4 posts tagged “free speech”
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.
As my opening outrage, I offer a controversy that began this spring when a student at Valdosta State University in Georgia decided to protest the university's plan to construct two new parking garages on the campus.
In March, the student, T. Hayden Barnes, posted flyers around the campus that raised environmental questions about the plan. In April, he wrote a letter to the student newspaper. He followed up with a letter to the university president, Ronald M. Zaccari.
Barnes soon received Zaccari's reply. On May 7, he entered his dormitory room to discover that a "notice of administrative withdrawal" had been slipped under his door. "As a result of recent activities directed towards me by you....you are considered to present a clear and present danger to this campus," Zaccari wrote. To be readmitted, Barnes would have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and to offer evidence "that you will be receiving on-going therapy."
As evidence of Barnes' purported derangement, Zaccari attached to his letter an image of the student's Facebook page, which contains a number of images related to the parking lot controversy, including Zaccari's face. According to the university president, this was a "threatening document." The university was also worried because Barnes had "posted a link on his website page to an article discussing the massacre at Virginia Tech"; linked to an advertisement for a film competition that featured the tagline, "Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is looking for the next big thing. Are you it?"; and commented on his website that he was "cleaning out and rearranging his room and thus, his mind, or so he hopes."
The Virginia Tech massacre, which occurred on April 16, was clearly very much on Zaccari's mind. He was so convinced that Barnes' actions constituted "a specific threat to his safety and a general threat to the safety of the campus" that he put the campus police on "high alert" and hired plain-clothes police officers to accompany him to "high profile" events.
Barnes has appealed his explusion to the Georgia Board of Regents. The Georgia Office of State Administrative Hearings now has jurisdiction in the case and has scheduled a hearing for Nov. 26.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new about what is happening in Valdosta. President Zaccari's use of the words "clear and present danger" carries us back to a 1919 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other critics of America's participation in World War I. The Court ruled that expressing criticism of the war constituted such a serious threat that protesters could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
The free speech movement was born just a few months later when the American Civil Liberties Union opened its offices in New York. In the intervening years, it has fought hard to prevent government officials from suppressing speech that it considers threatening. In 1969, the Supreme Court finally endorsed Holmes' view. Today, the government can punish only direct incitement to violent acts that occurs in a context that is likely to produce violence.
Clearly, T. Hayden Barnes is guilty of nothing more than unintentionally frightening a jumpy administrator.
There is one other remarkable aspect of this case. As free speech has grown in this country, so has the number of groups that are dedicated to defending it. The ACLU was our only civil liberties group for many years, but there are dozens today.
The group that is trying to call attention to the Barnes case is the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). I am grateful to FIRE President Greg Lukianoff for documenting this case in detail on his Web site.
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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