on Trial - English

Transcription

on Trial - English

Ferlinghetti on Trial
The Howl court case and juvenile delinquency
Author(s): Joel E. Black
Source: Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 27-43
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.27
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i n q u i r i e s
joel e. black
Ferlinghetti on Trial
The Howl court case
and juvenile delinquency
The Publisher
In late May 1957, Officers Russell Woods and Thomas Page of the Juvenile Division
of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) entered City Lights Bookstore to
purchase a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. They arrested Shigeyoshi
Murao, an employee of the store who was its only occupant at the time, for distributing
obscene material. Howl publisher and City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti
surrendered to police a couple days later, upon his return to San Francisco from a visit
to Big Sur. Shortly thereafter, a trial date was set at the San Francisco District Court,
and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California posted bail
for Murao and Ferlinghetti.1
The city of San Francisco’s prosecution of Ferlinghetti for violating obscenity laws
by publishing Howl reopened a case that the United States Attorney at San Francisco,
Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 4, pps 27–43. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.
© 2013 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.27.
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Lloyd H. Burke, had already reviewed and abandoned, and
2
drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go!
tied it to local censorship concerns. Because the Juvenile
Go!’”9 The morning after the reading Ginsberg received a
Division prosecuted it, the case immediately became an
telegram from Ferlinghetti paraphrasing Ralph Emerson’s
issue of obscenity and juvenile delinquency. Before the start
letter to Walt Whitman upon reading Leaves of Grass: “I
of trial, Captain William Hanrahan of the SFPD’s Juvenile
greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get
Division announced to reporters, “anything not suitable for
the manuscript.”10
3
publication in newspapers shouldn’t be published at all.”
Ferlinghetti anticipated difficulties publishing Howl and
Hinting that he hoped to use the decision in the Howl trial
he obtained the support of the ACLU chapter in Northern
as the first step in a campaign to remove “filth” from the
California before printing the poem.11 Astonishingly,
city’s bookstores, Hanrahan announced, “We will await the
Ginsberg’s depiction of a mechanical and soulless world
4
that preys on innocence, or the “lamb,” and his castigation
The Ferlinghetti trial, which unfolded during the
of Cold War nationalism, barely appeared in a trial that was
summer months of 1957, amid tensions over juvenile
preoccupied with sexual accounts, references to narcotics,
delinquency, intimately connects San Francisco police and
and the effects of both on young people.12 The trial began
local antiobscenity activists with Beat Generation writers.
inauspiciously. Ginsberg was out of the country during the
Four years earlier, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had moved to San
proceedings and relied on personal letters and newspaper
Francisco and founded City Lights Bookstore with Pete
accounts to keep abreast of developments.13 Presiding
Martin. The two hoped the store would become the “center
judge Clayton W. Horn, who regularly taught Sunday
of an intellectual community” in the city’s North Beach
school, entered the courtroom under a cloud: he had just
district.5 The next year, Ferlinghetti bought Martin’s share
been taken to task by the press for ordering shoplifters
in City Lights and added a publishing business. It was as a
to write penitent essays after viewing the film version of
publisher that he came into contact with the Beats, many of
the Ten Commandments.14 At trial, lead prosecutor Ralph
whom, including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack
McIntosh, a self-described “specialist in smut cases,” vowed
Kerouac, and Gregory Corso, met in New York City in the
to protect families by keeping controversial expression,
late 1940s and lived irregularly in San Francisco in the mid-
like that in “Howl,” out of newspapers and off airwaves.
1950s. Ginsberg would write “Howl” shortly after moving
Meanwhile, attorney Jake Ehrlich, who was nicknamed “the
to Bay Area, and the poem would launch his literary career.
6
master” for his successful criminal defense of a clientele
Ferlinghetti’s marriage, homeownership, and doctorate
that ranged from Nazis to kidnappers and fan dancers,
from the Sorbonne set him apart from the nucleus of those
berated “small thinking and small minds,” and defended
writers and poets to whom he looked principally for fresh
Ferlinghetti pro bono.15
outcome of this case before we go ahead with other books.”
and innovative work upon which to build his bookstore and
his press.
The prosecution of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing
Howl reveals how Californians reacted to sweeping social
7
Despite its East Coast origins, the Beat Generation was
and legal changes in postwar America. The trial developed
inaugurated, in part, in California. “Howl” was originally
from popular and legal investigations into the relationship
read in October 1955 at San Francisco’s Six Gallery Studio,
between juvenile delinquency and narcotics, comic books,
a converted auto repair shop at the corner of Union and
rock music, motion pictures, and pornography that appeared
Fillmore. The event was advertised as “Six poets at Six
in the decade after World War II. These debates were
Gallery,” and offered, “wine, music, dancing girls [and]
serious poetry.”8 Jack Kerouac captured the evening in
The Dharma Bums (1958), where he describes “collecting
dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing
around in the gallery and coming back with three huge
gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all
piffed so that by eleven o’clock when Alvah Goldbook [Allen
Ginsberg] was reading his, wailing his poem Wail [Howl]
28
Ralph McIntosh, a selfdescribed “specialist in
smut cases,” vowed to
protect families.
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City Lights Bookstore.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY.
formalized in a Congressional study of juvenile culture. In
salacious. In the era of Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
the early 1950s, veteran Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.)
which officially prohibited racial segregation in schools,
and his Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency
and preceding by only eight years Griswold v. Connecticut
traveled the country to study the effect of books, movies,
(1965), which established a constitutional right to privacy,
comics, and other media on juveniles. The Howl trial
law was at the center of important social and cultural
also reflects important postwar developments in First
battles.16 In fact, the Howl trial would be the first test of
Amendment law, which marked new efforts to protect
a new interpretation of the First Amendment that was
expression that might be considered sacrilegious or
created the same summer Ferlinghetti was tried. The People
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Cold Warriors worried that juvenile narcotic
use could jeopardize the country’s
military strength.
of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, then, tells a
Cold Warriors worried that juvenile narcotic use could
story about California. But the case also places California at
jeopardize the country’s military strength. Harry Anslinger,
the center of a national story about obscenity and juvenile
the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, demanded
delinquency in American life. In the end, conservative
more serious penalties for violations, including minimum
politicians and journalists were troubled to find that Howl
and maximum prison terms, and more severe punishment
was not illicit, but protected, expression. Their severe and
of repeat offenders.21 The legislative result was the Boggs
sometimes ruthless persecution of Ginsberg and the Beat
Act of 1951, which promised, “to detect and apprehend
Generation after the trial would have the paradoxical effect
the despicable interstate narcotics peddler.”22 With the
of demonstrating not that the Beats were obscene, but
passage of a Narcotics Control Act in 1956, first convictions
that antiobscenity activists were out of step with law and
for narcotics offences were raised to five years, while the
American culture in the 1950s, marking them as radical
sale of heroin by a person over eighteen to a person under
agents in need of regulation and restraint.
eighteen could elicit the death penalty.23
These years witnessed the strengthening of a powerful
association between narcotics, juveniles, and delinquency
The Juvenile Delinquent
in the media across the United States. In 1954 journalist
Howl’s social and legal context stretches back to the early
and Cold Warrior Victor Riesel announced in the national
1940s to include the mobilization of journalists, police,
Catholic monthly Sign that Chinese Communists were
district attorneys, and politicians in response to a perceived
“ready to dump millions of dollars worth of crippling, nerve
juvenile delinquent threat. Their combined efforts gave rise
shattering heroin on the teen-age market,” and he imagined
to the prohibition and regulation of narcotics, comics, rock
clandestine “dope rings reaching the youngsters who are
music, and motion pictures—each of which marked the
within a few years of draft age.”24 Riesel’s improbable claim
participating juvenile as a delinquent. Scholars have argued
echoed statements made by Narcotics Bureau Director
that in the early 1940s no category existed for the study of
Harry Anslinger in 1953 that “communists were smuggling
violent adolescents, especially those not linked to organized
opium and heroin from China,” to weaken young men
crime, whose activities conjured up “terrifying visions” of
by “subsidizing addiction.”25 In 1952, journalist Edward
the “young banding together.”17 Street gang or “delinquent”
Mowery cautioned readers of Catholic Digest that just
clothing confirmed these fears. Malcolm X recalled from his
because “no parochial school children had been found to be
youth “the men sharp in their zootsuits and crazy conks,”
addicted to dope, teachers and parents should not play ostrich
that inspired his own efforts to “get a zoot.” Composed
and ignore the evil drug.”26 Instead, Mowery explained,
of an oversized “drape jacket” and baggy, high-waist pants,
heroin—the “terror drug”—had “become a scourge” in cities
tapered at the ankle, zoots blatantly disregarded material
across the country, resulting in the hospitalization of eight-
shortages during the Second World War and announced
year-old marijuana users and the prevalence of childhood
the “racial and cultural otherness” of the wearer. Conflict
“heroin users and peddlers” who, in addition to becoming
over the apparel culminated most dramatically in the Zoot
addicted to narcotics, promised to entice “parochial school
Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943.19 Paradoxically, while
pupils” to try drugs.27 Equating communists with street
zoot suits were about economic marginality, juvenile
gangs, journalist John Gerrity proposed vigorous class and
delinquency was also about having enough discretionary
racial barriers, explaining that the “average high school
income to consume cultural contraband.20
student”—who is presented by Gerrity as middle class and
18
30
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Pasteboard of advertisement for City Lights Bookstore featuring winged Allen Ginsberg.
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY.
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The Supreme Court halted
a grassroots, municipallevel campaign to censor
comics that had swept
through fifty cities.
and called on the broader society to wage “an all out
attack on all conditions contributing to the problem of
juvenile delinquency.”33 The Comic Magazine Association
of America (CMAA), created in September 1954 just ahead
of the release of the Committee’s findings, effectively
purged comics of crime, horror, and sexual content.34
To some authorities, at least, rock music—which had
emerged in the mid-1950s as a fusion of hillbilly and rhythm
and blues music that was characterized by sexualized lyrics
and a quickened tempo—was the embodiment of juvenile
delinquency in the mid-1950s. Described as illicit, violent,
white—would have to “prowl the dens of his city for months
and sexual, rock also appeared to transgress class and race
before he [could] make a contact.”
boundaries.35 “Every proved delinquent has been definitely
28
Despite this alarm, legal authorities resisted wholesale
influenced by rock and roll,” Music Journal declared in early
efforts to prohibit salacious and gruesome materials. In
1958, characterizing its sounds in the racist vernacular of
spring 1948, the Supreme Court decided that a New York
the day as a “return to savagery” and a “throw back to jungle
State law banning all violent and prurient publications
rhythms.”36 According to Time magazine, rock music might
because they might endanger juveniles was too vague to
not have created juvenile delinquency, but because it was
survive a First Amendment challenge. In Winters v. New
singularly “adopted by the hoodlum element” it defined
York, the Court accused the state of New York of not setting
it.37 In response, the music industry sanitized lyrics, as
up a “sufficiently definite standard of conduct” that would
epitomized by pop singer and actor Pat Boone’s “whitening”
allow individuals to distinguish between protected and
of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and Little Richard’s
unprotected speech.
With this decision the Supreme
“Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.”38 The music industry’s
Court halted a grassroots, municipal-level campaign to
commitment to racial regulation was made clear when Alan
censor comics that had swept through fifty cities. In
Freed’s “Rock’n’Roll Dance Party” was canceled by CBS
upholding broad protections for speech, Winters marked a
in 1955 after Frankie Lymon, of the black group Frankie
trend in which the Supreme Court overrode local obscenity
Lymon and the Teenagers, was televised dancing with a
regulation and imposed a single constitutional standard.30
white girl.39 Campaigns to erect race and class barriers to
29
Congress, in response, acted to regulate juvenile
delinquency in the 1950s through committee hearing and
32
insulate the nation’s youth from juvenile delinquency also
appeared in Hi-Teen and Dress-Right programs.40
nonbinding reports. In 1954, Senator Kefauver’s Senate
Like rock music and comics, motion pictures like The
Subcommittee, which investigated the cultural materials
Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause
of adolescent life, met with psychiatrist Frederic Wertham,
were investigated as a forum for delinquent practices,
the nation’s foremost expert on comic books. According
despite the existence of an active production code.41 In
to Wertham, random violence and homosexuality—which
Committee hearings two months before the release of Rebel
he considered equally “deviant” expressions of juvenile
Without a Cause in 1955, Kefauver explained to Jack Warner,
delinquency—were the direct result of the “chronic
whose studio produced the movie, “We have had some calls
stimulation, temptation and destruction by comic books.”31
saying this is not a good picture from the standpoint of
While the Committee’s report acknowledged debate over
young people.” Warner responded, “They must be working
the validity of Wertham’s correlation of comics and juvenile
from radar because I myself haven’t seen it put together.”42
delinquency, it concluded that given the Cold War stresses
But in his interview, Warner neglected to mention that the
“this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in
studio had already censored the motion picture by cutting
feeding, through comic books, a concentrated diet of crime,
a handful of scenes involving violence and sexuality, or
horror and violence.”32 As a result, the final report called
implied narcotics use.43 The Committee’s final report on
on the industry to “raise the standard of its products,”
motion pictures included noted Los Angeles psychiatrist
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Cover of Life magazine, September 5, 1957.
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY.
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Frederick Hacker’s claim that motion pictures “contribute
At the time of his testimony, Samuel Roth was poised to
to, or at least shape, the content of criminal activity,” along
become the namesake of an important Supreme Court
with his astonishing speculation that motion pictures
case on obscenity and the First Amendment. That case
double the delinquency rate of their juvenile audience.44 In
would be decided the summer that Lawrence Ferlinghetti
claiming that movies victimize adolescents who are “at a
was tried in San Francisco for publishing Howl.52 In its first
high pitch of sexual curiosity and imitativeness,” journalist
definitive statement on obscenity law in nearly ten years, the
William Morris agreed with Harry Anslinger and comic
Court upheld Roth’s five-year sentence for mailing obscene
45
expert Frederick Wertham that regulation was not enough.
materials. 53 According to the high court, obscenity would
Calls for the intensified regulation of cultural materials
remain illegal: “The unconditional phrasing of the First
also generated critical responses in California. “Freelance
Amendment was not intended to protect every utterance.”54
actor” Ronald Reagan worried that state censorship
But Ferlinghetti would benefit directly from the decision’s
weakened American claims on freedom during the Cold
new obscenity test. Roth carved out an exception for “ideas
War and produced adolescents “mentally conditioned to
with even the slightest redeeming social importance,”
[the point which] somebody can tell them . . . what they
including “unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas and even
can read and what they can hear . . . and what they can say
ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion.”55 With
and what they can think. If that day comes,” Reagan added
this exception, which expanded protection for controversial
dramatically, “we have lost the Cold War.” 46 Reagan found
ideas, Roth connected earlier protections developed by the
some support from the courts. Amid the proliferation
Supreme Court in Winters and Burnstyn to California and the
of repression in the form of loyalty oaths, blacklists, and
prosecution of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl.
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
hearings, federal courts read broad individual protections
into the First Amendment. Four years after the Supreme
Court signaled its willingness to protect criminal, sexual,
The prosecution of Lawrence Ferlinghetti put California
and violent depictions in print materials in Winters v. New
at the center of these national discussions about juvenile
York, it attached First Amendment protections to movies in
delinquency and obscenity just as new anxieties surfaced in
Burstyn v. Wilson when it rejected a motion-picture licensing
California’s Bay Area. The year before Howl was first read
system for being “unconstitutionally vague.”
in Six Gallery Studio, San Francisco newspapers and moral
47
Efforts to protect freedom of expression would find limits
reform organizations, like the Social Hygiene Association,
in pornography. One of Kefauver’s final hearings probed the
measured “dope and gang activities” and assigned “bills of
relationship between pornography and juvenile delinquency
health” at the beginning of the school year.56 An outbreak
and examined books, pamphlets, records, motion pictures,
of youth violence in September 1956 at San Francisco’s
cards, casts, and carvings “synonymous with depravity,
Kezar Stadium following a football game spurred city
[that] corrupt[ed], defil[ed] and destroy[ed]” juveniles.48 In
and state officials to debate the possible suspension of all
its report, the Committee ascribed to obscenity the same
future high school football games.57 Newspapers reported
pathology Cold Warriors ascribed to narcotics: “Once
an agreement “to tighten discipline over juveniles” by
initiated . . . impressionable young minds . . . inevitably
introducing curfew laws forbidding persons eighteen and
hunt for something stronger, something with more ‘jolt,’
under from being on the street after 11:00 p.m.58 Before
something imparting a greater thrill.”49 According to this
the end of the 1956 calendar year, state officials were
narrative, pornography afflicted the “healthy” child with
discussing a “wave of juvenile violence” and the possibility
“abnormalities.”
Publisher Samuel Roth, who ran a
of establishing “psychiatric teams in each correctional
bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village, spoke before
school of the California Youth Authority” to treat juvenile
the Committee as a legendary purveyor of obscene literature
delinquency.59 Amid these heightened concerns about
and disagreed with the Committee’s emphasis on child
juvenile delinquency, early the next year, in spring 1957,
protection. “It may mean something to a mature adult, but
Officers Russell and Page entered City Lights Bookstore to
it cannot mean anything to a boy or girl,” Roth explained.
purchase a copy of Howl.
50
51
34
The Trial
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L
awrence Ferlinghetti was tried in a San Francisco
McIntosh’s two prosecution witnesses were prepared to
District Court by judge alone through the summer
judge Howl. David Kirk, a graduate student at Stanford
of 1957 in a case that pivoted on the “redeeming social
University, and Gail Potter, who had taught high school in
value” of sexual and narcotic content, and which positioned
Florida and California—and who distributed pamphlets
local regulatory efforts against a pattern of expanding
advertising her services as a speech and diction teacher
federal constitutional prosecution.60 Ralph McIntosh,
during the trial—testified for the prosecution that Howl
the attorney prosecuting Ferlinghetti, was convinced that
was worthless. Both equated the poem’s “redeeming social
delinquent juveniles were stimulated by cultural materials
value” with whether or not they liked it. Kirk disliked the
and considered the content in Howl and Other Poems
poem “after five minutes,” and Potter complained, “you
representative of those materials. At the beginning of the
feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to
trial, McIntosh asked that the court interpret obscenity
read that stuff. I didn’t linger on it too long, I assure you.”65
broadly, that “the book could be indecent and also come
In reference to the weakness in Potter’s testimony and her
within the purview” of the statute. However, Judge Horn
employment at the University of San Francisco, a Catholic
rejected this appeal. Instead, he adhered strictly to the
institution, Ferlinghetti quipped in Evergreen Review, “the
broad, new, First Amendment obscenity test, formulated
critically devastating things the prosecution’s witnesses
by Justice William Brennan in Roth v. United States, which
could have said but didn’t remain one of the great Catholic
extended constitutional protection to “all ideas having even
silences of the day.”66
61
the slightest redeeming social importance.”62 His burden
The defense team had an easier time meeting the new
of proof made substantially more difficult by the adoption
constitutional test established in Roth. With the assistance
of Roth as precedent, Assistant District Attorney McIntosh
of ACLU lawyers Lawrence Spicer and Albert Bendich,
would not be able to rely on the broad language prohibiting
Jake Ehrlich employed a two-pronged strategy. First, he
obscene and indecent expression in the California Penal
introduced examples where profanity and anatomically
Code; instead, he had to pass a much narrower test and
descriptive language were employed, asking the court
prove the absence of “redeeming social importance.”
rhetorically, “Is it against the laws of decency of the District
McIntosh’s strategy was to spotlight instances of graphic
Court of Appeal to write of the sexual organ and the sexual
or arcane language, describing those “who let themselves
act?”67 Once he established the legitimacy of anatomical
be ****** in the *** by saintly motorcyclists,” those “who
language, he flooded the court with literary experts,
blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
including prominent academics, journalists, and writers, all
the caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,” those “who
affirming the “redeeming social value” of Ginsberg’s poem.
got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo
Literary critic and author Kenneth Rexroth exalted Howl as
with a belt of marijuana for New York.” For instance, he
“probably the most remarkable single poem published by a
asked star defense witness—the prolific Berkeley scholar
young man since the Second World War.” Mark Linenthan,
Mark Schorer—what “busted in the pubic beard” meant,
who taught poetry at San Francisco State College, called
and what “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
Howl a “powerful indictment of the modern world.”
heavenly connection” were. Schorer responded that “you
Berkeley sociologist Leo Lowenthal, who was famous for
can’t translate poetry into prose, that’s why it’s poetry,” and
his study of literature and society, described Howl as a
testified that Howl had “value” because it intended to “make
“genuine work of literature” that captured the “unrest and
a significant comment on or interpretation of human
tension” of the 1950s.68 Aimlessly probing the credentials
experience.”
and publications of defense witnesses, McIntosh did not
63
64
He asked star defense witness—the prolific
Berkeley scholar Mark Schorer—what
“busted in the pubic beard” meant.
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manage to weaken any claims of “redeeming social value.”
of obscene expression. As they gathered to discuss the
Instead, questions about the expertise of witnesses took the
availability of prurient material and to consider how to
prosecution off topic and left the assistant district attorney
“punish its peddlers without endangering the freedom of
looking like an outlier in a prosecution he was directing.
press and publication,” the SFPD’s Captain Hanrahan, who
oversaw the seizure of Howl, conceded that it was difficult
to define obscenity and to convict its distributors. However,
The Outcome
he admitted that there were few recent complaints about
Judge Horn spent the month after the trial in San Francisco
juveniles buying “filthy publications.” Remarking that
formulating an opinion that was shaped in powerful, and
obscene publications “seem to be a dangerous stimulant to
sometimes contradictory, ways by conceptions of freedom
perverts,” Captain Hanrahan now shifted away from using
during the Cold War. On 3 October 1957, he upheld
courts to protect juveniles and toward the popular censure
Ferlinghetti’s right to publish Howl. Horn cast his decision
of materials classified as obscene.74
in a robust tradition of First Amendment protection
The vigorous public censuring of Howl that developed
that connected Ferlinghetti’s rights to publish Howl not
after Horn’s decision connects Ferlinghetti’s trial in
only to Roth, but also to the original intentions of the
California to national postwar anxieties about juvenile
founding fathers. “The authors of the First Amendment,”
delinquency, sex, and narcotics. This shift from legal
Horn explained, “knew that novel and conventional
censoring toward a popular, extralegal censuring was most
ideas might disturb the complacent, but they chose to
clearly mediated by the mainstream and academic media.
encourage a freedom, which they believed essential if
Initially, critics supported Ferlinghetti’s right to publish
vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over slothful
Howl. In a first line of responses, editorials published
ignorance.”
in the San Francisco Chronicle struck a balance between
69
Horn’s decision was not only about the supremacy of
applause for “the police department’s drive to clean up
constitutional law but about the freedom of individual
dirty books” and criticism that “the infraction of our
choice: “[T]he only completely democratic way to control
individual rights is a threat to any adult.”75 The Saturday
publication” is through choice, Horn explained, “through
Review, Reporter, and Nation magazines each published
non-governmental
70
brief statements affirming the poem’s First Amendment
Confident “in the ability of people to reject noxious
right and celebrating its legal vindication with phrases
literature” and opposed to the idea that freedom of speech be
like “a ringing defense of freedom to read.”76 Howl also
reduced to “vapid innocuous euphemism,” Horn rejected
had staunch defenders among proponents of the literary
the use of legal mechanisms, or government, to regulate
avant-garde. Evergreen Review, launched by Grove Press
the expression in Howl.
One paradox in Judge Horn’s
in 1957 as a forum for the new literary works of English
reading of Roth, as it pertains to descriptions of sex, is that
playwrights, French existentialists, and American Beatniks,
depictions of homosexual sex, which were outlawed by Cold
devoted its entire second issue to the works of the Beat
War culture, were not legally obscene if they spoke to the
Generation.77 Meanwhile, academics, like Berkeley English
work’s realism, or “social value.” Meanwhile, heterosexual
Professor Thomas Parkinson, judged Howl “one of the
sex, which in Cold War culture was associated with health,
most important pieces of poetry published in the past ten
vigor, and stability, was potentially more vulnerable to an
years [and] of the very highest order.”78
censorship
71
by
public
opinion.”
obscenity charge, if it could be interpreted as scandalous
or immoral.
72
from Ferlinghetti’s right to publish “Howl” and trashed
Local censors were disappointed by Horn’s decision.
During
36
the
In a second line of responses, critics shifted away
trial,
San
Francisco’s
mayor,
the poem’s literary merits. Harvard English Professor
George
John Hollander, a friend of Ginsberg’s from their days
Christopher, acknowledged that there was a “very practical
together at Columbia University, lambasted Howl as
problem of law enforcement involving obscenity,” and
a “dreadful little volume,” and a “very short and very
asked, “Where is the line of demarcation?”73 After the trial,
tiresome book.”79 Frederick Eckman, who taught poetry at
city officials continued to struggle to define the parameters
the University of Texas, sensed something more ominous
boomcalifornia.com
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Ad for City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 1962.
COURTESY OF THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY.
Ad for City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, 1957.
COURTESY OF THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY.
in Howl, describing it not only as “a very shaggy book, the
an expression of cultural and racial assimilation: “[T]he
shaggiest I’ve seen,” but also as a celebration of “social and
bohemian and juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with
psychological ills” by a “highbrow cousin” to “the black
the Negro, [and] the hipster was a fact of American life.”82
jacket, switchblade-toting street-fighter.”80 John Ciardi,
With the hipster, Mailer reconceptualized the delinquent as
English professor at Rutgers University and poetry editor
a cultural signature and indicated that despite the efforts
of Saturday Review, wrote in his short piece “Epitaph for
of police, district attorneys, and local censorship drives,
a Dead Beat” that the Beat Generation was about drugs,
“dingy allies,” and “narcissistic sickliness” and slandered
their literary aspirations, advising, “I hope the next time
the young go out for a rebellion they will think to try the
library.”81 Ciardi also identified Howl and the Beats with
behaviors that Normal Mailer described in “The White
Negro,” a short piece that was also published by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti. In it, Mailer cast juvenile delinquency as
“I hope the next time
the young go out for a
rebellion they will think
to try the library.”
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the threat of juvenile delinquency had not been—and could
not be—curtailed. Confirming Mailer’s assessment, Jack
Kerouac’s ode to recreational drug use, itinerancy, sexual
adventure, and friendship—On the Road—was published
the same year, 1957. Critics hailed the book and its author
“There was no one behind
me. The court was full of
beatnik types. I felt lost.”
for capturing the voice of the “Beat Generation.”83
A third line of critical public censure described the
to our standards.”92 The meeting marked an enduring
Beats as criminals. In his review in New Republic in 1957,
interest in suppressing illicit expression, if only through
conservative writer Norman Podhoretz characterized the
public censure. In attendance at the meeting was Ralph
Beat “rebels” as “homosexual, jazz and dope addicted
McIntosh. Though present in an unofficial capacity, the
vagrants.”
Then, in Partisan Review the following year,
assistant district attorney blamed the failed prosecution
Podhoretz disparaged the Beat message as “Kill the
of Ferlinghetti on “the lack of public support by decent
intellectual who can talk coherently, kill the people who can
people.” Acknowledging that he had felt like an outsider
sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible
in the courtroom, McIntosh explained, “There was no one
characters who are capable of seriously getting involved
behind me. The court was full of beatnik types. I felt lost.”93
with a woman, a job, a cause.”85 Time described Allen
Democratic Representative Katherine Granahan supported
Ginsberg as a “discount house Walt Whitman”—himself
McIntosh’s complaint and, echoing the sentiments of
a self-styled poet of the New York City streets—and argued
antinarcotic and anticomic activists, suggested that the
the Beats were guided by a “rhythm of madness and self
“filth and smut aimed at our youth” may “very well be a
destruction.”86 In Life’s November 1959 issue, Journalist
communist conspiracy.”94 Granahan’s alarm confirmed
Paul O’Neill branded the Beats un-American and likened
that anxieties over juvenile delinquency that were raised
Ginsberg and Kerouac to “fruit flies” who “profane the
by Ferlinghetti’s decision to publish Howl would continue
surface” of America—the “sweetest and most succulent
to shape debates, in California and nationwide, over youth
casaba ever produced by the melon patch of civilization.”
and the material culture of delinquency well into the 1960s.
84
87
Commotion over the Beat Generation inspired New
York Post’s Alfred Aronowitz to travel to California and
produce a collection of stories on Northern California
The Legacy
Beatniks for New York readers.88 Aronowitz described a
The prosecution of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing
San Francisco businessman complain that “[Beats] used to
Howl tells a story about California, but also places California
clutter up the place” until he “put up a sign, ‘out of bounds
at the center of a national discussion over juveniles and the
to poets, beatniks, drug addicts, [etc.]’”
regulation of obscene expression that involved journalists,
89
A reverend told
90
academics, congress, and courts. In San Francisco in
And a policeman explained to Aronowitz that the Beats’
the late 1950s, Allen Ginsberg—whose poetry was at the
“standards are very low. Our information was that as far
center one of the single most important crusades against
as sex was concerned anything went.” Echoing the logic of
juvenile delinquency and obscene expression in postwar
the Ferlinghetti prosecution, he added, “We had to protect
California—reaped the benefits of celebrity. Self-consciously
our young people from that.”
Aronowitz, “most of them tend to be mentally disturbed.”
Beat writing, Aronowitz
placing his work amid a “poetry renaissance glimpsed in
suggested, did not produce a generation of “great minds,”
San Francisco,” Ginsberg rebuked the “ugliness, anger,
but idle perverts.
jealousy, vitriol and sullen protestations of superiority”
91
Individuals in San Francisco directly involved in the case
it engendered, and criticized journalists, commercial
against Ferlinghetti continued their fight against obscenity
publishers, and academics for their resistance to new
in that city. Toward the end of 1959, a group of seventy-
things, for their “fearful allegiance to the organization of
five persons, “many known in San Francisco community
mass stereotype communications.”95 Upon recording Howl,
affairs,” met to plan a boycott of newsstands, drugstores,
also in 1959, Ginsberg continued to admonish his detractors
and other outlets selling materials that “failed to live up
for their “dull materialistic vagaries,” branding his academic
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Ginsberg was just trying
to survive a Cold War that
Reagan was committed
to winning.
with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public
Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Text and Bibliography (NY:
Harpers Perennial, 1995), 151.
2
Federal customs seized a portion of the second printing of Howl
on 24 March 1957, under an obscenity section of the 1930 Tariff
Act targeting anyone who “publishes, sells, distributes, keeps
for sale or exhibits any obscene or indecent writing.” Cited in
Erlich, Howl of the Censor (San Carlos: Norse, 1961). Burke
may have become aware of Howl because Villiers, a repudiated
British press known to censors for printing “questionable”
material, printed it. Moreover, while it is not entirely clear why
Burke backed away from the prosecution, it is possible that
Ferlinghetti’s solicitation of the ACLU of Northern California
presented the US Attorney with an undesirable, protracted,
and public legal battle over a relatively unknown, local poem
and poet.
larger cultural movement that developed in the 1960s, and
3
San Francisco Chronicle, 4 June 1957, 3.
while protecting juveniles became a cover for conservative
4
protests, the trial revealed shifting conceptions of freedom
San Francisco Chronicle, 6 June 1957, 1, 4.
5
Barry Silesky, Ferlinghetti: An Artist in His Time (New York:
Warner Books, 1996), 56.
6
The move to San Francisco also marked a personal milestone
for Ginsberg, as he learned to accept his homosexuality.
Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of
Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martins, 1984), 190–191; Jane
Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House,
1968), 42.
public censuring, that distinction was critical in Judge Horn’s
7
Silesky, Ferlinghetti, 56, 82–83.
avowal of freedom of expression, as it was to other legal
8
Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Bibliography (New York: Schuster,
1989), 195.
9
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Signet, 1959), 13.
Kerouac regularly discussed his friends in his books. “Alvah
Goldbook” is Allen Ginsberg, and “Wail” is “Howl.”
10
Silesky, Ferlinghetti, 66. As the paraphrasing suggests, this
telegram was mostly symbolic. Ginsberg wrote Kerouac in
August 1955, two months before the reading at Six Gallery,
beaming, “. . . will put out Howl next year in booklet for
the poem, nothing else. It will fill a booklet.” See Miles, ed.,
Howl, 149.
11
Allen Ginsberg, ed. Barry Miles, Howl, 151, 169.
12
Allen Ginsberg, “Notes on the Final Recording of Howl,”
Spoken Word Series, 7006, 1959. Fantasy Records Inc.
13
Allen Ginsberg, ed. Barry Miles, Howl, 156–162.
14
David Perlman, “How Captain Hanrahan Made Howl a
Bestseller,” The Reporter, December 15, 1957 (15), 37–38.
15
Perlman, “How Captain Hanrahan Made Howl a Bestseller,”
38; Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 6, 96–99, 112.
16
Griswold was decided in 1965 and involved the right of married
couples to use birth control. Brown and Griswold were decided
critics (in particular) as “creeps who wouldn’t know poetry if
it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.”96
Ginsberg’s rebuke points to two broader conclusions.
First, the prosecution of Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl
was but one clash in a broader culture war. While Beat
poetry and prose can be understood as a counterpoint to the
that connected individuals as politically diverse as Ginsberg
and Ronald Reagan over the dangers of censorship. Arguably,
though, Ginsberg was just trying to survive a Cold War that
Reagan was committed to winning. Second, courts and
lawmakers were at the center of culture changes in the 1950s.
Although in his rebuke Ginsberg ignored the important
distinction between official legal censoring and unofficial
efforts to regulate censorship. Ultimately, the trial would
reveal that the efforts to officially regulate speech in Cold
War America were somehow out of step with the meaning
of freedom of expression and, more broadly, with the tenets
of democracy. Judges, scholars, and politicians agreed with
Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti that in Cold War America it was
the conservative detractors—and not the Beats—who were
the radicals in need of restraint and regulation. b
Notes
I am grateful to Elizabeth Dale, Joseph Spillane, William Bush, and
William Issel, along with the blind reviewers and staff at Boom,
for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
1
In a letter to his father several months before the seizure of
copies of Howl, Ginsberg wrote, “Civil Liberties Union here
[Northern California] was consulted and said they’d defend
[Howl] if it gets into trouble, which I almost hope it does.”
Barry Miles, ed. Allen Ginsberg Howl: Original Draft Facsimile,
Transcript and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by the Author
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a decade apart. See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483
(1954); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
17
Eric Schneider, Vampire, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth
Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 37, 63–64, 66–70. Also see Tom Engelhardt, The
End Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of
a Generation (NY: Basic Books, 1995), 134–135.
18
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told To Alex
Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), 59, 61. Robyn D.G.
Kelley has revisited Malcolm X’s autobiographical narrative to
interpret the zoot as a statement of “oppositional black politics.”
It both “challeng[ed] middle class ethics and expectations,”
Kelley explains, while at the same time “carving out a distinct
cultural and ethnic identity.” Similarly, in his overview of
New York’s postwar juvenile gangs, Schneider highlights
the importance of clothing, which “signaled the wearer’s
disaffection from the dominant culture,” but also identified
the wearer’s gang affiliation, situating him in a specific set of
practices and alliances.” Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture
Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press,
1994), 163, 170; Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian
Kings, 143–148.
19
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 63. Candida Taylor,
“Zoot Suits: Breaking the Cold War’s Dress Code,” in Nathan
Abrams and Julie Hughes, eds., Containing America: Cultural
Consumption and Production in Fifties America (Birmingham:
University of Birmingham Press, 2000), 65.
20
Engelhardt, The End Victory Culture, 134–135.
21
The founding director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry
Anslinger, advocated in the Food, Drugs, Cosmetics Law Journal
for a “strengthening of the penalty provisions of the federal
narcotic laws.” H.J. Anslinger, “The Federal Narcotics Laws,”
Food, Drugs, Cosmetic Journal 6 (October 1951): 747.
22
Anslinger, “The Federal Narcotics Laws,” 747–748.
23
David Matso, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 231.
24
Victor Riesel, “United Front: Racketeers and Sovieteers,” Sign
(September 1954), 16–18.
25
H.J. Anslinger and William Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics
(New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 10, 166.
26
Edward Mowery, “The Dope Menace and Our Children,”
Catholic Digest (October 1952), 44.
27
Mowery, “The Dope Menace and Our Children,” 45.
28
John Gerrity, “The Truth About the ‘Drug Menace,’” Harper’s
Magazine (February 1952), 27–31.
29
40
The appeal in Winters v. New York was launched by the state of
New York in response to that state court’s decision to overturn
its law targeting magazines carrying stories “principally made
up of criminal news, police reports or accounts of criminal
deeds or pictures or stories of deeds or bloodshed, lust or
crime.” Winters v. New York, 333 U.S. 507 (1948).
30
In its written opinion, the court expressed sympathy with the
censorship initiative, explaining, “though we can see nothing
of any possible value to society in these magazines,” it also
added “they are as much entitled to the protection of free
speech as the best of literature.” Winters v. New York, 333 U.S.
507 (1948).
31
Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, claiming
a link between comics and various expressions of delinquency,
Frederick Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York:
Rinehart, 1954), 10. In the book, Wertham presented a series of
anecdotes to support his contention that comics are at “the root
of modern mass delinquency.” Most spectacularly, he related
the story of “three boys, six to eight years old, [who] took a boy
of seven, hanged him nude from a tree, his hands tied behind
him, then burned his face with matches. In this case, probation
officers investigating found that they were reenacting a comic
book plot.” According to Wertham, comics corrupt goodnatured children by teaching them to conceal crimes, conceal
evidence, evade detection, hurt people, and more specifically,
run down a policeman, commit forgery, and steal checks. “In
the comic book syllabus,” Wertham writes, “stealing of every
variety is amply covered.” Wertham also claimed to identify
instances of sexual “deviance” in the Batman-type story which
“helped to fixate homoerotic tendencies” for boys and the
Wonder Woman and Black Cat stories, which were “the lesbian
counterpart of Batman.” Frederick Wertham, Seduction of the
Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954), 150, 158–162, 190.
32
Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 32. US Senate, Committee
on the Judiciary, Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate
Juvenile Delinquency, (Comic Books), 83d Cong., 2nd sess., 21
April 1954, 14. Frederic Thrasher alleged “weakness in Dr.
Wertham’s approach” and argued that his conclusions were
“not supported by adequate research data.” The committee
summarized Thrasher’s contention as “the case against comics
has not been proved, pro or con.” See Frederick M. Thrasher,
“Comics and Delinquency: Cause or Scapegoat?” The Journal
of Educational Sociology, December 1949: 195–205. Wertham
could not account for the millions of young people who read
comic books and demonstrated perfectly normal behavior and
attitudes. See Wright, Comic Book Nation, 96.
33
Wright, Comic Book Nation, 33.
34
According to Wright, all but three comic book publishers
joined the CMAA. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 173–178.
35
George Lipsitz, “Land of a Thousand Dances: Youth, Minorities
and the Rise of Rock and Roll,” in Lary May, ed., Recasting
America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 267.
36
“Editorially Speaking,” Music Journal 16 (February 1958), 3.
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37
Time, 18 June 1956, 54.
38
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black
Consciousness and Race Relations (London: University College
London Press, 1998), 44; Ellis Cashmore, The Black Culture
Industry (Routledge, 1997), 61; Ian Inglis, Popular Music and
Film (Wallflower Press, 2003), 123.
39
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black
Consciousness and Race Relations, 49–50, 85.
40
The Hi-Teen program, developed in 1946, and the Dress
Right program, originating from the mid-1950s. Both were
intended to reverse trends in delinquency and to strengthen
the borders of appropriate adolescent behaviors and practices.
The Hi-Teen program defined a “proper” teenager as socially
committed, involved in efforts to feed the poor of Europe or
collect for the March of Dimes. As its name suggests, DressRight proposed dress recommendations designed to “restrict
sexuality” and insulate the wearer from juvenile delinquency.
William Graebner, “The Containment of Juvenile Delinquency:
Social Engineering and American Youth Culture in the Postwar
Period,” American Studies, 1986 27(1): 83, 85–86, 90–91, 95.
41
The Production Code Administration (PCA) established in
1934, mandated review to ensure a script “contained nothing
that could offend.” See Jerold Simmons, “The Censoring of
Rebel Without a Cause,” Journal of Popular Film and Television,
23 (June 1995), 57. For the Cold War and the motion picture
industry, see Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood
Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon, 1983); Jerold Simmons, “The Censoring of Rebel
Without a Cause,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 23
(June 1995): 57; Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics:
The Juvenilization of American Movies (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2002), 114.
42
US Senate, Committee of the Judiciary, Hearings Before the
Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (Motion
Pictures) 84th Cong., 1st sess., 15–18 June 1955, 128.
43
The makers of Rebel Without a Cause were required to
cut violence from the opening scene, to omit any sexual
suggestiveness between protagonists Jim and Judy prior to
entering an abandoned mansion and to dramatically curtail
a choreographed knife fight. Additionally, censors raised
concerns over whether a cupped hand concealed a tobacco
or a marijuana cigarette. Aside from these changes, the
finished product of the film did not differ dramatically from
the original script. See Jerold Simmons, “The Censoring of
Rebel Without a Cause,” Journal of Popular Film and Television,
23 (June 1995), 58.
44
US Senate, Committee of the Judiciary, Hearings Before the
Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (Motion
Pictures) 84th Cong., 1st sess., 15–18 June 1955, 96–97.
45
Ibid, 97.
46
Mary Dudziak argues in Cold War Civil Rights that restrictions
on speech undermined claims that the United States
represented freedom during the Cold War. See Mary Dudziak,
Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For Reagan,
see US Senate, Committee of the Judiciary, Hearings Before
the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (Motion
Pictures) 84th Cong., 1st sess., 15–18 June 1955, 95–6.
47
Burstyn involved the decision of state censors in New York
to ban showings of Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle because
it was “sacrilegious.” While the Court in Burstyn agreed that
states could establish systems for licensing films, it also ruled
that their standard could not be “constitutionally vague.” See
Burstyn v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952). For a discussion of the
case, see Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski, The
Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2008), 90–101.
48
US Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings Before the
Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (Obscene and
Pornographic Literature) 84th Cong., 2nd sess., 28 June 1956,
2–4.
49
Ibid, 8.
50
Ibid, 63.
51
Ibid, 53. In his testimony, Roth added, “It is not abnormal to see
a man with his arm around a woman.” The rest, he explained,
was up to the child’s imagination. Ibid, 53.
52
Ibid, 49.
53
Roth was indicted on twenty-six accounts of mailing obscene
material, found guilty on four counts and sentenced to five
years and fined five thousand dollars for violating a Federal
obscenity statute. See Roth v. United States 582 (S.D. NY 1956).
For more, see Leo Hamalian, “The Secret Careers of Samuel
Roth,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1:4 (1968: Spring): 335–336.
Roth combined Alberts v. California and Roth v. United States.
Alberts published photos of scantily clad women and unlike
Roth made no claim of literary merit. He was convicted of
violating a California obscenity statute, and the Supreme Court
consolidated his and Roth’s cases under Roth’s name. Alberts v.
California, 352 U.S. 812; 77 S. Ct. 28; 1 L. Ed. 2d 41; 1956 U.S.
In the previous attempt to settle the censorship issue a court
in New York examined the constitutionality of the New York
law that convicted the publisher of Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs
of Hecate County. The case divided the Supreme Court, four to
four, effectively sustaining the previous conviction, and leaving
the country’s jurists without a clear or current obscenity test.
See Lewis, Literature, Obscenity and the Law, 162–163, 267.
54
This element of the decision recalled a tradition of restricting the
salacious and prurient that reached back to nineteenth century
Anglo-American Law. In Regina v. Hickling English Judge
Cockburn defined obscenity as illegal and issued a circular
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definition of obscenity as “whether the tendency of material
charged as obscene is to deprave and corrupt those whose
minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose
hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Cockburn quoted in
Morris Ernst and Alan Schwartz, Censorship: The Search for the
Obscene (New York: McMillan, 1964), 35. In the United States
in the nineteenth century, obscene materials—including print
material, birth control, and images—were classified as illegal
and banned from the postal service. Comstock Act, 3 March
1873, Stat. At L., 598; Rochelle Gusrstein, Repeal of Reticence:
A History of America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free
Speech, obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1996), 54.
“Howl” was a deeply unconventional poem. Ferlinghetti clearly
felt that it was not too difficult to criticize its style and content.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Horn on Howl,” Evergreen Review 4
(1957), 155; Thomas Merrill, Allen Ginsberg (New York: Twayne,
1969), 87.
67
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 10, 53.
68
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 26–27, 60–66.
69
Horn’s decision addressed a number of significant precedents,
including the “whole book” test, established in Ulysses,
the profanity test established in People v. Viking Press, the
“community standards” test established in Kennerley, and the
legal validity of expert witnesses, which formed the backbone
of Ehrlich’s defense, and was given legal sanction in Halsey.
See United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72
F.2d 705 2nd Cir. (1934); People v. Viking Press 147 Misc. 813
(Magistrate Ct., 1933); United States v. Kennerley, 209 F2d 119
(S.D.N.Y. 1913); Halsey v. New York Society For the Suppression of
Vice, 234 N.Y. 1, 7, 136 N.E. 219, 221 (1922). Also see, Ehrlich,
Howl of the Censor, 119.
55
Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476; 77 S. Ct. 1304 (1957).
56
San Francisco Chronicle, September 21, 1954: 1; San Francisco
Chronicle, 22 September 1954: 1; San Francisco Chronicle,
26 November 1954: 2.
57
San Francisco Chr, 5 September 1956: 1.
58
San Francisco Chr, 29 September 1956: 2; San Francisco
Chronicle, 11 October 1956: 5.
70
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 126.
59
San Francisco Chr, 1 December 1956: 10.
71
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 125.
60
The case against Shigeyoshi Murao was dismissed near the
beginning of the trail. See Edward De Grazia, Girls Lean Back
Everywhere: The Law Of Obscenity And The Assault On Genius
(New York: Random House, 1992), 335.
72
John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A
History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 293–294.
73
61
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 12, 116.
San Francisco Chronicle, 1957 June 7: 2.
62
63
42
66
The Supreme Court decision was Roth v. United States 354
U.S. 476 (1957). McIntosh had reason to question of the scope
of the Roth test. Chief Justice Warren agreed with Brennan’s
written decision, but worried this protection was too broad. See
J.W. Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor (San Francisco: Norse, 1961),
14. David Perlman, “How Captain Hanrahan Made ‘Howl’ a
Bestseller,” 37.
For obscene references at trial, see J.W. Ehrlich, Howl of the
Censor (San Carlos, CA: Nourse, 1961), 30–33. The asterisks
replaced the words “fucked” and “ass.” In cross examination,
McIntosh asked Mark Schorer to explain, “one, two, three, four,
five, six dots—“in the’ three dots . . . I would like to know what
is meant by that paragraph.” Defense attorney Jake Ehrlich
objected before Schorer responded. In its original publication,
some of the poem’s frankest language, including this passage,
was censored. However, in his 1959 recording of Howl with
Fantasy Records, Ginsberg read the passage in its entirety. It
is likely that Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg initially censored some
of the strongest language in the early edition to get around
precisely this sort of censorship trouble. Ginsberg, Howl and
Other Poems, 14, 13; Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 32–33.
64
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 26–31.
65
Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 77–8, 85, 94. David Perlman, “How
Captain Hanrahan Made ‘Howl’ a Bestseller,” 39.
74
Ibid, 22 May 1958: 5.
75
Editorials by Lucas Davidson and Judith Tauber, San Francisco
Chronicle, 13 June 1957: 24.
76
“News of the Week,” Publisher’s Weekly, October 1957. Also
see, John Fuller, “Tradewinds,” Saturday Review 40 (5 October
1957): 5–7; “The Red-Eyed Censors,” Nation, vol. 184, no. 16
(20 April 1957): 335.
77
Evergreen devoted its entire second issue to the writings
of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Phillip
Whalen, and Robert Duncan, among others. The quote belongs
to Ferlinghetti. See Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Horn on Howl,”
Evergreen Review 1 (1957): 145.
78
Thomas Parkinson, Editorial Page, San Francisco Chronicle, 18
June 1957: 20.
79
John Hollander, “Review of Howl and Other Poems,” Partisan
Review 24 (Spring 1957), 296–298. Hollander issued an
addendum to this critique in February, 1984. Citing a “reluctance
to see the tone of his review perpetuated,” Hollander admitted
his review developed from “disappointment he saw an old
friend and poetic mentor take.” “I only regret,” he continued,
“that I hadn’t given ‘America’ and ‘In a Supermarket in
California’ time to register, I should certainly have commended
them.” For addendum, see Lewis Hyde, On the Poetry of Allen
Ginsberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 28.
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80
Frederick Eckman, “Review of Howl and Other Poems,” Poetry
90 (1957), 386–397.
81
John Ciardi, “Epitaph for the Deadbeats,” Saturday Review (6
February 1960), 11–13.
82
83
88
Alfred Aronowitz. “The Beat Generation,” New York Post,
March 1959. The Post ran at least a dozen stories throughout
the month.
89
Aronowitz, New York Post, 15 March 1959, M 4–5.
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” in Advertisement for Myself
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 340–343.
90
Aronowitz, New York Post, 20 March 1959, 70.
91
Aronowitz, New York Post, 15 March 1959, M 4–5.
Gilbert Millstein, New York Times Book Review, 5 September
1957.
92
San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 1959, 1.
93
San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 1959, 8.
94
Granahan made this announcement in her capacity as
Chairperson of the Congressional Subcommittee studying
pornography. San Francisco Chronicle, 13 November 1959,
1, 12.
84
Norman Podhoretz, “A Howl of Protest in San Francisco,” New
Republic (16 September 1957), 20.
85
Norman Podhoretz, “The Know Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan
Review 2 (Spring 1958): 305–311, 313–316, 318.
86
Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg, “The Beat Generation and
the Angry Young Men,” Time (9 June 1958),99, 100, 102.
95
Allen Ginsberg, “Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lamb,”
San Francisco Chronicle, 6 June 1959, 20.
87
Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” Life (30 November
1959), 115.
96
Allen Ginsberg, “Notes on Finally Recording Howl,” Spoken
Word Series (Fantasy Records, Inc., 1959), 7006.
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on Trial - English

Transcription

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