Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression

Chapter 5. Cold War, Hot Lust: Sexual Politics in the 1950s

When Roth lobbed his appeal at the Supreme Court, it failed to detonate , and obscenity law retained its foggy mist. More literally effective in generating explosions that year was the Soviet Union, whose atomic testing paid off a few months after Roth’s loss. Numerous factors generated what history came to know as the Cold War, but Soviet nuclear capacity certainly solidified it. Its ramifications would extend across the globe during decades of geopolitical conflict, but they also coalesced around the body of Samuel Roth, who would end the new decade in a prison cell. Cold War concerns structured not just American foreign policy in the 1950s, but domestic politics as well. Most famously, McCarthyism spearheaded a broad suppression of dissent. The regulation of sexuality , too, became a national obsession, one deeply intertwined with both external concerns over communism and internal anxieties over “subversion.” Indeed, from the start furiously anticommunist Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph McCarthy’s ill-founded tirades against purported communists shared both rhetoric and logic with the intense sexual policing of the decade. Noting the pervasive antigay fervor, historian David Johnson has identified a “Lavender Scare” that paralleled and even outlasted McCarthy’s Red Scare. With the federal government wholly committed to building what historian Margot Canaday calls “The Straight State,” one that simultaneously excluded homosexuality and carefully policed heterosexuality to produce a dominant “normalcy” that hinged on marital, procreative sex, free speech frequently took a backseat to Cold War concerns. This played out politically in the early 1950s, with jarring Supreme Court opinions that privileged national security over individual First Amendment rights. Politics, sexuality, and law would also converge over obscenity doctrine, as a judicially inhospitable climate { 105 } c h a p t e r 5 Cold War, Hot Lust Sexual Politics in the 1950s 106 { Chapter 5 } developed, encouraged all the while by a resurgent social panic over pornography. The United States was caught in an ideological bind surrounding the First Amendment. On the one hand, since virtually every aspect of American life was refracted through a Cold War lens, censorship had to be repudiated as something foreign to the American way of life, the province of Soviet totalitarianism—a distinction that also promoted American religiosity as a counterpoint to Soviet atheism (only in the 1950s did “In God We Trust” become the national motto and “under God” join the Pledge of Allegiance). On the other hand, widespread sentiment favored the domestic suppression of both communists and pornography. The solution was to define such suppression seemingly out of existence by framing it as something other than censorship . The framers of the Constitution “never meant the First Amendment to protect filth peddlers who poison minds,” explained Better Homes and Gardens in 1957. The Supreme Court had already expressed the same idea about communism, and it would ultimately agree with the magazine on smut. Allowing either communist speech or obscene materials was simply not included in what Americans meant when they expressed opposition to censorship. Samuel Roth observed the development of this lurching national transition from the margins. Perpetually badgered by the postal authorities throughout the decade, he nonetheless managed to avoid both prison and the national eye until prominent figures pulled him back into focus, using him to represent all that was unsavory—and even un-American—about the smutmongers who had suddenly become a key national menace. This chapter situates his return to the Supreme Court in its Cold War context, leaving the next chapter to track the precise doctrinal elements of his case that created a baffling but nonetheless enduring precedent. Varieties of Deviance Defining words played an important role in the domestic side of the Cold War. Talk of supporting global freedom and democracy rang hollow to the citizens of Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, and a dizzying array of so-called Third World nations on whom the United States imposed violent, dictatorial puppet governments. At home, though, a complacent media obscured and distorted the stories of such foreign entanglements to bring them in line with the more commendable rhetorical ideals. Much rested on the preservation of this fiction, since every aspect of American life was constantly contrasted to the brutal Soviet domination of its own puppet states. Other fictions also prevailed, none so fervently as that of sexual normalcy. Again, communist social organization helped structure American norms by counterexample. In place of communal childrearing , the atomized nuclear family was the key structure. Where...