- Unfit to Print - Censorship of Printing
- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
- -The First Amendment
- A cherished, but mistaken belief of Americans is that freedom of the press grew from the natural political desires of the American people. Colonial America was diverse in opinion, religion, and politics. The most severe early oppression of the press came not from the appointed royal government, but from the elected assemblies.
- William Penn presided over a council meeting in 1683 which ordered that the laws of the colony would not be permitted to be printed. The first criminal trial in America over press freedom involved Pennsylvania's first printer, William Bradford. He was charged with seditious libel, had his press seized by the government, and spent more than a year in jail. His crime was that he printed a pamphlet called The Frame of Government , which was a copy of the colony's official charter.
- The first American newspaper appeared in Boston in 1690. There was only one issue printed before being shut down. It offended the British authorities by criticizing English laws. It also offended the clergy by offering spicy rumors about the French royalty.
- The slander trial of American printer John Peter Zenger in 1735 was to establish the precedent that truth could not be libel. This was a landmark case for freedom of the press, but even after the trial official and popular censorship took place. The Bill of Rights was not adopted until 1791 because many of the founding fathers didn't think it necessary to protect basic rights. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington disagreed.
- The First Amendment was less than a decade old when it faced it's first serious challenge. In 1798, war with France seemed imminent. There were many French speaking people in the United States. President John Adams and Congress passed a series of laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts. It was now a crime to publish any "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the Congress or President "with the intent to defame" or bring them "into contempt or disrepute." The act expired in 1801 and President Jefferson pardoned all those who were convicted under these laws.
- In 1835, an attempt was made to abridge freedom of the press in matters that urged "slaves to insurrection". There was limited support for this bill, so John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina proposed a bill to make it illegal for postmasters to deliver such printed material. It was also unsuccessful.
- Gradually, the feeling of need to limit press freedom moved from political topics to moral. Anthony Comstock, in 1872, formed New York Society for the Suppression of Vice after being offended by seeing the books his fellow employees passed around. The Vice Society was not only about the suppression of printed materials. They started aid programs to help the poor. One such effort was to send street urchins to western farms.
- Comstock's efforts saw the founding of other groups to govern public morals such as Watch and Ward Societies. Through their efforts the moral guardians promoted postal obscenity laws, boycotts, and a few book burnings. Opposition by members of such groups stopped a planned 1882 edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" because of a poem that mentioned prostitution. Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata" was similarly banned from publication in 1890.
- Not all attempts of the Societies were successful. In 1884, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was banned because of bad grammar and dialect and accoridng to one critic it " . . . deals with . . . low grade morality. . . The book is flippant and irreverent. . . It is trash of the veriest sort". Louisa May Alcott joined the attack, "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had better stop writing for them." Twain said of the criticism, "That will sell 25,000 copies for us, sure." The book sold 50,000 copies in the first two months.
- Elbert Hubbard fared worse than his rival Twain. Hubbard was viewed with vile contempt by those citizens who valued moral restrictions. His "Philistine" magazine was said to contain "among other things certain matters in print of an obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and indecent character." In 1912, he went one step too far when he printed a joke about a "Miss Mary Merryseat" who he referred to as "Gladys". His humor was not appreciated. He was convicted on six counts of felony obscenity, fined $100 and lost many of his rights of citizenship. In order to obtain a passport, he had to have a presidential pardon from Woodrow Wilson. In 1915, he obtained his pardon and set sail for Europe on the S.S. Lusitania.
Copyright (C) 1997 by Frank Granger
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