Postmaster General Hays Disavows Role of Censor
Postmaster General Will Hays, in a speech to the newspaper publishers and editors in the U.S. on this day, announced that he would not play the role of censor in his job. The occasion was his decision to restore the second-class mailing privileges to the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Volkszeitung, which had been denied the privilege, and thereby excluded from the mails, during World War I.
The denial of mailing privileges, which was entirely at the discretion of the Postmaster General, was one of the principal devices for suppressing dissent during the war. The most important case involved the radical anti-war magazine, The Masses, which the Post Office declared “unmailable” on July 7, 1917. U.S. District Court judge Learned Hand declared the ban unconstitutional on July 24, 1917, in the most important of the few successful challenges to government censorship during the war. Unfortunately, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals soon reversed Hand and restored the ban.
Reportedly, the last political book banned by the Post Office in this era was Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Postmaster General Hays lifted the ban on September 7, 1922. Berkman was the companion of Emma Goldman, a famous anarchist, birth control advocate, and opponent of World War I. Both were deported to the Soviet Union on December 19, 1919 on the famous “Red Ark.”
Tolerance for political dissent, however, did not extend to sexually related materials, and in the 1920s censorship of literature and birth control material steadily increased.
Hays, a Republican in the administration of President Warren G. Harding, was far more tolerant of unpopular opinion than had been President Woodrow Wilson’s postmaster general. The irony is that Hays soon left his government job and became the head of the Motion Picture Producers Association, and in that role he was responsible for the development of greater censorship of the movies. That movement culminated in the notorious Production Code, adopted on June 13, 1934, which exerted a heavy hand of censorship on American movies until the late 1960s.
Read a history of censorship: Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (2002)
Learn more about film censorship in the 1930s: Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (1996)
Check out the anti-censorship efforts of Banned Books Week: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/