Censorship: "a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America"

 

In America, issues of politics and censorship play an increasingly large role in determining what facts readers learn about events. From the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times -- leaked by Daniel Ellsberg -- to the jailing of of Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks case, government agencies claim issues of national security to keep sensitive and allegedly damaging information from being released while Individual rights remain at risk.

Censorship can affect mass-market publication, too, as in the case of Operation Dark Heart (see below). At one point the Defense Department threatened to buy up all copies of the book in order to prevent it from reaching bookstores; St. Martin's Press agreed to a partial compromise -- but one that involves redacting (blacking out) classified text.

At the Banned Books site there is a long list of censored and banned titles, many of which were challenged by American government agencies. Writers using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain material have been questioned and refused access. Publishers have long fought such pre-publication censorship. In one case (Fair Game, the Valerie Plame book) the outed C.I.A. operative found a way around government censorship: she published the redacted text and amended an afterward by a second writer, who reveals the public record of all the redacted material.

 

"We believe attempts to censor ideas to which we have access--whether in books, magazines, plays, works of art, television, movies or song--are not simply isolated instances of harassment by diverse special-interest groups. Rather they are part of a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America. ... Censorship cannot eliminate evil. It can only kill freedom. We believe Americans have the right to buy, stores have the right to sell, authors have the right to write and publishers have the right to publish Constitutionally-protected material. Period."

(Excerpt from a letter to 28 newspapers, signed by Ed Morrow, president, American Booksellers Assn. and Harry Hoffman, president, Walden Book Co., Inc., 1990).

Here's a brief sample of titles which have been under investigation by government agencies, taken from the Banned Books site:

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (2007) Written by Valerie Plame Wilson, who claims her cover was intentionally disclosed by the Bush administration. Portions of Fair Game are blacked-out and indicate, say the publishers, places where the CIA has demanded redactions. The extensive afterword by reporter Laura Rozen, drawn from interviews and the public record, is included to provide context to Plame Wilson's story.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971) by Mike Royko. A Ridgefield, CT school board in 1972 banned this book from the high school reading list, claiming it "downgrades police departments."

The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974) by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. The CIA obtained a court injunction against this book's publication stating the author, a former CIA employee, violated his contract which states that he cannot write about the CIA without the agency's approval. First amendment activists opposed this ruling, "raising the question of whether a citizen can sign away his First Amendment rights." After prolonged litigation, the CIA succeeded in having 168 passages deleted.

Deadly Deceits (My 25 Years in the CIA) (1983) by Ralph McGheehee. The CIA delayed the publication of this book for three years, objecting to 397 passages, even though much of what the author wrote about was already public knowledge.

Freedom and Order (1966) by Henry Steele Commager. The U.S. Information Agency had this book banned from its overseas libraries because of its condemnation of American policies in Vietnam.

Operation Dark Heart (2010): On Friday, August 13, 2010, just as St. Martin’s Press was readying its initial shipment of Operation Dark Heart, the Department of Defense expressed concern that its publication could cause damage to U.S. national security. The publication of the initial edition was canceled. However, after consulting with the author, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin's Press agreed to incorporate some of the government’s changes, which includes redacting classified text, into a revised edition.

Pentagon Papers (1971) Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, this 3,000-page history of U.S. involvement in Indochina was kept a secret even from the Johnson administration and banned from publication by court order. The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled and lied to the public regarding their intentions. The New York Times was printing portions of it when the order to stop publication came down. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision and Bantam proceeded to publish a paperback edition. Daniel Ellsberg, who originally leaked the document to the Times in 1971, said at the end of 2010 that “every attack now made on WikiLeaks and JulianAssange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

The naughty bits, 1973: celebrate Banned Books Week with "Slaughterhouse Five"

It's ALA's Banned Books Week, 2014. The outrage of Huckleberry Finn is still a thrill, over 120 years since its publication. Congratulations to Mr. Twain, who continues to make the national conscience uncomfortable more than a hundred years after his death.

Here are the naughty bits of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a book often banned and often cited as objectionable, as enumerated in the dissenting opinion of Justice Powell in the 1973 Supreme Court decision. For more First Amendment decisions and lots of fun reading, visit the First Amendment Center.


APPENDIX TO OPINION OF POWELL, J., DISSENTING

"The excerpts which led the Board to look into the educational suitability of the books in question are set out (with minor corrections after comparison with the text of the books themselves) below. The pagination and the underlinings are retained from the original report used by the board. In newer editions of some of the books, the quotes appear at different pages. 


SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

PAGE / QUOTE

29 'Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.' The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944.

It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody . . .'

32 'You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert -- see? He's facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, 
and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.'

34 'He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the prevention of disease only!' . . . He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a shetland pony.'

94 & 95 'But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected . . . The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ who didn't look like much, was actually the son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought . . . 

Oh boy -- they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch this time! And that thought had a brother: There are right people to lynch. 

People not well connected . . . . The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really WAS a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections then he had . . . . So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought . . . since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then just before the nobody died . . . . The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son . . . God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections.'

99 'They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals.'

120 'Why don't you go fuck yourself? Don't think I haven't tried . . . he was going to have revenge, and that revenge was sweet . . . It's the sweetest thing there is, said Lazzaro. People fuck with me, he said, and Jesus Christ are they ever fucking sorry.'

122 'And he'll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger'll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life's gonna be like without a pecker. Then he'll shoot him once in the guts and walk away. . . . He died on account of this silly cocksucker here. So I promised him I'd have this silly cocksucker shot after the war.'

134 'In my prison cell I sit . . . With my britches full of shit, And my balls are bouncing gently on the floor. And I see the bloody snag when she bit me in the bag . . . Oh, I'll never fuck a Polack any more.'

173 'And the peckers of the young men would still be semierect, and their muscles would be bulging like cannonballs.'

175 'They didn't have hard-ons . . . Everybody else did.'

177 'The magazine, which was published for lonesome men to jerk off to.'

178 'and one critic said. . . . 'To describe blow-jobs artistically."

Texas nixes the Nixon nose

Censorship can take many forms, and in Texas there can be an ever-changing array of causes. The mere resemblance of Richard Nixon's famous nose to -- well, the school boards of Texas would rather not describe it -- got a children's illustrated book in trouble with upset parents and their over-active imaginations.  

The list of books banned in Texas for the 2010-2011 school year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, included some quite innocuous titles. Among the banned books were Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Who Looked Like Lincoln, and Creepy Castles.

Each book drew complaints from parents or teachers and been banned for reasons including offensive language, sexual explicitness and more.

The Boy Who Looked Like Lincoln - banned for “profanity” and “sexual content” - tells the story of Abraham Lincoln look-a-like Benjy, who gets gifts of stove pipe hats on every birthday.

After relentless teasing, he is sent to a summer camp for kids who resemble things and Benjy soon realizes he is not weird, but unique, and learns to accept his appearance. Displeased readers posted in an online forum about how one child at the camp, who resembles Richard Nixon, has an elongated nose which could be interpreted as being male genitalia.

Deborah Caldwell Stone, deputy director of the ALA Office For Intellectual Freedom, said banning literature is a breach of the First Amendment.

“We think any instance of censorship is one instance too many,” she told the website Chron.com.

"Howl on Trial": "what a storm of lunatic-fringe activity I have stirred up"

"Howl" is the howl of the generation, the howl of black jackets, of James Dean, of hip beat angels, of mad saints, of cool Zen, the howl of the Withdrawn, of the crazy Sax-man, of the endless Vision whose visionary is Allen Ginsberg ... "Howl" is essentially a poem to be read aloud but only by the Howler ... any other Howler would screw it up, thus for those who are unable to hear Ginsberg read his "Howl" will have to settle for its visuality. And visuality it has, that is, if you're hip enough to visualize it. If you're a drag go read Wilbur or something.

(Gregory Corso, 1956)

Better delayed than never, a recent film starring James Franco captured the frenzy surrounding "Howl," the ecstatically mad poem by Allen Ginsberg, and the obscenity trial which followed its publication in the mid-1950s. Corso's comments, a celebration of the poem's "visuality," was central to the poem's meaning, and is what made the poem such a target for obscenity charges.

Successive generations will always need reminding about the perils of censorship, if not just access to government information but in renewed challenges to freedom of creative expression as well. Still, it is difficult now to comprehend what an impact the trial had on American culture. It's equally difficult to imagine contemporary culture without judge Clayton Horn's decision, or justice Potter Stewart's words: "In the free society to which the Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself."

Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (City Lights, 2006, edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters) is an especially timely read, collecting correspondence, reporting, magazine articles, and testimony excerpts surrounding the creation of the poem and the subsequent trial. There are some genuinely affecting early letters to friends (in one he addresses Kerouac as "Dear Almond Crackerjax"). Ginsberg was so uncertain of the trial's outcome that he spent most of the time out of the country, and as a result his letters to Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Corso, and many others are a written record of the trial behind the scenes.

The initial public success with "Howl," Ginsberg found to his amazement, was astounding. It was a foreshadowing of the unwelcome publicity to come. To his father Louis he wrote:

"The reading (at the Six Gallery) was pretty great, we had traveling photographers, who appeared on the scene from Vancouver to photograph it, a couple of amateur electronics experts who appeared with tape machines to record, request from state college for a complete recording for the night, requests for copies of the recordings, even finally organizations of bop musicians who want to write music and give big west coast traveling tours of "Howl" as a sort of Jazz Mass, recorded for a west coast company called Fantasy Records that issues a lot of national bop, etc. No kidding. You have no idea what a storm of lunatic-fringe activity I have stirred up."

(Donlin, Cassady, Ginsberg, LaVigne, and Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1956)

Even amid the craziness Ginsberg unwittingly "stirred up," the letters show a sense of humor and self-awareness. In the resulting wake of controversy Ginsberg often used this deprecation as a defense and a tool as he endlessly explained himself, often to uncomprehending critics. But this was a humor and a point of view no less expected among his friends. Here he is concluding his letter to Kerouac, slipping out of seriousness in an unexpected burst of humor which also wound up in the finished poem:

"What Sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed in their skulls and ate their brains and imagination?

Moloch Moloch Solitude Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!

Children screaming under stairways! Old men weeping in parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Skeleton treasuries! Ghostly banks! Eyeless capitols!

Robot apartments! Granite phalluses and monstrous bombs!

Visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Gone down the American River!

Dreams! Miracles! Ecstasies! The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!" etc.

Love,

Allen

By de-fusing his critics he allowed the poem's readers to see the shock of truth in the words. Ginsberg spent the remainder of his life fighting battles for creative expression, and giving artists the freedom to say what they mean. It was the poet's way of affirming Justice Stewart:

"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Long ago, those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free."

(1956 City Lights photo by Allen Ginsberg)

"Books That Shaped America": A Library of Congress exhibit of controversial books

The Library of Congress has created an exhibit, "Books that Shaped America," which explores books that "have had a profound effect on American life." Below is a list of books from that exhibit that have been challenged as acceptable reading in schools, or banned outright. Below are notes about some of the featured titles from the Banned Books Week organization.

(To learn more about challenges to books since the inception of Banned Books Week, check out the timeline created by the American Library Association.)

Moby-Dick; or The Whale, Herman Melville (1851): In a real head-scratcher of a case, a Texas school district banned the book from its Advanced English class lists because it “conflicted with their community values” in 1996. "Community values" are frequently cited in discussions over challenged books by those who wish to censor them.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884): The first ban of Mark Twain’s American classic in Concord, MA in 1885 called it “trash and suitable only for the slums.” Objections to the book have evolved, but only marginally. Twain’s book is one of the most-challenged of all time and is frequently challenged even today because of its frequent use of the word “nigger.” Otherwise it is alleged the book is “racially insensitive,” “oppressive,” and “perpetuates racism.”

The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1895): Restricting excess and refusing to allow teachers to teach books is still a form of censorship in many cases. Crane’s book was among many on a list compiled by the Bay District School board in 1986 after parents began lodging informal complaints about books in an English classroom library.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965): Objectors have called this seminal work a “how-to-manual” for crime and decried because of “anti-white statements” present in the book. The book presents the life story of Malcolm Little, also known as Malcolm X, who was a human rights activist and who has been called one of the most influential Americans in recent history.

Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987): Again and again, this Pulitzer-prize winning novel by perhaps the most influential African-American writer of all time is assigned to high school English students. And again and again, parental complaints are lodged against the book because of its violence, sexual content and discussion of bestiality.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown (1970): Subtitled “An Indian History of the American West,” this book tells the history of United States growth and expansion into the West from the point of view of Native Americans. This book was banned by a school district official in Wisconsin in 1974 because the book might be polemical and they wanted to avoid controversy at all costs. “If there’s a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it,” the official stated.

The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903): Generally hailed as Jack London’s best work, The Call of the Wild is commonly challenged for its dark tone and bloody violence. Because it is seen as a man-and-his-dog story, it is sometimes read by adolescents and subsequently challenged for age-inappropriateness. Not only have objections been raised here, the book was banned in Italy, Yugoslavia and burned in bonfires in Nazi Germany in the late 1920s and early 30s because it was considered “too radical.”

Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961): A school board in Strongsville, OH refused to allow the book to be taught in high school English classrooms in 1972. It also refused to consider Cat’s Cradle as a substitute text and removed both books from the school library. The issue eventually led to a 1976 District Court ruling overturning the ban in Minarcini v. Strongsville.

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951) Young Holden seems to be the favorite child of the censor. Frequently removed from classrooms and school libraries because it is “unacceptable,” “obscene,” “blasphemous,” “negative,” “foul,” “filthy,” and “undermines morality.” And to think Holden always thought “people never notice anything.”

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953): Rather than ban the book about book-banning outright, Venado Middle school in Irvine, CA utilized an expurgated version of the text in which all the “hells” and “damns” were blacked out. Other complaints have said the book went against objectors religious beliefs. The book’s author, Ray Bradbury, died last year.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (1940): Shortly after its publication the U.S. Post Office, which purpose was in part to monitor and censor distribution of media and texts, declared the book nonmailable. In the 1970s, eight Turkish booksellers were tried for “spreading propaganda unfavorable to the state” because they had published and distributed the text. This wasn’t Hemingway’s only banned book – A Farewell to Arms and Across the River and Into the Trees were also censored domestically and abroad in Ireland, South Africa, Germany and Italy.

Banned Books week, Sept 22-28: no sex or violence please, we're American

If it's a new school year, can book challenges be far off?

Banned Books Week is the national book community's annual celebration of the freedom to read. Libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. The 2013 celebration of Banned Books Week will be held from September 22-28.  

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982. For more information on Banned Books Week, click here. 

According to the American Library Association, there were 464 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2012, and many more go unreported. The 10 most challenged titles of 2012 were:

1. Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey
   Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group
   
   
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group
   
   
3. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher
   Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group
   
   
4. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James.
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit
   
   
5. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.
   Reasons: Homosexuality, unsuited for age group
   
   
6. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.
   Reasons: Homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit
   
   
7. Looking for Alaska, by John Green.
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group
   
   
8. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
   Reasons: Unsuited for age group, violence
   
   
9. The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit
   
   
10. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
    Reasons: Sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence