From the first 50 years of the Progressive Review:
Sam Smith - Government
censorship was never much of a problem for us. Other publications,
however, did not fare as well. In B.W. (Before Web) the Post Office was
the most powerful prude around. As a young radio reporter in 1959, I
interviewed the Assistant Postmaster General in his office on the
subject of obscenity, a space grandly baroque enough to have pleased a
top official of the Mussolini regime. He guided me from his enormous
desk to some comfortable chairs in a windowed corner for the interview.
On the floor, randomly tossed in a large scattered pile, was the most
magnificent collection of sex magazines I had ever seen. I wondered but
did not ask why, given the hazard he told me they presented, he got to
read them and I, for example, did not.
Thirteen years
later, in 1972, I was visited by one Howard Roberts, a postal inspector,
carrying the current copy of another local paper, The Daily Rag. As I
later explained in a letter to an official of the ACLU:
"Roberts
informed me that he was delivering my copy of the Rag, but that the
Postal Service considered the cover obscene and that he was asking that I
refuse the publication and return it to him. Naturally I was titillated
by this strange proposal, but upon viewing the cover found it to
contain only a dowdy cartoon lady with mammary glands bulbous but
properly covered. She was wearing a button that read 'Fuck the Food
Tax.'"
"I told Roberts no at some length, reminding
him of existing legislation that adequately provided for those who
wished to refuse mail . . . I'm afraid I was angry and did most of the
talking, cowing Roberts sufficiently that he refused to answer any of my
subsequent questions. He said that since I wouldn't refuse the
publication he wasn't going to tell me anything more . . . He departed,
leaving me with my copy of the Rag. He still, as I recall, had two or
three other copies with him. Incidentally, Jean Lewton, associate editor
of the Gazette, was in the room during the discussion. Roberts
carefully shielded the offending publication from her view."
In
short, the Postal Service was seriously proposing criminal prosecution
not only of the Rag, but of those who read it. It was a classic example
of the First Amendment problem Lenny Bruce had raised: "If I can't say
'fuck' then I can't say, 'fuck the government.' I called the Rag and
other media and after a story or two ran and the ACLU got involved, the
Post Office backed off and ever since the capital has been saying "fuck"
without fear of criminal sanction.
