The Right to Read

Mr. Blanshard goes to the heart of the most important controversial issues of our time, examining the great moral problem-areas of American lie in which the people's right to read is threatened by censorship laws or reactionary pressure groups. He covers the recent battles for freedom in America's public libraries, schools and newspapers from Los Angeles to Washington, and from Atlanta to Detroit. He discusses paperbacks, comic books, "girlie" magazines, tabloids, book-burning, pornography, textbooks, libel laws, fraudulent advertising, monopoly in the ownership of newspapers, Communist propaganda, the National Organization of Decent Literature and the American Legion.

Although Mr. Blanshard is a lawyer, this is not a legal treatise. However, it is packed with well-documented legal facts, the kind of facts which ordinary readers want to know about the laws and customs controlling our reading matter, especially in the twilight zones of obscenity, sedition, blasphemy, fraud and violence. It summarizes the legal decision in these matters in popular language, and discusses the social concepts that lie behind the laws. It asks those vital questions which concern the common man: How bad are the comic book, and should they be suppressed? Dare we put Communist books on our public library shelves? Who doctors our textbooks? Does anti-religious literature have a fair chance in America? Should the common man have the right to read the truth in wartime? Will the literature of internationalism destroy the loyalty of our school children? Where did our ideas of obscene literature come from?

This is not a blanket attack on censorship, but a reasoned analysis of the whole pattern of the control and the distribution of reading matter in our civilization. Through all the discussion runs an emphasis upon the need for preserving America as an open society in which there will be a reasonable balance between freedom and responsibility Mr. Blanshard's deepest concern is with the right of the non-conformist minority in morals, politics, economics and religion to write and speak freely without penalty. "Censored ideas," he says, "are usually the most vital ideas of our life, and man's whole future may depend upon  his right to examine them with free intelligence."

Paul Blanshard. The Right to Read: The Battle Against Censorship. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1/1/1956. Hardcover. 339 pp.