Marjorie Heins, Not In Front of the Children: "Indecency", Censorship and the innocence of youth, Hill and Wang, New York, 2001.
'The time was approaching when the Supreme
Court could no longer avoid the urgent questions raised by obscenity law...Early
1950s America was not the most hospitable environment for asking such questions.
Arguments against censorship of any sort had rough sledding in a political
atmosphere dominated by seditious speech, loyalty tests for employment,
and blacklists of suspected Communists or their sympathizers.' (p.50)
The case of Butler v Michigan involved
a typical state obscenity law that criminalized any publication with a
tendency "to incite minors to violent or depraved or immoral acts, manifestly
tending to the corruption of the morals of youth" Alfred Butler was
convicted in the state court for selling "an admittedly serious" novel,
The
Devil Rides Outside. Felix Frankfurter, writing the opinion of
the Supreme Court, overturned the conviction because the 'result[of the
Hicklin
principle] was "to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading
only what is fit for children"'(pp.60-61)
United States v Roth was heard in
1957 after harm-to-minors was 'dead as a general censorship test'.
Nonetheless the decision was important. 'The announcement that obscenity
was outside the First Amendment was crucual to the Supreme Courts holding
in Roth. For it meant that government did not have to satisfy
the "clear and present danger" test that applied when political speech
was suppressed, or, indeed, any other standards of justifcation, before
criminalizing expression deemed to be obscene... Justice Brennan[then]
asserted that he was merely following a consensus among lower courts that
had already rejected Hicklin and adopted the dominant them/prurient
interest formula'. (pp.63-64). 'Justices Douglas and Black were the
two predicatble dissenters in Roth. They saw no reason for
political compromise...because there was no scientific basis to believe
that "impurity of sexual thoughts impelled to action, whether by juveniles
or adults," obscenity laws were constitutionally unjustified.'(p.65)
'The Supreme Court's Butler and
Roth
decisions had rejected the Hicklin test of juvenile vulnerability
as a measure of literary censorship for adults, but the problem of minors
remained.'(p.68)
A major censorship issue in the 1950s was the regulation of comic books
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