Leonard S. Marcus - You Cant Say That!: Writers for Young People Talk about Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell

censor: to examine in order to suppress or

delete anything considered objectionable

Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary

Its hard being a person.

We all know that.

from Runaway Teen by William Stafford

At the age of ten, it thrilled me to learn that history had once been made in Mount Vernon, New York, the quiet, tree-lined suburban town where my parents had chosen to raise their family. Quiet it was, with an imposing Carnegie library, an annual Fourth of July parade, one ten-story skyscraper, and a place to grab a twenty-five-cent slice after school among the highlights. Back in preRevolutionary War times, though the 1730s to be exact Mount Vernon had been the site of real fireworks when a fearless newspaper publisher and journalist named John Peter Zenger dared to expose the assorted crimes of New York Colonys corrupt royal governor William Cosby, among them an attempt to fix a local election in which Mount Vernons St. Pauls Church played a pivotal role. Enraged by the bad press, the governor had jailed Zenger, claiming his fiery verbal attacks were unlawful. At trial, the judge and jury disagreed with Cosby, and the charges against Zenger were dropped on the grounds that to publish the truth could never be a crime. In 1789, the Founding Fathers cited the Zenger case as they drafted the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, a sweeping statement of principles that guaranteed citizens freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion and assembly, and the right to criticize their government. Ever since then, the First Amendment has stood as a shield protecting a wide swath of the basic rights that we as Americans enjoy, including the freedom to read and write whatever we please. As such, it has also served as a powerful safeguard against efforts at censorship, including those aimed at books for children and teens.

I can still recall the pride with which my fourth-grade teacher spoke to us about the Zenger trial, the First Amendment, and their long-term consequences. Thanks to the Founding Fathers foresight and wisdom, she said, Americans had won the battle for freedom of expression. Lucky us for being the heirs to that noble legacy!

As I later realized, the story of that battle was far more complex, and far from over; attempts to censor the printed (and spoken) word have been a recurring feature of American history. In 1821, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court banned the sale of a spicy English novel called Fanny Hill as an imminent threat to public morality. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act, which, by making it illegal to send printed items ranging from erotica to birth control manuals through the mail, effectively denied access to these materials to millions of readers. Anthony Comstock, the bombastic moralist whose New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had vigorously lobbied for the legislation, next took aim at a type of sensational adventure fiction then attracting legions of teenage readers. Fans of dime novels purchased the spellbinding paperbacks at newsstands with their own pocket money and could not get enough of them. Comstock, however, certain the books were a corrupting influence, warned parents that, [If] read before the intellect is quickened or judgment matured sufficient to show the harm of dwelling on these things, [then dime novels will] educate our youth in all the odious features of crime. Once again turning the postal system to his advantage, he managed to have the publishers second-class-postage permits revoked, thereby sending their shipping costs skyrocketing. Comstock was a self-righteous bully on a mission to impose his own morals on everyone. Imagine what damage he might have done in the age of Twitter.

At the same time that Comstock was waging war against an entire genre of popular teen fiction, one of Americas most highly regarded authors, Mark Twain, found himself in the censors crosshairs when the trustees of the Concord (Massachusetts) public library voted to ban Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its shelves. Coarseness of language was the scornful complaint, along with the Olympian judgment that Twains book was trash and suitable only for the slums. The author gamely shrugged off the criticisms with the prediction that sales would soar on the news of the novels spectacular notoriety.

While Twain in the long run had nothing to fear from the censors, he lived to see Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned at the Denver, Omaha, and Brooklyn public libraries, among others. His book remained a cultural lightning rod, not least because, in the guise of a picaresque adventure story told by a rascally teenager, he had written a powerful meditation on racism in America. In later years, critics tended to miss this point altogether and to zero in on Twains repeated use of the word nigger instead as proof that the novel had in fact been written from a racist point of view. Among the objectors, ironically, was the principal of the Mark Twain Intermediate School, in Fairfax, Virginia, whose initial attempt to restrict student access to Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn was set aside in favor of a thoughtful plan to provide students with the historical context they would need to understand Twains exquisitely nuanced, funny-serious book.

In the long history of censorship, Anthony Comstock rates as a comparative latecomer. Two millennia before, the Greek philosopher Plato had boldly laid out the case for censorship as a legitimate exercise of governments moral authority: The poet, he declared, shall compose nothing contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or just, or beautiful, or good, which are allowed in the state; nor shall he be permitted to communicate his compositions to any private individual, until he shall have shown them to the appointed censors and the guardians of the law, and they are satisfied with them. Platos own teacher, Socrates, had been sentenced to death in democratic Athens for worshipping false gods and planting dangerous ideas in the minds of the city-states youth. By then, in the Roman Republic, high government officials called censores the origin of our term not only conducted the census but were also charged with regulating the moral behavior of those they entered into the rolls. Citing early examples like these, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that the persistence of censorship into our time should surprise no one: The instinct to suppress discomforting ideas, Schlesinger observed, is rooted deep in human nature. It is rooted above all in profound human propensities to faith and to fear.

By the year I turned eight, two major instances of censorship of young peoples reading material had already occurred within my lifetime. First, in 1954, a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham published a popular study in which he blamed the rise of juvenile delinquency in America on the bad influence of horror comics like Tales from the Crypt. The alarm Wertham sounded in his book Seduction of the Innocent generated enough public concern to trigger a full-dress Senate investigation. Guided by fear of further government meddling, the comics publishers huddled among themselves and voluntarily came up with a plan to censor their own industry. The Comics Code Authority satisfied the senators and dampened the creative spirits of comics artists and writers for years afterward.