The Practice of Censorship

From The Atlantic -January 1930

“Censorship wherever it exists is as much a problem for the police as for the critics. And, like the poor, it is always with us.”

by Edward Weeks

The Practice of Censorship

Living, as I do, in what Alexander Woollcott impatiently termed ‘that nasty and silly city of Boston’ and deriving my livelihood from publishing, I am naturally sensitive on the subject of book censorship. In itself censorship is an impatient theme, and when it calls for a law so unjust and an enforcement so unhappy as that in operation in Suffolk County (which contains the city of Boston) one is apt to follow Mr. Woollcott’s example and lose one’s temper. For two years I have served on committees which have endeavored to reform the Massachusetts laws ‘relating to obscene literature.’ In the course of this service I have come into dose contact with the actual practice of censorship and have gained, perhaps, more than a parochial perspective of the whole vexed question.

In a little over two years sixty-eight books have been suppressed in Boston. Only two of this number — The American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, and Oil, by Upton Sinclair — were brought to trial. The other sixty-six were thought to be subject to the present Massachusetts statute, and so, according to the strict letter of the law, they may have been. Complaints, however, were lodged against them only in Suffolk County, where, in most cases, they were promptly withdrawn from sale; but, since officials throughout the other districts of the Commonwealth did not feel called on to take any action, we have the anomalous situa-tion of books being banned in Boston yet being sold openly in Cambridge, only three miles away.

Read on http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/193001/censorship-practice