DIRTY WORKS

The history of a spirited crusade against outdated censorship laws.

As cultural historian Gary demonstrates in this exhaustively researched book, the Roaring ’20s introduced “a culture increasingly marked by leisure and consumption” that moral custodians feared “would uncouple sex from the idea of sin.” The author describes the efforts of ACLU co-founder and lawyer Morris Ernst, who, from the 1920s to the ’50s, fought decades-old obscenity laws with colleagues Alexander Lindey and Harriet Pilpel in support of feminists, birth control activists, and others. Gary expertly details the forces Ernst battled, including the 1873 Comstock Act, named after Anthony Comstock, “the nation’s foremost censor and smut eradicator”; the subsequent efforts of his protégé, John Sumner; and the Postal and Customs officials who carried out their remit. The author then describes Ernst’s biggest cases, featuring such clients as Mary Ware Dennett, indicted for obscenity over her pamphlet The Sex Side of Life (1918); Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness (1928), “the most important English-language lesbian novel” of its time; and Margaret Sanger, after New York City police officers raided her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. Gary also describes the firm’s work defending sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and the U.S. publication of Ulysses before Ernst’s late-life “truculent anticommunism” and his “dubious alliance” with J. Edgar Hoover. The long sections on legal arguments are dry, but the narrative contains memorable passages. Among them is Ernst’s cross-examination of a doctor who unwittingly became a witness for the defense when he admitted that contraceptive devices could be used for other medical purposes. Gary quotes lines from censorship advocates that read as risible, as when a U.S. Attorney warned that Dennett’s pamphlet “would lead to sexual depravity in the streets” and “invoked ancient Roman practices as a useful model for thinking about a daughter’s maiden chastity,” comments that “produced plenty of smirks among Dennett’s supporters.”

An important book about a neglected figure in the fight for reproductive rights and freedom of expression.