The Mechanics of Censorship
Discussions of censorship often center on the substantive basis for the censoring because that is where a lot of the excitement is. What supposedly made Lady Chatterly’s Lover obscene? After all, this is where all the good smutty bits of books are brought up. We like that because we can argue about the proper line between literature and pornography, what is acceptable for teens, and the nature of public offense, or whatever else interests us. But just as important is the mechanism of censorship; how the censoring happens and by whom. If hard core pornography is defined as “I know it when I see it” as Justice Potter Stewart famously declared, then who does the seeing matters. While all censorship is terrible, centralized censorship is far more dangerous than decentralized censorship. Sadly, we are moving into an era where more and more censorship is being centralized.
Lately, I’ve become a bit fascinated with comparative censorship (of English speaking countries at least). For example, Nicole Moore’s The Censor’s Library explores Australia’s long history of censorship using her discovery of a massive archive of preserved but forgotten records. Thanks to a truly unique geography, Australia relies on imports (mostly from the U.K.) for nearly all of its books and, thus, much of its censorship was centralized in a powerful board that had the authority to recommend books for import or effectively block access. Moore explores the justifications for these determinations, recorded but not made generally public, finding that they track with pretty much what we expect. Books that were seen as politically seditious, sexually immoral, blasphemous, and the like were often forbidden. Similarly, I’ve been enjoying Aoife Bhreatnach’s Censored podcast where she reads books banned by the Irish censorship board. This fascinates me in part because as a unitary state, Ireland empowered this censorship board with nearly unlimited discretion to decide what Irish people could read (or watch) for most of the century. Also, as an explicitly Catholic state the censorship speaks probably even more heavily towards religion and blasphemy than other countries. Sadly, the Irish board doesn’t seem to have preserved its records of why specific titles were banned but that is part of what makes the podcast fun. In such systems, these boards exercised immense power that could effectively close the market totally to dangerous books.
The U.S., however, is a quite different beast because it lacks a strong centralized state. Instead, American federalism splits and disperses governing power between federal and state authorities (and the later splits further to local governments). This creates a messy, chaotic system in which a book could be obscene in one state, or even town, but not another. In any given situation, different governing actors may come to different conclusions based on no apparent reason. For example, an imported book could be declared obscene by customs and prevented from being imported but a local edition printed in New York could be declared not obscene by the post office and thus mailable. But when it arrives at different locations, it can be charged as obscene by police and prosecutors in every single jurisdiction without concern for what federal authorities thought or the law enforcement and courts of another state. And this only speaks to governing authority. American censorship has long been heavily influenced by interest groups pushing particular visions of objectionable literature and winning, to different degrees, market and governmental influence over what is available.
To take one of my favorite examples, Radclyffe Hall published her The Well of Loneliness in 1928. A story of lesbian life, The Well of Loneliness would be an influential book for decades. Though it had no sex or smutty passages on the page, it was declared obscene in a high profile U.K. trial. In Australia and Ireland, on the other hand, public trial and discussion was unnecessary: their censorship boards quietly declared it was illegal and dangerous. In the U.S. things proved to be more complicated. The Watch and Ward Society of Boston, which was a private group that exercised near total control over the book market in Boston at the time, showed no concern for The Well of Loneliness. It couldn’t have been missed, the book was famous and sold huge numbers, but this group of famous prudes just let it go on shelves without incident. The New York Society for Suppression of Vice, however, took a much different tack and orchestrated criminal charges. A New York judge bound the book for trial declaring that “The book can have no moral value since it seeks to justify the right of a pervert to prey upon normal members of a community and to uphold such relationship as noble and lofty. Although it pleads for tolerance on the part of society of those possessed of and inflicted with perverted traits and tendencies, it does not argue for repression or moderation of insidious impulses.” The judge admitted that the book was written in a restrained manner and that it had merit but the very idea of a book about a lesbian suggesting that she should be accepted as such was an inherently obscene idea. After a high profile trial, however, The Well of Loneliness was declared not obscene. The publisher took out huge advertisements celebrating the book and sold even more copies.
This kind of chaotic censorship has only increased in some ways today. Since around 1970, literary obscenity died in the U.S. - though some people want to bring it back - and the book challenge took its place. While we couldn’t declare a novel obscene and criminal, censors would try and leverage governmental power to get a book removed from a school and/or library to limit access and knowledge of supposedly dangerous ideas. Schools and libraries are distinctly local in organization and censorship attempts, thus, have had to be fought out in the most local of venues. Attempts to have total removal of a book from all schools is nearly impossible. Some states, however, are seeking to turn that system around and impose state level controls. Utah has adopted an innovative new censorship law precisely to impose the views of extremists on all.
Utah just passed a law providing that any book banned in three districts (or two districts and five charter schools) is banned statewide. Now I’ve spoken to the idiocy of the various attempted definitions that Utah has proposed in the past, such as here, but this introduces a new and dangerous level of censorship to the system. Now a group of extremists, such as Utah Parents United, can lobby a few small districts to ban books and force that on larger districts that resisted their campaigns earlier. After all, Utah has 41 school districts, so 3 is an extreme minority even before taking into account the huge population variation between those districts. They can use districts that really hate queer people, for example, like Washington County, to declare books sexually explicit for mentioning that queer people exist. This then is used against Salt Lake City schools that do not generally hate their queer students or citizens (at least not to the same degree).
Sadly this form of attempted centralization is proceeding apace. Declarations that school materials cannot dare to mention that people of color experience the U.S. differently than white folk (the “critical race theory” panic), teach about the realities of inequality in American history, or that LGBTQ people exist have been on the rise. A number of states have sought to require libraries to follow “advice” issued by state agencies on what is allowed to exist in public spaces - Oklahoma even appointed noted hate monger Chaya Raichik to their board, a woman who’s work is pretty clearly connected to mass bomb threats against schools, libraries, and hospitals. These attempts to centralize censorship in the hands of extremists are only helped by laws like Utah’s and sadly the victims of this extremism is our future as kids are raised to be less empathetic and more hateful just like the extremists want.
