March 25, 2023 • 25 mins
What are the most commonly banned books? In this classic 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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stephman
Never Told You, a production of iHeart Radio. And recently
we had an episode where we talked about book banning,
specifically what's going on in the United States right now
(00:28):
with book banning, which is a lot. But as we
mentioned in that episode, book banning has quite a long history,
quite a long history, and it's pretty telling. And in
that spirit, we do have a classic all about banned
books for you to give you more context in this conversation,
(00:52):
So please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You
From housetop dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today, by listener requests,
(01:12):
we are kicking off a two part Summer book Club
two thousand and twelve series, and we're talking about saucy
books books. We've discussed romance novels before, the genre unfortunately
termed chick lit before, and I would say that for
(01:35):
women's literature popular fiction this summer. The title that everybody's
talking about is we gotta say it, Caroline, It's fifty
Shades of Gray. Yeah, And as I was just telling Kristin,
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 club series do not
(01:57):
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 specifically book banning in
(02:20):
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 to as far back as oh,
I don't know for fifty BC. What happened in four
(02:43):
fifty BC? Well, Carol on a guy named Anaxagris an
axe Gorris, thank you, Okay, we'll just run with that.
A guy with a not easily to roll off the
tongue name Anaxagoras. He wrote some stuff and people did
(03:03):
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. And then in
(03:24):
three Socrates was required 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've been ideas or thoughts happening, there's been some form
of censorship. Yeah, and people, humans, human animals seemed to
(03:46):
really enjoy just having things on paper, other people's ideas
on paper that they can then rip up or ban all.
Anaxagoras got got so much guff because they thought that
he was being derogatory to the gods. Yeah, and that
kind of theme of offending people's religious sensibilities is certainly
(04:07):
something that we still see with book banning today, and
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
(04:28):
devout Christian and founder of the New York Society for
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. It's
(04:49):
crime too. And he considered dime novels to be pornography
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
(05:11):
had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives and also
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 US Congress did pass the
(05:32):
Comstock Act while which was an antip scenity bill that
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
Sanger's early pamphlets on contraception. Oh oh my. I mean
(05:55):
even even that like kind of biological reproductive information is
considered you know, banned. Yeah, it's so funny. Everybody got
their panties on a twist about just learning about women's bodies,
just learning about contraception, family planning, anything like that, any
any sexy anything, Yeah, was just too much, and all
because it had to do with women's bodies. They were like, Nope, nope,
(06:17):
can't read it. It's going to pollute everybody's minds. We're
all going to be filthy afterward. And something that I
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
(06:39):
that in the nineteen fifties, stoleacious titles would be labeled
banned in Boston to help move them off the shelves
because people be like, 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.
(06:59):
But the efforts in Boston were really led by the
watch and Wards Society, who kind of like Comstocks New
York Society for the Suppression of Ice. Yeah, this was
coming from the Boston Globe. Just to give you a
sense of how much the Watching Wards Society cracked down
and also how much people like I mean, they jumped
when the Watching Words Society cracked its whip. For instance,
(07:23):
in its heyday, the Boston Public Library kept books which
the Watching Wards 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,
(07:47):
definitely a stretch of time that was big on book banning. Yeah,
for sure. In nineteen fifty three, for instance, Senator Joseph McCarthy,
whose name should be very familiar, had his AIDS search
US Information and Service libraries in Europe and Asia for
subversive books and libraries were accused of circulating communist materials. Yeah,
(08:07):
all the McCarthyism that was sweeping the nation at the
time seemed to kind of replace banning books on the
basis of immorality to banning books on the basis of
subversive communist undertones, right, just making everybody scared, yeah, and
burning books and such. But then, thank goodness, in nineteen
(08:28):
eighty two, the Supreme Court stepped in with the case
Board of Education Island Tree School District versus Pico with
a little 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 ideas contained in those books.
(08:51):
Basically saying that there needs to be a balance between
school's role as an educator and student's right of access
to the material. So a book has to be pervasively
vulgar to be banned. Yeah, And this case sprang out
of nineteen seventy six issue where a bunch of parents
(09:11):
and school staff ordered that certain books be removed from
a junior high in high school library. And to give
you an idea of some of the books that they
wanted to ban Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, A Go
ask Alice, which is a commonly banned book, A Reader
for Writers edited by Jerome Walter Archer, The Naked Ape,
(09:33):
The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers edited by Langston Hughes,
a lot of other race related titles as well. And
they claimed that the books were anti American, anti Christian,
anti Semitic, and just playing filthy, and thankfully the Supreme
Court stepped in and said yeah, yeah. And there was
another case in nineteen eighty nine Texas v. Johnson, where
(09:56):
a Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Junior, said that
there is a bedrock principle 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 ban books
(10:20):
are not going away, basically no. And the thing is,
even though we have Supreme Court justices like William J.
Brenner who have in the past supported First Amendment rights
and the freedom of expression. That is not to say
that obscene literature is legally protected in the US. So
(10:42):
a case that christ and I actually learned about in
our journalism days at college and in our legal ethics
course exactly we had a very dynamic professor. I really
liked that class. This case is called Miller v. California,
and it basically established a three point test for scinity.
And those points are one, the text must appeal to
(11:04):
prurient interests 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
(11:27):
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. For instance, in Ulysses,
(11:48):
which we'll get to. It all sprang out of one
episode where the protagonists masturbates rather than the entire work,
and the law used to focus just on and how
it might affect vulnerable populations, particularly to miners. Yeah. So,
in nineteen thirty three, in the wonderfully named case United
(12:09):
States versus one book called Ulysses as opposed to what
I don't know, 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, because all of this that was
(12:31):
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 really descriptive, right, that's right,
email it through the mail had been banned since nineteen
twenty two because of the masturbation scene that a younger
girl had read, freaked out, her parents freaked out, and
(12:52):
then you know, we have a legal case spring up
from that end. The nineteen thirty three case usv. 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, hey, it's not obscene. Let's move
(13:12):
on from there. But some other controversial publishers and writers
who have rankled conservatives throughout the twentieth century, Going back
a little bit before that Ulysses case, we have hl
Mancin aka the Sage of Baltimore, who seemed to love
just making conservatives really mad with his writing. Right. He
(13:37):
was actually arrested in nineteen twenty six in Boston for
distributing copies of American Mercury, which was a publication that
he put out. The publication had been banned by, as
we mentioned earlier, the Watch and Wards Society, who contended
that the periodical was obscene, and the judge disagreed with them.
Mancin turned around and ended up suing the society. He
(13:59):
was based 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 worse, 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, and he often spoke out
(14:21):
directly against religious fundamentalists and fun fact, hl Mancon first
to use the term Bible belt right. He also coined
the term monkey trial of the Scopes trial. So, moving
on from Mancon, one guy who we can thank for
some of our smuttiest books in our home libraries Barney Rossett,
(14:45):
who founded the publishing company Grove Press, and essentially the
aim of Grove Press was to breach the dam of
American Puritanism, as he called it. He brought a bunch
of writers to Americans attention, including Samuel Beckett. He published
che Guivara, and in the nineteen sixties he published D. H.
(15:06):
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which originally appeared in Italy in
nineteen twenty eight, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which
was a very controversial, sexually explicit autobiographical novel that had
been published in Paris in nineteen thirty four and banned
since then in the US. Yeah, and I gotta say
that Tropic of Cancer is in fact so sexually explicit
(15:27):
it is almost I find difficult to read. Really, Yes,
there was just so much penis interesting. Yeah, but Lady
Chatterley's Lover was a really important book because the case
started out the obscenity case started out in England in
nineteen sixty with the case of Crown v. Penguin Books,
(15:48):
and essentially Penguin won and they were allowed to sell
the books, but in the US you still couldn't get
your hands on the copy until Barney Rossit 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 when
(16:09):
they pan to the secretary's breakroom 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 D. H. Lawrence was like, no, no,
my woodsman's sex scenes will remain, and he did a
(16:32):
little d snap formation with his fingers. But actually Rossa
had to fight several battles over Lady Chatterley's Lover because,
like the earlier book we mentioned, the main distribution method
was through the mail. Yeah, the Postmaster General actually barred
the book from the mail, but a federal judge ended
up overturning the band, ruling that the book had redeeming merit,
(16:54):
And that is the key. Does the piece of literature
have redeeming merit? Yeah? And Tropic of Cancer, as anyone
who has read it can imagine, was a whole lot
of trouble for Barney Rossett. He faced more than sixty
legal cases seeking to ban it in twenty one states
and even led to Rossett's arrest, although the grand jury
decided against an indictment. But it was It's interesting to
(17:18):
hear or read interviews with Rossett because he was so
just persistent and really didn't care whether what it took
to bring racier titles to the US exactly. Well, some
of these people who are out to ban books for
(17:41):
whatever reason. You can't just get a book band willie
nilly out of the gate right away. You have to
actually raise a challenge, and so that's an attempt to
remove or restrict materials based on the objections of a
person or group. Most challenges are unsuccessful, and libraries and
schools are typically able to retain the challenge materials. But
(18:01):
between nineteen ninety and two thousand, according to the American
Library Association, there were six thousand, three hundred 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, especially when you consider
it in the contemporary context of all of the more
(18:22):
sexually explicit or racy stuff, racy stuff that we see
on television, on the internet. Yeah, 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 so
I walk upset too. But I'm just saying, like, is
really these books are the thing that you're worried about
the most, Like, shouldn't you maybe take the internet away first?
(18:42):
But the two top challenged topics basically are sexually explicit
material and offensive language, followed by things with occult themes, violence,
anything that seems to be perceived to promote homosexuality, as
well as religious viewpoints and speaking of occult themes. Between
(19:02):
two thousand and two thousand and nine, the Harry Potter
series the number one most banned books in the United
States because of the wizardry teaching out children to be wizards.
It makes people very upset. My French professor in college
went on a rant about how you know you see
these people wearing black around campus. They're not God, they're
(19:26):
witches and they're doing voodoo when they are evil because
of Harry Potter. Yeah, because one of my classmates had
given a presentation in French on Hairy Potter. So well
with the offensive language stuff as well. There are still
issues over Huckleberry Finn because he refers to Jim as
the inn word. It's like, well, what do we do?
What do we do with that? Because that was you know,
(19:47):
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 books out there. There's this whole
band Books Week, which I believe this year is in
(20:09):
September and of September. Yes, it is from September thirtieth
to October sixth, 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 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
(20:31):
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 Gad speed Catcher in
the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, to Kill a Mockingbird, the
Color Purple, all of which deal with difficult themes. But
I couldn't imagine not having them to read, and you know,
(20:54):
all of the the rich imagery that they bestow upon us.
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. Yeah. So next
up in our Summer Book Club two parter, we are
going to dive deeper into racer material and talk specifically
(21:19):
about erotica. Warning to those who have younger listeners in toe.
In the meantime, I want to hear from listeners curious
to know if your library has ever tried to ban books?
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 of that? International listeners are what
(21:41):
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 to read. And speaking of which,
we have two letters here, both about manic Pixie dream guys.
(22:03):
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, the sort of prince charming
archetype that pops up sometimes in movies to be the
object of his affection and his all glamor and gentlemanliness
and just so perfect who usually sort of convinces the
(22:24):
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. He may not have pixie ust,
but his smile is usually slightly blinding because of how
white his teeth are. The other option maybe fits less well.
(22:45):
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, other times he's just dull. He
pops up in those kind of movie these reesed. Witherspoon
stars in a lot where she's dating him or engaged
to him or something, and then goes off on some
(23:05):
kind of adventure and ends up believing 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. So too excellent candidates,
Thank you, Brandon. Okay, this one's from Amber. She says
that she loved the man Pixie Green Girl episode and
(23:27):
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 Deschanelle is the girls girl, he
is the guy's guy. With the exception of a few
dramatic roles time to Kill, Cadillac, lawyer, and amistad, he
has played roles to portray very happy male qualities, travel
(23:50):
to exotic places, expensive cars, great figure, I agree, power, freedom,
and he always gets the girl. Another celebrity that fits
would be Christopher Pine for the same I do wonder
why the social discourse is not addressed in male counterparts
but has 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
(24:12):
to this would be I don't know if there is
a total male equivalent to a Mani 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 Man, Yeah, Manic Pixie dream because he's the catalyst,
for instance, for Paul Rudd's transformation, and while it may
not be romantic, and he kind of goes through his
(24:34):
own transformation as well. I don't know he tends to
kind of play sort of hippie drippy dudes. Yeah, and
I love him. Yeah. If in case you're listening to
Jason Siegel, that's true. So if you are a Jason
Siegel and would like to get in touch with me,
or if you have any any thoughts you'd like to share,
moms Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can
send your letters, and you can also find us on Facebook,
(24:56):
follow us on Twitter at Mom's 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 Banned by Kristen Conger at HowStuffWorks dot com.
(25:17):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com. Brought to you by the Reinvented twenty
and twelve camera. It's ready, Are you
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stephman
Never Told You, a production of iHeart Radio. And recently
we had an episode where we talked about book banning,
specifically what's going on in the United States right now
(00:28):
with book banning, which is a lot. But as we
mentioned in that episode, book banning has quite a long history,
quite a long history, and it's pretty telling. And in
that spirit, we do have a classic all about banned
books for you to give you more context in this conversation,
(00:52):
So please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You
From housetop dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today, by listener requests,
(01:12):
we are kicking off a two part Summer book Club
two thousand and twelve series, and we're talking about saucy
books books. We've discussed romance novels before, the genre unfortunately
termed chick lit before, and I would say that for
(01:35):
women's literature popular fiction this summer. The title that everybody's
talking about is we gotta say it, Caroline, It's fifty
Shades of Gray. Yeah, And as I was just telling Kristin,
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 club series do not
(01:57):
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 specifically book banning in
(02:20):
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 to as far back as oh,
I don't know for fifty BC. What happened in four
(02:43):
fifty BC? Well, Carol on a guy named Anaxagris an
axe Gorris, thank you, Okay, we'll just run with that.
A guy with a not easily to roll off the
tongue name Anaxagoras. He wrote some stuff and people did
(03:03):
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. And then in
(03:24):
three Socrates was required 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've been ideas or thoughts happening, there's been some form
of censorship. Yeah, and people, humans, human animals seemed to
(03:46):
really enjoy just having things on paper, other people's ideas
on paper that they can then rip up or ban all.
Anaxagoras got got so much guff because they thought that
he was being derogatory to the gods. Yeah, and that
kind of theme of offending people's religious sensibilities is certainly
(04:07):
something that we still see with book banning today, and
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
(04:28):
devout Christian and founder of the New York Society for
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. It's
(04:49):
crime too. And he considered dime novels to be pornography
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
(05:11):
had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives and also
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 US Congress did pass the
(05:32):
Comstock Act while which was an antip scenity bill that
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
Sanger's early pamphlets on contraception. Oh oh my. I mean
(05:55):
even even that like kind of biological reproductive information is
considered you know, banned. Yeah, it's so funny. Everybody got
their panties on a twist about just learning about women's bodies,
just learning about contraception, family planning, anything like that, any
any sexy anything, Yeah, was just too much, and all
because it had to do with women's bodies. They were like, Nope, nope,
(06:17):
can't read it. It's going to pollute everybody's minds. We're
all going to be filthy afterward. And something that I
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
(06:39):
that in the nineteen fifties, stoleacious titles would be labeled
banned in Boston to help move them off the shelves
because people be like, 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.
(06:59):
But the efforts in Boston were really led by the
watch and Wards Society, who kind of like Comstocks New
York Society for the Suppression of Ice. Yeah, this was
coming from the Boston Globe. Just to give you a
sense of how much the Watching Wards Society cracked down
and also how much people like I mean, they jumped
when the Watching Words Society cracked its whip. For instance,
(07:23):
in its heyday, the Boston Public Library kept books which
the Watching Wards 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,
(07:47):
definitely a stretch of time that was big on book banning. Yeah,
for sure. In nineteen fifty three, for instance, Senator Joseph McCarthy,
whose name should be very familiar, had his AIDS search
US Information and Service libraries in Europe and Asia for
subversive books and libraries were accused of circulating communist materials. Yeah,
(08:07):
all the McCarthyism that was sweeping the nation at the
time seemed to kind of replace banning books on the
basis of immorality to banning books on the basis of
subversive communist undertones, right, just making everybody scared, yeah, and
burning books and such. But then, thank goodness, in nineteen
(08:28):
eighty two, the Supreme Court stepped in with the case
Board of Education Island Tree School District versus Pico with
a little 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 ideas contained in those books.
(08:51):
Basically saying that there needs to be a balance between
school's role as an educator and student's right of access
to the material. So a book has to be pervasively
vulgar to be banned. Yeah, And this case sprang out
of nineteen seventy six issue where a bunch of parents
(09:11):
and school staff ordered that certain books be removed from
a junior high in high school library. And to give
you an idea of some of the books that they
wanted to ban Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, A Go
ask Alice, which is a commonly banned book, A Reader
for Writers edited by Jerome Walter Archer, The Naked Ape,
(09:33):
The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers edited by Langston Hughes,
a lot of other race related titles as well. And
they claimed that the books were anti American, anti Christian,
anti Semitic, and just playing filthy, and thankfully the Supreme
Court stepped in and said yeah, yeah. And there was
another case in nineteen eighty nine Texas v. Johnson, where
(09:56):
a Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Junior, said that
there is a bedrock principle 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 ban books
(10:20):
are not going away, basically no. And the thing is,
even though we have Supreme Court justices like William J.
Brenner who have in the past supported First Amendment rights
and the freedom of expression. That is not to say
that obscene literature is legally protected in the US. So
(10:42):
a case that christ and I actually learned about in
our journalism days at college and in our legal ethics
course exactly we had a very dynamic professor. I really
liked that class. This case is called Miller v. California,
and it basically established a three point test for scinity.
And those points are one, the text must appeal to
(11:04):
prurient interests 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
(11:27):
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. For instance, in Ulysses,
(11:48):
which we'll get to. It all sprang out of one
episode where the protagonists masturbates rather than the entire work,
and the law used to focus just on and how
it might affect vulnerable populations, particularly to miners. Yeah. So,
in nineteen thirty three, in the wonderfully named case United
(12:09):
States versus one book called Ulysses as opposed to what
I don't know, 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, because all of this that was
(12:31):
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 really descriptive, right, that's right,
email it through the mail had been banned since nineteen
twenty two because of the masturbation scene that a younger
girl had read, freaked out, her parents freaked out, and
(12:52):
then you know, we have a legal case spring up
from that end. The nineteen thirty three case usv. 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, hey, it's not obscene. Let's move
(13:12):
on from there. But some other controversial publishers and writers
who have rankled conservatives throughout the twentieth century, Going back
a little bit before that Ulysses case, we have hl
Mancin aka the Sage of Baltimore, who seemed to love
just making conservatives really mad with his writing. Right. He
(13:37):
was actually arrested in nineteen twenty six in Boston for
distributing copies of American Mercury, which was a publication that
he put out. The publication had been banned by, as
we mentioned earlier, the Watch and Wards Society, who contended
that the periodical was obscene, and the judge disagreed with them.
Mancin turned around and ended up suing the society. He
(13:59):
was based 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 worse, 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, and he often spoke out
(14:21):
directly against religious fundamentalists and fun fact, hl Mancon first
to use the term Bible belt right. He also coined
the term monkey trial of the Scopes trial. So, moving
on from Mancon, one guy who we can thank for
some of our smuttiest books in our home libraries Barney Rossett,
(14:45):
who founded the publishing company Grove Press, and essentially the
aim of Grove Press was to breach the dam of
American Puritanism, as he called it. He brought a bunch
of writers to Americans attention, including Samuel Beckett. He published
che Guivara, and in the nineteen sixties he published D. H.
(15:06):
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which originally appeared in Italy in
nineteen twenty eight, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which
was a very controversial, sexually explicit autobiographical novel that had
been published in Paris in nineteen thirty four and banned
since then in the US. Yeah, and I gotta say
that Tropic of Cancer is in fact so sexually explicit
(15:27):
it is almost I find difficult to read. Really, Yes,
there was just so much penis interesting. Yeah, but Lady
Chatterley's Lover was a really important book because the case
started out the obscenity case started out in England in
nineteen sixty with the case of Crown v. Penguin Books,
(15:48):
and essentially Penguin won and they were allowed to sell
the books, but in the US you still couldn't get
your hands on the copy until Barney Rossit 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 when
(16:09):
they pan to the secretary's breakroom 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 D. H. Lawrence was like, no, no,
my woodsman's sex scenes will remain, and he did a
(16:32):
little d snap formation with his fingers. But actually Rossa
had to fight several battles over Lady Chatterley's Lover because,
like the earlier book we mentioned, the main distribution method
was through the mail. Yeah, the Postmaster General actually barred
the book from the mail, but a federal judge ended
up overturning the band, ruling that the book had redeeming merit,
(16:54):
And that is the key. Does the piece of literature
have redeeming merit? Yeah? And Tropic of Cancer, as anyone
who has read it can imagine, was a whole lot
of trouble for Barney Rossett. He faced more than sixty
legal cases seeking to ban it in twenty one states
and even led to Rossett's arrest, although the grand jury
decided against an indictment. But it was It's interesting to
(17:18):
hear or read interviews with Rossett because he was so
just persistent and really didn't care whether what it took
to bring racier titles to the US exactly. Well, some
of these people who are out to ban books for
(17:41):
whatever reason. You can't just get a book band willie
nilly out of the gate right away. You have to
actually raise a challenge, and so that's an attempt to
remove or restrict materials based on the objections of a
person or group. Most challenges are unsuccessful, and libraries and
schools are typically able to retain the challenge materials. But
(18:01):
between nineteen ninety and two thousand, according to the American
Library Association, there were six thousand, three hundred 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, especially when you consider
it in the contemporary context of all of the more
(18:22):
sexually explicit or racy stuff, racy stuff that we see
on television, on the internet. Yeah, 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 so
I walk upset too. But I'm just saying, like, is
really these books are the thing that you're worried about
the most, Like, shouldn't you maybe take the internet away first?
(18:42):
But the two top challenged topics basically are sexually explicit
material and offensive language, followed by things with occult themes, violence,
anything that seems to be perceived to promote homosexuality, as
well as religious viewpoints and speaking of occult themes. Between
(19:02):
two thousand and two thousand and nine, the Harry Potter
series the number one most banned books in the United
States because of the wizardry teaching out children to be wizards.
It makes people very upset. My French professor in college
went on a rant about how you know you see
these people wearing black around campus. They're not God, they're
(19:26):
witches and they're doing voodoo when they are evil because
of Harry Potter. Yeah, because one of my classmates had
given a presentation in French on Hairy Potter. So well
with the offensive language stuff as well. There are still
issues over Huckleberry Finn because he refers to Jim as
the inn word. It's like, well, what do we do?
What do we do with that? Because that was you know,
(19:47):
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 books out there. There's this whole
band Books Week, which I believe this year is in
(20:09):
September and of September. Yes, it is from September thirtieth
to October sixth, 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 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
(20:31):
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 Gad speed Catcher in
the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, to Kill a Mockingbird, the
Color Purple, all of which deal with difficult themes. But
I couldn't imagine not having them to read, and you know,
(20:54):
all of the the rich imagery that they bestow upon us.
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. Yeah. So next
up in our Summer Book Club two parter, we are
going to dive deeper into racer material and talk specifically
(21:19):
about erotica. Warning to those who have younger listeners in toe.
In the meantime, I want to hear from listeners curious
to know if your library has ever tried to ban books?
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 of that? International listeners are what
(21:41):
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 to read. And speaking of which,
we have two letters here, both about manic Pixie dream guys.
(22:03):
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, the sort of prince charming
archetype that pops up sometimes in movies to be the
object of his affection and his all glamor and gentlemanliness
and just so perfect who usually sort of convinces the
(22:24):
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. He may not have pixie ust,
but his smile is usually slightly blinding because of how
white his teeth are. The other option maybe fits less well.
(22:45):
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, other times he's just dull. He
pops up in those kind of movie these reesed. Witherspoon
stars in a lot where she's dating him or engaged
to him or something, and then goes off on some
(23:05):
kind of adventure and ends up believing 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. So too excellent candidates,
Thank you, Brandon. Okay, this one's from Amber. She says
that she loved the man Pixie Green Girl episode and
(23:27):
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 Deschanelle is the girls girl, he
is the guy's guy. With the exception of a few
dramatic roles time to Kill, Cadillac, lawyer, and amistad, he
has played roles to portray very happy male qualities, travel
(23:50):
to exotic places, expensive cars, great figure, I agree, power, freedom,
and he always gets the girl. Another celebrity that fits
would be Christopher Pine for the same I do wonder
why the social discourse is not addressed in male counterparts
but has 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
(24:12):
to this would be I don't know if there is
a total male equivalent to a Mani 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 Man, Yeah, Manic Pixie dream because he's the catalyst,
for instance, for Paul Rudd's transformation, and while it may
not be romantic, and he kind of goes through his
(24:34):
own transformation as well. I don't know he tends to
kind of play sort of hippie drippy dudes. Yeah, and
I love him. Yeah. If in case you're listening to
Jason Siegel, that's true. So if you are a Jason
Siegel and would like to get in touch with me,
or if you have any any thoughts you'd like to share,
moms Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can
send your letters, and you can also find us on Facebook,
(24:56):
follow us on Twitter at Mom's 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 Banned by Kristen Conger at HowStuffWorks dot com.
(25:17):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com. Brought to you by the Reinvented twenty
and twelve camera. It's ready, Are you
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!