July 11, 2012 • 24 mins
What are the most commonly banned books? In this episode, Cristen and Caroline read between the (banned) lines of history, from a legal timeline of book banning to the primary reasons books are banned in the first place: sex, language and the occult.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom Never told you?
From house stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And today, by
(00:21):
listener requests, we are kicking off a two part Summer
book Club two thousand twelve series, and we're talking about
saucy books, books, books. We've discussed romance novels before, the
genre unfortunately termed chick lit before um and I would
(00:44):
say that for women's literature, popular fiction this summer, the
title that ever everybody's talking about is we gotta say it, Caroline,
it's fifty Shades of Gray. Yeah. And as I was
just telling us, and I didn't even really know what
this book was until about a month ago. Yeah, And
there was a specific request also for our summer book
(01:07):
Club series, do not be about fifty shades of Gray.
So don't worry, we're not about to talk about you
know what some might not really appreciate in terms of
erotic fiction, that is fifty shades of gray. But all
this fifty Shades of Gray buzz got us thinking about
books that are hard to get your hands on and
(01:29):
specifically book banning in the US, because I think today
in the information age, with the Internet, you know, we
can it seems like we can read whatever we want.
But that was certainly not the case for a long
time here in the US, and going back in history too,
(01:49):
as far back as oh, I don't know for fifty
b C. What happened in four fifty BC? Well, Caroline, Uh,
a guy named an axe like Corris, an axa Corris,
thank you. We'll just run with that guy with it
not easily to roll off the tongue name an Axagoras.
(02:12):
He wrote some stuff and people did not like it. Yeah,
he was a Greek philosopher who ended up getting forced
out of Athens and had his writings burned after claiming
that this crazy notion that the sun was actually a
white hot stone and the moon reflected the Sun's rays.
So everybody's like, get out out of town. We hate you,
you're stupid um. And then in three Socrates was required
(02:38):
to drink poison for supposedly corrupting youth, leading them to
criticize Athens again, what's going on with you Greeks? But
I mean, seriously, like, as long as there have been
ideas or thoughts happening, there's been some form of censorship. Yeah,
and people, humans, human animals seemed to really enjoy just
(02:59):
having things on paper, other people's ideas on paper that
they can then rip up or ban um all In
Axagoras Scott got so much guff because he they thought
that he was being derogatory to the gods. And that
kind of theme of offending people's religious sensibilities is certainly
something that we still see with book banning today, and
(03:22):
it was something when we go look at the history
of book banning in the US, Christianity does play a
pretty big role, starting in eighteen seventy three with US
Post Service inspector and politician Anthony Comstock, who was a
devout Christian and founder of the New York Society for
(03:42):
the Suppression of Vice right, And this whole society's goal
was to prevent obscene materials from polluting the minds of
the American people. And he really targeted erotica and crime stories,
which I think is funny, so it's not just sexy
times that he doesn't want people to read about its
crime too, And he considered dime novels to be pornography
(04:04):
for children. Yeah, and this kind of puritanical intrusion on
literature and printing was It seemed like it was pretty
widely accepted at the time, because Congress did pass the
Comstock Acts, which were an anti obscenity bill that Comstock
had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives and also
(04:26):
barred obscene literature from interstate commerce. And this kind of
puritanical intrusion on literature and what people were and weren't
allowed to read legally was I mean, I guess fairly
widespread at the time because the US Congress did pass
the Comstock Act, which was an anti obscenity bill that
(04:47):
Anthony Comstock had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives
and also barred obscene literature from interstate commerce. And by
obscene literature, we are also talking about things like Margaret
Singer's early pamphlets on contraception. Oh my, I mean, even
even that like kind of biological reproductive information was considered,
(05:12):
you know, banned. Yeah, so funny. Everybody got their panties
on a twist about just learning about women's bodies, just
learning about contraception, family planning, anything like any any sexy
anything was just too much, and all because it had
to do with women's bodies. They were like, Nope, nope,
can't read it. It's going to pollute everybody's minds. We're
all going to be filthy afterward. And something that I
(05:33):
didn't know was that Boston was really the hotbed of
literary suppression. Bostonians out there, you guys, I mean, claim
to fame. One. Books were so often banned in Boston
that in the nineteen fifties, stolecious titles would be labeled
(05:56):
banned in Boston to help move them off the shelves. Oh,
it must be bad if it was banned in Boston. Yeah,
I don't. I don't get it. I mean, you guys
had the tea party, you know, you threw tea bags
in the water and stuff, and now here you are
banning books. I don't get it. But the efforts in
Boston were really led by the Watch and Words Society,
who kind of like Calm Stocks New York Society for
(06:17):
the suppression advice. Yeah, um, this was coming from the
Boston Globe. Just to give you a sense of how
much the Watching Words Society cracked down and also how
much people like I mean they jumped when the Watching
Words Society cracked its whip. For instance, in its heyday,
the Boston Public Library kept books which the Watching Words
(06:39):
Society found objectionable in a locked room. The Museum of
Fine Arts kept parts of its Asian collection behind doors.
And again the you know the label band in Boston
became a selling point for smutty literature. Yeah, well, they
weren't the only ones. The nineteen fifties were definitely, definitely
a stretch of time that is big on book banning. Yeah,
(07:02):
for sure. In in three, for instance, Senator Joseph McCarthy,
whose name should be very familiar, had his aids search
US Information Service libraries in Europe and Asia for subversive books,
and libraries were accused of circulating communist materials. Yeah. All
the McCarthy is um that was sweeping the nation at
the time seemed to kind of replace banning books on
(07:25):
the basis of immorality to banning books on the basis
of you know, subversive communist undertones, right, just making everybody scared, yeah,
and burning books and such. But then, thank goodness, in
the Supreme Court stepped in with the case Board of
Education Island Tree School, district versus Pico with a little
(07:48):
bit of a little bit of sensibility about this whole
book banning issue. Yeah, they ruled that public school boards
could not remove a book from the library quote simply
because they disliked the idea contained in those books. Basically
saying that there needs to be a balance between school's
role as an educator and student's right of access to
(08:08):
the material. So a book has to be pervasively vulgar
to be banned. Yeah, and um, this case spring out
of U nineteen seventies six issue where a bunch of
parents and school staff ordered that certain books be removed
from a junior high and high school library. And to
(08:29):
give you an idea of some of the books that
they wanted to ban, slaughter House five by Kurt Vonnegut,
a go ask Alice, which is a commonly banned book,
UM A Reader for Writers edited by Jero Walter Archer,
of The Naked Ape, The Best Short Stories by Negro
Writers edited by Langston Hughes, a lot of other um
(08:50):
race related titles as well. And they claimed that the
books were anti American, anti Christian, anti Semitic, and just
playing filthy and think thankfully, the Supreme Court stepped in
and said yeah, yeah. And there was another case in
nine Texas v. Johnson, where a Supreme Court Justice William J.
Brennan Jr. Said that if there is a bedrock principle
(09:12):
underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may
not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society
finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. So we have
people like this saying things like this, which are wonderful
and supportive of knowledge and access to knowledge. But book
banning efforts to banned books are not going away, basically no.
(09:33):
And the thing is, even though we have Supreme Court
justices like William J. Brenner who have in the past
supported UH First Amendment rights and the freedom of expression,
that is not to say that obscene literature is legally
protected in the US. So a case that Christ and
(09:54):
I actually learned about in our journalism days at college
and our and our legal ethics course exactly we had
a very dynamic professor. I really like that class um.
This case is called Miller v. California, and it basically
established a three point test for obscenity UH. And those
points are one the text must appeal to prurient interests
(10:16):
when taken as a whole, it must involve patently offensive
sexual conduct. And it must contain no literary, artistic, political,
or scientific value. And these are points that have come
up again and again in various cases, because there is
a desire to protect literature that is actually out there
to inform and to educate it. This will prevent people
(10:37):
from this willy nilly being like, well, that's against my
religious beliefs or my moral beliefs, and I don't want
anybody else to read it. Yeah. And in the in
the past, the way that the law approached obscenity was
more narrowly focused on whether or not there was a
particular obscene scene in the book. Um. For instance, in Ulysses,
(10:58):
which will get to it also bring out of one
episode where the protagonists masturbates, rather than the entire work,
and the law used to focus just on how it
might affect vulnerable populations, particularly to minors. So in nineteen
thirty three, in the wonderfully named case United States versus
(11:20):
one book called Ulysses as opposed to what I don't know, um,
the judge ruled that Ulysses was not obscene and he
didn't use the Hicklin test as it had been recognized prior,
which was just focusing on the vulnerable population and how
obscenity affected them. The judge ended up saying that it
should be judged by its effects on the average person. Right,
(11:41):
because all of this that was in nineteen thirty three,
as you mentioned, and up until that time, the sale
of Ulysses in the US, or mailing it through the mail.
That's that's really descriptive, right, that's email it through the mail,
UM had been banned since nineteen two because of the
masturbation scene that a younger girl had read. Freaked out,
(12:02):
her parents freaked out. And then you know, we have
a legal case spring up from that, and the N
three case US v. One book called Ulysses was a
test case brought on by Random House actually that wanted
to publish Ulysses. So they were testing the waters with that,
and like you said, the judge ruled that it's not obscene.
(12:23):
Let's move on from there. But some other controversial publishers
and writers who have rankled conservatives throughout the twentieth century. UM,
going back a little bit before that Ulysses case, we
have hl Mancon a k a. The Sage of Baltimore,
who seemed to love just making conservatives really mad with
(12:46):
his writing. Right. He was actually arrested in ninety six
in Boston for distributing copies of American Mercury, which was
a publication that he put out Um. The publication had
been banned by, as we mentioned earlier, the Watching Words Society,
who contended that the periodical was obscene, and the judge
disagreed with them. Lincoln turned around and ended up suing
(13:07):
the society. He was basically kind of lawsuit happy because
he thought, here I am, I'm going to prove that
this stuff is not bad for the public, that society
is not being affected for the worst, and I just
want my voice heard. Yeah. And he used a satirical
style that allowed him to poke fun at the thoughts,
words actions of the US and it's more conservative citizens,
(13:29):
and he often spoke out directly against religious fundamentalists and
fun fact, hl mancon first to use the term Bible belt. Right.
He also coined the term monkey trial at the Scopes trial.
So moving on from Mancon one guy Um, who we
can thank for some of our smuttiest books in our
(13:51):
Home libraries. Barney ross It who founded the publishing company
Grove Press, and essentially the aim of Growth Press was
to breach the damn of American Puritanism, as he called it.
He brought a bunch of writers to Americans attention, including
Samuel Beckett. He published che guevara Um, and in the
(14:13):
nineteen sixties he published D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover,
which originally appeared in Italy and nine and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer, which was a very controversial sexually explicit
autobiographical novel that had been published in Paris in ninety
four and banned since then in the US. Yeah. And
I gotta say that Traffic of Cancer is in fact
(14:35):
so sexually explicit it is almost I find difficult to read. Really. Yes,
there's just so much penis interesting. Um. Yeah, But Lady
Chatterley's Lover was a really important book because the case
started out the abscenity case started out in England in
nineteen sixty with the case of Crown v. Penguin Books
(14:57):
and essentially Penguin one, and they were allowed to sell
the books, but in the US you still couldn't get
your hands on the copy until Barney ross It fought
the legal battle in the United States and Lady Chatterley's
Lover got into our hands here. And there's a great
scene in I believe it's the first season of Madmen
(15:18):
when they pay to the secretaries break room or something
and they're all passing around a copy of the unabridged
version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which because initially the publishers said, hey,
if you cut out all of the dirty stuff, then
we can publish it, and uh d H. Lawrence was like, no, no,
(15:38):
my woodsman's sex scenes will remain, and he did a
little d snap in formation with his fingers. But actually
uh Rossa had to fight several battles over Lady Chatterley's
Lover um because, like the earlier book we mentioned, the
main distribution method was through the mail. The Postmaster General
actually barred the book from the mail, but a federal
(16:00):
judge ended up overturning the band, ruling that the book
had redeeming merit, and that is the key. Does the
piece of literature have redeeming merit? And tropic of cancer,
as anyone who has read it can imagine, uh was
a whole lot of trouble for Barney ross It um.
He faced more than sixty legal cases seeking to ban
it in twenty one states and even lead to Rosset's arrest,
(16:22):
although the grand jury decided against an indictment. But it
was it's interesting to hear UM or read interviews with
Rossett because he was so just persistent and really didn't
care whether what it took to bring um racier titles
(16:43):
to the US exactly. Well, some of these people who
are out to ban books for whatever reason. You can't
just get a book band willy nilly out of the
gate right away. You have to actually raise a challenge,
and so that's an attempt to remove restrict materials based
on the objections of a person or group. Most challenges
(17:04):
are unsuccessful, and libraries and schools are typically able to
retain the challenge materials UM. But between two thousand, according
to the American Library Association, there were six thousand, three
d and sixty four challenges raised against books. And that
number for ten years. I feel like that's pretty high.
I feel like that's a lot of challenged books. Well,
(17:26):
especially when you consider it in the contemporary context of
all of the more sexually explicit or racy stuff, racy
stuff that we see on television, on the internet. You know,
the fact that we're still so concerned about books I
find I mean, do kids even go to libraries anymore?
I hope I won't up too, But I'm just saying, like,
(17:46):
is really these books are the thing that you're worried
about the most, Like, shouldn't you maybe take the internet
away first? But the two top challenged topics basically are
sexually explicit material and offensive length, which followed by things
with occult themes, violence, anything that seems to be perceived
to promote homosexuality, as well as religious viewpoints. Yeah, and
(18:09):
speaking of occult themes. Between two thousand and two thousand nine,
the Harry Potter series the number one most banned books
in the United States because of the wizardry. It's teaching
out children to be wizards. It makes people very upset.
My my French professor in college went on a rant
(18:30):
about how you know you see these people wearing black
around campus. They're not they're not God, their witches and
they're doing voodoo when they're evil because of Harry Potter. Yeah,
because one of my classmates had given a presentation in
French on Airy Potter so well with the offensive language
stuff as well. They're still issues over Huckleberry Finn because
he refers to Jim as the in word. It's like, well,
(18:53):
what do we do? What do we do with that?
Because that was you know, writing in the time. How
does it apply now? And again, if you apply that
Miller test and look at the body, the entire body
of the work and whether or not it has literary merit,
usually things shake out in favor of the book. Right. Well,
there there are people, don't worry, there are people supporting
(19:13):
books out there. Uh, there's this whole Banned Books Week,
which I believe this year is in September and of September. Yes,
it is from September to October six, So that gives
listeners plenty of time to get a lot of a
lot of books to read openly. Yeah, and not burn
and not burn them. Well, yeah, it's definitely. It's not
(19:34):
only to kind of feature the band books to get
more people to read them, but it also the whole
point of it is to celebrate the freedom to read
and the importance of the First Amendment. Yeah, because we've
talked a lot about racier literature, but a lot of
common books that have been banned over the years include
titles like The Great God Speak, Catcher in the Rye,
Grapes of Wrath, to Kill a Mockingbird, the Color Purple,
(19:56):
all of which deal with difficult themes. But I couldn't
imagine not having them to read, and you know, all
of the the rich imagery that they bestill upon us,
well exactly, I mean, except for the Grapes of Wrath.
I don't know what happened to me. Why I didn't
read that in high school, but I read I read
these other ones in I guess in high school. So
(20:18):
next up in our Summer Book Club two parter, we
are going to dive deeper into rac or material and
talk specifically about erotica, warning to those who have younger
listeners into But in the meantime, we want to hear
from listeners. UM. Curious to know if your library has
(20:40):
ever tried to ban books? Um, have you ever challenged
a book? Have you read banned books? I don't know,
what do you What do you think about censorship and
all that? International listeners are what are the state of
book banning and censorship in your countries? As well. Let
us know, mom stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can send all of your letters that we love
(21:01):
to read. And speaking of which, we have two letters here,
both about manic pixie dream guys. So Brandon wrote in
with a couple of suggestions about manic pixie dream guys,
and he says, there are two candidates that I can guess.
(21:21):
The sort of prince charming archetype that pops up sometimes
in movies to be the object of his affection, and
it's all glamour and gentleman venus and just so perfect
who usually sort of convinces the heroine that there's more
to love than all that. He's almost never given any
real sort of dimension and is defined only by his
interactions with the female main character and sometimes by her friends.
(21:44):
He may not have pixie dust, but his smile is
usually slightly blinding because of how white his teeth are.
The other option maybe fits less well. He is the
male character who is in the perfect on paper life
the female protagonist has at the beginning of a movie,
but ends up being kind of Sometimes he's an outright jerk,
(22:05):
other times he's just dull. He pops up in those
kind of movies, Reese Witherspoon stars in a lot where
she's dating him or engaged to him or something, and
then goes off on some kind of adventure and ends
up leaving him triumphantly at the end of the movie. True,
it's often for a true love interest of some kind,
but occasionally we also see this happen when she decides
she doesn't need to define herself by the man she's with.
(22:28):
So too excellent candidates, Thank you, Brandon. Okay, this one's
from Amber. She says that she loved the Manic Pixie
dream Girl episode and that it raised such paradoxical views
that we in the US have about women. However, when
you asked about male equivalence to this female caricature, my
brain instantly jumped to Matthew McConaughey. If Zoe Deschanel is
the girl's girl, he is the guy's guy. With the
(22:50):
exception of a few dramatic roles time to Kill, Cadillac
lawyer and amis Dad. He has played roles to portray
very happy male qualities, travel to exotic places, expense of cars,
great figure, I agree, power of freedom, and he always
gets the girl. Another celebrity that fits would be Christopher
Pine for the same reasons. I do wonder why the
social discourse is not addressed in male counterparts but has
(23:12):
only focused on the female pixies. Hopefully the uproar over
this will die down and we can just enjoy people
for who they are. I guess my response to this
would be I don't know if there is a total
male equivalent to a Manic Pixie dream girl. I think
that a lot of I was thinking about this a
lot of Jason Siegel's characters, like in I Love You
Many Manic Pixie dream because he's the catalyst, for instance,
(23:36):
for Paul Rudd's transformation, and while it may not be romantic,
and he kind of goes through his own transformation as well,
I don't know. He tends to kind of play sort
of hippy drippy dudes and I love him. In case
you're listening to Jason Siegel, that's true. So if you
are a Jason Siegel would like to get in touch
with me, or if you have any and he thoughts
(23:58):
you'd like to share mom Stuff at Discovery dot Com
is where you can send your letters, and you can
also find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at
mom Stuff podcast, and if you would like to learn
more about the history of banning books and how people
go about getting those books off of the library shelves,
you can read the article how Our Books ban by
(24:19):
Kristen Conger at how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com brought to you by the reinvented
two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom Never told you?
From house stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And today, by
(00:21):
listener requests, we are kicking off a two part Summer
book Club two thousand twelve series, and we're talking about
saucy books, books, books. We've discussed romance novels before, the
genre unfortunately termed chick lit before um and I would
(00:44):
say that for women's literature, popular fiction this summer, the
title that ever everybody's talking about is we gotta say it, Caroline,
it's fifty Shades of Gray. Yeah. And as I was
just telling us, and I didn't even really know what
this book was until about a month ago. Yeah, And
there was a specific request also for our summer book
(01:07):
Club series, do not be about fifty shades of Gray.
So don't worry, we're not about to talk about you
know what some might not really appreciate in terms of
erotic fiction, that is fifty shades of gray. But all
this fifty Shades of Gray buzz got us thinking about
books that are hard to get your hands on and
(01:29):
specifically book banning in the US, because I think today
in the information age, with the Internet, you know, we
can it seems like we can read whatever we want.
But that was certainly not the case for a long
time here in the US, and going back in history too,
(01:49):
as far back as oh, I don't know for fifty
b C. What happened in four fifty BC? Well, Caroline, Uh,
a guy named an axe like Corris, an axa Corris,
thank you. We'll just run with that guy with it
not easily to roll off the tongue name an Axagoras.
(02:12):
He wrote some stuff and people did not like it. Yeah,
he was a Greek philosopher who ended up getting forced
out of Athens and had his writings burned after claiming
that this crazy notion that the sun was actually a
white hot stone and the moon reflected the Sun's rays.
So everybody's like, get out out of town. We hate you,
you're stupid um. And then in three Socrates was required
(02:38):
to drink poison for supposedly corrupting youth, leading them to
criticize Athens again, what's going on with you Greeks? But
I mean, seriously, like, as long as there have been
ideas or thoughts happening, there's been some form of censorship. Yeah,
and people, humans, human animals seemed to really enjoy just
(02:59):
having things on paper, other people's ideas on paper that
they can then rip up or ban um all In
Axagoras Scott got so much guff because he they thought
that he was being derogatory to the gods. And that
kind of theme of offending people's religious sensibilities is certainly
something that we still see with book banning today, and
(03:22):
it was something when we go look at the history
of book banning in the US, Christianity does play a
pretty big role, starting in eighteen seventy three with US
Post Service inspector and politician Anthony Comstock, who was a
devout Christian and founder of the New York Society for
(03:42):
the Suppression of Vice right, And this whole society's goal
was to prevent obscene materials from polluting the minds of
the American people. And he really targeted erotica and crime stories,
which I think is funny, so it's not just sexy
times that he doesn't want people to read about its
crime too, And he considered dime novels to be pornography
(04:04):
for children. Yeah, and this kind of puritanical intrusion on
literature and printing was It seemed like it was pretty
widely accepted at the time, because Congress did pass the
Comstock Acts, which were an anti obscenity bill that Comstock
had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives and also
(04:26):
barred obscene literature from interstate commerce. And this kind of
puritanical intrusion on literature and what people were and weren't
allowed to read legally was I mean, I guess fairly
widespread at the time because the US Congress did pass
the Comstock Act, which was an anti obscenity bill that
(04:47):
Anthony Comstock had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives
and also barred obscene literature from interstate commerce. And by
obscene literature, we are also talking about things like Margaret
Singer's early pamphlets on contraception. Oh my, I mean, even
even that like kind of biological reproductive information was considered,
(05:12):
you know, banned. Yeah, so funny. Everybody got their panties
on a twist about just learning about women's bodies, just
learning about contraception, family planning, anything like any any sexy
anything was just too much, and all because it had
to do with women's bodies. They were like, Nope, nope,
can't read it. It's going to pollute everybody's minds. We're
all going to be filthy afterward. And something that I
(05:33):
didn't know was that Boston was really the hotbed of
literary suppression. Bostonians out there, you guys, I mean, claim
to fame. One. Books were so often banned in Boston
that in the nineteen fifties, stolecious titles would be labeled
(05:56):
banned in Boston to help move them off the shelves. Oh,
it must be bad if it was banned in Boston. Yeah,
I don't. I don't get it. I mean, you guys
had the tea party, you know, you threw tea bags
in the water and stuff, and now here you are
banning books. I don't get it. But the efforts in
Boston were really led by the Watch and Words Society,
who kind of like Calm Stocks New York Society for
(06:17):
the suppression advice. Yeah, um, this was coming from the
Boston Globe. Just to give you a sense of how
much the Watching Words Society cracked down and also how
much people like I mean they jumped when the Watching
Words Society cracked its whip. For instance, in its heyday,
the Boston Public Library kept books which the Watching Words
(06:39):
Society found objectionable in a locked room. The Museum of
Fine Arts kept parts of its Asian collection behind doors.
And again the you know the label band in Boston
became a selling point for smutty literature. Yeah, well, they
weren't the only ones. The nineteen fifties were definitely, definitely
a stretch of time that is big on book banning. Yeah,
(07:02):
for sure. In in three, for instance, Senator Joseph McCarthy,
whose name should be very familiar, had his aids search
US Information Service libraries in Europe and Asia for subversive books,
and libraries were accused of circulating communist materials. Yeah. All
the McCarthy is um that was sweeping the nation at
the time seemed to kind of replace banning books on
(07:25):
the basis of immorality to banning books on the basis
of you know, subversive communist undertones, right, just making everybody scared, yeah,
and burning books and such. But then, thank goodness, in
the Supreme Court stepped in with the case Board of
Education Island Tree School, district versus Pico with a little
(07:48):
bit of a little bit of sensibility about this whole
book banning issue. Yeah, they ruled that public school boards
could not remove a book from the library quote simply
because they disliked the idea contained in those books. Basically
saying that there needs to be a balance between school's
role as an educator and student's right of access to
(08:08):
the material. So a book has to be pervasively vulgar
to be banned. Yeah, and um, this case spring out
of U nineteen seventies six issue where a bunch of
parents and school staff ordered that certain books be removed
from a junior high and high school library. And to
(08:29):
give you an idea of some of the books that
they wanted to ban, slaughter House five by Kurt Vonnegut,
a go ask Alice, which is a commonly banned book,
UM A Reader for Writers edited by Jero Walter Archer,
of The Naked Ape, The Best Short Stories by Negro
Writers edited by Langston Hughes, a lot of other um
(08:50):
race related titles as well. And they claimed that the
books were anti American, anti Christian, anti Semitic, and just
playing filthy and think thankfully, the Supreme Court stepped in
and said yeah, yeah. And there was another case in
nine Texas v. Johnson, where a Supreme Court Justice William J.
Brennan Jr. Said that if there is a bedrock principle
(09:12):
underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may
not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society
finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. So we have
people like this saying things like this, which are wonderful
and supportive of knowledge and access to knowledge. But book
banning efforts to banned books are not going away, basically no.
(09:33):
And the thing is, even though we have Supreme Court
justices like William J. Brenner who have in the past
supported UH First Amendment rights and the freedom of expression,
that is not to say that obscene literature is legally
protected in the US. So a case that Christ and
(09:54):
I actually learned about in our journalism days at college
and our and our legal ethics course exactly we had
a very dynamic professor. I really like that class um.
This case is called Miller v. California, and it basically
established a three point test for obscenity UH. And those
points are one the text must appeal to prurient interests
(10:16):
when taken as a whole, it must involve patently offensive
sexual conduct. And it must contain no literary, artistic, political,
or scientific value. And these are points that have come
up again and again in various cases, because there is
a desire to protect literature that is actually out there
to inform and to educate it. This will prevent people
(10:37):
from this willy nilly being like, well, that's against my
religious beliefs or my moral beliefs, and I don't want
anybody else to read it. Yeah. And in the in
the past, the way that the law approached obscenity was
more narrowly focused on whether or not there was a
particular obscene scene in the book. Um. For instance, in Ulysses,
(10:58):
which will get to it also bring out of one
episode where the protagonists masturbates, rather than the entire work,
and the law used to focus just on how it
might affect vulnerable populations, particularly to minors. So in nineteen
thirty three, in the wonderfully named case United States versus
(11:20):
one book called Ulysses as opposed to what I don't know, um,
the judge ruled that Ulysses was not obscene and he
didn't use the Hicklin test as it had been recognized prior,
which was just focusing on the vulnerable population and how
obscenity affected them. The judge ended up saying that it
should be judged by its effects on the average person. Right,
(11:41):
because all of this that was in nineteen thirty three,
as you mentioned, and up until that time, the sale
of Ulysses in the US, or mailing it through the mail.
That's that's really descriptive, right, that's email it through the mail,
UM had been banned since nineteen two because of the
masturbation scene that a younger girl had read. Freaked out,
(12:02):
her parents freaked out. And then you know, we have
a legal case spring up from that, and the N
three case US v. One book called Ulysses was a
test case brought on by Random House actually that wanted
to publish Ulysses. So they were testing the waters with that,
and like you said, the judge ruled that it's not obscene.
(12:23):
Let's move on from there. But some other controversial publishers
and writers who have rankled conservatives throughout the twentieth century. UM,
going back a little bit before that Ulysses case, we
have hl Mancon a k a. The Sage of Baltimore,
who seemed to love just making conservatives really mad with
(12:46):
his writing. Right. He was actually arrested in ninety six
in Boston for distributing copies of American Mercury, which was
a publication that he put out Um. The publication had
been banned by, as we mentioned earlier, the Watching Words Society,
who contended that the periodical was obscene, and the judge
disagreed with them. Lincoln turned around and ended up suing
(13:07):
the society. He was basically kind of lawsuit happy because
he thought, here I am, I'm going to prove that
this stuff is not bad for the public, that society
is not being affected for the worst, and I just
want my voice heard. Yeah. And he used a satirical
style that allowed him to poke fun at the thoughts,
words actions of the US and it's more conservative citizens,
(13:29):
and he often spoke out directly against religious fundamentalists and
fun fact, hl mancon first to use the term Bible belt. Right.
He also coined the term monkey trial at the Scopes trial.
So moving on from Mancon one guy Um, who we
can thank for some of our smuttiest books in our
(13:51):
Home libraries. Barney ross It who founded the publishing company
Grove Press, and essentially the aim of Growth Press was
to breach the damn of American Puritanism, as he called it.
He brought a bunch of writers to Americans attention, including
Samuel Beckett. He published che guevara Um, and in the
(14:13):
nineteen sixties he published D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover,
which originally appeared in Italy and nine and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer, which was a very controversial sexually explicit
autobiographical novel that had been published in Paris in ninety
four and banned since then in the US. Yeah. And
I gotta say that Traffic of Cancer is in fact
(14:35):
so sexually explicit it is almost I find difficult to read. Really. Yes,
there's just so much penis interesting. Um. Yeah, But Lady
Chatterley's Lover was a really important book because the case
started out the abscenity case started out in England in
nineteen sixty with the case of Crown v. Penguin Books
(14:57):
and essentially Penguin one, and they were allowed to sell
the books, but in the US you still couldn't get
your hands on the copy until Barney ross It fought
the legal battle in the United States and Lady Chatterley's
Lover got into our hands here. And there's a great
scene in I believe it's the first season of Madmen
(15:18):
when they pay to the secretaries break room or something
and they're all passing around a copy of the unabridged
version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which because initially the publishers said, hey,
if you cut out all of the dirty stuff, then
we can publish it, and uh d H. Lawrence was like, no, no,
(15:38):
my woodsman's sex scenes will remain, and he did a
little d snap in formation with his fingers. But actually
uh Rossa had to fight several battles over Lady Chatterley's
Lover um because, like the earlier book we mentioned, the
main distribution method was through the mail. The Postmaster General
actually barred the book from the mail, but a federal
(16:00):
judge ended up overturning the band, ruling that the book
had redeeming merit, and that is the key. Does the
piece of literature have redeeming merit? And tropic of cancer,
as anyone who has read it can imagine, uh was
a whole lot of trouble for Barney ross It um.
He faced more than sixty legal cases seeking to ban
it in twenty one states and even lead to Rosset's arrest,
(16:22):
although the grand jury decided against an indictment. But it
was it's interesting to hear UM or read interviews with
Rossett because he was so just persistent and really didn't
care whether what it took to bring um racier titles
(16:43):
to the US exactly. Well, some of these people who
are out to ban books for whatever reason. You can't
just get a book band willy nilly out of the
gate right away. You have to actually raise a challenge,
and so that's an attempt to remove restrict materials based
on the objections of a person or group. Most challenges
(17:04):
are unsuccessful, and libraries and schools are typically able to
retain the challenge materials UM. But between two thousand, according
to the American Library Association, there were six thousand, three
d and sixty four challenges raised against books. And that
number for ten years. I feel like that's pretty high.
I feel like that's a lot of challenged books. Well,
(17:26):
especially when you consider it in the contemporary context of
all of the more sexually explicit or racy stuff, racy
stuff that we see on television, on the internet. You know,
the fact that we're still so concerned about books I
find I mean, do kids even go to libraries anymore?
I hope I won't up too, But I'm just saying, like,
(17:46):
is really these books are the thing that you're worried
about the most, Like, shouldn't you maybe take the internet
away first? But the two top challenged topics basically are
sexually explicit material and offensive length, which followed by things
with occult themes, violence, anything that seems to be perceived
to promote homosexuality, as well as religious viewpoints. Yeah, and
(18:09):
speaking of occult themes. Between two thousand and two thousand nine,
the Harry Potter series the number one most banned books
in the United States because of the wizardry. It's teaching
out children to be wizards. It makes people very upset.
My my French professor in college went on a rant
(18:30):
about how you know you see these people wearing black
around campus. They're not they're not God, their witches and
they're doing voodoo when they're evil because of Harry Potter. Yeah,
because one of my classmates had given a presentation in
French on Airy Potter so well with the offensive language
stuff as well. They're still issues over Huckleberry Finn because
he refers to Jim as the in word. It's like, well,
(18:53):
what do we do? What do we do with that?
Because that was you know, writing in the time. How
does it apply now? And again, if you apply that
Miller test and look at the body, the entire body
of the work and whether or not it has literary merit,
usually things shake out in favor of the book. Right. Well,
there there are people, don't worry, there are people supporting
(19:13):
books out there. Uh, there's this whole Banned Books Week,
which I believe this year is in September and of September. Yes,
it is from September to October six, So that gives
listeners plenty of time to get a lot of a
lot of books to read openly. Yeah, and not burn
and not burn them. Well, yeah, it's definitely. It's not
(19:34):
only to kind of feature the band books to get
more people to read them, but it also the whole
point of it is to celebrate the freedom to read
and the importance of the First Amendment. Yeah, because we've
talked a lot about racier literature, but a lot of
common books that have been banned over the years include
titles like The Great God Speak, Catcher in the Rye,
Grapes of Wrath, to Kill a Mockingbird, the Color Purple,
(19:56):
all of which deal with difficult themes. But I couldn't
imagine not having them to read, and you know, all
of the the rich imagery that they bestill upon us,
well exactly, I mean, except for the Grapes of Wrath.
I don't know what happened to me. Why I didn't
read that in high school, but I read I read
these other ones in I guess in high school. So
(20:18):
next up in our Summer Book Club two parter, we
are going to dive deeper into rac or material and
talk specifically about erotica, warning to those who have younger
listeners into But in the meantime, we want to hear
from listeners. UM. Curious to know if your library has
(20:40):
ever tried to ban books? Um, have you ever challenged
a book? Have you read banned books? I don't know,
what do you What do you think about censorship and
all that? International listeners are what are the state of
book banning and censorship in your countries? As well. Let
us know, mom stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can send all of your letters that we love
(21:01):
to read. And speaking of which, we have two letters here,
both about manic pixie dream guys. So Brandon wrote in
with a couple of suggestions about manic pixie dream guys,
and he says, there are two candidates that I can guess.
(21:21):
The sort of prince charming archetype that pops up sometimes
in movies to be the object of his affection, and
it's all glamour and gentleman venus and just so perfect
who usually sort of convinces the heroine that there's more
to love than all that. He's almost never given any
real sort of dimension and is defined only by his
interactions with the female main character and sometimes by her friends.
(21:44):
He may not have pixie dust, but his smile is
usually slightly blinding because of how white his teeth are.
The other option maybe fits less well. He is the
male character who is in the perfect on paper life
the female protagonist has at the beginning of a movie,
but ends up being kind of Sometimes he's an outright jerk,
(22:05):
other times he's just dull. He pops up in those
kind of movies, Reese Witherspoon stars in a lot where
she's dating him or engaged to him or something, and
then goes off on some kind of adventure and ends
up leaving him triumphantly at the end of the movie. True,
it's often for a true love interest of some kind,
but occasionally we also see this happen when she decides
she doesn't need to define herself by the man she's with.
(22:28):
So too excellent candidates, Thank you, Brandon. Okay, this one's
from Amber. She says that she loved the Manic Pixie
dream Girl episode and that it raised such paradoxical views
that we in the US have about women. However, when
you asked about male equivalence to this female caricature, my
brain instantly jumped to Matthew McConaughey. If Zoe Deschanel is
the girl's girl, he is the guy's guy. With the
(22:50):
exception of a few dramatic roles time to Kill, Cadillac
lawyer and amis Dad. He has played roles to portray
very happy male qualities, travel to exotic places, expense of cars,
great figure, I agree, power of freedom, and he always
gets the girl. Another celebrity that fits would be Christopher
Pine for the same reasons. I do wonder why the
social discourse is not addressed in male counterparts but has
(23:12):
only focused on the female pixies. Hopefully the uproar over
this will die down and we can just enjoy people
for who they are. I guess my response to this
would be I don't know if there is a total
male equivalent to a Manic Pixie dream girl. I think
that a lot of I was thinking about this a
lot of Jason Siegel's characters, like in I Love You
Many Manic Pixie dream because he's the catalyst, for instance,
(23:36):
for Paul Rudd's transformation, and while it may not be romantic,
and he kind of goes through his own transformation as well,
I don't know. He tends to kind of play sort
of hippy drippy dudes and I love him. In case
you're listening to Jason Siegel, that's true. So if you
are a Jason Siegel would like to get in touch
with me, or if you have any and he thoughts
(23:58):
you'd like to share mom Stuff at Discovery dot Com
is where you can send your letters, and you can
also find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at
mom Stuff podcast, and if you would like to learn
more about the history of banning books and how people
go about getting those books off of the library shelves,
you can read the article how Our Books ban by
(24:19):
Kristen Conger at how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com brought to you by the reinvented
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