Friday, April 27, 1962 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
Thoughts on Censorship and Censors
ONE OF THE landmarks in the legal annals of censorship is the 1933 case of James Joyce's Ulysses, a storm center on both sides of the Atlantic for a number of years. Judge John M. Woolsey delivered the opinion of the federal court. Such a book, he stated, "must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on a person with average sex instincts . . . who plays in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role of hypothetical reagent as does the 'reasonable man' in the law of torts. . . It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned."...
Would be censor virtuously without exception rest their case on the protection of children and young people. The testimony of medical, psychiatric, and sociological authorities rebels their contentions. Two research criminologists, Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck, intensively examined a thousand delinquent boys from the Boston area. The most significant factors contributing to delinquency, they found, were culture conflict, unwholesome family environment, educational deficiencies, socially undesirable use of leisure time (for example, gambling, drinking, drug addiction, and sex misbehavior), and psychological defects.
THERE WAS no evidence that erotic or other types of reading matter were contributing elements in delinquency. In the same vein, George W. Smyt, one of the nation's outstanding children's court judges, listed for a New York state legislative commission 878 factors that had troubled children brought before him. Reading was not on the list, but "difficulty" in reading was. This point has been confirmed by other workers in the field of antisocial juvenile behavior. Far from discovering that delinquency grows out of reading, the clinicians report that it is more likely to grow out of inability to read. It is the consensus, in short, that delinquent children read much less than do the law-abiding.
But granting that it is highly undesirable to expose immature minds to hard-core obsessivity and pornography, normal adult readers hardly require such tender coddling. The definitive word on the subject was stated by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1957. Invalidating a Michigan statute designed mainly to protect young people, the court ruled: "The State of Michigan insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to protect the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig. The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children"...
PRIVATE pressure groups probably are more numerous, more vocal, and more active in the censorship field than in any other area. Inumerable organizations are working incessantly to place restrictions and limitations on what the American people may read, or see, or hear. They are voices calling for conformity, for unanimity of opinion, and for eliminating all ideas with which they happen to disagree. Operating extra-legally, such groups use, as their chief method, pressure on news dealers, drugstore, and booksellers, to force them to remove from their stocks every item on blacklists prepared by headquarters organizations. The books so listed have not been banned from the mails, and in an overwhelming majority of cases no legal charges have ever been brought against them...
Also full of common sense and
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broad toleration is a series of rules proposed by Father John Courtney Murray, for the guidance of minority groups, including the statement that "in a pluralist society no minority group has the right to impose its own religious or moral views on other groups, through the use of the methods of force, coercion, or violence"...
THERE would doubtless be universal agreement on the principle that our school textbooks should be American and should never be permitted to become vehicles for the propagation of obnoxious doctrines. The task of selection, however, is not one to be delegated to self-appointed experts, with obvious axes to grind. Instead, trust ought to be placed in the integrity, good faith, and plain common sense of
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the school boards and teachers of the country. As an investigating committee of the U.S. House of Representatives commented in its report: "If these educators are so utterly naive and untrained as to need help from a lobbying organization in selecting proper classroom materials, then our educational system has decayed beyond all help, a proposition we cannot accept."
There are two basic facts about censorship that banners and burners of books apparently will never learn.
- First, banning a book, given the contrary streak characteristic
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of human nature, automatically creates a universal desire to read it and, frequently, has been responsible for making best sellers out of what would otherwise remain mediocre failures.
- Second, ideas cannot be killed by suppression. There is scarcely any record of a book's total disappearance being caused by the censor's fires. Somewhere, almost invariably, a copy has survived, which can be multiplied and passed
on to succeeding generations. Only when the ideas expressed in books have lost their interest and meaning do the books vanish.
The most certain way to breathe life into a book and to ensure its longevity is to prohibit its being read.
(Excerpted from an article in the March 1962 Kansas Business Review by Robert B. Downs, dean of library administration at the University of Illinois)
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