6 posts tagged “censorship”
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."
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!
We lost a battle last week. Approximately 75 parents of students at the Westhampton Beach High School on Long Island, New York, had complained to the school board about the inclusion of two books on a list of 300 titles that students can select for reading assignments. They argued that James Patterson's Cradle and All and Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle should be banned because of their sexual content.
The first thing to note is that these parents were not complaining about books that their children were being forced to read. Students could choose any of the titles on the list of 300, and parents were free to veto books they thought were inappropriate.
This fight was not about parental rights. It trampled the rights of the parents who wanted their kids to be able to use these books. No, this was your average power play by a group of conservative parents who want the school board to rein in the educators who put the books on the list.
And it worked. The school board voted 4-3 last week to ban the books.
But the news was not all bad from Westhampton Beach. The censors met strong opposition from community members who rallied behind the leadership of bookseller Terry Lucas, the owner of The Open Book. Terry was one of four people who spoke at the initial school board meeting. She circulated a petition and held a read-in at her store, which attracted 60 students, teachers, and librarians as well as a couple of local authors.
If your morale needs a boost, you can watch kids reading their favorite banned books in a video of the read-in on the Web site of the Library Club. Or you can look at the smiling faces of those who participated.
Independent booksellers have long been leaders in the fight for free speech. If we want them to keep fighting, we have to help them survive.
June 26
In 2006, four Connecticut librarians spoke to the press for the first time about their fight against a National Security Letter (NSL) that the FBI had issued in an effort to obtain the records of their patrons. With the assistance of the ACLU, they had challenged the NSL as a threat to the privacy of their patrons. However, a gag order had prevented them from discussing the case publically for nearly a year. They were finally allowed to speak when the government withdrew the NSL and lifted the gag.
In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling declaring the Communications Decency Act (CDA) unconstitutional in Reno v. U.S. The CDA banned the display of "harmful" sexual material on the Internet. The Court declared that the law would deprive adults of information that was protected by the First Amendment. The Electronic Freedom Foundation has posted a brief commemorative piece.
In 1971, in an extraordinary Saturday session, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the Pentagon Papers case. President Richard Nixon had obtained injunctions blocking the publication of excerpts from the secret government study, a history of American involvement in Vietnam. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post challenged the injunctions as unconstitutional prior restraints on the press.
June 25
In 1992, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, a bill that authorized the victim of a sexual attacks to sue the producers and distributors of any obscene material that might have "caused" the assault. However, the bill had been largely discredited. "Give us a break!" Joe Teller of the comedy team Penn and Teller wrote in the New York Times. "When one pays $7 to go into a theater to see big pictures moving on a wall, one does not have to be a mental giant to realize you are watching a movie. It makes you wonder how they explain the millions of people who saw ‘Psycho’ without stealing bankrolls or bumping off blondes.’"
June 24
Today is the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roth v. United States, upholding the right of the government to ban "obscene" material. Although the decision was celebrated as a victory by anti-pornography activists, the majority opinion by Justice William Brennan also declared that sex and obscenity were not synonymous. Works that dealt with sex that were not "utterly without redeeming social importance" were protected by the First Amendment, Brennan said. Over the next decade, the Supreme Court would hand down a series of decisions narrowing the definition of obscenity to apply only to "hard-core pornography."
In 1961, Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, published in the United States one of the most notorious works in the English language, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Officials in more than 60 communites filed obscenity charges in an effort to suppress the book. Three years later, the Supreme Court reversed a decision by the Florida Supreme Court that had declared the book obscene.
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