
David A. Paterson is not the first governor of New York who could tell a joke.
In 1918, New Yorkers narrowly elected Alfred E. Smith as governor. Smith had learned to crack “wise” growing up on the streets of the Lower East Side. His humor helped him win political office and rise quickly to the leadership of the New York Assembly.
On the floor of the Assembly one day, an upstate Republican made the mistake of interrupting Smith with an irrelevant question as he pressed for a law to compensate workers who were injured on the job. He answered:
“As I was walking down Park Row this morning, a friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Al, which would you rather be, a cellar full of stepladders, a basketful of doorknobs or a piece of cracked ice?’ and I replied that I would rather be a fish because you can always break a pane of glass with a hammer.”
“Mr. Speaker,” objected the Republican. “I certainly do not get the point to the gentleman’s answer.”
Smith sprang the trap. “You don’t get the point to my answer? Well let me say to you that there is just as much
point to my answer as there is to your question.”
Like Governor Paterson, Al Smith took the oath of office at a difficult time. Paterson faces a faltering economy and a budget that is billions in the red. Smith was elected just as World War I came to an end and the nation entered a sharp recession coupled with high inflation.
Like Paterson, Smith did not have a strong electoral mandate. He had won only because the deadly flu epidemic kept Republicans away from the polls upstate.
Yet Smith would become one of New York’s greatest governors, and his success offers some hope for Paterson’s chances.
Some observers have noted that Paterson’s service in the legislature could be a plus. Certainly it was for Smith, who served in the Assembly for 11 years. His humor and warm personality won many Republican friends for a Tammany Democrat who would be in the minority throughout his career.
Of course, once the inaugural glow had faded, the Republicans had no intention of doing any favors for their friend. They fully expected to regain the governorship two years later.
But Smith never acted liked his election was an accident. He immediately appointed a bi-partisan Reconstruction Commission made up of the state’s leading citizens to address both the economic emergency and the long-term problems of reorganizing state government and improving the lives of workers.
In fighting for these reforms, Smith showed that he was capable of applying the lash. When the legislature threw his first legislative program back in his face, he attacked. “The entire program of reconstruction not only met defeat, but nothing was suggested in its place,” he said. “The great forum for public discussion was darkened, and the decisions that meant so much to the people of the State were made in a side room behind closed doors.”
Yet Smith never lost his sense of humor. Following another frustrating legislative session, he was in New York City trying to forget his troubles at the circus when a reporter approached. How would he compare the circus animals and the legislature, the reporter asked. “No comparison,” growled the gravel-voiced governor. “The animals are very intelligent.”
Smith captured the hearts of New Yorkers by developing constructive policies, taming the legislature, and keeping people laughing. Although he was narrowly defeated for reelection in the historic Harding landslide of 1920, he ran again in 1922 and received one of the biggest pluralities in state history. He went on to serve three more terms during which he achieved his ambitious plan for government reorganization. Franklin D. Roosevelt was only telling New Yorkers what they already knew when he called Smith “the Happy Warrior.”
While it is too soon to tell whether Governor Paterson will be a success, getting us laughing was a good first step.
February 22
In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Michigan obscenity law that made it a crime to publish, print or sell any work containing " obscene, immoral, lewd or lascivious language....tending to incite minors to violent or depraved or immoral acts." Lawyers for Michigan argued that the state must have the power to ban works that were harmful to children, even if the law violated the First Amendments rights of adults. Speaking for a unanimous court, Justice Felix Frankfurter disagreed: "Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. It thereby arbitrarily curtails one of those liberties of the individual....that history has attested as the indispensable conditions for the maintenance and progress of a free society."
February 21st
In 1921, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap are convicted of obscenity in New York for publishing an excerpt from James Joyce's novel Ulysses in their magazine, Little Review. The excerpt described indirectly but clearly a middle-aged man's thoughts as he secretly masturbated while observing a young girl. When a lawyer claimed that the language was too veiled to be obscene, the judge scoffed. "The man went off in his pants," he said. Anderson and Heap were fined $50, but not before Anderson tried to put the prosecutors on trial, including John Sumner, who had succeeded Anthony Comstock as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. "It was the poet, the artist, who discovered love, created the lover, made sex everything that it is beyond a function," she said. "It is the Mr. Sumners who have made obscenity."
February 8
In 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy charged in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that the State Department was full of Communists and Communist sympathizers who were shaping American policy in ways that aided an international Communist conspiracy. "I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party but who are nevertheless still helping to shape our foreign policy," McCarthy claimed. The speech was a sensation and soon made McCarthy the leader in the growing Red Scare.
February 1
In 1960, four African-American students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College sat down at a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Black students were soon staging "sit-ins" at segregated restaurants throughout the South.
Most booksellers and librarians thought the same way. An Atlanta librarian told the Library Journal in 1909 that she hid trashy novels in the stacks in the hopes that no one would find them. Booksellers joined the censors in suppressing books in Boston during the early 1920s.
So all of us book people were complicit in censorship. Yet it was the librarians who came to carry the stigma of censoriousness. The image of the shushing librarian is deeply ingrained in popular culture.
But the free expression movement in this country owes a lot to librarians. In 1939, the American Library Association adopted the Library Bill of Rights, encouraging librarians to buy books based on their "value and interest," ignoring "the race or nationality or the political or religious views of the writers." In 1953, when Joseph McCarthy was still riding high, librarians joined publishers in proclaiming the importance of intellectual freedom in a statement, "The Freedom to Read."
Many librarians have shown great courage in upholding free speech. One of the most celebrated cases occurred in 1950 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, when Ruth Brown, the town's librarian for over 30 years, was dismissed for subscribing to five "subversive" publications, The Nation, The New Republic, Soviet Russia Today, Negro Digest and Consumer Reports. (Yes, Consumer Reports!)
I knew about Ruth Brown, but I had not heard about Jeanne Layton until I read her obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune the other day. Layton also lost her job, not in the dark ages of the McCarthy era, but in 1979. She was fired for refusing to remove Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana, from the shelves of the Davis County library. (Davis is a small county just north of Salt Lake City.)
It seems that Morris F. Swapp, a county commissioner who was also a member of the county library board, considered DeLillo's novel "obscene" and instructed Layton to ban it. He had picked a fight with the wrong woman. She not only refused to ban the book: she refused to accept her firing, launching a fight for reinstatement. "Jeanne was a very small person in stature, but she was one of the strongest people I know," her nephew, Craig Layton, told the Tribune.
It was not an easy fight. According to her nephew, it was an "excruciating" experience for the librarian. But she won her job back in 1980, vindicating the principle for which she had fought. "It's not the library's role to determine choices for adults," she told an interviewer in 1990. "It's important for the library to serve everyone in the community, not just select groups."
Jeanne Layton died on January 19 at the age of 77. Hers was a life--and an example--to be remembered.
I thought you might like to see the face of the Westhampton Beach, N.Y., bookseller who defended the use of "salacious" books at the local high school. Terry Lucas is the woman in white.
The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression takes tremendous satisfaction in defending Mrs. Claus!
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[this is good]Hi ! I have found your article about Consumer Reports. You can check out the reviews and comments about Consumer... read more
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