1914 May 16

Judge Learned Hand Rebukes Anti-Obscenity Crusader Anthony Comstock

 

In the midst of a criminal trial in New York City, Judge Learned Hand, who would go on to become of the most famous judges in American history, rebuked anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock. After Comstock had interrupted the trial several times, Hand told him, “I do not wish to hear any more.” It was a rare rebuke for Comstock, who always always found judges sympathetic to his “anti-smut” crusade.

Comstock was the author of the Comstock Act, the most powerful censorship law in the United States from its enactment on March 3, 1873 until about the 1960s, when courts limited its application in a series of decisions. Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which was the most aggressive censorship organization from the 1870s until the 1930s.

Judge Learned Hand became famous during World War I for his District Court decision on July 24, 1917 halting a ban on the anti-war magazine The Masses by the U.S.Post office. It was one of only a handful of decisions during the war affirming First Amendment protection for anti-war speech. Unfortunately, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Hand’s decision and censorship resumed.

Three decades later, however, Hand had become more conservative in this views. He wrote the Second Circuit Court of Appeals opinion which the Supreme Court embraced in upholding the constitutionality of the Smith Act in the famous case of Dennis v. United States on June 4, 1951. The Smith Act made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and the Dennis decision is regarded as one of the worst attacks on the First Amendment in the history of the Supreme Court.

Learn more about Anthony Comstock: Heywood Broun and Margaret Leach, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (1927)

Read a biography of Learned Hand: Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge (1994)

And about the censorship crusade: Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (1968)

Learn about Comstock at the U. S. Postal Inspection Service here.

Read about the history of sex and the U.S. Constitution: Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century (2017)

 

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