Book charts trends in censorship

Free speech? Protective censorship? The debate is moving in new directions, sometimes prompted by advancing technology, according to the author of a revised and expanded book on the issue.

Paul Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History, is the author of “Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). The first edition of the book, published in 1968, covered the late 19th century to the 1930s. The second edition will include new material exploring the topic of censorship into the present.

Boyer says that in the late 19th century, obscenity laws formalized censorship by regulating what could be mailed or imported. However, these laws were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of a larger pattern of social control enforcing the Victorian “code” of literary propriety.

“Major book publishers, book sellers, librarians and genteel, middle-class publications like ‘The Atlantic’ all adhered to an informal code that nearly everyone accepted,” he says.

The system broke down in the 1920s with a number of nationally publicized court battles over such novels as James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” A decade later, events in Europe during the 1930s profoundly affected American editors and publishers, Boyer says.

“The Nazi book-burnings in May 1933 really crystallized anti-censorship sentiment in this country — there were a lot of American commentators warning that this is where censorship can lead,” Boyer says. The landmark federal court decision clearing “Ulysses” occurred a few months after the Nazi book burnings, he notes.

The last half of the 20th century has seen a shift in the venue of the debate, Boyer says. “We don’t seem to have the big national battles over obscenity in print,” he says. Instead, the struggle takes place on the grassroots level, often in school or even public libraries.

Says Boyer, “The targets are everything from ‘Huckleberry Finn’ to ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ to the Harry Potter books.”

Research suggesting links between pornography and violence against women also have provoked calls for censorship. In the mid-1980s, feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon and their supporters proposed ordinances in Minneapolis; Indianapolis; Cambridge, Mass.; Madison, Wis. and elsewhere to legally suppress representations combining explicit sex and violence against women. Proponents argued that such material violated women’s civil rights.

Pornography, especially kiddie porn, now readily accessible on the Internet, has fueled the protection vs. free speech debate even more, Boyer says. Citing the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000, Boyer observes that everyone agrees with the general goals of the law, “but precise definitions of key terms and the specific means of implementation have become highly controversial. Complicating the whole issue is that children today are often more computer-literate than the adults who supposedly are supervising their children’s computer use,” he says.

The new edition of “Purity in Print” will be in bookstores later this spring.