ABSTRACT
In writing Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail, Mr. Paul and Mr. Schwartz have performed a service, for a large and peculiar sector in our national behavior was made public in emotionally laden crusades of committees concerned about the psychic sanitation of the young, in the accompanying news reports, or in pamphlets and monographs that were difficult to secure. The basic issue involved in suppressing obscenity, that of censorship, was not debated in the Senate until 1930, and then only because it suddenly struck Senator Cutting that in the disguise of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was a major challenge to the principles of democracy. The issues of censorship are notoriously treacherous, and this particular treatment indicates the need not for positivistic history but for a synthetic work, lodged as this work is lodged, in the legal narrative. The legal narrative alone, however, evades large areas that pertain to history proper.
