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April 10 - May 4, 2025
The War Department gave the American Library Association lists of books that did not belong in libraries, and they were followed to the letter.
In a time of national stress, American writers were expected either to offer superficial escape . . . or to provide yet another channel for glorifying the Allied cause and reinforcing the national impulse toward a higher, purer life.
The book’s decadent sexiness made it “one more symptom of the sex problem that the war had been sent to cleanse, and by writing it Lawrence had managed to subvert the war effort without mentioning it,” writes Hynes.33
In this sense, the war was not merely to defeat enemies
Lord Horatio Kitchener, banned correspondents from the area surrounding the British Expeditionary Force.
The war artist Paul Nash complained, “I’m not allowed to put dead men into my pictures because apparently they don’t exist.” 42
At times, news reports from France, Germany, and Austria were so heavily censored that nothing would appear of them in newspapers except blank spaces where the articles would have been.
Censorship resulted in disinformation, either by omission—such as strict restrictions on casualty reports—or by affirmative falsehoods.
“Every war story” reaching the American public, according to the historians James Mock and Cedric Larson, “had been censored somewhere along the line—at the source, in transit, or in the newspaper offices.”48 All journalists were required to swear an
War dissenters can expect no “mercy . . . from an outraged people and an avenging government,” said Wilson’s attorney general, Thomas Watt Gregory.56
Amid the hysteria, vigilantes attacked German Americans and ransacked their homes and businesses. Nor were other Americans spared. In Illinois, a mob wrapped a man accused of disloyalty in an American flag and murdered him in the street.57
Iowa’s “Babel Proclamation” was among the most extreme of such restrictions, requiring that only English be spoken in public, in schools and places of worship, on trains, and even on the telephone.
“Surely, if Christians were forbidden to fight to preserve the Person of their Lord and Master, they may not fight to preserve themselves, or any city they should happen to dwell in,” and “Under no circumstances can I undertake any service that has for its purpose the prosecution of war.”
It could also become a crime to invoke inconvenient historical events.
“History is history, and fact is fact,” the judge allowed. “But this is no time . . . for those things that may have the tendency or effect of sowing dissension . . . and of creating animosity or want of confidence between us and our allies.” As for Goldstein’s loss of personal liberty, the judge told him, “Count yourself lucky that you didn’t commit treason in a country lacking America’s right to a trial by jury. You’d already be dead.”66
The press was thick with stories—often correct, other times exaggerated or false—depicting Bolshevik rule as an apocalyptic mixture of chaos, property confiscations, and unchecked brutality.
the subversive German spy was replaced by the Communist revolutionary.
Soon, federal and state authorities organized strike forces to stamp out radical organizations, as well as what Palmer called the “constant spread of a disease of evil thinking.”
Besides, those who were captured had, according to Palmer, “sly and crafty eyes” and “lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features,”
What he omits is that Schenck’s leaflets had no such effect, much less did they constitute a “clear and present danger” of one.
Holmes began to reconsider his position over the following months. “I fear we have less freedom of speech here than they have in England,” he wrote to a friend.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. . . . That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. . . . While that experiment is part of our system, I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe . . . unless . . . an immediate check is required to save the country.74
In Whitney v. California (1927), Charlotte Whitney had been found guilty under a state law against advocating the violent overthrow of government. Whitney’s crime was helping to establish the Communist Labor Party, which supported “revolutionary class struggle.” The court allowed the conviction, yet Brandeis wrote a separate opinion, joined by Holmes, that advanced a definitive statement on the right to dissent. His words are as stirring now as they were nearly a century ago: Those who won our independence believed . . . liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of
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John Steinbeck explained how he and other war correspondents followed rules that were both “imposed and . . . self-imposed”: We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort.
The result was what Fussell called a “systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized” presentation, whereby the superiority of German weaponry, the horrors of exploding bodies, the vomiting of terrified GIs during battle, and the immense toll of it all were not transmitted home.107
Images revealing American abuses of the enemy’s lifeless bodies were forbidden, as were photographs of GIs making necklaces with the teeth of dead Japanese.
But by 1943, military authorities were concerned that recent American military successes were generating overconfidence at home, and with it, absenteeism in factories.
that the city had been “slightly damaged.” More accurate Japanese reports started to emerge after the attack on Nagasaki, mainly to stress US callousness in using a “new-type” bomb against civilians, and to label as hypocritical the US’ claims to moral superiority.
world the brutal effects of the bombings.113 The reasons for censorship by occupation forces in Japan are many, and predictable: to prevent accusations of war crimes, to mislead the world as to the true murderous capacity of the new weapons, to keep a defeated population docile, and to drive the narrative that the bombs were necessary to end the war and save Japanese and American lives.
“Radio jamming gets debated,” Power reported, “and the response is, ‘if we actually jam hate radio, it violates freedom of speech.’”3
Two RTLM executives later received lengthy prison terms for crimes against humanity, but at least their right to spew hatred had been protected.
The right to freedom of expression in the modern US is exalted to the point where most speech is protected unless violence or lawlessness is imminent.
but with the Internet’s upending of the marketplace of ideas, many of the victories are starting to look like liabilities.
The US Supreme Court stated, in 1971, that “free expression is powerful medicine” for a diverse society, and if the resulting “verbal cacophony” disturbs, the noise is “not a sign of weakness but of strength.”
when algorithms decide whose voices are heard or magnified; and when corporations frame their buying of elections and burying of climate change information as free speech—it may be time to rethink some cherished assumptions.
is absolute, its reliability ceases. Once substantial exceptions or qualifications are introduced, the law balances the right against other imperatives.
In the book accompanying a 1984 New York Public Library exhibition about censorship, the historian Arthur Schlesinger concluded that it “has lost its moral advantage, at least in democratic nations,” which he posited against “those vast regions of the world sadly sunk” in “fanaticism.”13
“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,” wrote George Orwell, “and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.” Such a state demands “the continuous alteration of the past” and “in the long run . . . a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”14
A year earlier, the Peruvian military fueled a large bonfire with one thousand copies of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel La ciudad y los perros (The time of the hero), which probed the moral effects of authoritarianism.
including the works of Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez.
Africans, his every word was viewed as an act of terrorism.
In 1996, French police seized an issue of the Algerian daily Liberté because of an article, “When the Seine Rolled with Corpses,” about a 1962 Paris demonstration for Algerian independence that ended in a bloodbath.16 Descriptions of contemporary colonial violence have also been widely censored. In 1989, the Arabic edition of Israeli author Dror Green’s Stories of the Intifada, which described Israel’s occupation from the perspective of the occupied, was banned in the West Bank and Gaza.
desert sun in an unventilated bus. That was damning enough, but when Green compared the situation in the bus to the suffering of Jews in railway carriages on the way to Nazi death camps, the entire book was deemed too incendiary for Palestinian consumption.17
censored. Indonesia is an example of this. In 1977, more than two decades after it gained independence, authorities banned Fons Rademakers’s Saijah and Adinda, a film adapted from a nineteenth-century novel that depicted the complicity of the Indonesian gentry under Dutch colonial rule. The government feared the film would give the impression that Indonesians were victimized by their own people rather than the Dutch—which could raise uncomfortable questions about the present.
From Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 “Decree on the Press,” which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” articles criticizing the Bolsheviks, to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1962 decision to allow the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other indictments of Stalinism, to Leonid Brezhnev’s strangling of political discourse and expulsion of Solzhenitsyn, and on to Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”), the USSR’s censorship policies were mercurial and in many cases arbitrary.
The writer and biologist Zhores Medvedev was accused of suffering from “incipient schizophrenia” and “paranoid delusions of reforming society.”19 His “symptoms” included his work exposing the quack science that led to massive crop failures and famines under Stalin.
This led to pervasive self-censorship, what journalists called Schere im Kopf, or “scissors in the head.”
Nothing about . . . lawn bowling, villas, or boulevards. (They awaken desires we are not capable of satisfying.) • Do not photograph the fruit on the tables at official receptions. (Otherwise the people will become envious.) • Nothing about Bratwurst-kiosks. (People are already eating enough meat.) • Nothing about homemade gliders. (People may think to escape.) • Nothing about Formula 1 racing. (We cannot afford it.)
Led by a Supreme Court intent on smashing speech restrictions, the postwar US has become, despite bouts of backsliding, among the least regulated speech environments the world has ever known.
Justice Holmes strenuously dissented: “If there is any principle . . . that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”22
