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April 10 - May 4, 2025
This time he was arrested and put on trial, in a case that tied disbelief in the Christian God directly to radical politics.
Paine’s attacks on Christianity and the Bible’s “lies,” “absurdities,” “atrocities,” and “contradictions” gave prosecutors much to work with.
One of Carlile’s more pugnacious shopmen was Humphrey Boyle, who was tried in the Old Bailey in 1822 for selling Paine’s blasphemous works and another pamphlet that characterized the Bible as obscene.
(Notably, Boyle’s trial took place during the same year that Thomas Bowdler published a cleaned-up version of the Bible, which he promoted as safe for family consumption.)
Mill thought it wrong to silence opinions chiefly because doing so harms the common good, not because it violates an individual’s freestanding rights to express themself.38
Finally, who should decide whether an idea would cause harm, or even what the “truth” is? Unsurprisingly, Mill appointed people who resembled himself: “Philosophers and theologians,” he said, are the only ones capable of guiding “simple minds” to sort out true from false notions and protect them from being misled.40
the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, he demanded multiple expurgations of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd. It was inappropriate in a publication established to be, in founder William Thackeray’s words, “strictly limited to the inoffensive” and with “nothing which could be unsuitable reading for the daughters of country parsons.” 43
“The rightful demands of the laborers increased because the people of the land study more, know more, see more,” testified a Hungarian peasant in 1890. “How can you blame us? We have learnt how to read and write. We would now like to wear better clothes, eat like human beings, and send our children to schools.”47 The
In Russia, playwrights and librettists were barred from depicting hundreds of specific subjects, including the Romanov tsars, the famine of 1892, and censorship itself.
an Austrian law forbade all printed matter that might create “an unfavorable influence upon the people’s morals, patriotism, or education.”52
An additional layer of ambiguity was added when states tried to accommodate the demands of the middle and commercial classes
At the same time, books with extremely troublesome subject matter could be allowed if the lower classes were deemed too ignorant to grasp them.
Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Russian authorities allowed it in both the original German and in translation, because it was “difficult” and “inaccessible,” its socialist message deemed buried in a “colossal mass of abstruse, somewhat obscure” arguments.
Authorities were especially alarmed by media that did not require reading, particularly theatre, drawings, and caricature, which communicated to a broader and poorer audience than printed text did and carried a more powerful, visceral impact.
The impression made [by a dramatic work] is infinitely more powerful . . . because [it] engages the eyes and ears and is intended to penetrate the will of the spectator in order to attain the emotional effects intended; this is something that reading alone does not achieve. Censorship of books can . . . make them accessible only to a certain kind of reader, whereas the playhouse by contrast is open to the entire public, which consists of every class, every walk of life, and every age.59
Censors had always been concerned about immorality, but now they focused primarily on suppressing the lower classes’ access to political information.
Even sensational news was suppressed, as lurid vice and crime stories were thought to stimulate the latent criminality of the underclasses.67 Yet
But most censorship systems can be breached, and the more complex they become, the more opportunities present themselves for doing so.
The nineteenth century’s preoccupation with censoring sex aligns with the class-driven suppression of other types of speech.
There was intense pressure on lawmakers to do something to stop pornography’s effect on “pure minds.”
Under what became known as the Hicklin test, an entire work could be banned if even one isolated passage tended to “deprave and corrupt” any segment of the population whose minds were believed to be vulnerable.
This protean definition of obscenity is exactly what the Hicklin test was meant to achieve: a work’s legality depended less on its contents than on who consumed it.
And despite France’s removal of most press restrictions in 1881, about fifty obscenity cases per year were brought through the end of the century, most resulting in convictions.
Under the Comstock Act, works by Chaucer, Tolstoy, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and William Burroughs, among many others,
Geoffrey Stone expresses the opposing point well: “To stifle free speech about [whether and how to conduct armed conflict] at the very height of wartime is arguably to suppress the right when it is most critical to the well-being of society.”102
For it is then that the population, especially those called to fight and possibly die, need to make informed judgments; and it is then that John Stuart Mill’s defense of minority opinions—the obnoxious ones that may advance truths no one presently grasps—must be taken most seriously.
Nineteenth-century censorship was marked by elites’ fears of challenges to their wealth and privilege from the underclasses.
World War I changed the geopolitical order suddenly, fundamentally, and forever. The conflict erased four empires, resulted in the eventual creation of more than a dozen new nations, sparked the Communist revolution in Russia, and poisoned the ground on which an even more transformative global conflagration would be fought a couple of decades later.
Slaps
Instead, there have been waves of ad hoc repression to meet short-term policy objectives, sometimes followed by after-the-fact repentance—and then by more of the same when the political waters again become choppy.
It was in the context of the US’ most excessive suppressions of World War I–era political speech that the Supreme Court, while affirming the convictions of harmless dissenters, fitfully developed many of the conflicting theories that have come to ground
In the century’s first decade, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was banned in many American schools for its imagined promotion of sexual fantasies and masturbation.
Wut
“It is disastrous,” the Hunan governor said, “to put animals and human beings on the same level.” Later, it was banned again in the US for the bad example set by its hookah-smoking caterpillar.3
In 1929, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was banned in Boston for being too sexual, not long before it was thrown onto bonfires by the Nazis for its pacificism.
while Americans were denouncing the Nazi book burnings, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was being set aflame
Published images of dead American soldiers would be allowed two years into the US’ involvement in World War II, but with severe restrictions, and then only to manipulate public opinion and demonize the enemy—images of GIs leering at prostitutes remained banned.
Only the enemy does evil.
fin-de-siècle
Sanger published a sex education column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a socialist newspaper. The column was suppressed; a blank box was put in its place that read “What Every Girl Should Know—nothing, by order of the United States Post Office!”10
Gary Stark describes concerns behind film censorship throughout the West: it “sprang from upper-class fears of the urban lower classes,” as widespread movie consumption was thought to “deprave and disorient” them, “undermine their attachment to traditionally sanctioned values, and lead to moral, perhaps even to social, anarchy.”14
The court held that cinema merited no free-speech protections because it was “a business pure and simple,” and films should not “be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion.” Given that movies were “capable of evil . . . the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition,” and were capable of exciting a “prurient interest,” laws preventing such ills were needed.16
Faced with the reality of censorship and a confounding array of local standards, members of the film industry formed the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC, much later called the British Board of Film Classification) to impose a “voluntary” scheme of film censorship. No film would be passed unless it was “clean and wholesome and absolutely above suspicion,” a broad standard that covered subcategories for sex, politics, violence, and derogatory representations of the armed forces and the empire.17
raising the risk, according to Württemberg authorities, of “severe agitation, high excitability and even mental disorders.”
It was feared that the film would encourage others to do the same.18
Escapism, not politics or revolution, was the preoccupation of pre-war cinema, and no early movies came close to posing a true challenge to entrenched power.
Belligerent governments ignited multimedia propaganda machines to bombard their populations with messages demonizing the enemy as murderous, perverted subhumans while exalting the nobility of their own national causes and characters.
The Allies were also denounced for using “savage”—that is, dark-skinned—colonial troops from Africa and Asia to fight civilized—white—peoples.22
For the US, which joined the fighting in 1917, the war was no less a rite of national cleansing and a contest of absolute good against pure evil.
Soon, articles appeared, such as those by an army public relations officer, Harold Hersey, assuring the nation that the war had “recreated” soldiers into men of “clean motives and higher desires,” and “superhuman beings” overnight: “How much sweeter and cleaner would our home lives be if we were to live like these boys do?”28 Social reformers and vice societies took
The link between killing and sex was too close.
Most wartime American literary censorship resulted not from court action but from intimidation and complicity.
