Censorship

“ In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that 'no law' does not mean what it says, that 'no law' is qualified to mean 'some' laws. I cannot take that step.
In this Nation every writer, actor, or producer, no matter what medium of expression he may use, should be freed from the censor. ”

“ No more potent force in defeat of that freedom could be designed than censorship. It is a weapon that no minority or majority group, acting through government, should be allowed to wield over any of us. ”

“ Put a case before them of supposed wrong, however preposterous and palpably false, and they will revel in it, print it with capital head-lines, and so capture the imagination of their sentimental, unthinking readers that these will no longer listen to the voice of reason or of truth. We are too proud—or perhaps not clever enough—to combat such barefaced propaganda; a strict censorship may be a crude weapon, but it is the only one at our command. ”

“ Every one who condemns the principle of censorship must also condemn the Lord Chamberlain’s control of the drama; but those who approve of the principle do not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain being the Censor ex officio. ”

“ But let me make the point clear; for it is the crucial point in the discussion of the modern Pg 274Bookstall Censorship. A great deal may be said against setting up a censorship of literature. A great deal may be said in favor of a censorship. But if a censorship there must be, the censor should be deliberately chosen for his office, and, in exercising his power, should be directly responsible to the public conscience. If a censorship there must be, let the community choose a man whose qualifications have been weighed, a man in whose judgment it decides that it can rely. ”

“ I ought to say here that I have strong reasons for believing that the Government will take advantage of this fleeting torpor of the public mind formally to reestablish the censorship, and my affair is but a prelude, a preparation, a step to a putting of all theatrical liberty outside general laws. By not making a repressive law, by purposely letting licence have free scope on the stage for the past two years, the Government imagines it has created, in the opinion of respectable men, who might be disgusted with that licence, a prejudice in favour of dramatic censorship. ”

“ As bad and obnoxious as I believe governmental censorship is in a Nation that has accepted the First Amendment as its basic ideal for freedom, I am compelled to say that censorship that would stamp certain books and literature as illegal in advance of publication or conviction would in some ways be preferable to the unpredictable book-by-book censorship into which we have now drifted. ”

“ Prison, the 182stake, massacre, war—what weapon has not been used by the foes of enlightenment that they might check mankind in its rise toward heights upon which the ancient, unhallowed prerogatives of a few reactionaries could not survive? And always, in some form or other, censorship has been the most serviceable weapon, both in times of war and times of peace, by which relentless unprogressives could break the spirit of those who strove to loosen the shackles of ignorance from the human spirit. ”

“ From this it follows that the censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration. Set up censors while the laws are vigorous; as soon as they have lost their vigour, all hope is gone; no legitimate power can retain force when the laws have lost it. ”

“ But censorship of the movies will be, in all probability, only a passing and more or less localized phase of our national tendency to indulge in mischievous experimental legislation. If not, however, if censorship should ever become both national and permanent, then would be sounded the doom of those emancipatory institutions which have made of our American experiment in self-government the one great hope, the one burning beacon-light, for an over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored world. ”

“ Still, with all this acceptance of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the true character of the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which is against license and anarchy. ”

“ They assail all the existing institutions,—army, state, church, property, and marriage,—not with the direct invective which would put them at the censorship’s mercy, but with the ridicule which in Paris, as in perhaps no other spot on the globe, is more potent than invective, and before which the censorship, though it turn pale and tear its hair with rage, is powerless. ”

“ The difference between law and censorship The answer is that a pamphlet, a newspaper article, or a resolution moved at a political meeting can do all the mischief that a play can, and often more; yet we do not set up a permanent censorship of the press or of political meetings. Any journalist may publish an article, any demagogue may deliver a speech without giving notice to the government or obtaining its licence. The risk of such freedom is great; but as it is the price of our political liberty, we think it worth paying. ”

“ All pervasive, it penetrates beyond national frontiers, spans the walls of censorship that bar the way to the written word, and seeps through the fine net of the Gestapo. It reaches the illiterate and the informed, the young and the old, the civilian and the soldier in the front line, the policy makers and the inarticulate masses. ”

“ Is there not something to be said for a political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not those continental governments who leave the stage practically free in every other respect, but muzzle it politically, be justified by the practical exigencies of the situation? ”

“ Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. ”

“ There would be absolute unanimity among the managers in favor of the censorship if they were all simply tradesmen. Even those actor-managers who made no secret before the Committee of their contempt for the present operation of the censorship, and their indignation at being handed over to a domestic official as casual servants of a specially disorderly kind, demanded, not the abolition of the institution, but such a reform as might make it consistent with their dignity and unobstructive to their higher artistic aims. ”

“ And it will be found that almost all the people who disinterestedly defend the censorship today are defending him on the assumption that there is no constitutional difference between him and any other functionary whose duty it is to restrain crime and disorder.
One further difference remains to be noted. As a magistrate grows old his mind may change or decay; but the law remains the same. The censorship of the theatre fluctuates with every change in the views and character of the man who exercises it. ”

“ Unlike a prosecution for obscenity, a censorship proceeding puts the initial burden on the exhibitor or distributor. Because the censor's business is to censor, there inheres the danger that he may well be less responsive than a court-part of an independent branch of government-to the constitutionally protected interests in free expression. ”

“ There are three tremendous forces against the establishment of a genuine censorship, and I think that they will triumph. The first is that mysterious nullifying force by which such movements usually do fizzle out. The second force against it lies in the fact that the movement is not genuinely based on public opinion. ”

“ This query is searching and fundamental. Advocacy of censorship in any form for the people of this country is a manifestation of un-Americanism that is as surely foredoomed to failure as was George III’s attempt to enforce a tax upon our ancestor’s tea. In truth, censorship, both fundamentally and historically, springs from power usurped and not from an altruistic regard for the moral welfare of a community. Its beneficiaries centuries ago learned how to camouflage their love of tyranny behind an assumed regard for the welfare of the public. ”

“ Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of the national mind, one of the reasons of England’s existence? They are the natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. ”

“ Roman censorship implied, like ostracism, a discretionary power. In a republic where all the citizens, kept by poverty to an extremely simple moral code, lived in the same town, exercised no profession which might distract their attention from the affairs of the state, and thus constantly found themselves the spectators and judges of the usage of public power, censorship could on the one hand have greater influence: while on the other, the arbitrary power of the censors was restrained by a kind of moral surveillance exercised over them. ”

“ We have no business acting as censors or endowing any group with censorship powers. It is shocking to me for us to send to prison anyone for publishing anything, especially tracts so distant from any incitement to action as the ones before us. ”

“ The motive for the establishment of this internal censorship is not merely fear of petty criticism, but distrust of democratic common sense. The officials fear that the people will be stampeded by false news and sensational scare stories. The danger feared is real, but the experience of Europe indicates that censorship regulations do not solve the problem, A printed story is tangible even if false. ”

“ The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored. ”

“ A censorship of a more enlightened and independent kind, exercised by the most eminent available authorities, would prove in practice more disastrous than the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, because the more eminent its members were the less possible it would be for them to accept the responsibility for heresy or immorality by licensing them, and because the many heretical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord Chamberlain because he does not understand them, would be understood and suppressed by a more highly enlightened censorship. ”

“ Moreover, the decision presents a real danger of eventual censorship for every form of communication, be it newspapers, journals, books, magazines, television, radio or public speeches. The Court purports to leave these questions for another day, but I am aware of no constitutional principle which permits us to hold that the communication of ideas through one medium may be censored while other media are immune. Of course each medium presents its own peculiar problems, but they are not of the kind which would authorize the censorship of one form of communication and not others. ”

“ Men who have agreed on no other point shake hands upon this. For sheer, blundering ineptitude, for blind inability to appreciate the mind and temper of our countrymen, in its utter ignorance of the psychological characteristics of the nation and of the Empire, to say nothing of the rest of the world, the methods of the censorship, surely, approach very closely the limits of human capacity for failure. ”

“ A rigid censorship, rightly designed to keep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the lives of our soldiers, was also keeping us in ignorance of many glorious incidents of the war such as would have thrilled us up to our throbbing throat. ”

“ The use of average men in censorship would necessitate sacrifices to the persuasive seduction of immorality, as I have suggested, and moreover there are very few average men. Accordingly, I am prepared to abandon that plan of censorship. ”

“ If any one doubts that this adjective "official" can properly be applied to our Capitalist Press to-day, let him ask himself first what the forces are which govern the nation, and next, whether those forces--that Government or regime--could be better served even under a system of permanent censorship than it is in the great dailies of London and the principal provincial capitals. ”

“ When we interfere with him and his sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a censorship to prevent him from telling, not lies, however mischievous and dangerous to our own people abroad, but the truth. ”

“ That censorship has largely falsified and still more largely concealed from the knowledge of the people the information to which the people are entitled as citizens called upon to act with intelligent judgment upon their own affairs. This practice of secrecy in the conduct of our Government has gone so far that, for two years, one of the most fateful periods in our history, our people have not been permitted to see, a few items excepted, the most important diplomatic correspondence and the directions to Government agents entrusted with most momentous business. ”

“ Any system of censorship, injunction, or seizure may, of course, to some extent serve to trammel, by delaying distribution or otherwise, freedom of expression; yet so may the threat of criminal prosecution, as this Court noted in Kingsley Books. ”