Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2004), "Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age", Library Review, Vol. 53 No. 4, pp. 237-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530410531884

Censorship is often seen as a struggle between freedom of expression and the protection of community standards. It is also an area where minorities may have real influence, and, when they turn into majorities, they have ways of shaping law and legislation in favour of oppression. Boyer's examination of book censorship in the USA is historical: the first edition, published in 1968 and very much a creature of its time, went up to the 1930s (seen through the lens of the 1960s with an eye on the McCarthyite, 1950s). This second edition adds two chapters, one on the to and fro of the period between the 1950s and the 1970s, and the other from the 1980s up to the present day. Boyer's approach is mainly historical, raising and driven by the censorship arguments of the 1960s (such as the famous literary trials of that period and the controversial judgements of Warren and Brennan of the Supreme Court), and concluding that such a historical perspective helps us understand the present, even though the challenges of the Internet age have made censorship more complex.

Readers may know Boyer from his editorial role in The Oxford Companion to United States History and other historical works. He is the Merle Court Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The historical (first edition) material consists of a survey of US censorship from the 19th century of Comstock and the “vice societies” (above all, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and its protagonist John Sumner, and the Watch and Ward Society in Boston with which H.L. Mencken battled over affairs like the “Hatrack” story in the 1920s). Boyer is strong on cases, loves a good story, links book censorship with cultural issues like social hygiene and World War I phobias, and clearly maps out the storyline of the “Clean Books Crusade” and other clashes where publishers and booksellers, librarians and politicians were all implicated. Issues then – protect the young, write what you like, no more “Polyanna” books, free speech, religious values, build protections into law, prevent postal abuses – extend into the present, Boyer argues, reflecting in the two new chapters the trend towards federal legislation and, under Reagan and Clinton, a moral conservatism reflected in law like the Communications Decency Act 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act 1998. What we have here, then, is an interesting and conventional history of US censorship (mainly books with a nod or two towards magazines and films, and at the end “the computer age”) along the lines of Edward de Grazia's Girls Lean Back Everywhere and Nicholas Karolides's Censored Books I and II.

Boyer's argument is very much that authors and publishers, booksellers and librarians took a long time to take a united stand against an increasingly vocal, but marginalized anti‐vice lobby, and that any reduction of moral oppression in the 1920s and 1930s was lost in the 1960s with Warren's case for social value and community standards, and in commissions like that of Meese. Cases from that period – Tropic of Cancer, Cleland, Ginzburg, Kaplan – are familiar. He uses Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence (1996) to move the argument on from that of a simple confrontation between libertarians and conservatives to that of an issue of reticence and exposure, which implicate both taste and privacy, and he is right to suggest that any analysis of majoritarian law‐making in the area of censorship, above all in the USA, must be seen in that highly‐textured social and cultural context. This captures the cross‐currents at the present time about CDA and COPA, and school librarians for sure would remind us that censorship – of books and Internet access – is very much alive. School, college, academic, and public librarians will be most interested in this book.

The wider picture, of regulatory control in the computer age, is hinted at rather than examined (e.g. passing comments on broadcasting and video), and needs the systematic treatment such as Stuart Biegel's (in Beyond our Control? Confronting the Limits of our Legal System in the Age of Cyberspace, MIT Press, 2001), so anyone using or buying this work needs to know that it is a historical study with two interesting, but polemic chapters (more like articles) bringing it up to date. As a paperback and for the money, this is a useful work, especially for a library lacking the first edition and/or supporting the study of censorship where carefully‐researched historical evidence (e.g. the Boston study is really good, and the illustrations relevant) is required. It will need, too, to be supplemented by historical studies of magazine and film censorship to give it a rounded view.