Commentary

BOOK CENSORSHIP IN AMERICA TODAY

Presentation to Words on Fire Panel, Boston, March 13, 2003:
"The Bonfires of Berlin: How It Happened Then – Why It Matters Now"

By Marjorie Heins

It is a bit daunting to be asked to talk about book censorship in the U.S. at an event devoted primarily to remembering the book burnings of Nazi Germany. We occasionally have book burnings here, organized by private groups like the Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, which burned Harry Potter books along with works by Shakespeare in January 2002, claiming that they were "Satanic deceptions." But these incidents are relatively infrequent, and are not conducted with the approval of the government or major universities.

Nevertheless, we do have book censorship in the U.S. Let me give you a quick background on American censorship history, followed by an outline of the problems we face today with attacks on books in public schools and libraries.

Book censorship of course has a long history predating the horrors of Nazi Germany. Until the Enlightenment in the 18th century, virtually all governments and powerful churches, with rare exceptions, suppressed words and ideas they considered threatening to their hegemony – which meant, for the most part, words and ideas thought to be subversive or blasphemous. By contrast, America in the mid-19th century, taking its cue from England, began the official suppression of books and ideas not about politics or religion but about sexuality – which is itself, of course, a political subject, because the targets were ideas and information that threatened dominant attitudes about women's role, about reproduction, and about social control of sexual behavior.

This new form of official government censorship was accomplished through the passage of laws against "obscenity." Three social factors combined to produce our first obscenity laws:

- Victorian-era official morality – in particular, attitudes about women's sexual nature or lack thereof;

- Fear that a newly literate working class would be "corrupted" by novels, detective stories, and other popular literature; and

- A drive by leaders of the middle and upper classes to institutionalize and control sexuality, especially birth control and abortion information, which were seen as threatening the institution of marriage and facilitating sex for pleasure rather than procreation. This was part of a larger political struggle – the Victorian era was not all button-down prudery; theories of anarchism and free love thrived through much of the 19th century, and obscenity law was used to silence these social critics. In Massachusetts, for example, the free-love radical Ezra Heywood was convicted under state obscenity law and sentenced to two years in Dedham jail for publishing a political tract called Cupid's Yokes, which attacked the institution of marriage.

In addition to state obscenity prosecutions such as Heywood's, the federal obscenity law, named after America's most famous moral entrepreneur, Anthony Comstock, greatly expanded the scope of censorship. The U.S. had federal obscenity legislation before Comstock, but he lobbied for a major expansion in 1873, and this "Comstock Act" is still on the books. It specifically added birth control information and devices to the list of banned materials.

As head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a special agent of the U.S. Post Office as well as the New York State prosecutor's office, Comstock was able to seize and destroy tons of books, magazines, pamphlets, advertisements, and birth control devices. And although one basis of obscenity law – fear of sexual arousal – applied to everyone, youth were a particular subject of concern. The U.S. Patent Office received numerous applications for anti-masturbation devices which parents were persuaded to acquire to prevent children from falling into dreadful habits.

As Comstock wrote in one of his several books, called Traps for the Young: there is "no more active agent employed by Satan in civilized communities to ruin the human family than EVIL READING."1 Comstock's counterpart in Boston, the Watch and Ward Society, was equally unrelenting: its annual report in 1893 warned that "even the briefest of stimulating passages" in literature "could plunge the helpless reader into that state of excitement in which principle is overcome by passion and nothing but opportunity is wanted for unbridled indulgence."2

The legacy of these anti-vice crusaders persisted well into the 20th century. Works suppressed under state obscenity laws, or banned from importation by Customs, or from the U.S. mails, included Boccaccio's Decameron, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Balzac's Droll Stories, Dreiser's An American Tragedy (the subject of a major censorship case in Massachusetts in 1927), Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County, The Arabian Nights, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (of course), Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, James Joyce's Ulysses, and hundreds more. In defense of Dreiser, by the way, Massachusetts anti-censorship forces "staged a free-speech rally, complete with satiric skits, while the trial was in progress. Birth control crusader Margaret Sanger, who had only recently been forbidden to speak in Boston, sat on the stage with a large piece of tape across her mouth."3

It wasn't until 1957 that the Supreme Court put any First Amendment limits on obscenity law, insisting that if literature had redeeming social value, it could not be suppressed. The first unexpurgated Lady Chatterley followed, and by the late 1960s, even Fanny Hill was protected – according to the Supreme Court, because it has literary and historical value. The case is known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure v. Massachusetts, and was a turning point for the Court, which had been struggling to come up with a definition of "obscenity" that would recognize both the importance to a free society of protecting literature and information about human sexuality, and the apparent political necessity of having laws in place to censor sexual material that – in the Court's words – lacks "serious value" and is "no essential part of the exposition of ideas."4

Today in the U.S., books are not suppressed very often through the criminal prohibitions of obscenity law. But they are the subject of unending censorship battles in public schools and libraries – and here, the targets of disapproval include religion, politics, violence, magic, vulgar words, and disobedience of authority, in addition, of course, to sex. Sometimes these battles are national in scope – as, for example, when Congress passed a law in 2000 requiring most American schools and libraries to install privately manufactured Internet filters that block tens of thousands of valuable Web pages on subjects ranging from fly fishing to the Knights of Columbus. A federal district court struck down the law, and the case was argued on March 5 before the Supreme Court.5

More frequently, school curriculum and library censorship are not imposed by Congress but by local school boards. This is a result in part of our decentralized educational system, which allows relatively small but highly vocal and determined local pressure groups to influence school boards and administrators. Most challenges come from the religious right, but those farther to the left are not immune from the impulse to suppress what they think – whether or not correctly – is dangerous literature. In the context of school censorship, Huckleberry Finn is probably the best example. In 2002, this masterpiece ranked seventh in the nation on the American Library Association's annual tally of most challenged books.6

The first six on the list were the Harry Potter series – for its focus on wizardry and magic; the Alice series – for sexual explicitness and offensive language; Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, for offensive language; Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for sexual content, alleged racism, and offensive language (the alleged racism is usually described as an unfair depiction of whites); Taming the Star Runner by S.E. Hinton, for offensive language; and Dave Pilkey's Captain Underpants series – for "encouraging children to disobey authority."7

Campaigns to remove books from school curricula and libraries go back decades. In one incident in 1975, seven members of the school board in a Long Island, New York town called Island Trees ordered the removal from school libraries of nine books that had been listed as "objectionable" by a local conservative group. They included Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, and Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes. The school board members explained that they had been told the books were "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy."8 Unlike many similar school censorship incidents, this one ended up at the Supreme Court, largely thanks to a student named Steven Pico who took the school district to court.

The Supreme Court eventually issued what we call a compromise decision. On the one hand, it said school boards have broad discretion to select or remove books that they consider "pervasively vulgar." But on the other hand, a narrow majority of five justices said that some motivations for the removal of books from school libraries would violate the First Amendment. Four justices joined an opinion explaining that school boards may not act "in a narrowly partisan or political manner," because "our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas."9 This Pico standard still governs in school censorship cases; as a result, most school boards have learned to frame their censorship decisions in terms of "vulgarity" rather than suppression of particular ideas.

Thus, for example, a perennial target of local school censors, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, is usually challenged for vulgar language or "taking the Lord's name in vain." The book is a popular choice of high school English teachers precisely because, as one scholar has said, it is "wonderfully teachable ...: simple and clear, yet profound and beautiful." It can "show beginning readers the paths to great books. ... It is a tragedy in the classic sense, showing humanity's ability to achieve nobility through and in spite of defeat."10 And although Of Mice and Men is often challenged, the challenges don't always succeed. In Ohio in 1992, for example, after a pressure group in one town counted 108 profanities, 12 racial slurs, and 45 uses of God's name in vain in the book and forced its removal from the local school's optional reading list, about 150 protesting parents, teachers, and students attended a review committee meeting where they extolled the book's virtues. Of Mice and Men was reinstated on the reading list.11

Let me recount just two more examples from the hundreds of book censorship incidents that occur every year. In 2002, the school board of Fairfax County, Virginia, voted to retain a historical novel for young readers, Gates of Fire, over the objection of a local group called PABBIS (Parents Against Bad Books), which protested its "profanity, violence, and lurid depictions of sadistic behavior." The historical setting of the book is ancient Greece, and the violence that so shocked PABBIS occurs during the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Local free-speech advocates formed a Right to Read Coalition that persuaded the board to retain the book.12

Finally, a very current case – Harry Potter again, this time in Arkansas. All Harry Potter books were removed from school library shelves in the town of Cedarville after the school board decided that they show "good witches" and "good magic," and teach that "parents/teachers/rules are stupid and something to be ignored."13 This was despite the recommendation of a review committee that voted 15-0 to keep the books. The case is now in court, challenging the board's decision under the standard announced by the Supreme Court in the Pico case, since the school board removed the Harry Potter books specifically because it objected to their ideas – favorable depictions of witches, the occult, and the notion of kids challenging authority.

The parents challenging this Harry Potter ban should win in court, but of course that will not stop other school boards from removing books from library shelves or curriculum reading lists. Book censorship will continue wherever the perennial human urge to censor trumps appreciation for intellectual freedom – and that is, unfortunately, in many parts of the U.S. today. This is why the Words on Fire festival is important, and why I hope it will inspire you to get active in your local freedom to read committee, or if it doesn't exist, to create one.

UPDATE: On April 22, 2003, a federal judge in Arkansas ordered the Cedarville School District to return J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books to the open shelves of its libraries.14

NOTES

1. Quoted in Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (NY: Hill & Wang, 2001), p. 30.

2. Id.

3. Id., p. 42.

4. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957); Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 24 (1973). The Fanny Hill case is A Book Named John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966).

5. The Supreme Court ultimately reversed the district court decision and upheld CIPA; see Ignoring the Irrationality of Internet Filters, the Supreme Court Upholds CIPA.)

6. American Library Association press release, "Harry Potter Series Tops List of Most Challenged Books Four Years in a Row," Jan. 13, 2003, www.ala.org/news/v8n16/banned_books.html (accessed 2/23/03).

7. Id.

8. Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 857 (1982).

9. Id. 457 U.S. at 870.

10. University of Wisconsin Professor Thomas Scarseth, quoted in Herbert Foerstel, Banned in the USA (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 143.

11. Id., pp. 145-6.

12. Reported in American Library Association, Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, July 2002, p. 179.

13. Free Expression Network Newswire, "National Groups Urge Court to Overturn Harry Potter Ban," March 3, 2003, www.freeexpression.org/newswire/0303_2003.htm (accessed 3/3/03).

14. See Press Release, "Judge Blocks Censorship of Harry Potter in Arkansas Schools," Apr. 23, 2003, http://www.freeexpression.org/newswire/0423_2003.htm.