From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,alt.censorship
Subject: Federal-level Book Censorship in the USA
Date: 26 Jan 93 12:56:51 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

[ in a thread started by someone asking whether the US ever banned
  books at a national level rather than by local initiatives ]
roger@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) wrote:
> daq@fc.hp.com (Doug Quarnstrom) writes:
>> From the discussion, I get the impression that the US typically uses the
>> concept of obscenity to attack a given book.  Is this assertion true?  Is
>> anything book rigorously avoids anything of a sexual nature safe from
>> censorship in the US?
> Heck, no.  Printing government secrets, esp. of the "national security"
> type, will do it too.

For a specific example of this, the magazine "Covert Action Information
Bulletin" has been subject to legal prior restraint for about the last 10
years to stop them printing the list of exposed CIA agents they used to
run.  "The Progressive" magazine narrowly won a prior-restraint case
against the Pentagon in the early 80s over an article on the hydrogen-bomb
industry (this was sensationalized by the media as if it were a do-it-
yourself guide for would-be amateur H-bomb makers: in fact what the
military didn't like was its exposure of the environmental hazards of the
process).  And I don't think a full version of Victor Marchetti's book ever
saw the light of day - the published edition was about 25% blank space due
to censorship.

The most dramatic case of the lot was probably the memoirs of an ex-CIA
killer published by Lawrence Hill & Co in the early 80s (somebody here
guessed that it was "An American Assassin").  The CIA sued them for one
billion dollars.  I never found out what the exact upshot was, but the book
has disappeared from every place I've looked for it, without trace.  Maybe
somebody has a copy they could scan for us?

Going back a bit, the complete writings in print of Wilhelm Reich were pulped
by order of the DEA in the Fifties.


> Anyway, the US bans books on "obscenity" grounds every day. [...]
> A famous case along this line was _Show Me_, a radical German sex ed book.
> A friend of mine worked on the case, which went to the Supreme Court.
> He has a copy, btw.  It's a bit much, imho--but I doubt it's killed anyone.

WHAT???  This book was on open sale in the UK with never a flicker of a
problem.  (We used to sell it in the radical bookshop I worked in once).
I thought it was one of the better sex education books out there.  This
simply *must* have been a ban for covertly political reasons, given that
pictures of several miles of erect penis are published in the US every day.


Is there anywhere a centralized list of all banned books in the US, along
the lines of the annual compendium the Irish government used to publish?

-- 
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