Groups Launch “War on Censorship”
A coalition of groups representing actors, authors, motion picture producers, screen writers, printers, and others on this day announced a “war on censorship” in the arts.
Calling itself the Joint Committee for the Promotion and Protection of Art and Literature, the new group singled out the Society for the Suppression of Vice as the lead instrument of censorship. (On the Society, see October 3, 1915.) The society had been founded and led for many years by the notorious Anthony Comstock, who had helped pass the Comstock Act, the federal censorship law in 1873. The law made it illegal to send birth control information or devices through the U.S. mails.
The new group was led by journalist George Creel, who famously headed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the federal government’s propaganda agency during World War I (see April 13, 1917).
Learn more about the censorship battles: Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (1968)
And more: Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935 (2007)
Learn more about Anthony Comstock: Heywood Broun and Margaret Leach, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (1927)
Read about the history of sex -and homosexuality– 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)