Saved from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (The 50th Anniversary of the Ban)

Here’s another anniversary that slipped by unnoticed: June 11 was the 50th for the decision by which Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield banned the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence, from the United States mails. The book was declared to be pornographic, smutty, obscene, and filthy. (Obviously the order was drafted with the assistance of a lawyer, a species for which Roget’s Thesaurus is like unto scripture.)

For younger readers a little history is in order. From the time of George Washington’s first administration, beginning in 1789, until 1971 the U.S. Post Office was an integral part of the Executive branch of the federal government, and the Postmaster General was a member of the President’s Cabinet and, consequently, in the line of succession to the presidency. One Samuel Osgood was the first to hold the office, which put him just a handful of tragedies away from becoming the second President of the United States. Since 1971 only lawyers have quite understood the legal nature of the organization that delivers the mail. But I digress.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover had had an unfortunate time of it even before 1959. Lawrence completed it in 1928, and it was published in Italy that same year, but it was not published in Britain until 1960, when it became the subject of a notable prosecution for obscenity. Unfortunately for the state’s case, the prosecutor put to the jury the rhetorical question whether the book was the sort of thing they would wish their wives or servants to read.

In the United States the book was one of several – others included Casanova’s memoirs, Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves, and the Kama Sutra – that were offered to the U.S. Senate by Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah as examples of the sort of scandalous literature that would demoralize America if permitted entry into the country. This was in March 1930, just a few months before he and a colleague immortalized themselves in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, widely credited with having made the Great Depression truly great. Anyway, to make his point Sen. Smoot proposed to read some racy passages from these books into the floor debate. Alas, in the end he was not put to the test of declaiming about “john thomas” and “lady jane” before his fellow solons and the crowd in the gallery.

“I did not believe there were such books printed in the world. They are lower than the beasts!” he declared. “I’d rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books.”

He was joined in the great senatorial sport of denouncing sin by South Carolina’s Sen. Cole Blease (real name; not a character out of Faulkner), a career politician and upholder of lynch law who opined thus: “I’d rather see the democratic and republican form of government forever destroyed if necessary to protect the virtue of the womanhood of
America.”

That virtue presumably was finally quashed in 1960, when a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Postmaster Summerfield’s order was contrary to something called the Bill of Rights.

A few years later a high-school friend of mine was caught reading Lady Chatterley by her English teacher, who not only confiscated the book but hurled it through an open window. There’s ignorant, preening bloviation, you see, and then there’s action.

Nowhere to my knowledge is there any mention in these legal and legislative proceedings that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is just a damned silly book. I’m pretty sure that’s what Mrs. Kidwell was thinking, though.

Here, by the way, is Tom Lehrer’s humorous take Lady Chatterley and banned literature in general: