The Little Magazine That Defied American Censorship

Imposing censorship is, the science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once remarked, “like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.” In Adam Morgan’s A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, a young girl stands in for the baby, and modernist literature, particularly James Joyce’s Ulysses, is the red meat. Morgan’s book is a biography of Margaret Caroline Anderson, founder of The Little Review, a literary magazine that ran from 1914 to 1929 and had the distinction of being the first to publish extracts from Ulysses in the United States—a fact that also makes it a cautionary tale of censorship run amok.

Anderson and her circle deeply felt the trauma and revolt accompanying America’s controversial entry into the Great War in April 1917. Her sometime partner and co-editor, Jane Heap, wrote sarcastically in June of that year: “It is a great thing to be living when an age passes.” The 1910s had once appeared a period of flowering for the avant-garde writers, artists, and movements surrounding The Little Review that were now suddenly running up against wartime censorship. Alongside friends like anarchist Emma Goldman and leftist newspaperman Floyd Dell, Anderson and Heap mourned the erosion of free speech and the reinvention of the government as a propaganda machine out to silence or deport any questioners. President Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 targeted any speech that could be interpreted as interfering with the war effort, and criminalized any possibly disloyal speech against the government, flag, Constitution, or military. Law enforcement zoned in on pacifists, socialists, and other anti-war protesters.

The repression of the war years left a lasting effect on American culture in the following decades. “The Great War may have been over, but a violent culture war had taken its place,” Morgan writes, “with capitalism, WASPs, and Victorian-era values on one side and anarchism, socialism, immigrants, and modern ideas like birth control and women’s suffrage lumped together on the other.” The Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920 marked the early convulsions of the first Red Scare, as federal agents attacked leftist bookstores, printers, and union halls, arresting thousands and deporting hundreds.

Somehow, it was in this atmosphere that The Little Review nurtured some of the most daring literature of the century. The Little Review published T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and James Joyce, among many others. This great, long-vanished magazine was of and for the modernists. Within that group, it was a beacon and a rallying force. “In all the world there is no such thing as an old sunrise, an old wind upon the cheeks, or an old kiss from the lips of your beloved,” Sherwood Anderson editorialized in an early issue, “and in the craft of writing there can be no such thing as age in the souls of the young poets and novelists who demand for themselves the right to stand up and be counted among the soldiers of the new.”

The conditions that Margaret Anderson and her contemporaries worked in have often been considered an exceptionally repressive moment in American history. Yet, as historians such as Adam Hochschild have recently remarked, the government-imposed limits on free speech and unabashed attacks on writers of that time are in some ways “eerily similar” to our own moment, with its attacks on the press and blocking of funds for scientific research focused on race, gender, and transgender issues. What is perhaps most striking about Morgan’s history is how precarious free speech has been in American history, and how exceptional a climate of free expression. Free speech protections as we have recently known them were not affirmed until the 1960s. The ACLU emerged from the aftermath of the first Red Scare, but so did a culture in which suppression was normalized.

Margaret Anderson was charismatic, queer, and cutting. Born in 1886, she already had unusually deep feelings about language even as a child. (When she learned that the word “ball” wasn’t spelled “boll” as she thought it should be, she felt “a resentment against God or man for having imposed an incredible stupidity upon the world.”) Her youth in Indiana was a lonely struggle, for the most part. She began finding a trace of steady happiness only after a slightly scandalous move to Chicago: She stayed at the YWCA and was soon cut off by most of her genteel Midwestern family. She was exactly where she was meant to be. “I always edit everything,” she wrote, in a kind of manifesto of the self. “I edit people’s clothes.… tones of voice, their laughter, their words.… It is this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor.” One of her employers was Francis Hackett at the Chicago Evening Post, who would go on to become the founding literary editor of The New Republic.

Anderson’s early professional life flourished in Chicago, and the book is in part a love letter to the city. Chicago gave her a place to find her voice without feeling it was being shaped or modulated by an existing aesthetic. English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy wrote Anderson in a letter, “… what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by turns febrility and torpor.” She would later find New York crawling with coteries, conducive to that very febrility and torpor, and, though she eventually traded the United States for France, she kept Chicago in her heart.

Working out of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, Anderson started The Little Review there in 1914. The precariousness of the project, especially when it came to money, was no match for her will power and imagination. “My greatest enemy is reality,” she would write in the opening pages of her memoir. She had covers printed with the words, “Making No Compromise With the Public Taste.” For the summer months of 1915, after running out of cash and losing her apartment, Anderson moved into a lakeside tent compound and edited The Little Review “by the light of a flaming gasoline torch.” Emma Goldman visited, grumbled about mosquitoes, and demurred when Anderson—clad in a baby-blue bathing suit—urged her to take off her clothes.

Jane Heap came into Anderson’s life around the same time. Heap, who had grown up on the grounds of an insane asylum in Kansas, was in Anderson’s experience “a hand on the exact octave that is me.” She wore men’s clothes and was one of the most brilliant conversationalists of her age. Like Anderson, Heap looked askance at the grand ambitions and derivative methods of most of the writers finding success around them. Once Anderson persuaded her to join the Review’s editorial staff, she took to the work as a vocation. “Here,” Heap wrote in a review typical of her voice, “is another man who hasn’t written the great American novel.”

After a vagabond summer in California, Anderson and Heap decamped for Manhattan in 1917. They had to use the cheapest possible printer for The Little Review, and their new foreign editor, Ezra Pound, was enraged by the typos that resulted. Yet from the start, Pound identified strongly with the tiny and perpetually struggling magazine. “One does not want to see the country sink back into the arms of Harpers and the Atlantic,” Pound wrote Anderson, disdainful of the establishment magazines and their predictable contents. (Her feelings for Pound mixed reverence with eye-rolling. Meeting him in Paris in 1923 was, she wrote, like “watching a large baby perform its repertoire of physical antics gravely.”)

Through its 15-year lifespan, the magazine grew into a modernist colossus. It never paid anybody, and it always urgently needed money. What little there was came from donors who were sometimes teased to their faces. Pound called John Quinn, an attorney who subsidized each of Pound’s contributions to The Little Review and later defended the magazine’s right to publish extracts from Joyce’s Ulysses, “my capitalist.” The price of an annual subscription to the Review was one dollar higher than the more established periodical Poetry, but Anderson reasoned it held something more wide-ranging—and more exciting. Poetry, after all, did not welcome the “new prose” that Anderson loved and championed; it was not likely to attract reproof from the vice squad. The Little Review received that barbed honor within its first five years.

Anderson first read the opening words of Ulysses in late January 1918. She told Heap, “We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” Pound agreed. A month earlier, he’d lobbied for The Little Review to take the plunge, writing, “I suppose we’ll damn well be suppressed.… BUT it is damn wellworth it. I see no reason why the nations should sit in darkness merely because Anthony Comstock was horrified at the sight of his grandparents in copulation.” The magazine began serializing Ulysses the same year and continued through December 1920, despite a lukewarm critical reception. (Virginia Woolf called it “an illiterate, underbred book,” while American readers wrote the magazine letters of protest over its “cheap Bowery vileness.”) During the course of that period, four issues were seized and burned for obscenity.

Together, Anderson and Heap faced obscenity charges in court in 1921. “This trial,” Morgan writes, “would make ­Ulysses the most influential literary work of the twentieth century. It would change the very definition of what a book could be.” It’s debatable whether Ulysses required this specific and embarrassing legal incident to take its place in the cultural pantheon, but it was necessary in one sense: The reversal of that decision 12 years later changed the prospects of every novelist that followed.

In a New York City courtroom, the floor “worn smooth by millions of Oxford shoes over the last 50 years,” three judges presided, including James J. McInerney. McInerney was a known quantity. In September 1915, he had ruled against Bill Sanger, husband of Margaret, for giving out birth control information. (“The trouble is that many women are too selfish,” he proclaimed during the sentencing hearing.) Anderson’s looks won her a measure of protection. When the time came to read aloud the offending passages from The Little Review, “one of the judges who had fallen asleep woke up, looked at Margaret ‘with a protective paternity,’ and ‘refused to allow the obscenity’ to be read in her presence.”

The judges’ thinking in this case grew out of a precedent in English law called the Hicklin test. In Regina v. Hicklin (1868, U.K.), the decision said obscenity was present if any part of the material had a tendency to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” If a section of a book, no matter how it was taken out of context, was seen as likely to “stimulate sexual thoughts in impressionable minds,” the work as a whole was classified as obscene.

Judgments about obscenity revolved around the imagined consciousness of the innocent reader—usually, in legal arguments, an adolescent girl. In her memoirs, Anderson writes that the courts considered her “a danger to the minds of young girls”; the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice soon leveled the same charge at the publishers of lesbian-forward novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Heap spoke out powerfully about the hypocrisy inherent in this idealization of girls and in the legal challenges leveled at Ulysses. “So the mind of the young girl rules this country?” Heap wrote in The Little Review of December 1920. If that were so, she wondered, why were there no girls in the U.S. Senate? Across America, millions of young girls were caring for their siblings and working for pay. Barely enfranchised yet, they had no true representative in the government.

Anderson and Heap’s guilty verdict took “a few minutes,” and each editor was fined $50, about equivalent to $900 today. Seized copies of The Little Review were sent to the Salvation Army, where, Morgan writes, “they were ripped up for recycling by sex workers in reform programs.” Anderson despaired.

The fortunes of Ulysses turned sunnier barely a year later. In Paris, Sylvia Beach—another queer woman—published the book to rapturous reviews in 1922. Anderson and Heap separated, with Heap shouldering most of The Little Review. As though following Ulysses, Anderson moved to Paris in 1923 after falling in love with Georgette LeBlanc, then a high-profile French singer. The two would live in impossibly romantic and ramshackle places: a ruined chateau and later a converted lighthouse on the Seine. The Little Review, after being edited largely by Heap for several years, printed its final issue in 1929.

In 1933, American publisher Bennett Cerf paid a customs officer to confiscate ­Ulysses, provoking another trial. On December 6, a federal judge ruled that it was no longer obscene. What had changed? Either the minds of young girls, the law’s perception of its own role regarding the morals of art, or a combination thereof. American culture now embraced the modernists. Their literary reputations had grown, and American readers bought up five-figure print runs quickly. The New York book publishers now made millions, according to Morgan, from selling Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and other Little Review regulars—most of whom had been banned a dozen years previously, and shunned by nearly every press because of the legal risk.

Ulysses’s American opponents had equated the novel with pornography. At a time in the United States when sexual purity had become a public health priority (the war had uncovered a silent epidemic of syphilis and gonorrhea raging through American households) as well as a social asset (specifically for young girls), legal decisions framed censorship as a protective measure. Some communities were stricter than others: being “banned in Boston,” which was heavily Roman Catholic, became almost a badge of honor for novelists. Much of Europe had no comparable moral police making publishing decisions. In Anderson’s words, “The Little Review was the first magazine to reassure Europe as to America, and the first to give America the tang of Europe.”

In contrast with today’s book-ban disputes, largely driven by political actors and school boards, Anderson and Heap faced censorship from the vice agents and postal inspectors who opened mail and trawled through books. The power of the Comstock Act, the federal postal censorship law that took effect in 1873, was barely beginning to wane. Vice agents like John Saxton Sumner, who kept a close eye on the Review while fruitlessly yearning to be respected by the literary in-crowd, sounded the alarm about writing like Joyce’s that dwelled on sex for its own sake, without a moral message. “It is the Mr. Sumners who have made it [sex] an obscenity,” wrote Heap, as opposed to Joyce and his ilk, “who discovered love, created the lover, made sex everything that it is beyond a function.” Literature jostled with the sex education and birth control movements in the battle for freedom of speech.

Anderson and Heap fought for Ulysses because it was “the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have,” in Anderson’s words. The Little Review embraced the novel simply because, as a work of art, it made its own rules. At great cost to themselves, these two editors dared to imagine a society where transgressive literature was a kind of portal to a freer future. They were ahead of their time, and possibly again ahead of ours.