Censorship 1950s Detroit Style
I’m on sabbatical this semester to both write and conduct further archival research for my book project. Luckily the archival part of things is going pretty well and I keep finding little fascinating tidbits. Today’s archival find comes from the American Civil Liberties files where I’m exploring different methods of mid-century censorship. The classic example of such censorship was the raid on a book seller and/or distributor, seizing their wares, and then criminal charges and punishment if convicted. But mid-century censors were clever folks and they designed many different means of achieving censorship without all the cost of legal due process. Today’s story illustrates the way that extralegal tactics could be even more effective.
The Detroit Police were one of the most powerful literary censorship organizations of the 1950s. Sadly, this fact has been mostly obscured in the study of obscenity and censorship because scholars have not focused on Detroit. Luckily, later this year Ben Strassfeld has a new book coming out later on this and a recent article on censorship of films as well. Until this book comes out I will have to rely on the bits and pieces I’ve come across. Detroit maintained a permanent squad of officers who’s job was to read the magazines, comics, and paperback books being distributed in the city. They would determine what was “objectionable” and obscene and notify distributors not to sell the material. This kind of system wasn’t unheard of but it usually was done by a formally non-governmental body outside of the law totally. For example, the Watch and Ward Society controlled distribution in early 20th century Boston by issuing similar judgments but they did so as a private group with the tacit consent of police and prosecutors. In Detroit, the police directly issued declarations of obscenity and threatening arrests if anyone disagreed. As the Detroit police bragged to a congressional committee in 1952, book sellers and distributors pretty much always complied.
Detroit Free Press 1/18/1957, 3.
The story I’m interested in occurred in 1957. It became known that Detroit Police had decided that Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara was obscene and not to be sold in the city. Above is the public declaration of a police commissioner supporting this ban: he wouldn’t want his kids, one who was practically an adult to read the book. Why? Well that is harder to say from what I have. This was not the kind of smutty 1950s book I have been researching. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1955, was a bestseller for 32 weeks, and was adapted into a film. The Wikipedia blurb doesn’t go into detail but suggests the reason for controversy: adultery. In dealing frankly with a man’s infidelities, these censors likely saw a dangerous challenge to the mythic 1950s white family and it was their duty to prevent such dangerous material from reaching readers. As the Detroit Free Press noted repeatedly, this was the first book to be banned in both paper and hardback by the police censors. That may sound weird but was not that uncommon because class (and race) biases worked heavily in mid-century censorship. Hardcover books were expensive and, thus, only read by the “better” sorts of society, your professionals who were assumed to be better able to handle the dangerous content. It was usually when material was available in cheap paperbacks that the censor freaked out because the poor could get it now! And of course kids. Kids are well known for searching for discussion of adultery in long novels.
The other difference from this banning was the publisher refused to accept it. Random House got its start nearly 40 years earlier pushing the boundaries of obscenity. Kevin Birmingham’s book on Ulysses is a wonderful examination of this history. I can’t say for certain why Random House pushed back in Detroit, sadly the record I have is minimal. But my guess is it was shocked that its “real” books were being treated like “smut.” It sought an injunction against the police banning their book. The police and city defense was a simple one: they hadn’t banned anything. To them the only “ban” was the decision not to sell an obscene book and that was at best a private, civil matter.
The judge saw through this transparently silly defense easily. While Michigan law made selling obscene material a crime, it gave no special powers to the police. The sole authority police had was “to order the arrest of any person selling a book where there is probable cause that such sale violates obscenity law.” At this point due process of law would attach and it would be up to the judicial process to hear evidence, in open court, and decide whether the material was actually obscene. Instead, the police “have circumvented the judicial process and have effected such ban upon the sale of the book by their non-judicial determination that the book is obscene.” This was the opposite of due process of law as a few officers secretly determined that some material was objectionable, to their sensibilities, and imposed it upon the city. The court issued an injunction that the city (eventually) accepted. In fact, the Supreme Court would strike down Michigan’s entire obscenity law shortly afterwards in Butler v. Michigan (1957) because the law limited the reading material of adults solely because of the supposed effects on youth: the result of this law “is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.” Both events spelled the end of Detroit’s informal censorship regime.
This is a fun story for my work because it illustrates both the creativity put into fighting obscenity as well as the futility of the attempt. The entire premise of obscenity law is that there is some objective standard that separates decent, good material from dangerous, bad material. This inevitably turns to the particular moral judgments of the folks making the decision and nothing more. Here it was adultery being discussed openly. A decade earlier, similar police officers in Detroit tried to ban the sale of a book about interracial love - and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held it obscene in a truly absurd opinion. This system worked as long as it did in Detroit because it was kept secret. Turns out a lot of people were unhappy discovering that their options were being limited arbitrarily based upon the whims of a few officers.
Random House v. City of Detroit, 1957. American Civil Libertieis Union Records Box 774 Folder 17. Mudd Library, Princeton University.
