The Narratives of Historical Bookbanning - And What It Means Now

In 1873, the federal government of the United States passed a law known as the Comstock Act, a motion that would later go on to have startling influence on the future trajectory of literary censorship. 

The Comstock Act was pushed for by a group known as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, headed by its titular leader Anthony Comstock. Comstock was a proclaimed reformer that advocated for the restoration of classic, religiously founded, values in literature and communication. This, translated, meant a war against the early feminist movement, which had begun to gain traction throughout a rapidly modernizing nation.  

Nominally, the Comstock Act pursued works that it considered immoral. This often took the form of prosecuting discussion of sexuality, which in turn allowed for targeting of feminist leaders, who frequently spoke regarding birth control and abortion. Although such information was nothing less than necessary at a time of high birth-related mortality rates, Comstock’s followers did not pay much heed to such consequences. The Society for the Suppression of Vice liberally targeted anything they could that had any shred of ‘indecency,’ not limited to feminism and abortion advocates alone but most famously the poet Walt Whitman and his anthology Leaves of Grass, which at the time had been controversial in public perception for its realistic depictions of class, racism, and gender dynamics. 

Though the Comstock Act is now widely regarded as a dead law, its influence upon censorship in media remains surprisingly significant. One of Comstock’s protegees was a law student named J. Edgar Hoover - a name that would become infamous as the soon-to-be director of the FBI, targeting the speech and writing of numerous individuals in Hollywood, literature, and the Civil Rights movement - most notably Martin Luther King Jr, for supposed ties to communism and ‘anti-American sentiment.’ Comstock’s war against indecency became a generalized tool for persecution against those who the government sought to depower, a driving force in the infamous McCarthy era that left lingering damage to creative works even now. Censorship was legally pursued not through direct means but by using more fringe examples of supposed indecency to censor larger works. 

Today, the legacy of the 19th-century act is more apparent than ever before. The same strategy employed by Comstock is practiced by groups such as Moms for Liberty, seeking to ban books that cover matters like gender, sexuality, and complex historical topics from schools often on the basis of sexually explicit content. As covered in prior articles, this strategy has been applied to works as varied as 1984, a commentary on authoritarianism and censorship, to the Diary of Anne Frank, decisions that simply prove censorship as being far from simply puritanical and much more so ideologically rooted. Nonetheless, such a means is proving itself successful - with thousands of books having been banned in libraries and schools since 2021. 

In such times, critical thought and discernment is ever more important than before - and all readers should consider censorship not through the veil of what it purports to be, but what purpose it actually serves. For understanding censorship agendas, reading between the lens is ever-integral, it seems, towards reading at all.