1959 September 7

Post Office to Stop Circulating Christian Pro-Censorship Editorial

 

Post Office officials, it was reported on this day, rescinded instructions to local postmasters that they display reprints of an editorial by a prominent Protestant minister attacking the novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D. H. Lawrence as “vile and obscene.”

The editorial was by Rev. Daniel Poling, editor of the Christian Herald, where it first appeared.

ACLU officials had protested the editorial when members found it posted on the bulletin boards in post offices in Nassau County on Long Island, New York.

First published in Italy in 1928, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was banned from the United States for thirty years. A U.S. District Court on July 21, 1959, however, ruled that it was not obscene and could be imported into the U.S. .

Learn more about the anti-censorship campaign in the 1950s and 1960s: Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill (1968)

Read the famous novel: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

Learn more at the National Coalition Against Censorship here.

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