Free Speech

• Paul Zindel’s books for young adults have often been censored or challenged by would-be censors. Mr. Zindel responded by keeping track of the ideas of the people he calls the CensorKooks. For example, one woman in Pennsylvania wanted to censor the word green in all school textbooks. Why? Green is the color of the Devil. In Cincinnati, a man wanted all vowels to be censored from all library books. Why? “If you can’t say it, you can’t do it.” Mr. Zindel once heard a would-be censor on a talk show scream, “And what are they teaching in our schools? They are teaching ‘Catcher in the Rye’! ‘The Pigman’! And ‘Lord of the Flies’! — three of the filthiest books ever written!” The would-be censor might have been better able to present his case if he had actually read these books — or he might have decided that these books didn’t need to be censored.

• Marvel Comics maven Stan Lee was once asked by the U.S. Office of Health, Education, and Welfare to put an anti-illegal drug message into some of the comicbooks he was creating. Happy to oblige, Mr. Lee wrote a three-part story in which Spider-Man saves the life of a friend who thinks that he can fly because of an illegal drug he took. Unfortunately, the censors at the Comics Code Authority rejected the storyline because it dealt with illegal drugs, even though the message was clearly anti-illegal drugs. Because he believed in the message (and because the U.S. government had asked him for his help), Mr. Lee had the comics printed without the seal of approval of the Code on the cover. The result: Lots of positive letters from lots of anti-illegal drug organizations.

• Nancy Garden is the lesbian author of “Annie on My Mind,” a young people’s novel portraying lesbian characters in a positive manner. Religious groups in Kansas attacked the book, which was in school libraries, and a fundamentalist preacher even burned a copy of the book in public. However, students, parents and librarians protested when “Annie on My Mind” was removed from school libraries. One boy and his friends even checked approximately 3,000 books out of school district libraries to show how empty the shelves would be if controversial books were removed.

• Many art critics respected the primitive art of Grandma Moses, but others did not. One critic remarked, “A primitive is an artist who doesn’t know much about painting, but knows what people like.” Other people thought that the popularity of Grandma Moses’ art was merely a passing fad. When gallery director Otto Kallir wrote her a letter intended to comfort her because of the critical attacks on herself and her art, Grandma Moses wrote back, “This is a free country, and people will talk. Let them; if we do what is right, they can’t hurt us.”

• Alfred Hitchcock ran into a problem with the censors because of the shower scene in “Psycho.” The censors insisted that the scene showed nudity and the knife touching flesh. Mr. Hitchcock knew that the scene contained nothing of the kind but was edited to make the viewers think that that was what they were seeing. However, he agreed to make changes to the scene, waited a while, then resubmitted the movie exactly as it had been when the censors saw it. This time, the censors agreed that the movie was OK.

• Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” is anti-censorship and pro-free speech, and it has frequently been the target of censors. Some students once wrote Mr. Bradbury to tell him that a passage about abortion had been deleted from a textbook version of his novel. Mr. Bradbury examined the textbook version and discovered that the editors had “censored some 75 separate sections from the novel.”

• Anna Pavlova was once censored while dancing in the United States. The authorities thought that the skirts of her ballet costumes were too short, so they made her wear longer skirts before allowing her to perform. About this experience, Ms. Pavlova said, “The evil was in the mind of my critics, I think, rather than in the beautiful art which it has always been my endeavor to give to the world.”

• When television was new, cigarette companies sometimes sponsored shows and censored them. For example, when Camel cigarettes was the sponsor of a news program, it would not allow any “No Smoking” signs to be seen in the program’s news footage, and it would not allow anyone to be seen smoking a cigar — with the exception of Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

• One way to censor a book is to steal it. During the 1979-1980 school year, a student checked out four books from a library in Montello, Wisc. Three of the books were written by Judy Blume, who is frequently the target of censors. The books were never returned, and librarians concluded that the parents of the student had stolen the books so that no one else could check them out and read them.

• L. Frank Baum’s books, including “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” have occasionally been censored. In 1957, Ralph Ulveling, the Detroit library director, ordered the book taken off library shelves because, he charged, it had a “cowardly approach to life.” The Detroit Times had an interesting response — it serialized the children’s novel, along with a notation that this book had been banned.

• “You want gun control? Get rid of the metal detectors around the Capitol building. Take away the Secret Service protection for all politicians… By next week the worst thing you’ll have to worry about is drive-by shoutings, which, I might add, are protected by the First Amendment.” — Dennis Miller, “Ranting Again”

• When the album “Jesus Christ Superstar” by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber came out, the rock opera was controversial and sometimes even banned. Arkansas’ biggest radio station banned the single “Superstar.” It also banned all records produced by the record’s label: Decca.

• “A free society means a society based on free competition, and there is no more important competition than competition in ideas, competition in opinion. This form of competition is essential to the preservation of a free press.” — Adlai Stevenson

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