timeline

Timeline (20^th Century)

1925

In Gitlow v. New York, the U. S. Supreme Court upholds the conviction of a New York socialist who had published a pamphlet advocating a communist revolution in this country, but agrees that First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press can be applied to state laws.

1929

• U.S. Customs refuses to admit Voltaire’s Candide.

• In two cases, In re Fox Film Corp. and In re Vitagraph, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules that sound films are no different from silents legally and are still subject to censorship.

1931

• U.S. Customs impounds a series of postcards depicting details from Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. This is hardly the first time the painting has been subjected to censorship. At its unveiling in 1541, Michelangelo’s use of nudes was derided as “better suited to a bathroom or roadside wineshop than to a chapel of the Pope.” The Catholic Church tried three times—in 1541, 1566, and 1760—to purify the work by painting clothes onto the nude figures. Although successful in 1931, the U. S. Bureau of Customs would be forced to drop a similar case two years later.

1933

• In a ruling that changes the judicial definition of obscenity, Federal Judge John M. Woolsey overturns the U.S. Bureau of Customs’ twelve-year ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses, allowing Random House to publish one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century.

Prior to the Ulysses decision, the definition of obscenity had been based on a British court decision in the case of Regina v. Hicklin (1868). Under the Hicklin Rule, a work could be ruled obscene if a single part of it could be said “to deprave and corrupt”anyone, no matter how immature or mentally unbalanced.

The Ulysses standard viewed a work in terms of its effect on the average person and judged the work’s overall effect rather than the effect of individual sections taken out of context. By this standard, other works of literary merit and even sex- education materials were protected from prosecution.

1939

Forest Lawn Cemetery in California unveils a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David with a fig leaf covering one of the sculpture’s most famous anatomical features. The fig leaf will remain until 1969, when it is removed over protests from local residents. Even the censored version is more forward than some would accept. Neighboring cemeteries in Glendale and West Covina have copies of the David made at the same time and never even put them on display.

1948

The Christian Crusade is founded “to safeguard and preserve the conservative Christian ideals upon which America was founded. . . to oppose persons or organizations who endorse socialist or Communist philosophies, and to expose publicly the infiltration of such influences into American life. . . to oppose U.S. participation in the United Nations, federal interference in schools, housing and other matters constitutionally belonging to the states, and government competition with private business.”In 1967, the organization, which would grow to a membership of 250,000 families, burns Beatles albums to protest John Lennon’s statement that the musical group is more popular than Christ.

1957

• The Supreme Court officially adopts the Ulysses standard in Butler v. Michigan, overturning the state’s obscenity law on the grounds that it would “reduce the adult population. . . to reading only what is fit for children.”

• Although the Supreme Court sides with the government in a pair of obscenity cases (Roth v. U. S. and Alberts v. California), Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.’s majority opinion introduces the concept of “redeeming social importance”as the chief factor distinguishing obscenity from protected speech. These are the first in a series of decisions in which the Court will struggle to create a legal definition of obscenity.

• The Court applies the Roth-Alberts standard to film for the first time in Times Film Corp. v. Chicago, determining for itself if a movie is not obscene. The case revolves around the French film Game of Love (1954), which the Chicago censors had banned on the grounds that its story of a young man initiated into lovemaking by an older woman violated standards of decency.

• Charles H. Keating, Jr. founds Citizens for Decent Literature in Cincinnati, Ohio. Through boycotts and letter-writing campaigns the group uses its influence to shut down pornography stores, protest questionable television programs, close theaters, and remove racks of objectionable books from otherwise “clean” stores. By the late sixties, the CDL has 350,000 members in twenty states.

• Under pressure from the NAACP and the Urban League, the New York City Board of Education takes Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn off the recommended reading list for the city’s schools. This is one of the first attacks on the book as racially insensitive—attacks that continue to this day.

1959

• Libraries in Montgomery, Alabama, remove Garth Williams’s 1958 children’s story The Rabbit’s Wedding from their shelves after complaints that the book is propaganda for miscegenation. The illustrations depict the marriage of a black male rabbit and a white female.

1962

• Operation Yorkville, the predecessor of Morality in Media, is founded. Under Father Morton Hill’s leadership, the organization campaigns against the availability of pornography to minors; operates the National Obscenity Law Center, a clearinghouse of legal information; and publishes the Morality in Media Newsletter and the Obscenity Law Bulletin.

1964

• Comedian Lenny Bruce is convicted of public obscenity after police view three nights of his work at New York’s Café Au Go Go. The conviction makes it increasingly difficult for the controversial comic to find work, eventually leading to the loss of his home. When he dies from a morphine overdose in 1966, some consider it an accident, others a suicide. In 1968, the conviction is overturned on appeal.

• Public libraries in Lincoln, Nebraska, place Hazel Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo on reserved status after complaints from parents and the local Human Relations Council about the book’s racial stereotypes.

1965

• In Freedman v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court places a new barrier in the way of prior censorship. Ronald L. Freedman, a Baltimore theater owner, refuses to submit the French film Revenge at Daybreak to the Maryland censors in order to create a test case, and is arrested for showing the film. Even though the lower courts acknowledges that the picture, which deals with IRA activities in 1916, is far from obscene, they uphold the state board’s right to require submission of all films prior to their exhibition.

Many civil libertarians hopes that the Supreme Court will use Freedman to finally overturn prior censorship altogether, but the Court rules more narrowly. Upholding film censorship in principle, they overturn the Maryland statute on procedural grounds because it does not ensure a speedy judicial review of all materials submitted.

The Court also imposes other restraints on censorship boards. Previously when the censors had refused to license a film, it had been up to the distributor or exhibitor to bring the case to court and prove the censors wrong. Under Freedman, however, a censorship board that finds a film obscene has to bring court action to prevent its exhibition, with the burden of proof falling on the censors. In addition, the censors are compelled to produce expert witnesses to support their case.

As a result of Freedman v. Maryland, several local ordinances—including those in New York, Virginia, Kansas, and Memphis, Tennessee—are ruled unconstitutional within the next few years. The case sets the precedent whereby most local censorship decisions will be overturned in the future. Maryland rewrites its censorship ordinance to guarantee a final judicial decision within five days, and the courts uphold their new law until 1981, when it becomes the last state censorship ordinance to be overturned.

1966

Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. creates a new, three-pronged standard for pornography in his majority decision overturning a Massachusetts ban on John Cleland’s eighteenth-century novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill. Under the Memoirs standard, a work may be ruled obscene only if it meets three requirements: “(a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value."

1969

• The producers, distributors, and exhibitors of X-rated and erotic films pool their resources to create the Adult Film Association of America. The Los Angeles-based organization fights censorship legislation, files friend-of-the-court briefs in censorship cases and supplies legal assistance to defendants.

• The reproduction of Michelangelo’s David at Forest Lawn Cemetery in California finally loses its fig leaf. The same year, authorities in Sydney, Australia, file obscenity charges against a bookstore for displaying a poster of the statue. The charges are dropped when the curator of the New South Wales Art Museum points out that the original has been on public display in Florence, Italy, for almost five hundred years.

1971

• The British evangelical crusade the Festival of Light is launched at a nationwide rally attended by 215,000. The group is led by Baptist missionary Peter Hill with the help of born-again journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, censorship crusader Mary Whitehouse, and pop singer Cliff Richard. As part of the organization’s campaign against pornography, they predict that the world will end in five years unless the country stamps out smut. When neither eventuality takes place, the group fades out of existence.

1975

• Phyllis Schlafly, formerly a vehement campaigner against the ERA, founds the Eagle Forum to advance a variety of conservative causes, including the battles against pornography and liberal public-school education.

• France changes its film censorship laws twice. Initially, the government stops ban-fling films for adult audiences, using an X rating to bar children under eighteen. Public protests lead to a second change in the system, limiting X films to specialized theaters so those who don’t want to be exposed to such materials won’t stumble upon them by accident. The new rating hardly opens the door to adult films. X-rated films are taxed at a higher rate, with foreign pictures charged an additional import levy that keeps many such films out of the country. In addition, advertising for X-rated films is extremely limited, with no promotional clips at all allowed on television.

1977

• The Reverend Donald Wildmon enters the censorship wars by spearheading two “Turn Off Television” weeks—one in late February, another in July—to get those opposed to sex and violence on television to boycott the medium. Initially he targets NBC, at the time the lowest-rated national network. In April, he also creates the “Let Your Light Shine” campaign, urging viewers offended by overly permissive television programming to drive with their headlights on during the day. Wildmon will later head up the Coalition for Better Television and the American Family Association, pressure groups dedicated to fighting indecency in television, movies, and publicly funded art.

1978

•In one of the most unusual censorship cases ever, British activist Mary Whitehouse wins a private lawsuit against that country’s Gay News for publishing James Kirkup’s “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name,” a poem describing homosexual relations between Christ and a Roman soldier. Under British law, Whitehouse sues the newspaper as a private citizen. The jury fines the editor five hundred pounds and the paper one thousand pounds.

• Jerry Falwell founds the Moral Majority, a political action group “dedicated to convincing morally conservative Americans that it is their duty to register and vote for candidates who agree with their moral principles.” At its height, the organization’s membership includes seventy-two thousand ministers and four million lay persons. Falwell and the Moral Majority will take credit for helping sweep Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980.

• The Supreme Court of Oregon becomes the first in the nation to overturn all restrictions on obscenity. As authority, the court cites the Oregon Constitution, the failure of the original thirteen colonies to legislate against sexual obscenity, and the state’s history: “Most members of the [Oregon] Constitutional Convention of 1857 were rugged individuals dedicated to founding a free society unfettered by the governmental imposition of some people’s views of morality on the free expression of others.”

• The Ayatollah Khomeini issues a death warrant against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and offers a one-million-dollar award for his death. The book, which presents an irreverent view of Islam and numerous contemporary political figures, is banned in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Malaysia, Qatar, Indonesia, and South Africa. In a display of sympathy for Rushdie, the French government decries the death sentence and promises to prosecute anyone killing the author. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who is portrayed in the book as “Mrs. Torture,” expresses sympathy for the Muslims. In 1993, President Bill Clinton speaks briefly with Rushdie, then apologizes to representatives of Islam for doing so.

• Frustrated at what he considers the failure of the ratings system to inform parents of film content, Dick Rolfe of Grand Rapids, Michigan, launches the Dove Foundation, an organization dedicated to advising parents on the suitability of films on video. Dove uses fifteen volunteers to screen and rate videos, and then sells lists of approved films to parents and video stores. The latter also receive stickers to put on films approved by the foundation. By 1993, Dove will provide its services to six hundred video outlets in the U.S. and Canada, less than 1 percent of total available stores. Dove also campaigns to get the studios to release on video the sanitized versions of films created for airline showing. In addition, in 1992 they convince McDonald’s to drop its promotion of Batman Returns because of the PG-13 film’s violence.

• At a meeting in Los Angeles, Ted Baehr of Atlanta’s Christian Film and Television Commission proposes the reestablishment of the Production Code. The document he distributes is virtually identical to the MPAA’s original Code except for the deletion of the industry’s early ban on miscegenation. The idea is largely derided by industry members and in the media.

• After years of court challenges and complaints, Dallas guts its age-classification law. Originally, the ordinance required that all films shown in the city be submitted to the Dallas Film Board for rating as to their suitability for young audiences. The board automatically labels all films rated R, X, or NC-17 unsuitable for minors, but when they extend that classification to the PG-13 Sarafina!, an anti-apartheid musical starring Whoopi Goldberg, the complaints are so strong that the Dallas City Council has to act. They reduce the ratings to mere recommendations and order their removal from advertising and box-office displays. A year later, they will disband the board altogether.

• Donald Wildmon launches a campaign against Steven Bochco’s police series “NYPD Blue” months prior to its September premiere on ABC. As originally announced, the program will be television’s first R-rated series, redefining limitations on language, nudity, sex, and violence. Although a sample episode is highly praised by advertisers, almost a quarter of ABC’s affiliates (fifty-seven stations) refuse to carry the show. When it scores solid ratings—thanks as much to a strong cast and solid writing as to the controversy—several affiliates decide to pick it up after all. After a few weeks, ABC offers “NYPD Blue” to independent stations in markets where affiliates have refused the show. In Dallas, the only top-twenty market not originally carrying the series, the local independent picking up “NYPD Blue” doubles its average rating for the series’ time slot.

•After years of delays as networks try to clean up and “de-gay” the story, Amistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a faithful adaptation of the popular newspaper soap opera originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, makes it to American television on PBS stations. Because of nudity, four-letter words, drug use, and the positive depiction of homosexuality, the miniseries is blacked out by several affiliates (most notably those in the Southeast) or aired in a bowdlerized version. When Georgia Public Television (GPTV) chooses to air the series in its uncensored form, the decision triggers an outcry from conservatives. One group petitions Governor Zell Miller to pull the series personally, something he cannot legally do. State legislators, many of whom have not seen Tales of the City and are not even aware that it is being telecast no earlier than 10:00 P.M., try to pass a motion censuring GPTV for using tax money to expose children to such adult materials. Conservatives manage to cut funding for a new production facility but fail to pass a measure prohibiting the use of state funds to produce or broadcast pornography.

·As this book goes to press, two of the first players in the Hollywood censorship wars are back in the news. A newly restored version of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth a Nation has been withheld from home-video release in England for two months by a ratings dispute with the British Board of Film Censors, now charged with regulating both home videos and theatrical films. The BBFC is demanding a disclaimer at the tape’s start to warn viewers that the film’s treatment of racial issues may cause offense, but to date has rejected two disclaimers suggested by the video’s distributor. At the same time, legislation pending in Parliament could give the BBFC more control than ever over the availability of violent films on home video. Among the films whose video releases have been held up until Parliament votes is Quentin Tarantino’s controversial, critically acclaimed independent production Reservoir Dogs.