The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (16 page)

—MARGARET ANDERSON

9.

The United States declared war on the German Empire on April 6, 1917. One week later, a bomb exploded in a munitions plant in Philadelphia, killing 130 people, the result of a German plot. After nearly three years of isolation, the war had come home. “German agents are everywhere,” ads warned in newspapers and magazines. Government notices encouraged citizens to send names of potential enemies and, in some cases, to take suspicious individuals by the collar and turn them over to the police: “The only badge needed is your patriotic fervor.”

Vigilance organizations—the Minute Women, the Sedition Slammers, the Boy Spies of America—sprouted up around the country looking for German spies, enemy sympathizers and draft dodgers. The most extensive organization was the American Protective League, a quasi-official auxiliary to the Justice Department. For a seventy-five-cent fee, many members received “U.S. Secret Service” badges, despite protests from the actual Secret Service. The APL made arrests, patrolled with sidearms and coordinated with local, state and federal officials. Members had no training and little oversight, and the loose organizational structure allowed them to engage in blackmail, wiretapping, burglaries, kidnappings and lynchings. By the end of the war, the APL had investigated roughly three million “character and loyalty” cases. They found zero German spies.

Some of the German spies were Irish. The most ardent Irish nationalists hoped a British defeat would give Ireland its independence, and a few plotted to use Ireland as a staging ground for German attacks on Britain—one of the conspirators was New York Supreme Court Justice Daniel Cohalan. In 1916, three months after the plot was uncovered, a cargo ship carrying two million pounds of munitions headed for Britain exploded in New York Harbor, and the resulting blast measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. Irish dockworkers had planted the firebombs. Like Justice Cohalan, the dockworkers were probably members of the Clan-na-Gael, a militant Irish nationalist group operating in semisecrecy in several U.S. cities.

In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which banned any activity hindering the U.S. armed forces or helping its enemies during the war. Citizens could be imprisoned for up to twenty years for using language that might provoke draft dodging or military insubordination. Congress amended the law to criminalize “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States,” and over the next three years the government waged the largest crackdown on political dissent in U.S. history. The highest government official enforcing the Espionage Act was the postmaster general, and he directed local postmasters around the country to inspect all newspapers and magazines—anything unsealed—for material that would “embarrass or hamper” the war effort. The prime enforcer of political control was neither a federal intelligence agency nor a league of citizen spies. It was an army of three hundred thousand civil servants.

It’s strange to think of it now, but the Post Office Department was a major federal law enforcement agency. On the eve of World War I, the FBI (then called the Bureau of Investigation) was a fledgling subsidiary of the Justice Department. When the Espionage Act was signed in 1917, there were only three hundred Bureau of Investigation agents, and the Secret Service had only eleven counterespionage agents in New York. But the Post Office (an executive branch department in those days) was well established. It had 300,000 employees, including 422 inspectors and 56,000 postmasters overseeing the circulation of fourteen billion pieces of mail every year. The Post Office reached the far corners of the country, and it had been that way for decades. Long before there were highways and telephones there were postal roads and mail couriers. Small towns had post offices before they had cemeteries.

So when the United States entered World War I and the government wanted to censor dangerous words with a nationwide mechanism that had a long history of constitutional authority, it turned to the Post Office. The government gained the power to censor words by mastering the ability to circulate them, and warfare—the other foundation of big government—justified more censorship. This was how the government found James Joyce. The censorship troubles of
Ulysses
began not because vigilantes were searching for pornography but because government censors in the Post Office were searching for foreign spies, radicals and anarchists, and it made no difference if they were political or philosophical or if they considered themselves artists.

—

THE GROWTH of the federal government is largely a story of the growth of the Post Office, and a powerful Post Office was the cornerstone of the U.S. censorship regime. Since its establishment in 1782, the Post Office had a legal monopoly over mail circulation, but the government didn’t exercise that power until 1844, when Congress declared that the system’s purpose was “elevating our people in the scale of civilization and bringing them together in patriotic affection.” Out of a diverse population sprawling across the continent, the mail would make Americans. This policy began a half-century expansion during which the Post Office built roads, slashed postage rates and stiffened penalties for private carriers violating the government’s monopoly. From 1845 to 1890, mail volume increased one hundred times over.

The Post Office garnered most of its strength by slashing postage rates. In 1844, it charged twenty-five cents to carry a letter four hundred miles, and if the letter had two sheets, the postage doubled (envelopes counted as another sheet). Seven years later, that same letter could be delivered nearly across the continent for only three cents. Newspapers and magazines enjoyed reduced rates since before the days of Ben Franklin, and yet periodical postage also plummeted. By 1879, newspapers and magazines were grouped as “second-class mail” and delivered anywhere for two cents per pound. If the recipient lived in the same county as the sender, delivery was free. Rates didn’t hit rock bottom until 1885, when periodicals were delivered anywhere in the country for one cent per pound, and it remained that way until 1918.

The infrastructure that made Americans also made modernists. The Post Office enabled little magazines on shoestring budgets to reach nationwide audiences. If half of
The Little Review
’s subscribers were in Manhattan and the other half scattered around the country, Anderson and Heap could distribute two thousand copies of an issue for $3.33. Their postage bill for the October 1917 issue was $2.50—the price of just one Joyce fan’s subscription. And yet all the Post Office needed to do to control a magazine like
The Little Review
was revoke its second-class status. First-class postage was eight to fifteen times higher—an unsustainable cost for a little magazine—and the Supreme Court ruled that postal bans and rate increases didn’t infringe on free speech because publishers had other distribution options, even if denying a magazine’s second-class rates would bankrupt it.

World War I dramatically expanded postal censorship. Postmaster General Albert Burleson claimed the Espionage Act gave him the authority to judge mailed material without court approval or congressional oversight. When Congress asked Burleson to disclose his surveillance instructions to the nation’s postmasters, he simply refused. The Post Office decided who broke the law, who deserved rate increases or outright bans and who deserved criminal prosecution. Burleson was a man to be reckoned with. He wore a black coat to match the black umbrella he carried at all times, and one of the president’s advisers called him “the most belligerent member of the cabinet,” which was saying a lot in 1918. He once complained about a socialist newspaper’s “insidious attempt to keep within the letter of the law.”

Under Burleson’s direction, Post Office inspectors began leafing through newspapers and magazines for unpatriotic material. Within a year, the government suppressed more than four hundred different issues from scores of publications for a range of political statements, ranging from a poem praising Emma Goldman to a reprint of Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that Ireland should be a republic. By the end of the war, more than a thousand people were convicted of violating the Espionage Act, and hundreds received prison sentences.

The foundation of this systematic suppression of political speech was a particular reading strategy that government officials used when considering allegedly treasonous texts: intentions and effects were secondary to an inherently dangerous nature. It didn’t matter if a magazine or pamphlet
actually
led people to avoid the draft or aid the nation’s enemies. It was enough if the Post Office decided that the words could potentially cause trouble. The basis of political censorship was the self-evident danger of words, their ability to provoke illicit actions in anyone who might read them. In other words, the government read a treasonous text the same way it read pornography. You knew it when you saw it.

But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The government applied the Espionage Act well beyond the authority of the statute itself. Judges granted the Post Office broad power to crack down on the corrupting tendency of radical speech partly because they had been so accustomed to granting that same power over obscenity. By the time James Joyce’s
Ulysses
began to appear in
The Little Review
in 1918, the Post Office was in a position to ban the circulation of several of the novel’s chapters for being both obscene
and
anarchistic. In fact, the government’s reaction to
Ulysses
reveals how much nineteenth-century ideas about obscenity shaped twentieth-century ideas about radicalism. The threat of political words corrupting a vulnerable nation of immigrants might have seemed critical after President Wilson’s declaration of war in 1917, but the threat of sexual words—and the fight against them—had been established for decades.

—

THE HISTORY of the U.S. censorship regime began in earnest in 1873, when Anthony Comstock boarded a train to Washington, D.C., with a draft of a new federal law in his pocket and a satchel filled with his dirtiest pornography. Comstock was the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and because he understood the power of words, he understood the power of the Post Office. The government’s postal expansion began the year Comstock was born, and his lifetime corresponded with the emergence of mass print markets. Cheap reading material was flooding the country because distribution costs were plummeting as quickly as production costs. “The daily papers are turned out by hundreds of thousands each day,” he wrote,

and while the ink is not yet dry the United States mails, the express and railroad companies, catch them up and with almost lightning rapidity scatter them from Maine to California. Into every city, and from every city, this daily stream of printed matter pours, reaching every village, town, hamlet, and almost every home in the land.

Circulation was insidious. Comstock wanted the government to ban not just immoral books and pictures but also circulars and advertisements—everything that kept pornographers in business. A book like
Lord K’s Rapes and Seductions
wasn’t the only problem. They had to outlaw the catalog listing the book for sale and the newspapers printing the ads that told people where to find it. The law also had to ban contraception and abortion-related articles—birth control, after all, was part of the same avaricious business of lust. Pharmacists and smut peddlers profited from the same fantasy of sin without consequences.

On March 3, 1873, after nearly a month of lobbying, Ulysses S. Grant signed Comstock’s bill banning any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character” as well as anything intended to prevent conception or induce abortion. And it wasn’t just illegal to mail indecent things. It was illegal for anyone—even a doctor—to mail information
about
indecent things. Advertisements for condoms, for example, or instructional manuals explaining how to use a condom (or what a condom
is
) were now criminal if sent through the mail, whether in a magazine or a private letter. The Comstock Act, as it was called, granted search and seizure powers with warrants based on nothing more than the sworn complaint of one individual (Comstock, for example), and the penalties for mailing obscene material were much harsher: the maximum fine was now five thousand dollars instead of five hundred, and the maximum prison sentence increased from one year to ten.

States across the country exercised even more power. New York’s anti-obscenity statute criminalized the sale, production, advertisement and possession of immoral material with intent to distribute. It gave the police search and seizure powers and allowed courts to order the destruction of books and property. This federal patchwork of obscenity laws had perverse effects. A man was free to visit a brothel, but if he wrote a
story
about visiting a brothel he could go to prison—immoral words became more punishable than immoral acts. An office clerk who mailed an obscene book faced a heavier sentence than the book’s author, publisher and seller because the Comstock Act wasn’t about raiding bookshops. It was about raiding the nation’s most powerful distribution network.

When President Grant signed the bill, Comstock was sworn in as a special agent of the Post Office Department. He carried a gun and a badge, and he was one of only a handful of special agents empowered to make arrests across the United States. In retrospect, Comstock’s special agent appointment was as important as the law that bears his name, for he single-handedly transformed postal law enforcement. Previously, the Post Office’s special agents collected debts, supervised delivery service and arrested mail thieves. Post–Civil War obscenity regulations required the government to supervise far more than the distribution of the mail. It supervised the
content
of the mail. And yet no one exercised that power until Comstock was sworn in. Since Abraham Lincoln signed the first postal obscenity law in 1865, officials prosecuted about one person per year. In Comstock’s first nine months as a special agent, he prosecuted fifty-five. The country’s largest bureaucracy suddenly had an attack dog, and the circulation of words was never the same again.