Censorship

Censorship. From the Colonial Era to the present, struggles over censorship have loomed large in American life, figuring in the history of antislavery and abolitionism, labor movements, antiwar protests, radical politics, gay rights advocacy, public education debates, controversies over sex and reproduction, and many other issues.

Although John Peter Zenger's 1735 acquittal did not eliminate seditious libel from American jurisprudence, it did make government censorship attempts more difficult. Though the founders' commitment to wholly unfettered speech remains in dispute, the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and freedom of the press erected a strong barrier against censorship, and Americans of the era clearly valued free political discourse. While common‐law ideas of libel, blasphemy, sedition, and obscenity persisted, radical ideas of free expression thrived as well, as groups and individuals asserted their interests in the public arena. But although the Bill of Rights seemed a bulwark in defense of free speech, the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts revealed its continued vulnerability.

Like the Federalist party in the 1790s, subsequent leaders during the Civil War, the two world wars, and the Cold War would insist that the nation's fate depended on the government's capacity to censor its critics. Confronted with antiwar and pro‐South agitation during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1863 and authorized the arrest of southern sympathizers, war opponents, and persons engaged in “any disloyal practice.” In World War I, under the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Amendment, the Woodrow Wilson administration suppressed antiwar periodicals and arrested numerous war critics, including the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. During the 1918–1920 Red Scare, officials imprisoned and deported many labor activists and radicals. During World War II and the early Cold War the government again engaged in censorship, monitoring wartime movie scripts and, later, removing books by politically suspect authors from United States Information Agency libraries abroad.

But anticensorship sentiment remained strong. The Wilson administration's abuses led Roger Baldwin and others in 1920 to found what became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919) sharply criticized censorship, as did the Harvard Law professor Zechariah Chafee in his critique of wartime censorship, Freedom of Speech (1920). The ACLU‐Holmes‐Chafee approach insisted that the First Amendment was meant primarily to serve the social good, by assuring a hearing for unpopular political views, not to protect individual liberty. This approach gave short shrift to traditional libertarianism, represented by Theodore Schroeder of the National Free Speech League, for example, which insisted on the individual's freedom of expression, political, sexual, or otherwise. In a tactically shrewd move, Progressive Era intellectuals offered their socially based argument for free speech in an era not particularly receptive to libertarian ideas. However, this argument made it harder to defend nonpolitical forms of expression, such as “obscene” books, “indecent” movies, and birth‐control information.

Following Holmes's lead, the Supreme Court in Near v. Minnesota (1931) overturned governmental efforts to impose prior restraint on a newspaper. In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the high court rejected a libel suit against the Times for a political ad, even though the ad contained certain inaccuracies. In 1971, the justices turned back President Richard M. Nixon's efforts to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers. The liberalizing trend gradually extended to sexually explicit material, in such cases as United States v. Ulysses (1933); Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California (1957); and a 1966 case involving John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Signaling a conservative turn, however, the Supreme Court in Miller v. California (1973) made it somewhat easier for local authorities to suppress sexually explicit material deemed obscene by local community standards.

Throughout American history, censorship battles have unfolded within a larger cultural context. For example, the expansion of First Amendment protection reflected the efforts of successive generations of artists, writers, and “sex radicals,” from nineteenth‐century advocates of “free love” to twentieth‐century proponents of abortion and gay rights. Conversely, in times of rapid social change, threatened social groups have used censorship as an instrument of social control. Amid the social upheavals of the Gilded Age, elite groups like the New England Watch and Ward Society and Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, relying on local statutes and on an 1873 federal law barring obscene material from the mails, sought to suppress dime novels, crime magazines, books deemed indecent, and contraceptive information. In the early twentieth century, as immigrants transformed urban America, as women surged into the workplace and the voting booths, as Victorian sexual mores eroded, and as movies and other new amusements captivated mass audiences, reformers condemned the stage, the press, and motion pictures for corrupting the young.

Would‐be censors especially targeted motion pictures. As local and state censorship boards pressured studios to produce more decorous movies, the Supreme Court in Mutual v. Ohio (1915) denied the film industry First Amendment protection. Catholic pressure forced Hollywood to accept a production code under Will H. Hays in 1930, and a Catholic censor, Joseph Breen, in 1934. Though the code was technically voluntary, Hollywood understood that the alternative was consumer boycotts and censorship. As oligopolies controlling production, distribution, and exhibition, the studios could enforce self‐censorship. The comic‐book industry, accused of promoting juvenile delinquency, copied the Hollywood model, adopting an almost identical code and enforcement mechanism. The movie‐censorship tide turned in 1952, however, when the Supreme Court in Burstyn v. Wilson (a case involving Roberto Rossellini's film The Miracle, denounced by New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman) reversed its 1915 position and gave the film First Amendment protection. Local and state censorship boards disbanded, and Hollywood abandoned the production code in 1966, adopting a rating system instead.

Censorship pressures revived, however, amid the culture wars of the late twentieth century. Evangelical Christians and conservative politicians defending “family values” demanded legal measures against sexually explicit movies, TV shows, rock lyrics, and Internet websites. The 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), which barred “indecent” materials from the Internet, was challenged by the ACLU and others, and in 1997 the Supreme Court struck it down on First Amendment grounds. Congress responded with the Child Online Protection Act (dubbed "CDA-II"), requiring public libraries receiving federal funds to install anti‐pornography software on computers available to minors. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law in 2003. At the local level, conservatives sought to purge objectionable books from school libraries and curricula. On the political left, meanwhile, activists and feminists called for legal action against “hate speech” denigrating ethnic or racial groups, and against pornography considered degrading to women. Issues of censorship and free speech, in short, once again loomed large as a new century began.
See also Anticommunism; Christian Coalition; Conservatism; Education: Education in Contemporary America; Feminism; Film; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Hoover, J. Edgar; Moral Majority; Post–Cold War Era; Radicalism; Roman Catholicism; Schenck v. United States;Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Socialism; Socialist Party of America; Television; Twenties, The; Zenger Trial.

Bibliography

Leonard W. Levy , Emergence of a Free Press, 1985.
John D'Emilio and and Estelle B. Freedman , Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 1988.
Samuel Walker , In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, 1990.
Donna Lee Dickerson , The Course of Tolerance: Freedom of the Press in Nineteenth‐Century America, 1990.
Mark E. Neely Jr. , The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, 1991.
Frank Walsh , Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry, 1996.
David M. Rabban , Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1997.

Francis G. Couvares

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer