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Eight: The Onslaught Against Federal Censorship
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
E I G HT The Onslaught Against Federal Censorship By 1929, literary censorship was decidedly on the wane all over America. The high tide of the "Clean Books" movement was six years in the past. The drive to liberalize Massachusetts' obscenity law was moving toward success. The vice societies lay in disarray. And the suppression of literature by private moralists or by overzealous local officials was accomplished, if at all, only under the keen scrutiny of a vocal anticensorship contingent with powerful weapons of law and publicity at its command. As the urgency of battle at the state and local levels diminished, attention shifted to a censorship issue hitherto largely unexamined and uncriticized: the administrative power held by the federal government over the free circulation of books. The first manifestation of this shift came late in 1929 207 208 PURITY IN PRINT with a vigorous campaign against the long-established censorship powers of the United States Customs Bureau. The authority of the government to bar "obscene" matter from American shores, dating from the Tariff of 1842, had been renewed in each subsequent tariff, most recently in the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. By the 1920S, the administration of this archaic censorship power had become bogged down in a bureaucratic morass. In the great majority of cases, the decision of the local inspector at the port of entry was final. Local ruling could, however, be appealed to the so-called United States Customs Court sitting in New York City. This group of appraisers, having little time or stomach for literary disputes, almost invariably upheld the ruling of the local Customs officer. In the mid-1920S, to promote uniformity at the various ports, the Customs Court began occasionally to promulgate rulings which placed certain titles under a general ban.1 A local obscenity decision could also be appealed to the federal courts. This was rarely done, however, because the presumption was strongly against the appellant. In 1927 Morris Ernst (in his first obscenity case) took to the federal courts a Customs ban on John Hermann's What Happens, an expose of high life among postwar youth published that year in France by an American expatriate. The judge was distinctly hostile, barring both the proffered expert testimony (by Heywood Broun and H. L. Mencken) and Ernst's efforts to introduce certain passages from Shakespeare into the record. The jury upheld the Customs ruling, and three hundred copies of What Happens were destroyed.2 Further to confuse matters, Customs rulings were also subject to review by the Treasury Department. Puzzled local inspectors regularly forwarded doubtful books to Washington , where an ad hoc group of Treasury officials rendered an opinion. Early in 1927, for example, Washington reversed a rul- [18.204.214.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:54 GMT) TIlE ONSLAUGHT AGAINST FEDERAL CENSORSIDr 209 ing by New York's Customs inspectors and admitted 250 copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, imported by A. & c. Boni, and 500 unbound sets of A Thousand and One Nights, on the reasonable grounds that these titles had always been admitted in the past. Similarly, a May 1929 ban by the Boston Customs authorities against Voltaire's Candide was quietly reversed in Washington, although not before the incident had become a national joke.3 In short, local Customs inspectors held wide powers, subject to sporadic review by a variety of higher authorities. Under such conditions, decisions were erratic and enforcement unpredictable. Books banned at one port might enter at another , works excluded in certain translations or editions were admitted in other guises, and a local ruling might be upset weeks or months later by an anonymous higher authority. The broad discretionary power held by local inspectors made the entire system vulnerable to the limitations of its weakest functionaries . "A classic is a dirty book somebody is trying to get by me," one of these local examiners confided to a reporter early in 1930, boasting at the same time that in the preceding two years he had read and barred "272 different titles-thousands of volumes."4 The bureaucratic nature of the system invited manipulation by special-interest groups. In 1923, French erotica was excluded with special diligence, not from a sudden access of prudery among Customs inspectors, but because the FrancoAmerican Board of Commerce and Industry, suspecting that such books were giving Americans a distorted idea of France, had secured the cooperation of the Customs Bureau in a campaign to bar them at the ports.5 Such erratic practices...