
          A Letter from Lillian_Smith: "Old Seeds Bearing a Heavy Crop."
With an introduction by Rose Gladney
          By Gladney, RoseRose Gladney
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 4-5
          
          As contemporary debates concerning the National Endowment for the
Arts remind us that censorship, like patriotism (to paraphrase Samuel
Johnson), too often becomes the last refuge of scoundrels, the words
Lillian_Smith prepared for the 1944 annual meeting of the
Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union again raise timely end probing
questions. What fears are aroused in those who would censor art? What
in our culture continues to produce a Jesse Helms?
          In the spring of 1944 Lillian_Smith found her own work the subject
of a censorship debate. Her novel Strange Fruit
had been declared a "big best-seller" even before publication date,
Feb. 29. Within a month, March 20, it was labeled obscene and banned
by the Boston police. Two weeks later, with the advice of the
Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and the cooperation of the novel's
publishers, Reynal and Hitchcock, Harper's
Magazine columnist Bernard de Voto initiated a test case of the
ban by purchasing a copy of the book from Abraham Isenstadt, owner of
University Law Book Exchange in Cambridge. Joseph Welch, later made
famous in U.S. Army v. McCarthy, defended Strange Fruit, but on April 26 District Court Judge
Arthur P. Stone found the novel "obscene, tending to corrupt the
morals of youth." A subsequent appeal did not overturn his decision,
and the novel remains, technically at least, banned in Boston.
          Efforts to ban the book in Detroit were successfully defeated by
combined efforts of the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Public
Library. The other successful banning of Strange
Fruit occurred in mid-May when the U.S. Post Office ordered
newspapers and magazines not to advertise the novel. The ban lasted
only three days, however, because publisher Curtice Hitchcock sought
and obtained the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt.
          Because Lillian_Smith sent a copy of the following statement with a
note to Curtice Hitchcock, it was preserved with her correspondence in
the files of her subsequent publishers, Harcourt, Brace, &
Jovonavich. It is reproduced here with the permission of the Lillian
Smith estate.
          From: Lillian_Smith Clayton, Ga.  (May 26, 1944)
          Statement to Civil Liberties Union of Mass.  For Annual
Meeting
          There are many people who can not bear to face a truth that
hurts. There are some who have dosed doors so firmly on their own
emotional past that they go into a panic of fear when a book revives
old memories. There are others who, because of early childhood
training, have learned to look upon all frankness--however serious,
however necessary to mature understanding of human experience--as
something unclean and contaminating.
          These are our immature, emotionally undeveloped people; frozen on a
level of infantile experience, completely cut off from the possibility
of growth and change.
          Our culture, our values, our family experiences, the Puritanic
strains in our religion--all tend to produce such people in numbers
larger than we care to admit.
          These people fear a book like Strange Fruit
with a profound dread; and will seize on any pretext, however silly,
to keep others and themselves, from having access
to it.
          But there are many others who fear the effect of Strange Fruit on the racial status
quo; and, I think, within this group we shall find Boston's major
reason for banning the book. These people believe it is to their
political and economic advantage to keep the Negro and the Jew and
labor where they are today. They fear all change. They know when
racial segregation begins to weaken, that other forms of segregation
and exploitation will crumble with it. They fear the book because it
has the effect of stirring imagination and reawakening guilt
feelings.
          To these people, segregation in all its forms: racial, economic,
religious, psychological, must be maintained at however great a cost
to civil liberties and intellectual freedom.
          It is only by realizing that the charge of obscenity is a clumsy
attempt to destroy the book's power and prestige, 

that we, who believe
in civil_rights, can defend these rights in terms of this book. One
can argue until doomsday about good taste without arriving at a just
and true decision. Good taste is innate kindness and sensitiveness,
tactfully genuflecting to contemporary taboos--a subtle and delicate
blend of social good-will and hypocrisy that is too delightfully
elusive to be caught and thumb-printed. For instance, what was good
taste in men's bathing suits twenty years ago would not be worn today,
for a fortune, by one of the Watch and Ward gentlemen. Although by
their own inexorable logic they should be compelled to wear such a
garment while they go about plucking strange fruit! Yet, however
elusive it is, good taste plays a necessary role in the rituals of
everyday life and social affairs and always will.
          But a book is not a social situation. A book is a serious
examination of life. Truth cannot be adjusted to this year's
drawing-room manners, as can our behavior at a tea party. It is
completely irrelevant, therefore, to attempt to use taste as a
criterion for artistic truth--just as it would be to offer it as a
valid reason for refusing to operate on a sick man. Truth, science and
human need have never conformed to Watch and Ward manners or to postal
regulations, and never will.
          To suggest anything else is so contrary to common sense and sanity
that one is compelled to brush such excuses aside and look for the
hidden reasons. Why is a serious book with one plain word in it being
fought across the country by post-office and watch and ward
socieities and police?
          The answer to this question will lead us to the roots of our
culture--roots we must be willing to look at closely. For there is
rising rapidly, now, to the surface of our American life, forces of
hate and fear end ruthlessness that do not often show themselves so
plainly. These evils in our culture have been here for a long
time. They are old seeds that are now bearing a strange and heavy crop
of trouble. We, in fighting for the right of this book to be read, are
not fighting a little battle over one small word but a war against a
way of life that threatens to destroy all that we value in human
goodness and freedom and intelligence.
        
