1 post tagged “new york society for the suppression of vice”

July 8

In 2004, critics of the USA Patriot Act won a symbolic victory when a majority of the members of the House of Representatives cast their votes for Rep. Bernie Sanders' Freedom to Read Protection Act, which he had offered as an amendment to a government appropriations bill.  The vote was 219-210.  However, Republicans leaders, who then controlled the House, extended the time allotted for voting, giving themselves time to pressure a number of Republican representatives to change sides.  As Democrats on the floor shouted, "Shame, Shame!" and "Democracy!", they finally produced a tie vote, killing the measure.

In 1946, acting on a complaint by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), New York City police entered four Manhattan bookstores and seized 130 copies of Edmund Wilson's novel, Memoirs of Hecate County.  Wilson, the literary critic for the New Yorker magazine, had published the book in March.  Widely reviewed, it had sold more than 50,000 copies.  But John Sumner, who had taken Anthony Comstock's place as leader of the NYSSV, insisted the book was obscene.  A New York court agreed and its decision was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948.