HISTORY OF CENSORSHIP IN AMERICA
https://stacker.com/history/history-censorship-america
America prides itself in valuing the freedom of speech, but the country has a long history of bruising fights to protect and uphold that right as guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Starting with the Founding Fathers in the 18th century, free speech was put to the test when President John Adams restricted the right to criticize a government official.
Stacker has compiled a look at key
moments and milestones in the history of censorship in America, consulting
academic papers, historical accounts, legal cases, industry records, and news
reports.
Many attempts at limiting free
speech in the United States have come during times of war. Criticism was
sharply curtailed during World War I, when vocal opponents to U.S. policy were
jailed and deported. Not long before that, newspaper editors and reporters were
arrested in the North for opposing the Civil War, and reports from the front
were heavily censored. In World War II, newspapers were complicit in protecting
U.S. interests and suppressing public information.
But it has been sexual relations
that has sparked the most passionate arguments over the limits of free speech,
whether it is in explicit novels, graphic pornography, classic Greek plays, Shakespeare,
poetry, or just the culture's puritanical tendencies.
Movies and comic books have adopted
systems to censor themselves as means of averting full-fledged censorship by
authorities. Comic book stories were accused of sending risqué messages to children,
and even the cartoon character Betty Boop started wearing longer skirts to
avoid criticism.
Still today, schools across the
country grapple with keeping books on their library shelves and in classroom
curriculum over seemingly incessant objections that they are profanity-riddled
or obscene and inappropriate. Throughout the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has
drawn the lines around just what merits protection as free speech—lines that
have shifted considerably over the years.
1722: Benjamin Franklin caught up in
brother’s censorship
In 1722, Benjamin Franklin’s older
brother, James, printer of “The New-England Courant,” was jailed for several
weeks for publishing criticism of the government, and the younger Franklin,
then 16, was named publisher for the extent of the jail term. James Franklin
ran afoul of the authorities again in 1723, went into hiding, and published
under his younger brother’s name again.
1798: Criticism of US government
officials made illegal
Under President John Adams in 1798,
it was made illegal to criticize a government official unless the claims could
be backed up in court. More than two dozen people were arrested under the
statute, but they were pardoned by incoming President Thomas Jefferson two
years later.
1821: Fictionalized memoirs of a
prostitute are banned
The novel “Fanny Hill,” a
fictionalized account of a prostitute’s memoirs, was written in 1748 and banned
in 1821. The prohibition was not overturned until a Supreme Court decision in
1966—nearly a century and a half later.
1846: Abolitionist newspaper put out
of business
Antislavery crusader Cassius Clay
founded a newspaper, “The True American,” in Kentucky to promote his
abolitionist views. A pro-Confederate mob called the Committee of Sixty broke
into the newspaper and stole its equipment, including its presses. The paper
went out of business a year later, in 1846.
1861: Reporters, editors arrested
during Civil War
During the Civil War from 1861 to
1865, newspaper reporters and editors were arrested in the Union if they wrote
about opposing the draft or discouraged enlisting in the army. Some were
detained, and others were sent to the Confederacy. Telegraph dispatches from
reporters at battlefield scenes were censored as well.
1863: Anti-Civil War speaker sent
South
In 1863, former Ohio congressman
Clement Vallandigham gave a speech critical of President Abraham Lincoln and
called for a peaceful end to the Civil War. Vallandigham was arrested and found
guilty of disloyalty and sympathy for the enemy by a military tribunal. He was
imprisoned, then banished to the Confederacy.
1873: Comstock Act permitted
searches of mail
In 1873, Congress passed the
Comstock Act, named after its main supporter, Anthony Comstock, a devout
Christian and head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The
Comstock Act permitted searches of the mail, without legal warrants, for
obscene material. It included contraceptives as obscene.
1903: US laws targeted immigrant
freedom of speech
The 1903 Immigration Act barred
entry into the United States of anarchists. The law suppressing immigrants’
political views followed the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by
an accused anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. The reach of immigration laws expanded
over the next decades, leading to the Cold War McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 that
banned entry and allowed for deportation of immigrants whose views were deemed
to be subversive.
1915: Ohio film censored win in
Supreme Court decision
The Supreme Court decided in its
Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio ruling of 1915 that
movies were not protected as free speech under the First Amendment. The Mutual
Film Corp., which leased and sold films, had sued the Ohio censorship board
that claimed the right to review and approve films. The court ruled against the
film company, deciding that the state’s law was not unconstitutional.
1918: Sedition Act used to quell
World War I opposition
The Sedition Act of 1918 limited the
rights to free speech during war, making it a crime to "willfully utter, print,
write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about
the form of the Government of the United States." President Woodrow Wilson
supported it to tamp down opposition to World War I and the draft. The act
targeted resisters, pacifists, socialists, and anarchists, and more than a
thousand cases filed by the government resulted in convictions before it was
repealed in 1920.
1919: Anarchist Emma Goldman
deported
Anarchist Emma Goldman was deported
in 1919 after a series of legal battles over her political views, lectures and
speeches advocating for women’s rights, union rights, and freedom of speech and
opposing the military draft. She moved to the Soviet Union and then not long
afterward to Great Britain.
1920: American Civil Liberties Union
was born
The American Civil Liberties Union
was founded in 1920. Its creation followed a series of raids, on orders of
Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, that rounded up and deported thousands of
people on grounds that they were radicals. The ACLU declared its interest in
protecting rights under the U.S. Constitution, including freedom of speech and
press.
1920: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ banned
as obscene
The New York publishers of James
Joyce’s “Ulysses” were convicted under the anti-obscenity Comstock Act in 1920,
fined, and ordered to stop publication of the complex novel over its sexual
content. The ruling fueled interest in the book by the Irish writer, which was
published two years later in Paris. Random House won the right to publish it in
a U.S. federal court ruling in 1934.
1929: Hemingway’s books challenged,
repeatedly
In 1929, Scribner’s Magazine was
banned in Boston for running Ernerst Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” on
grounds that it was too sexual. Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” was banned in
Boston a year later, and, in 1941, the U.S. Post Office decided his “For Whom
the Bell Tolls” was pro-Communist and could not be shipped in the mail.
1930: Movie industry adopted
self-censoring Hays Code
The film industry in 1930 adopted
the Hays Code, calling for movies to be "wholesome" and
"moral" as a means of self-policing to avoid outright government
censorship. The production code banned lustful kissing, suggestive dancing,
nudity. Movies could not mock religion, depict illegal drug use, show
interracial romance, or even portray detailed crimes that could be imitated.
The Code held sway for decades, but its effectiveness declined after World War
II, with family-oriented competition from television and more scintillating
foreign films.
1920: ‘Lady
Chatterley’s Lover’ lost in US Senate
“Lady Chatterley's
Lover” by English author D.H. Lawrence aroused the wrath of U.S. Sen. Reed
Smoot, who denounced it in a 1930 speech when the Senate was considering
loosening restrictions of book imports under the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. The
Republican senator from Utah won his battle after threatening to read obscene
passages from the book on the floor of the Senate. The ban was lifted in a
federal obscenity trial in 1959.
1941: War Powers Act
established Censorship Office
During World War II,
as part of the 1941 War Powers Act, President Franklin Roosevelt created the
Office of Censorship, which issued guidelines for the media to determine for
itself if the information being published would be valuable to the enemy. Under
the voluntary censorship, newspapers did not publish photographs of dead U.S.
troops, kept secret information about plans to drop the atom bomb, and did not
write about the president’s ill health. The mail was read and censored as well.
1946: Supreme Court
ruling ends postal censorship
In the early 1940s,
the U.S. Post Office denied less costly second-class postage privileges to
Esquire magazine. The Postmaster General had decided postage rates could be
determined by whether a publication contributed to the “public good” and found
that the magazine’s jokes and pinups failed the test. A unanimous 1946 Supreme
Court decision put an end to the postal censorship and, with the ruling,
extended the protection of free speech beyond political to popular speech.
1952: Supreme Court,
in reversal, protected movies
In 1952, a legal
ruling on a film “The Miracle,” written by Roberto Rossellini and directed by
Federico Fellini, ended decades of U.S. censorship. The film had been denounced
by the Catholic Church as sacrilegious, prompting New York authorities to
rescind its license, and the film’s distributor took the case to court. The
Supreme Court decided movies were protected under the First Amendment,
reversing its 1915 opinion that did not grant them such protection.
1954: Comic books
policed for gay, violent messages
Comic books were the
focus of censorship arguments over whether they exerted a dangerous influence
on children. Publishers in 1954 created the Comics Magazine Association of
America and a Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval that policed the use of
horror, crime, sex, and violence. The code was heavily influenced by the book
"Seduction of the Innocent," by German psychiatrist Fredric Wertham,
who found a gay subtext in the stories of Batman and Robin and claimed Wonder
Woman was a lesbian.
1955: Post office
found classical Greek play obscene
The U.S. Post Office
in 1955 seized a rare volume of “Lysistrata,” a Greek play written by
Aristophanes about women withholding sex to force men to end war. The
postmaster general said it was obscene and lewd. After a battle led by famed
First Amendment attorney Edward De Grazia, the post office backed off before a
trial was held.
1955: Elvis Presley’s
moves, music censored
Florida police in 1955
threatened to arrest Elvis Presley if he did not stand still while performing,
and two years later, his performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” was filmed from
the waist up due to opposition over his suggestive moves. In 1960, his songs
were among those banned from radio stations that were refusing to play music
considered to be sexually explicit.
1957: Roth court case
set new obscenity standard
A U.S. Supreme Court
ruling in 1957 set out a new obscenity test with the case of Samuel Roth, a
bookseller in New York accused of sending obscene circulars and an obscene book
through the U.S. mail. The standard set out under Roth v. United States was
whether “the average person,” applying community standards, would find the
entire work obscene.
1963: Comic Lenny
Bruce convicted of obscenity
Comic Lenny Bruce was
arrested on stage and convicted in 1963 of obscenity in Chicago. The following
year, he was arrested in New York for violating an obscenity law. He was
convicted and sentenced to four months in jail, but he remained free on bail
and died of a drug overdose in 1966, at 40.
1964: Supreme Court
ruled in favor of 'Tropic of Cancer'
The U.S. Supreme Court
in 1964 ruled in favor of publication of the sexually explicit novel
"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller. The court decision found that the
book merited First Amendment protection because it had some redeeming social
value, making a distinction from obscenity that was "utterly without
redeeming social value."
COVID Lockdown Censorship Was JUST THE START! With Neil Oliver - SF 439
READER COMMENTS:
This video is about what is happening globally—an attempt to centralize global power using multiple crises/creating fear to manipulate people to give up liberties.
The creation of the internet was funded by DARPA (U. S. military/industrial complex) in order for surveillance, to gather mass information on everyone….(perhaps the reason why using the internet has been free)
It is necessary now for people to realize what is really happening in order to stand against the tyranny, by being able to ferret out the truth and retaining higher ideals….
For example, consider the anti-humanity scams: the Covid pandemic, climate change, gender confusion, transhumanisn, aliens and UFOs, just some of the lies that authorities are using
A great psychological warfare….a great takedown of nation states….a great takedown of traditional political systems….a great takedown of family/community relationships….a great takedown of the freedom to debate ideas….a great takedown of economic well being and transfer of wealth to the mega wealthy.
If you deceive masses, people are so embarrassed that they believed the lies, that they don’t want to talk about being deceived so they are complicit to the “scam” and fall into talking about and focusing on the next crisis that is presented.
Three hundred years of humanism and anti-God indoctrination has brought us to this point.
Therefore, evil progresses…. Until the system itself is taken down by God. He intervened against Babylon, Noah’s flood, etc...........J
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