Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition, Routledge, London 1992.
In June 1942 the Office of War Information
released the 'Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry'.
'According to Neve the impact of
government in the later years of the war
was much more to rule out or tone down themese which might imply criticism
of American society or institutions.' (p.68)
Marjorie Heins, Not In Front of the Children: "Indecency", Censorship and the innocence of youth, Hill and Wang, New York, 2001.
It is worth noting that many states adopted the 1934 Ulysses obscenity test, but that some did not: Massacheussets stuck with the Hicklin standard throughout this decade, as did Ohio.
In Hannegan v Esquire(1946) the Supreme Court 'ruled that the denial of second-class mailing privileges to Esquire magazine on the gorund that the journla's risque features rendered it "morally improper" exceeded the Post-Master's statutory authority...This was encouraging for those eager to bring some coherence to the law of obscenity and harm to minors, but esquire involved only an interpretation of thr Post Office Law, not of the Constitution. The underlying issues remained: did the First Amendment allow government to police the morality of sexual ideas or impose censorship in order to preserve minors' sexual ignorance? The justices had an opportunity to address these issues the very next year.'(pp.47-48)
'In 1947, new york's high court had followed the Hicklin test in affrirming an obscenity finding against [Edmund] Wilson's book of stories, Memoirs of Hecate county... the Supreme Court, evidently not eager in 1947 to make a major statement about obscenity law's continuing clash with literary freedom, affirmed he New York decision, without writing an opinion, on a 4-4 vote.' (p.48)
'By thelate 1940s suppression of a work by as celebrated a literary figure as Wilson caused embarassment aming the middlebrow as well as the intellectual elite.' (p.48)
'An even more remarkable outpouring came at about the same time from a country judgein Philadelphia, Curtis Bok. At issue this time were a variety of literary works, including James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy and William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Wild Palms. Dismissing the obscenity charges, Judge Bok produced a detailed, scholarly history of censorship from ancient times. His critiqueof Hicklin was unrestrained: "strictly applied", he said, the test "renders any book unsafe, since a moron could pervert ot some sexual fantasy to which his mind is open the listings in a seed catalogue.' (p.49)
In 1948 'New Yorks had found the magazine Headquarters Detective-True Cases form the Police Blotter to vilate a state law banning publications "principally made up of" criminal news or police reports or "pictures or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime"...In Winters v New york the Supreme Court invalidated the law because terms like "bloodhed" and "lust" were too vague to put publishers on notice of what was illegal...the Winters case is best known for rejecting the argument that a publications trashy style robs it of First Amendmet protection.'(p.55)
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