of evangelistic zealots who claimed to represent everyone in the country. Many of the Comstock laws are still on the books in the 21st century.
The Struggle for Free Expression
1821. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, 1749. This is the first-known U.S. obscenity case involving a book, a novel about a the life of a prostitute. Charges were brought in Massachusetts against the book’s U.S. publisher, Peter Holmes, who was convicted for corrupting, debauching, and subverting the morals of youth. It was finally cleared in 1966.
1842. The first federal obscenity law was passed, as the U.S. Tariff Act, which prohibited imports of obscene material from foreign countries and empowered U. S. Customs to seize offending books. This law was largely ignored.
1865. Sending obscene publications through the mail was made a criminal offence; this gave U.S. Postal authorities the power to censor, although they rarely did so.
1873. This is the momentous date when censorship got out of hand. Spearheaded by Anthony Comstock, the first federal anti-obscenity law was passed, a law that prohibited sending through the mail anything that had to do with sex (not just obscenity). State legislatures used it as a model for similar laws; the amalgam of all these laws came to be known as the Comstock Laws.
1881. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman was banned in Boston for sexually explicit language; the expurgation of offending passages was demanded. The poem was later published intact in Philadelphia.
1890. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoi. Forbidden by the U.S. Post Office. Theodore Roosevelt declared Tolstoi to be a “sexual and moral pervert.”
1892. Salome by Oscar Wilde. Banned in Boston.
1915. Hagar Revelly by Daniel Carson Goodman. Warning the young of the dangers of vice, this book was attacked by Comstock because some of the vices were described. The publisher Mitchell Kennerly courageously defended the book and was acquitted. Federal Judge Learned Hand made the first legal challenge here to the Hicklin Rule.
1920. Ulysses by James Joyce. The book was published in installments,beginning in 1918, in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s The Little Review at the Washington Square Bookstore in New York. Copies were seized and burned by U.S. Post Office in 1920. Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in Paris at Shakespeare & Co. in 1922, but Ulysses was forbidden entry into the U.S. Not cleared until 1933.
1922. Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier. Bookstore clerk Raymond D. Halsey was nabbed in 1919 by Sumner’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, tried for selling an obscene book, and acquitted. He then sued the Society for false arrest and malicious prosecution. The New York Court of Appeals read the book, which Gautier had frankly declared in his introduction made light of fornication, adultery, and homosexuality. The court decided in Halsey’s favor. This important case established the precedent that literary experts could offer testimony in support of a book to guide the judge in assessing community opinion.
1927. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. Banned in Boston because it depicted an “obscene” clergyman.
1927. The Thousand and One Nights. Seized by U.S. Customs as obscene.
1928. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Cited by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for pleading tolerance of homosexuality, the book was seized in raids on the publisher’s office and Macy’s book department. The book was cleared in a courtroom victory in 1939.
1929. Candide by Voltaire. This classic was seized by U.S. customs as obscene on its way to a Harvard literature class. (It had been imported without hindrance for the preceding 170 years.) In 1944, the U.S. Post Office demanded that a mail order catalog omit this book. (All the works of Voltaire have been banned at one time or another, many of them burned.)
1929. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Banned by U.S. Customs as obscene and injurious to public morality.
1929. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. Written in 1928; although acclaimed as a literary masterpiece, the book was banned in England and in the United States for over thirty years.
1930. Amendment of U.S. Tariff Act of 1842 at last allowed a number of classics into the country, including Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Abelard’s Letters to Heloise, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
1930. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway banned in Boston.
1933. Ulysses by James Joyce. After Random House’s four-year battle to publish the book, a landmark case (United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”) was decided by the Federal Court in New York. Judge John. M. Woolsey wrote an eloquent and erudite opinion that esteemed the book as a work of art. He did not apply the Hicklin Rule, and judged the book not by its effects on children but on the average person and held that a work could not be judged on individual passages taken out of context. This effectively ended the Hickin Rule at the federal level.
1934. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Published in Paris in 1934, this book was banned in the U.S. for twenty-seven years. Brought to trial in 1953, the U.S. Customs ban was upheld by the court. Not cleared until 1961.
1946. Action was brought against Kathleen Windsor’s restoration-era bodice ripper Forever Amber. The judge found it “conducive to sleep, but not to sleeping with a member of the opposite sex.”
1946. Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson. Banned in several U.S. cities. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought suit against Doubleday, and the New York court found the book obscene. Memoirs of Hecate County then became the subject of the first U.S. Supreme Court obscenity case, heard in 1948. The justices split four to four, Felix Frankfurter abstaining because he knew the author personally. The earlier conviction was then upheld by New York Court of Appeals, which extended the ban through the 1950s.
1948. William Faulkner. Several novels banned in Philadelphia.
1954. Wonder Stories by Hans Christian Anderson stamped “For Adult Readers Only” in Illinois to prevent children from reading smut.
1954. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio was finally cleared by U.S. Customs.
1957. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. This is the earliest application of the Roth standard (Roth v. United States). Book dealer Samuel Roth had been prosecuted in New York for distributing such magazines as American Aphrodite and Photo. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but created an important new standard. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. concluded that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment but that literature was. The test of obscenity now became “whether to the average person, applying contemporary standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.” The Roth case was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1957, just after Howl was seized, and decided in June, two months before Howl was tried. The Roth decision enabled the ACLU to argue
