The resurgence of American censorship and book bans
This is a repost of an entry that originally ran in July 2023.
Anthony Comstock is back in the news. More than a century after his death, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and the law he inspired – the 1873 “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” more commonly known as the “Comstock Act” – have emerged once again as players in America’s cultural wars, cited by right-wing judges in 2023 to support banning books, drag shows, and the medical abortion drug mifepristone.
Comstock was active throughout the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. He opposed women’s suffrage, the dissemination of any information regarding birth control or abortion, and pornography or other “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Thousands were arrested under the Act and Comstock himself boasted that 15 people were driven to suicide by his actions. After his death in 1915, Comstock’s work was carried on by his successor at the NYSSV, John Sumner.
As I discuss in my book, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity », it was Sumner who had Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap arrested in 1920 in New York for publishing an excerpt of James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary magazine, The Little Review. In January of that same year, Prohibition became law in the US after the Volstead Act passed. In April, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for the murder of a Boston-area paymaster in what many believed was a politically motivated action based on their anarchist political beliefs. And perhaps most importantly, in 1920 the 19th Amendment became law, guaranteeing women the right to vote, sending Sumner into a frenzy over the fear that “radical feminists” would upend American society. In the midst of these social and cultural changes, Anderson and Heap were convicted, narrowly escaped a prison sentence, and were fined fifty dollars each (about $750 today). Joyce’s Ulysses was effectively banned from the United States. Copies of The Little Review that contained excerpts of it were taken to the official government incinerator and burned. Fortunately, copies already in the hands of purchasers survived to be digitized for us today.
In his biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellman described the scene immediately at the conclusion of the trial: “When they had left the courtroom [their defense attorney John] Quinn said, ‘And now for God’s sake don’t publish any more obscene literature.’ ‘How am I to know when it’s obscene?’ asked Margaret Anderson. He replied, ‘I’m sure I don’t know, but don’t do it.’” (1982: 503) One hundred years later, American school teachers preventatively emptying their classroom shelves of all reading material are asking the same question and getting the same answer.
Then, as now, the pro-censorship crusaders claimed to be fighting on behalf of America’s youth, suppressing material that might have (in the words of the Hicklin Rule – an English law upon which the Comstock Act was based) “a tendency … to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” (Birmingham 2014: 168) – meaning children, women, and immigrants, those who, in the estimation of the NYSSV, did not have the intelligence or cultural sophistication of upper-class white men such as themselves. Material such as nude figures in works of art (like Michelangelo’s David, the subject of recent controversy in Florida) would corrupt these lesser minds, but could be perfectly fine viewing for the members of the NYSSV themselves.
Censorship under the Comstock Act was bound up with social control in rapidly urbanizing societies where traditional mores no longer held sway and where diverse populations mingled more frequently. As Kevin Birmingham argues, “Censorship wasn’t just about sex. It was about preserving a tenuous public order.” (2014: 174) As waves of immigrants arrived in American cities, the idea was that enforcing morality in urban life would control a population that seemed increasingly out of control.
Sumner and the NYSSV were not alone in their moral outrage at Joyce’s Ulysses, as I discuss in more depth in Outrage. Many reviewers joined in the condemnation. Alfred Noyes wrote in the Sunday Chronicle: “It is simply the foulest book that has ever found its way into print … there is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages.” Joseph Collins wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Mr. Joyce has seen fit to use words and phrases that the entire world has covenanted and people in general … have agreed shall not be used, and which are base, vulgar, vicious and depraved.”
Despite his claim that “the entire world” agreed, the welter of adjectives Collins used pointed to a fundamental uncertainty at the heart of the Comstock Act, which prohibits anything “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, disgusting, or indecent.” Piling up long strings of words did not hide the fact that each of those words, no matter how many there were, was a subjective judgment. By what rule do we decide if something is disgusting? How is that different from what is lewd? Or is it? And, more importantly, who decides on that interpretation? Judges in obscenity cases were simply to know it when they saw it.
This is no easier in 2023 than it was in 1920, as we have seen by the competing legal rulings that various judges are handing down. American society is no less fractured today than it was a century ago – that, in fact, is precisely the point. In a rapidly changing world where traditional norms no longer seem to hold sway, obscenity laws can be attempts by the powerful to control and silence marginalized groups which seem to be gaining voice.
So why do the arts matter? The reality is that America is a nation of diversity – diversity of belief systems, ways of life, identities, languages, convictions, backgrounds. Our cultural productions are tied to that diversity and the arts speak to those identities, differences, and deeply held beliefs. As more voices rise up from people who have been silenced and ignored – rise up in poetry, music, books, paintings, food, movies, TV shows, fashion and all forms of culture – those voices not only critique, but by their very existence disprove the idea that “the whole world” agrees with the way society has operated and with the power structures that keep those social systems in place. I argue in Outrage that it then becomes crucial for those who benefit from those power structures to shut down the diversity of voices.
A century ago, pro-censorship forces like Comstock, Sumner, and the NYSSV, fueled by fear of the social changes that they saw happening around them and the concomitant possible loss of dominance and control for those in power like themselves, turned to the courts to suppress the words and images that were part of that change. In the short term, riding on a wave of social backlash, they prevailed. James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in the US.
But in April 1933, the Nazi government in Germany began burning books. The burnings were gigantic spectacles, meant to “purify” German libraries, schools, and homes of “culturally destructive” literature. While many of the authors whose works were burned were Jewish, not all were. Included in the pyres were works from, among others, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Helen Keller, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells – and James Joyce. With the Nazis burning Joyce’s works for their “culturally destructive” influences, it became uncomfortable for Americans to be doing the same. In 1934, in a legal challenge to the Ulysses ban engineered by Bennett Cerf at Random House, who hoped to publish a US edition of Ulysses, and argued by Morris Ernst, the ban against Ulysses on the basis of obscenity was lifted. The court decision stated decisively that a nation’s access to reading material could not be limited by fears for children. When it comes to defining what is offensive, “the whole world” does not agree.
In 1934, the Comstock Act lost the day in court, but it did not go away. It is back with us now.
References:
Birmingham, Kevin. 2014. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Penguin.
de Grazia, Edward (1991) "Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius" in Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 9, pp. 394.
Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giuffre, Katherine. 2023. Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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