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

Chapter 3. Samuel Roth, From Art to Smut

{ 49 } Of the few things Samuel Roth is remembered for, none are flattering . Yet his life embodied many American narratives, some myth, some historical reality: that of the lowly immigrant achieving middleclass comforts through hardscrabble labor and ingeniousness; that of the white ethnic outsider seeking elusive inclusion in the American body politic; and that of a developing mass culture with eyes toward aesthetic loftiness and mind frequently in the gutter. Most of all, in both his personal obsessions and his long conflict with the law, Roth represented a parallel American history to the iconic moments of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War II, and suburbanization, marked instead by evolving but persistent fixations and anxieties about religion, identity, and, most of all, sex. Roth was not a free-speech activist, until he needed to be; while it is impossible to fully untangle his motivations for pursuing a life of publishing smut, they undeniably ranged from the monetary to his unwavering personal interest in the matters at hand in his various publications . Even in these overlapping layers, he remained quintessentially American, in a society where sex was simultaneously policed, fetishized, and turned into a commodity. While Roth’s 1957 Supreme Court obscenity case is generally the index through which he enters the historical record, the three decades up to that moment are just as important in charting the legal and cultural struggles over obscenity and the boundaries of the socially permissible . Because Roth’s many court battles transpired locally, primarily in New York City, and held little significance as precedents to be cited in other cases, they have drawn little attention from historians devising genealogies of modern obscenity doctrine. If marginal to the organic congealing of doctrine, though, they reveal much about the employment and intentions of obscenity law, amounting to a shadow c h a p t e r 3 Samuel Roth, From Art to Smut history of obscenity as it played out well below the Supreme Court’s purview. It is to Roth’s early legal and cultural tumult that this chapter turns. Toward the Obscene Underbelly of Culture: Roth in the 1920s Born to a family of Austrian-Polish Jews in 1893, Samuel Roth entered a social world marked by the poverty, instability, and violent antiSemitism that spawned a wave of Jewish outmigration from eastern Europe during the period, part of a much longer diasporic history that would haunt Roth throughout his life. Immigrating into the United States at age seven and taking refuge, like hundreds of thousands more eastern European Jews, in New York City, the young Roth arrived just in time to experience the dawning of a new century, matching his new homeland’s bristling energy with his own boundless aspirations. Young Roth grew up against a backdrop of President Theodore Roosevelt’s spirited celebrations of fitness and vigor as masculine traits to be adopted by both individual men and the nation itself, and he seemed to absorb some of that rhetoric, proudly writing to a cousin in 1915 that “I run, wrestle, swim, and do pole-vaulting.” But even as an adolescent his attention turned primarily to literature, through which he explored politics, religion, and sex, in varying proportions. Roth later claimed that his literary interests grew out of childhood punishment in which his father made him write as penance for various wrongdoings, until he had devised a complete history of the world in verse. As a teenage Zionist, he edited a Jewish-American journal, and despite his humble origins (and the noted anti-Semitism of the school) his poetic efforts landed him a scholarship to Columbia University , where he edited a literary magazine. By 1917 he published his first book, First Offering: A Book of Sonnets and Lyrics. If composed primarily of lovelorn-young-man clichés involving “moonless nights and sunless days” alongside tributes to Columbia and a few aimless freeverse experiments in the vein of Walt Whitman, it certainly announced ambition, an excited reach if not yet a matching grasp. Classified as 4F and thus unfit for combat on account of his poor eyesight, Roth spent World War I working for the Jewish Welfare 50 { Chapter 3 } Board, teaching literacy to immigrants. After war’s end and his departure from Columbia, he founded the Poetry Bookshop, but not even the budding Greenwich Village bohemian scene of the time could keep such a heady establishment financially afloat, and he soon...