BackStory; Banned: A History of Censorship

This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. In the 1930s, a Hollywood exec named Joe Breen started censoring nearly every film heading to theaters. Why would the studios allow this? Because everybody in Hollywood knew that Joe Breen was far preferable to censorship boards and states across America. Those guys were really wack. Movies haven't been the only target of censors in American history. In 1800, President John Adams imprisoned a journalist who slandered him. He described Adams as having hands wreaking with the blood of a poor, friendless, Connecticut sailor. This week banned a history of censorship, from suppressing the debate over slavery to tying reporters hands in the Gulf War with military guidelines. If those rules were followed, you couldn't cover anything or report anything. Coming up on backstory, a history of censorship. Don't go away. Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, the National

Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm here with Peter Onif. Hey there, Brian. And Ed Ares is with us. Hello, gentlemen. We're going to begin today in the summer of 1835 in Charleston, South Carolina's post office. The postmaster, a man named Albert Huzzy, had a problem. He watched his large sacks of strange mails streamed into his office. Columbia University historian Richard John says that Huzzy was witnessing the first direct male campaign in US history. Abolition is based in New York City, American anti-slavery society. Hit upon a scheme flooding the South with newspapers advocating the immediate

abolition of slavery. The abolitionist aim to put the moral argument against slavery right under white southerners' noses. But when slaveholders caught wind of the campaign, they were outraged. They also feared it was the first step to fomenting a slavery billion, which brings us to the Charleston postmaster's predicament. He says to himself, oh my gosh, if I permit these tracks to be distributed, this might threaten everything in the male. That is to say, this might encourage a mob to assail the male on route to the Charleston office or on route to other offices. So it's kind of, he sees it as sort of a poison. Huzzy marked the bag suspicious and threw them in the corner of the post office. Maybe he thought he'd deal with a problem the next day or maybe he knew those bags wouldn't be there for long.

On Wednesday, July 29, 1835, at some point between 10 and 11 in the evening, small group of men identified as the lynchman, broke into the post office in Charleston, South Carolina by forcing open a window with a crowbar. The lynch mob stole the bags of abolitionist tracks. The following night, the lynchman burned these tracks, along with effigies of three of the leading abolitionists in a spectacular bonfire watched by a loud and enthusiastic crowd of 2000, which was around one seventh of the entire white population of the city. The bonfire solved Huzzy's problem, but it created one for the federal government. The postmaster general, a man named Amos Kindle, knew the government couldn't censor newspapers streaming in from the north, but many local governments in the south had laws criminalizing abolitionist messages.

So with President Andrew Jackson's backing, the postmaster general circulated a letter saying that local law in the south trumped the national law. The nation's first mass mailing soon turned into the first mass censorship of the US mail. This made it easy for the southern state governments to enforce a sort of a burly in wall around the states to prevent information from entering their territory that would be threatening. The censorship stood for 25 years until the Civil War. While that was a blow for abolitionist, the act of censorship itself represented a long-term win. You see in the early 1830s, slavery wasn't a national political issue, but after this event in Charleston, growing numbers of northerners were outraged by the effort to silence abolitionist voices. And once it became commonly believed that the federal government

was threatening civil liberties in its attempt to protect the interests of southern slaveholders to many thousands millions of Americans who had no particular interest in the slavery issue one way or the other. The abolitionist issue could much more easily be re-envisioned as a defense of fundamental American values. Americans have long cherished their constitutional right to free speech, but the nation has repeatedly bumped up against the limits of that speech. Every year, the American Library Association spotlights books that are pulled from local schools and libraries. They call it Ban Books Week. So this year, we're marking the occasion by taking a look at episodes of censorship in U.S. history. We've got stories of a journalist jail for mocking the president, censorship of a 19th century sex columnist, and Hollywood studio's self-sensoring to boost their bottom line.

But first, we're going to turn back to the fight over censorship in the mid-1830s. After being shut out of the Postal Service, the American Anti-Slavery Society brought the issue of slavery to a new venue, the United States Congress. The group tried to keep the issue of slavery in the public eye by flooding Congress with thousands of anti-slavery petitions. Then, sympathetic congressmen would read the petitions on the floor of the house. Southern lawmakers were incensed. In 1836, they began passing a series of resolutions tabling the petitions. Known as the gag rule, the resolutions in effect outlawed talk of slavery on the house floor. But a small group of anti-slavery congressmen refused to be silenced. They read the petitions anyway. The leader of this group was none other than John Quincy Adams. The former president, diplomat, and senator had been nicknamed Old Man Elequent, and he was gearing up for his final campaign. Adams regularly stood on the

house floor to read anti-slavery petitions, one account from an abolitionist in the stands, painted a raucous picture. Scores of southerners on their feet, howling, screaming, calling points of order, calling for the speaker to put him down, saying, how could we, how are we supposed to stand these insults? Someone please put him down. This is Yale University historian Joanne Freeman. She describes this scene in John Quincy Adams's battle against censorship in her forthcoming book, The Field of Blood, Congressional Violence in Antibela, America. And a bunch of southerners went and stood around Adams' chair to try and intimidate him that way. And Adams supposedly looked up and said, oh, so does the shoe pinch? Well, I'll make it pinch more. So Adams was in full Adams form. But the fellow watching this wrote in his letter, I've never seen anything like that before. So this sounds like a pretty dangerous situation.

Adams is stirring up just about every congressman is packing heat at this time. Isn't that true, Joanne? Well, a lot of them certainly are packing heat, or I don't know what the phrase is for packing your knives or things or whatever. One or the other. So Adams does not get beaten up if I recall, but doesn't mean that other people are immune. Well, yeah, Adams is kind of literally and figuratively bulletproof because of who he is. But obviously other people didn't have those advantages. People were intimidated and actually physically attacked. And the most extreme example of that is Joshua Giddings of Ohio, who also really aggressively and consistently like Adams made anti-slavery fighting his cause. And not surprisingly, during his Congressional career, at least seven times he was assaulted in one way or another. Wow. So let's talk a little bit about how John Quincy Adams fought. Aside from constantly presenting these petitions, what were some of the moves he made?

How did he keep this thing going? Adams sustained this campaign in a number of ways. And yeah, partly it was just being persistent and consistent. But it was also partly how he did it joined with his amazing skill with parliamentary maneuvering. For example, there'd be a roll call vote. And in the middle of the roll call vote when it got to him, he would suddenly bring up an anti-slavery petition, right? So he knew this was not the thing to do. Adams was deliberately aggressively kind of fluently violating this gag, to make a point about slavery. And also to force the public to see the ways in which he and other northerners were being gagged. This is the most violent kind of censorship. You can't talk. It sounds to me just faintly un-American. Don't we have something in the Bill of Rights about free speech? Well, certainly Adams took advantage of that argument, right? One of the things he did was he said that thing in the Bill of Rights. Yeah, we're going to write a petition.

Yes, the people have the right to petition. He was really aggressively making that point. Particularly, hey, new northerners who might not really have strong feelings about slavery yet, you're probably going to have really strong feelings about the fact that your fundamental right in that first amendment is being violated. So in some ways, it seems to me southerners began to figure out that this wasn't really working effectively. They had overplayed their hand and it maybe hurt their cause in the long run. Right, absolutely. They essentially, and you can see this even in some of the foremost promoters of the rule, is that they literally, and in some cases, announced that they're backing down because it was very apparent that the attack on the rule was doing everything that they didn't want. It was stirring up northern opposition. It was putting anti-slavery into the conversation again and again and again. And northerners of both parties realized that this is now an issue, whether it's an anti-slavery issue or a first amendment rights issue. They now feel far more able to stand and

say that they don't like the rule. And on both counts, the rule standing rule 21 gets overturned. Yeah, so they back down and hooray American democracy redeems itself and peace and love. Return to the halls of Congress. Is that the story? Well, not so much. Well, tell us, what's the aftermath of this attempt at extreme censorship? Well, right. So the extreme censorship goes away, but the violence doesn't. You know, they're still are able to either gag people with calls to order shut them up effectively with parliamentary maneuvering or by threatening people, intimidating them, threatening them with dual challenges. There's one instance in which a guy calls someone to order and a southerner doesn't like it and it comes up to this poor fellow and says, you do that again and I'm going to cut your throat from ear to ear and he's wearing the booey knife so he could do it. You know, so the violence, I mean, it isn't every second of every day, every congressman thought he was going to get stabbed in the gut by a southerner, but the violence was a consistent continuing

threat and that didn't stop with the gag rule. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Joanne. Joanne Freeman, Professor of History at Yale, an author of the fourth coming book, The Field of Blood. Thanks for having me. Ed Peter, gag rule applied to the nation's rhetorical body known as windy and giving speech. Don't we wish? I really don't get that. And especially today, I think of Congress, we see them on C-SPAN. It's broadcast nationally. How do they actually keep this stuff quiet back in the 19th century? Well, Brian, the suppression of those petitions was no secret in the north because there was full reporting on the gag rule itself all over the north through the northern press. So there was a lot of focus on that single medium, the newspaper, and through that medium, the northern public

interested or not was forced to take into consideration what was happening in Congress. And you know, Brian, what's interesting is the way that the white south prevented itself from letting that contagion spread within itself. And these very years that the Congress is wrestling with the gag rule, Virginia, the largest slave state is debating whether they should begin the eventual emancipation of slavery. That turners rebellion, a general decline in the economy of Virginia, the largest slave state, led many people to wonder, is this really the future? And there's a close vote. And then as soon as that votes over, people said, oh my god, what were we doing? We're saying all these things that are being published all over the state and all over the country. Some enslaved people could actually read this. Never again, will the future of slavery be publicly debated? Disgust in the south. And that is the case. So the remarkable thing to me is how for 30 years after this, the white south manages to suppress within its own borders, any discussion about any future of slavery other

than its perpetuation. And that takes the form of everything from tarring and feathering to actually shooting and killing people to driving people out of the south. And so the gag rule fails in Congress, but it certainly succeeds across the south as a whole. That's right. And I think it's an important remember that southerners in Congress were bullies for reason. It's not just that they were pathological personalities. They saw that their whole way of life was at risk and that required both a strong defense against the outside and strong policing on the inside. And that's a combination that ends up being fateful for the future of the union. Earlier, we heard from Richard John, a historian at Columbia University and author of Spreading the News, the American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. A version of that story aired on our episode on the History of the Post Office. Hi back story listeners. We have an episode we're working on

that you can help us shape. With the presidential debates on the horizon, I bet you've been thinking about some great debate moments in American history. Like Lloyd Benson's 1988 withering put down of Dan Quale on the vice presidential debate. Senator, I serve with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. Or Ronald Reagan's joke dismissing concerns about his advanced age compared to his rival Walter Mondale. That was in 1984. I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponents youth and inexperience. And of course debate history is full of infamous gaffees. I mean gaffes. I would do away with the education, the commerce. And let's see. I can't.

The third. Sorry. Oops. I went to a number of women's groups and said can you help us find folks? And they brought us whole binders full of women. Admiral Stockdale, your opening statement please sir. Who am I? Why am I here? We'd love for you to send us your favorite debate moment from presidential history. You can record a voice memo on your smart phone and send it to backstory at Virginia.edu. Or leave a comment on backstoryradio.org and we'll reach out to you. We're looking forward to hearing them. Before the break we heard about the decades-long attempt to censor anti-slavery messages. But that wasn't a country's first struggle over free speech. In 1799 a journalist named James Thompson Calender published a pamphlet called The Prospect Before Us.

His chosen target was the US president John Adams. He described Adams as having hands reeking with the blood of a poor friendless Connecticut sailor. This is historian Richard Bernstein. And he's a liar whose office is a scene of profligacy and usury and whose purpose is to embroil the country in a war with France. John Adams and his Federalist party had recently passed the alien and sedition acts which among other things made it illegal to criticize the federal government. Bernstein says Calender wasn't exactly the most high-minded champion of the First Amendment. And Calender is the kind of guy who publishes whatever he can find that says skirlis and nasty and defamatory as he can because it sells papers. Calender was thrown in prison, a move that would outrage journalists today. But Bernstein says there was a context for Adams's heavy-handed response. We are so used to the constitution and the presidency and all the other

institutions as being centuries old and sanctified in their legitimacy and all that other stuff that we forget how fragile the government was in the 1790s. Most people basically thought that the government was little more than the character and reputation of those holding office under it. So if you damage the character and reputation say of the president or of congress then you're damaging the constitutional system itself and you could if you go too far bring the whole thing down. And how effective was the Federalist campaign against the Republican press? Printers were indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced, jailed and fined. Even those printers who were not indicted and so forth start to worry, what's going to come over the hill next week? Is a federal grand jury going to indict me for violating the statute? I'd better be careful. So this is a chilling effect? That's exactly the phrase I was thinking of. This is a way of keeping people from

speaking their minds. So we have this law on the books creating a new federal crime and has a tremendous chilling effect and potentially jeopardizing the future of the free press in America. But it does have a sell by date. It's going to expire after a while. Tell us a little bit about the history of this edition. Well, this edition act has two odd features. One is if you look at the list of government officials that you can't criticize. There's one key player who's missing. The Federalists list the president, the congress and the government. But they'll admit the second ranking man in the government, the vice president, who happens to be a Republican named Thomas Jefferson. Oh, yeah. So all Federalists can slide Jefferson with impunity. Nothing's going to happen to them under the Sedition Act. The other feature of it is the Federalists built an expiration date into the Sedition Act. The expiration date happens to coincide with the end of John Adams's term as president. The Federalist thought, well, if Adams gets reelected,

we will reenact the Sedition Act for another four years. If not, they don't have it. If not, Adams's opponents will not have it to use against us. And that's pretty much what happens. There's what might call unfinished business or loose ends. Even though the Sedition Act expires, there are still printers who are indicted, tried, convicted, jailed and fined. And some of those guys are still in jail. So President Jefferson sets out to pardon them and remit their fines. And that's supposed to tie up the whole business of the Sedition Act. Let's get back to James Thompson calendar. What happened to him? Calendar was fined heavily. I don't remember how much, but it was a lot. The problem was it took a while for the government to remit the fines. And that made calendar angry. And calendar also felt that he has suffered quite a bit for the cause of Thomas Jefferson. And he wanted a goodie in return. He wants the postmanstorship of Richmond. And Jefferson didn't want to do it and wouldn't do it.

At which point calendar says, I'm going to attack everybody I can. And he does. And that would include Thomas Jefferson, of course. Very particularly. Yeah. So tell us. Tell us how he gets back at well, in specific particular, he notes that the man whom the people delight to honor is keeping. And I'm going to clean it up a little bit. An African American concubine named Sally. So in other words, calendar is the first guy in the press to expose the alleged relationship. Although I don't believe it's alleged between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And this of course is scandal. And then James Thompson calendar turns up ground in a local stream. Well, Richard, I know you're on the side of free speech because you speak freely all the time. I try. But when you think back on this period, it sounds as if you mentioned a call calendar, poor calendar,

your sympathetic that he is for all his warts. And he was practically all warts. He's the hero of your story. Are you willing to be identified with that? No. James calendar was a racist. One of the reasons he published the Sally Hemings story was he had a horror of interracial sex. And he was also a difficult, impossible, contankerous, vicious, brutal human being. And it's not really great to have him as a symbol of free speech, except sometimes that's what you get. Right, but the first amendment is a dead letter if there's no United States of America, if the government falls apart. So there are limits even to your absolutism right there. Well, I don't know about that because I don't think that any abuse of free speech or free press that we have seen in our history gives any reason to believe that it would have brought the government down. Richard Bernstein lectures at the City College of New York and is a biographer of

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. We'll link to his books on our website backstoryradio.org. We just heard about one of the government's early efforts to muzzle political opinion. But later in the 19th century, lawmakers went after another type of speech. In 1873, Congress passed legislation outlawing quote, obscene, lude, or lascivious materials in the mail. It became known as the comm stock law, named after the moral reformer who lobbied for the act. The U.S. Post Office appointed this same Anthony comm stock to enforce the law. That meant that comm stock and his agents could legally open anyone's mail in search of obscene material. Today, comm stock is synonymous with heavy-handed censorship. The word comm stockery is actually in the dictionary, but less well-known are the names of those he tried to silence. Backstory producer Nina Ernest has a story of one of comm stocks

more colorful opponents. In the 1890s, a stenographer named Ida Cratic embarked on a new career as a couples counselor. A little doctor Ruth had you could improve your sex life, but also a marriage therapist trying to figure out what's gone wrong in these relationships and why there's so much astrangement in any given marriage. This is Lee Schmidt, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that Cratic was in a unique position as there weren't a lot of self-styled sex therapists and buttoned up Guilded Age America. But Cratic herself was unmarried in her late 30s. So when she started talking publicly about sex and sex reform, some wondered how a chased woman would know anything about this topic. And she says, well, the reason I have this knowledge is I think I can speak of this as a wife. It's just that she's a wife of a spirit. In other words, she believed she had a husband who was a ghost. Cratic, like many Americans of her era, was swept up in the spiritualist religious movement.

She believed that she had reconnected with an old love who had died and that she was now having intimate relations with this spirit. Schmidt says that Cratic knew the public would think she was crazy. So she wrote, how far the reader may value my testimony as being the result of my personal experience? He will, of course, decide according to his bias for or against the possibility of communication with our deceased friends beyond the grave. However, I can truthfully say that I have gained from it a knowledge of sex relations that many years of reading and discussions with other people never brought me. Armed with our celestial sexual expertise, Cratic wrote six pamphlets full of advice for married couples. These pamphlets supplemented her meager income. Customers would request a copy and she would sell them for about 50 cents a piece. But she had to mail them. And that's how she ran up against Anthony Comstock and his censorship regime.

He basically worked under the ages of the post office and seized anything that he found to be offensive. This is Craig Lemay, a journalism professor at Northwestern University. He says that it didn't take much to offend Comstock. The moral reformer saw obscenity everywhere, not just in dirty pictures, but in works of art and even medical textbooks. Anytime he learned about someone engaged in some activity, whether it was an art gallery or a physician offering contraceptive services or whether it was a book dealer, he would basically make a solicitation for services or products. And in the moment, they were provided to him. He would arrest them. He basically did entrapment. Comstock claimed that he and his network of informants confiscated 160 tons of allegedly obscene material and prosecuted over 3,500 people. The eccentric eye to Cratic was one of them. Post office agents appalled by her pamphlets

explicit references to sexuality brought federal cases against her in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. All you have to do to prove that something is obscene literature is to point to a single passage and a text and show that that passage could incite lascivious thoughts in someone. Prosecutors would read her marital advice out loud in the courtroom. In one pamphlet called the Wedding Night, she wrote that it was a wife's duty to vote perform pelvic movements. Women have been so taught to be passionless, have been so taught that they try not to show any feeling. So she's trying to get people to move and you read that in court. You're pretty much guaranteed you're going to be seen as wildly obscene. Cratic fought Comstock by claiming that she had the protection of the First Amendment. You know, the one that says, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

There was just one problem. For the most part what he did, nobody thought of then is raising any kind of First Amendment issue. That's Craig Lamey again. He says the Supreme Court didn't set the precedent for a modern understanding of freedom of speech until later in the 20th century. So for Cratic and others, the most famous amendment wasn't already defense against Comstock in his agents. They didn't have any legal precedent to rely on. I mean, there weren't any First Amendment cases to fall back on. So they might have argued in some abstract way for a right to speak freely, but they simply would not have formulated the arguments that way. And they didn't. Cratic never won a case, but she did manage to avoid jail time, at least until 1902. That year she relocated to New York City. And despite knowing the risks, she continued to send out her pamphlets. I think at that point, she really saw herself as standing for religious freedom, freedom of press, freedom of expression. And in some ways, I think she's courting this climactic showdown

with Comstock. This time, Comstock arrested her in person. She first had a state trial which she lost and spent three months in a workhouse. The prison was overcrowded, filled with vermin and had no running water. It's after she gets out of jail for that, that three months sentence. And as she's awaiting the federal trial, that she's very fearful at this point, that because she's been tried so many times and is such a repeat offended, that she's going to get the maximum sentence. So she's got it into her head. Well, she's going to get a five-year sentence. She was 45 and based on her three months in the workhouse. She doesn't think she's going to survive in jail. Cratic lost her federal trial. She had nothing to do, but wait for her sentencing on October 17th, 1902. That day, she was found dead in her apartment. I'd a credit card sealed the room, pulled it with gas, and slit her wrist. The marriage reformer left two notes behind,

one for her mother, and one to the public. I resolved that if again attacked by Comstockism, I would stand my ground and fight to the death. Perhaps the American people may be shocked into investigating the dreadful state of affairs, which permits that unctuous, sexual hypocrite, Anthony Comstock, to wax fat and arrogant, and to trample upon the liberties of the people, invading in my own case, both my right to freedom of religion and to freedom of the press. She stages it well. Her suicide becomes this cause-the-love among free speech activists, and they pound Comstock for, as they see it, driving this innocent, pure-minded woman to her death. It's a setback form. It becomes one of the cases that really has a hard time living down.

And she was by no means the only one. He used to boast about people who committed suicide. When he prosecuted people and they committed suicide, he thought his work was done. He took credit, and I believe, for at least 15 different suicides. Her death didn't bring Comstock down. He was on a crusade to protect American youth from obscenity, a major concern for the public. So he kept his position until he died in 1915. Comstock, as most people now view him as kind of a blot on the American history of free expression, okay, I buy that. But at the same time, for most of his career, he had the support of the press, he had the support of powerful people, and be at public opinion on his side. In the 20th century, the Supreme Court would expand Americans' right to free expression, too late for idocratic. Nina Ernest is one of backstory's producers. Let's turn to the present now, with best-selling novelist, poet and filmmaker, Sherman Alexey.

In 2007, Alexey wrote a novel for young adults, the absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. The story is based on Alexey's childhood on the Spokane Reservation in Eastern Washington. Told in the voice of a 14-year-old boy, the novel doesn't shy away from painful subjects, bullying, poverty, violence, and alcoholism. This candor won Alexey a huge fan base among teens. It also won him a national book award. But in 2014, absolutely true diary won the more dubious honor of being the book most frequently banned or challenged in America. I asked Alexey where he thought his novel fit in in the long list of banned books throughout American history. I mean, when you start talking about to kill a mockingbird or, you know, naked lunch or on the road, pardon me once to say I don't really fit into that because perhaps there's actually a new category of banning

that didn't exist so much before. Where before, I think it was about saving the whole country from evil writers. The new banning is trying to pretend kids are immature. Well, you've been very straightforward about your work being pretty autobiographical. I'm curious to know what it's like to have a book banned for something that actually happened to you. You know, I suppose at the beginning I heard my feelings a bit. You know, the book is about being bullied. So when people ban the book, I see them as bullies. And actually, it's sort of a challenge. And it's also, I enjoy it because all it means is that every kid in that community in that school is now going to want to read the book. Well, that's true. I'm sure it helps sales. Oh, you know, I've been a national bestseller for eight years now. Well, who's the target audience of absolutely true diary? I mean, what it's come down to is a lot of kids

have been reading the book who feel trapped by their communities who feel trapped by the expectations placed upon them. You know, African-American kids, you know, Spanish-speaking kids, you know, little farm town, little mining town. You know, I've gotten letters from kids going to really, really exclusive private schools who also feel trapped by their families and their communities. Yeah, you mentioned letters. Have you gotten letters? Thousands of letters. You know, often in those letters, kids will confess to very difficult things happening to them. And it's often very difficult to read the letters. They end up being so confessional. But the book matters to them so much that sometimes the kids feel like it's the first time they've ever seen themselves in a book. Recognize themselves in a book. And that powerful connection frees them to write. I want to ask you a question about history. Do you think that if your work was set on an Indian reservation in 1915,

it wouldn't have gotten so much pushback? I mean, everybody loves, you know, 19th century Indians. We're sad and defeated in the 19th century. Having an Indian in the 21st century means we're alive and thriving and ready to challenge you on your bulls**t. You know, reading a book about Native Americans you know, opens up this entire terrible history. And I think certain parents aren't so much afraid of the content of any one book as they are that that book might serve as the springboard to a much larger education by any particular kid. Well, fortunately, school kids don't have iPhones or access to the web. Well, but the thing is they are still being told by authority figures that something is wrong. And so really despite the fact that there's all this other information available all the time when a authority figure is telling you something or it's right is wrong, that is developing your moral system. That's the dangerous part about censorship.

Sherman, is censorship getting better or is it getting worse or it's just a constant in our lives? Well, you know, when you think about school bannings, library challenges and all this stuff, really on a pure numbers basis, there aren't that many. You know, there were a lot of forest fires in Washington state this summer, and it just occurred to me that what we're doing with fighting against these censorship efforts, these banning efforts is that we're putting out spot fires. We're putting out lightning strikes because otherwise these things can grow into larger movements, into complications of oppression. So each of these is not necessarily dangerous on their own except inside that particular community. But if they start building together, then it becomes something truly scary. Sherman Lexi is the author of the absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. It was the most frequently banned or challenged book in the U.S. in 2014. Hey backstory listeners.

We're assembling a history of American manufacturing for an upcoming show, but we're doing something a little different. We're going to focus on just five objects in order to tell that story, objects that reflect the twists and turns of America's economic history and how they affect U.S. culture. Take the nylon stocking. It's a great example of how the 20th century synthetics revolution found its way into every aspect of American life. So much so that in the 1940s, a nylon shortage even sparked a riot. This is where you come in. We'd love for you to tell us what object best tells the story of American manufacturing. Is it the cotton gin, the microchip, or maybe a simple union card. Record a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to backstory at Virginia.edu. Leave a comment on backstoryradio.org and we'll reach out to you. We've already heard a lot about the government's role in censoring the public

from jailing journalists in the 1790s to prying in the middle of the century later. We're going to turn now to one industry's attempt to censor itself. In the 1920s and early 30s, Hollywood producers weren't exactly shy about using sex to sell tickets. Thomas Doherty, a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, says a classic example of silver screen scandal is the 1932 Gene Harlow film Red-Headed Woman. In which she sleeps her way to the top and is not punished for it at all. Yes, I'm on my way up to the boss's house with his mail. Why didn't he secretary do it? Don't be dumb, his wife's in Cleveland. And at the end of the film, you see her in Paris with this sugar daddy in the back seat of a Rolls Royce. She's got a mink on. And as the camera pulls back from them, you see her wink in the mirror at the chauffeur who smiles. That ending might not raise eyebrows today, but movies featuring sex and violence shaped many collars in the American Catholic Church. Church leaders formed the National Legion of Decency in 1933

and commanded that their flock boycott theaters. Hollywood producers recognized the threat to their bottom line, so they worked with two Catholic leaders to create a production code to guide their films. The code wasn't just a list of words you couldn't say, like the FCC's list that prevents us from saying f*** and s*** over the airwaves. Instead, it was a 5,000 word guideline for how to produce moral stories. Its principles of plot demanded that no plot or theme should definitely side with evil and against good. This meant instead of the main character in John Steinbeck's of mice and men getting away with murder, he faces the arm of the law. The Hollywood production code went into effect in 1934. Thomas Doherty says the job of implementing it fell to one man. An iron hammer. And the guy who does this really is one of the most important people in the history of American censorship is a guy named Joseph I. Brain. He's the guy on the scene in Hollywood,

head of the production code administration, and you gotta get through Joe Brain or your film does not get a production code seal. And that means it does not get distributed in the 16,000 theaters in America. Wow, pretty, pretty important guy. So what did he look like and how did he roll? He was your basic Victorian Irishman, came from Philadelphia, a very stern guy, a very strict Catholic, but nobody's fool. Every screenwriter in Hollywood knew that, you know, you'd put like five lines into your script hoping you could, you know, negotiate and get one of them by. But the lines would have to be elusive, they'd have to sort of not be explicitly sexual. And maybe the best known example is from the film Casablanca, which to me has sort of the most romantic elusive line in all of classical Hollywood. I know, well, you're going to a specific place, right? What about us? We'll always have Paris. Just think of that line. He's clearly not talking about that time he had with Ingrid Bergman, you know, at the Eiffel Tower watching that great view.

Well, I'm just assuming that, you know, if you're a director or producer in Hollywood, you hate this guy. But no, because everybody in Hollywood knew that Joe Brain was far preferable to 100 local sensors from Atlanta, Nashville, Philadelphia, you name it, censorship boards in states across America. Those guys were really whacked. With Joe Brain, you could have lunch, you could sit down, you had one guy to deal with, which was reasonable, and you had the production code. It's sort of like a constitution. We can all argue about its meaning. So if they're oppressive and for something, you could come to Joe Brain and say, well, you've passed it, you know, two years ago in this film, where if you went to, Nashville had a notorious sensor named Lloyd Teep Inford, just a vile racist. And he would clip out or not allow to be shown in Nashville any film that had, you know, African-Americans and whites, you know, having a nice relationship, even children. So things like the Little Rascals movies, you know, he wouldn't allow to be shown, because they showed, you know, interracial harmony.

So if the choice is between Lloyd Teep Inford and Joe Brain, it's kind of obvious. And did Joe Brain inoculate films against the binfords of the world? In other words, did local sensors get a second bite at the apple? They could, but when Brain comes on, these local and state censorship boards start losing a lot of their power. Because if you look at the box office from, say, 33 to 34, there is a slide in the early 30s during the pre-code era. And then in 1934, the slide reverses itself. And 34, you start seeing this uptick in box office. And so the moguls say, ah, we put the code in in 34, people seem to be responding at the box office window. The production code is working. Tom, you study film for a living. Is that your explanation of why audiences increase? I think there was something to it. And part of this is just because of the tone of the Great Depression, where in an age of real political and economic chaos and uncertainty,

people seem to crave in popular art, the sense of security and the sense of morality. And the sort of the modern notions we have of free expression, people in the 1920s and 30s, by and large, didn't feel that way. They accepted a kind of social control from their church, from their state, from their family, that I think most Americans would find. From the town, fathers. That's actually a good phrase because one of the things that made the local exhibitors, a so desirous of a production code, is, you know, like the Sheriff's wife had cornered you in the lobby and say, how can you show such a moral films? And if they can make a lot of money with, say, ah, Shirley Temple, rather than May West. And nobody's calling them a smut merchant. I mean, they're going to pick Shirley Temple every day. You know, bring retired from the production code administration in 1954. And believe it or not, I've been to a film or two since then. And they're very different than the films you're describing.

What happened? Well, what happened is America changed. That American no longer demanded from its popular culture, moral order. And I think the other thing that happened, and this has to do with the war, is that we no longer seeded those kind of decisions to public authorities, whether they're from the state or from the church. That Americans decided, well, yeah, I can decide what movie I want to go to myself. And to me, the film that sort of shows this more than any other motion picture is a film from 1960. And if any of your listeners are old enough to happen to have seen it in the theater, I would wager they remember where they were and what theater they saw this film in because it served as such a primal movie memory for that generation. And the film, of course, is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. After you see Psycho, it's like the production codes over, you know, the sex, the violence, the lack of moral order. I mean, that's the film that even though there is normally a code still in effect, it's, it's over after Psycho.

Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. He's the author of Hollywood Sensor, Joseph I. Bringing and the Production Code Administration. We're going to end the show today with a view of press censorship during war. In many military conflicts, censorship was routine and often transparent. During World War II, the government even opened an office of censorship to regulate news reports. But we're going to fast forward 50 years when the Pentagon shifted tactics. In the fall of 1990, Joe Galilei was gearing up to cover the first Gulf War for the US News and World Report. He was about to leave for Saudi Arabia when he received the Pentagon's new set of rules for wartime journalists. The rules ran 36 pages, double-sided, small type. And if, if those rules were followed, you couldn't cover anything or

report anything. Galilei was shocked. He'd been a reporter during the Vietnam War when the military's guidelines ran just one page. Vietnam, in fact, was the most openly and freely covered war in the history of our country. The Pentagon trusted reporters would not reveal any information that might compromise national security. There were no military censors. Movement was never limited for me. I went wherever I wanted to go and generally was welcomed at the other end by the soldiers that I was covering. Dan Helen, a communications professor at UC San Diego, says this press freedom created a myth by the end of the Vietnam War. I mean, there's different versions of this idea, but the US lost the war in Vietnam because it lost its will to win, and that was the responsibility of the media.

That was due to media coverage of the war. That's of you that developed after the war. Galilei insists the press never had that much influence. I wish that I could have written a story so powerful that it would have driven us out of that war. In which case, there would only be 1,100 names on that black granite wall in Washington, DC instead of 58,290. What really turned public opinion in Vietnam was not what they saw on television and the only evening news. What it was was an absolutely endless flow of bright, shiny, aluminum, body containers flying home to every little town in America. But Alan says the myth became conventional wisdom within the Pentagon. When the US military

started planning for the next wars, they took the attitude that media coverage inevitably means the decline of public support for a war, and therefore you have to restrict the media as much as possible. And so, during the first Gulf War, the Pentagon relied on press pools, small groups of journalists who were granted permission to cover the same event, and the US military decided where to send those journalists. And for the most part, the pools were not sent to where the fighting was actually going on. So most journalists had the experience that they missed that war essentially, that they were back in the hotel and not where actual fighting was going on. As a result, reporters found themselves censored ahead of time. I mean, the journalists can't get there to report the story to begin when they don't even need to censor them because they don't have anything substantial to report. And there was another problem

with the pool system. Even journalists who got good access to combat zones still lived in the shadow of Vietnam. John Theolka, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal during the Gulf War, recalls reporters with access to a military helicopter during battle. They witnessed the army's flanking maneuver that would ultimately decide the war. And they got back to an airfield where they found one phone. There's a line of soldiers calling home to say, I'm mom, I'm okay. And the officer in charge of minding the reporters decided to put them in the back of the line, first telling them how much he hated reporters. There was just a lot of sort of gratuitous hatred spewing out of a war that happened 20 years previously. And in the end, a lot of the copy, a lot of the video tape, a lot of the pictures got delayed to the point where nobody ever saw it. Theolka says the news business is like the milk business. It has to be fresh. Editors would likely dump reports of

three day old battles. The news of the war is the first draft of history. If the first draft has big holes in it or is censored or whatever, then you have tampered with your own history. And when the Pentagon went back to review these first drafts of the history, military officials noticed something missing, namely the war. You know, I went to conferences after the war where they put the generals on one side of the table and us on the other. And one of the generals started complaining and I said, where were your pool journalists? He said, oh, I locked them up in the rear at headquarters and didn't bring them forward. And I said, now you're complaining, you have no film of your great successes on the battlefield. Whose fault is it? Determined to learn from their mistake that Pentagon sought a new strategy for wars that were to follow. The solution was the

embed system, which attached reporters to military units inside combat zones. It gave more journalists more access than press pools. Embedding journalists in military units also kept them safe in increasingly dangerous war zones. Most news organizations have depended on the system since the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Still, Halin notes that the embed system is simply another form of censorship, rather than a return to the open coverage of Vietnam. Most news organizations were aware that the policy of embedding was good at giving them access, but would give them a limited view of what was actually going on because they'd be accompanying US troops and they'd be reporting things essentially from the point of view of US troops. And those limits matter in a democracy. Fialca says that the press needs to be able to report on a war as freely and openly as possible.

The public pays billions of dollars for these episodes and they should understand how they work and how they don't work. And it really is in the military's interests to get the truth out there because they're representing a country that puts a great deal of value in the first amendment. John Fialca helped us tell that story. He was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and is the author of Hotel Warriors covering the Gulf War. We also heard from Joe Galloway, who reported for United Press International and US News and World Report. He's the co-author with Lieutenant General Harold Moore of We Were Soldiers Once and Young. And Daniel Halin, professor at UC San Diego, and author of The Uncensored War, The Media and Vietnam. That's going to do it for us today, but don't censor yourself. Let us know what you thought of

the show. Just head over to backstoryradio.org. While you're there, you can help shape our upcoming shows on the history of populism in America and the history of disability. Share a story or ask us a question. You can also send an email to backstoryappreginia.edu or find us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. This episode of backstory was produced by Andrew Parsons, a bridge of McCarthy, Nina Ernest, Kelly Jones, Emily Gadik and Bruce Wallace. Jamal Milner is our technical director. We have helped from the listages Monday. Special thanks this week to Katie Olson and Sarah McConnell, and to Christian Pesco and Deborah Caldwell Stone from the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy

Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onaf is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstory is distributed by PRX, the public radio Exchange.