which he soon renames “Howl,” based on his Moloch vision.
| June 6 | Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was in Big Sur when Murao was arrested, turns himself in to the police upon his return and is released after the ACLU posts $500 bail. |
| August 8 | Howl’s jury trial is scheduled to begin at the Municipal Court of the City and County of San Francisco, 750 Kearny Street, with Judge Byron Arnold presiding. |
| August 16 | After a delay, trial by jury is waived and the case is switched to Judge Clayton W. Horn’s court. |
| August 22 | Charges against Shigeyoshi Murao are dismissed by Judge Horn, since the prosecution could not prove that Murao had read the publication or sold it “lewdly.” |
| September 5 | Nine witnesses for the defense testify on the literary merits of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. |
| September 19 | Rebuttal witnesses and closing arguments are given in the trial. |
| October 3 | Judge Clayton W. Horn finds Lawrence Ferlinghetti not guilty of publishing and selling obscene writings, on the grounds that Howl and Other Poems was not written with lewd intent and was not without “redeeming social importance.” |
| October | To meet the demand created by the trial, a fourth printing of 5,000 copies is ordered. |
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Long ago, those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free. In the realm of expression, they put their faith, for better or worse, in the enlightened choice of the people, free from the interference of a policeman’s intrusive thumb or a judge’s heavy hand. So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance. A book worthless to me may convey something of value to my neighbor. In the free society to which our Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself.”
—Potter Stewart, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
MILESTONES OF LITERARY CENSORSHIP
by Nancy J. Peters
During the century prior to the Howl decision in 1957, freedom of expression in America, with few exceptions, did not extend to any writing that contained overtly sexual references. No matter how beautifully written or ethical its viewpoint, if a work of literature employed frank sexual language or depicted sexual acts, it was considered obscene and banned in the U.S. Then, over the next decade, beginning in 1957, a series of court decisions began to remove restrictions on purportedly obscene literature. At the apex of legal tolerance, in 1966, the ban was finally lifted from John Cleland’s 1749 novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which had been, in 1821, the object of America’s first known obscenity case.
Obscenity laws are concerned with prohibiting lewd or sexually charged words or pictures, and with determining what role the government should have in regulating what people should read and see. The U.S. Supreme Court has always held that the First Amendment does not protect obscene material that would present a clear and present danger to society. The problem is that there have always been disagreements about what constitutes obscenity. There is still a lack of clarity around the meaning of the words “indecent,” “filthy,” “lewd,” “lascivious,” and “obscene.” Justice Potter Stewart memorably epitomized the problem when he admitted that he couldn’t define “obscenity” but “I know it when I see it.” In current Internet cases, deliberations of the Supreme Court focus on these same definitions. What is meant by “indecent”? Which “community” is being offended? These questions are still not resolved.
The intent of the authors of the Bill of Rights was to withhold the power to censor from the national government. Thus, the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press …” The idea was to leave decisions in these matters to the individual states. Today, American obscenity law is a patchwork of court decisions,