Censorship
| Author | Jeffrey Wilson |
| Pages | 843-848 |
Page 843
"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." Despite the guarantee implicit in the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, there have been many attempts in the ensuing two centuries to censor or ban speech, both in print and in other media.
Censorship is at best problematic and at worst dangerous when it tries to silence the voice of the powerless at the behest of the powerful. History has shown that power and influence are not reliable guides for judgment when it comes to information. The Nazi government in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and the governments of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, have shown the world what happens when large, powerful nations choose to deprive their own citizens of knowledge and a voice. In the United States, Americans pride themselves on freedom of speech and freedom of the press—but many of them have experienced censorship. Boards of education frequently try to ban certain books from their school districts; television and radio stations ban certain programming; and newspapers may alter certain stories. The reasons for censorship are numerous, but they all share a common goal: protection. Perhaps children are the most frequently protected group. Books are banned when they depict violence or sexually suggestive material. Motion pictures are rated to protect young people from sex and violence on the screen. Internet resources are filtered to ensure that students will be unable to log into pornographic web sites.
Society, and often the courts, have determined that some information does need to be censored, and that not all media deserve First Amendment protection. Deciding which materials fall into which categories is a subject of ongoing debate.
Censorship laws existed in ancient Rome and Greece more than 2,500 years ago; ancient societies in the Middle East and China also had censorship regulations. The role of censorship was to establish moral standards for the general population; civilizations that exercised it saw censorship as a means of helping the people by providing them with guidance.
The invention of movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century revolutionized the printing industry; it made more books available and helped literacy spread beyond just the most educated in soci-
Page 844
ety. A more literate public meant more need for censorship. The Roman Catholic Church released a list of Prohibited Books, or Index Librorum Prohibitorum, in 1559, the first of 20 such lists (the last was issued in 1948). This list included books deemed by the Church to be heretical. Authors such as Galileo were denounced, and some authors (such as Sir Thomas More) were put to death. Prohibitions were not only religious; in 1563, Charles IX of France issued a decree that all printed material required his special permission.
Nonetheless, it became harder to suppress information, and by the end of the seventeenth century there was a movement toward freedom of speech and the press. Sweden established a law guaranteeing freedom of the press in 1766, followed by Denmark in 1770. The newly formed United States put the First Amendment into its Constitution in 1787, and the French government moved in the same direction in 1789 at the dawn of its revolution.
The First Amendment has long been the standard by which the U.S. government has measured the freedom of individuals to speak or write their opinions without fear of reprisals. That freedom is not absolute; one of the most commonly cited examples warns that people do not have the right to walk into a crowded theater and shout, "Fire!" thus causing people to panic and trample over each other. Through the decaded the government has attempted to determine legitimate curbs to this freedom as opposed to arbitrary or discriminatory prohibitions.
Censorship existed in the United States from its beginnings, the existence of the First Amendment notwithstanding. But although there were federal anti-obscenity laws, censorship itself was not mandated by federal or state governments. What codified censorship was the 1873 Comstock Act, which called for the banning of literature deemed sexually arousing, even indirectly. The man for whom the act is named, Anthony Comstock, was the leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a special agent for both the U.S. Post Office and the New York state prosecutor's office. The Comstock Act banned the mailing, importation, and transportation of any printed material (even private letters) that contained lewd or lascivious material. It also banned the transport of any sort of contraceptive drug or device, as well as literature describing contraceptive devices. What this meant was that a book that in any way made mention of any sort of birth control could be considered lewd and subject to confiscation. Violators of the Comstock Act (Comstock himself was deputized and arrested many violators himself) faced steep fines and even time in prison.
Other books that were affected by the Comstock Act included The Decameron (written by Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth...
To continue reading
Request your trial