Censorship: supervision and control of the information and ideas circulated within a society. In modern times, censorship refers to the examination of media including books, periodicals, plays, motion pictures, and television and radio programs for the purpose of altering or suppressing parts thought to be offensive. The offensive material may be considered immoral or obscene, heretical or blasphemous, seditious or treasonable, or injurious to the national security.
--Encarta Encyclopedia
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
1726
Irish Protestant clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift publishes Gulliver's Travels anonymously in 1726. The four-part novel relates ship captain Lemuel Gulliver's voyages to fanciful countries such as Lilliput and Brobdingnag, where he meets both tiny and giant inhabitants.
The work's satirical attacks on English politicians and social practices, as well as its coarse descriptions of bodily functions, provoke much comment and controversy among the reading public. Even the first publisher of the book fears that it is too critical of English society and expurgates the text slightly, over Swift's objections.
The first printing sells out in a week, and the book is never thereafter out of print. However, Gulliver's Travels is often published in expurgated versions, both in England and abroad. In the 19th century, Victorian critics charge that Swift's view of human nature is too pessimistic.
Although Swift intends the book for an adult audience, Gulliver's Travels imaginative storyline and clear writing help make the book a children's classic, generally in abridged editions. To this day, publishers of school versions, even at the college level, struggle with how much of the book may be printed. Gulliver's Travels is perhaps most frequently encountered today in adaptations for film, stage, or television, many of which are aimed toward children and lack large sections of the story and Swift's satirical tone.
Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
1988
The 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses in Britain unleashes a firestorm of worldwide protest from Islamic fundamentalists. They assert that the hallucinatory comic fable by Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie blasphemes the Koran and the prophet Muhammad. There are violent demonstrations against the book in the world's major Islamic enclaves, including a book-burning outside London. In India and Pakistan, tens of thousands of protesters gather, and more than 20 are killed by police. Governments throughout the Muslim world ban the book.
Five months after the book's release, Iran's religious and political leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, sentences Rushdie and his associates to death, with a bounty that eventually rises to more than $5 million. Rushdie goes into hiding under British government protection and remains in fearful seclusion for six years. During this time, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, is stabbed to death and attempts are made on the life of the Italian translator and Norwegian publisher of the book. The death sentence persists, even after the Ayatollah Khomeini dies and is replaced by a less fundamentalist regime.
While in hiding, Rushdie continues to write, publishing four books of fiction, including The Moor's Last Sigh, which wins Britain's prestigious Whitbread Award for best novel of 1995. Around the world, writers, publishers, and editors come to his aid, raising money and lobbying for international pressure against Iran to lift the death sentence. In 1998, the Iranian president announces the Rushdie affair is "completely finished," although a private Muslim foundation maintains a nearly $3 million bounty. Rushdie appears in public more and more often in the mid- and late '90s, meeting with President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, even reading a "Top Ten" List on the Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. Although the edict has been lifted, Rushdie still claims he cannot live a normal life.
Early Jazz
1900-1930
The American musical art form jazz emerges in New Orleans around the advent of the 20th century. Jazz blends elements from varied traditions, including African and African American, religious, brass band, and blues styles. The improvisational music that results has a syncopated rhythm, and originally both the performers and audiences are African American.
New Orleans' Storyville, a notorious Red Light district, is home to the brothels and bars that provide the only venues for jazz, since African American performers are banned from performing at white clubs. In 1917, the U.S. Navy, fearing dissipation and violence among sailors, shuts down Storyville, scattering jazz musicians, who join riverboat bands or move to cities such as Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City, where local styles evolve. Ironically, the first jazz recording is made that same year by an all-white band.
Jazz's popularity grows, and as it attracts a wider audience, so do campaigns to censor this "devil's music." Early detractors like Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, ridicule jazz, saying it sounds better played backwards. A Cincinnati home for expectant mothers wins an injunction to prevent construction of a neighboring theater where jazz will be played, convincing a court that the music is dangerous to fetuses. By the end of the 1920s, at least 60 communities across the nation enact laws prohibiting jazz in public dance halls.
The introduction of Prohibition in 1920 brings jazz into gangster-run nightclubs, the venues that serve alcohol and hire black musicians. These speakeasies allow whites and blacks to mingle socially for the first time; they also draw young audiences from all social classes, attracted to both the music and the increasingly suggestive jazz dances. Both the mixing of the races and the widespread belief that jazz incites sexual activity causes critics of jazz to step up their efforts. "Jazz was originally the accompaniment of the voodoo dance, stimulating half-crazed barbarians to the vilest of deeds," proclaims Ann Shaw Faulkner, president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, a powerful alliance of women's social and reform groups that launches a crusade against jazz in 1921.
But the reformers do not halt the growing popularity of jazz among both black and white audiences. Recordings and radio broadcasts allow the music to reach beyond nightclubs, and the arrival of virtuosos such as New Orleans-born cornet and trumpet player Louis Armstrong and composer Duke Ellington propel the art form to a higher level.
In the following decades, jazz continues to evolve, attracting both black and white audiences. Increasingly it is identified as one of America's greatest contributions to music and becomes a subject of academic study and analysis. Public opposition to jazz fades as new generations embrace swing, big band, bebop, and later styles. However, during the Cold War, jazz is still banned in some Eastern European countries for being subversive and decadent. Well into the 1980s, the underground clubs where it is performed in these countries provide meeting places for political dissidents.
Elvis Presley
1956
By the spring of 1956, rock 'n' roll sensation Elvis Presley is fast becoming a national phenomenon. His first single for RCA records, "Heartbreak Hotel," is number one on the charts, and plans are in the works for his movie debut. Everywhere Presley performs, his sultry looks, swinging hips, and dynamic vocal style drive teenage listeners wild. His ability to perform music influenced by black rhythm and blues for a white audience brings this music to the growing postwar "Baby Boom" generation.
Presley has already appeared six times on national television, but it is his appearance on The Milton Berle Show on June 5, 1956, that triggers the first controversy of his career. Presley sings his latest single, "Hound Dog," with all the pelvis-shaking intensity his fans scream for. Television critics across the country slam the performance for its "appalling lack of musicality," for its "vulgarity" and "animalism." The Catholic Church takes up the criticism in its weekly organ in a piece headlined "Beware Elvis Presley." Concerns about juvenile delinquency and the changing moral values of the young find a new target in the popular singer.
After Berle's show, Ed Sullivan, whose variety show is one of television's most popular, declares that he will never hire Presley. Steve Allen, who has already booked Presley for The Tonight Show, resists pressure from NBC to cancel the performance, promising he will not allow the singer to offend. When Presley appears on Allen's show in July, he good-naturedly agrees to spoof his image by dressing in white formal wear and singing "Hound Dog" to a basset hound. The show garners high ratings.
In August, Ed Sullivan reverses his decision and announces he has signed the young star to an unprecedented $50,000, three-show contract. During the first two appearances, although the camera sometimes pulls far back to show Presley's gyrations at an unthreatening distance, there is no effort to control what Presley does or sings. But for the final show, the CBS cameras reveal Presley only from the waist up, even during his performance of a gospel tune. At the end of the show, Sullivan makes it a point to put his arm around Presley and compliment him for being "a real decent, fine boy." Some historians believe the camera instructions may have been orchestrated by Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, in order to provoke publicity.
Presley's music, with its combination of both rhythm and blues and country influences, helps launch rock 'n' roll; his intense popularity among America's youth makes him one of the first media superstars. By the time of his death 20 years later, Presley will have produced 90 record albums, charted 149 singles, including 18 at number one on the Billboard chart, acted in 31 films, and performed before countless fans. His funeral is a national media event.
Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto
1851
Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi signs a contract in April 1850 to write a new work for the 1850-'51 season of Venice's La Fenice theater. Among the proposed subjects is an adaptation of Victor Hugo's play, Le Roi s'amuse, which tells the dark story of a lecherous king, Francis I, his hunchbacked jester, Tribolet, and the jester's innocent daughter, who is raped by the king
The Minister of Public Works in Paris had shut down Le Roi s'amuse after a single performance in 1832 because of the curses and insults in the text, the portrayal of royalty as corrupt, and the offensiveness of the final scene, in which Tribolet carries the body of his daughter in a sack, thinking it is the king, whom he has hired an assassin to kill. Verdi, however, sees great operatic potential in the play, and writes from his home in Busetto to his librettist Francesco Piave, in May 1850, encouraging him to "turn Venice upside down to make the censors permit this subject." Piave suggests that all will go well.
This proves not to be the case, as many different authorities, including the police and the official censor, must be satisfied. The first objections come from the director of La Fenice, who finds the story immoral. Piave defends the libretto and Verdi writes to explain work is already under way, and that if forced to take another subject because of censorship, he could not write a satisfactory opera.
The Venice police request a copy of the libretto, which Verdi has sent at once, but he instructs Piave to make no "deals that will lead to changes in the characters, the plot, or the dramatic situation." He also demands that the librettist resolve the problem promptly.
Only a few days later, La Fenice writes Verdi to say that the opera, now titled La maledizione (The Curse,) has been prohibited by the office of public order, cited by the Military Governor of Venice as a "deplorable," "repugnant," "obscene triviality." The final line of the governor's letter warns La Fenice "not to insist further on this matter."
Verdi is enraged, blaming Piave for false assurances that the opera would be approved. He writes La Fenice to discuss alternatives, none attractive and ends his letter "the damage and the unhappiness resulting from this veto are so great that I have no words to describe them."
Piave, however, does not give up, and works with officials from the theater to revise the story. By December 11, the proposed premiere only a few months off, they send a version to Verdi which the censors have approved, despite the earlier edict. The title and setting are now changed, the king has been demoted to a duke, the sex and other corrupt behavior significantly softened.
Verdi finds the revision largely unacceptable: the curse which sets off the drama now has no motive; Triboletto, the jester, has been de-hunched and is no longer ugly. And the sack in which he unknowingly drags the body of his beloved daughter is eliminated. Verdi writes, "What difference did the sack make to the police? Are they afraid of the effect it has? ... If you take away the sack, it is unlikely that Triboletto would talk for half an hour to a corpse, without having a flash of lightning show him that it is his daughter." The tragic climax of the opera is thus rendered absurd.
La Fenice is now in crisis; the new season depends on a new opera by Verdi. Piave and others meet the censors and take up Verdi's demands, searching for a compromise. On December 23, they write Verdi that his main requests can be granted and "there will be no problem about the sack." A new title for the opera, Rigoletto, is proposed. The police approve the work, asking only for the change of a few names. On January 26, Piave writes to Verdi, "At last yesterday at three in the afternoon our Rigoletto reached the directors safe and sound, with no broken bones and no amputation."
Verdi arrives in Venice with the completed score on February 19, with three weeks to rehearse Rigoletto, which is expected to save an otherwise lackluster season at La Fenice. It premieres on March 11, 1851, to sell-out crowds and mixed reviews, many critics offended by the subject. Despite this, and a heavily cut version in Rome which fails, the opera soon enters the repertoire of opera companies in Italy and around the world. Now considered one of Verdi's greatest works, it is one of the most performed operas of all time.
The Federal Theater Project's The Cradle Will Rock
1937
At the height of the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt creates the Works Progress Administration, a relief organization designed to put American workers back on the job. Responding to unemployment in the cultural arena, the WPA institutes Federal Music, Art, Writers, and Theater Projects, employing 40,000 people in units across the country.
The New York theater unit hosts a remarkable company of writers, actors, directors, and crew, led by producer John Houseman and his protégé director, 21-year-old Orson Welles. Although their initial productions have been classic works, in 1937 Welles and Houseman choose Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, a contemporary folk opera set against the backdrop of a steel strike. Characters in the left-leaning work include fat-cat capitalists, brutal policemen, heroic union organizers, and a warm-hearted prostitute.
While the play is going through rehearsal, violent labor action spreads throughout parts of United States. Simultaneously, conservative members of Congress attack WPA director Henry Hopkins and his liberal idelogy, attempting to cut funding. Fearing The Cradle Will Rock's pro-labor message will cause further damage to the WPA, on the eve of opening night, federal authorities shut the production down.
Welles travels to Washington to plead for a reversal -- there are 14,000 seats sold for the run of the play. Failing, he rushes back to New York, as an audience of 600 mill about the Federal Theater wondering if the show will indeed go on. Welles and Houseman telephone frantically to secure an alternate venue, and the cast and audience march 20 blocks across town to another theater. Blitzstein sits at a piano alone on stage; union rules prohibit Equity performers playing in what is now a non-union house. One by one, however, most of the actors voice their parts from their seats, to the applause and cheers of a delighted crowd. This break with the WPA gives birth to the Mercury Theater, which in various incarnations produces some of the most memorable productions of the '30s.
Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907
With Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso offends the Paris art scene in 1907. Showing his eight-foot-square canvas to a group of painters, patrons, and art critics at his studio, Picasso meets with almost unanimous shock, distaste, and outrage. The painter Matisse is angered by the work, which he considers a hoax, an attempt to paint the fourth dimension. "It was the ugliness of the faces that froze with horror the half-converted," the critic Salmon writes later. The painter Derain comments wryly, "One day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas."
In the months leading up to the painting's creation, Picasso struggles with the subject -- five women in a brothel. He creates more than 100 sketches and preliminary paintings, wrestling with the problem of depicting three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional picture plane. The original composition includes two men -- a patron surrounded by the women, and a medical student holding a skull, perhaps symbolizing that "the wages of sin are death." In the final composition, the patron is gone and the medical student -- who has been called a stand-in for the painter himself -- has become a fifth woman with a primitive mask, holding back the crimson curtain to reveal her "sisters." The painting is described as a battleground, with the remains of the battle left on the canvas. The Iberian women in the center of the canvas clash with the hideously masked creatures standing and squatting on the right.
In creating Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso turns his back on middle-class society and the traditional values of the time, opting for the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel. He also rejects popular current movements in painting by choosing line drawing rather than the color- and light-defined forms of Impressionism and the Fauves. The painter's private demons take shape in the figures on the canvas. Picasso later calls Les Demoiselles d'Avignon "my first exorcism painting." He likens the act of painting to that of creating fetishes, or weapons: "If we give spirits a form, we become independent." The originality of Picasso's vision and execution in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon help plant the seeds for cubism, the widely acclaimed and revolutionary art movement that he and painter Georges Braque develop in years to come.
After its initial showing, the painting remains largely unseen for 39 years. It is shown at the Galerie d'Antin in Paris in 1916, then lies rolled up in Picasso's studio until it is bought in the early 1920s by Jacques Doucet, sight unseen. It is reproduced in the publication La Revolution Surrealiste in 1925, but remains relatively unknown until 1937, when it is shown at the Petit Palais in Paris. The Museum of Modern Art in New York buys it soon afterwards, and in later years it becomes a prized part of the collection.
Richard Serra's Tilted Arc
1981
In 1981, artist Richard Serra installs his sculpture Tilted Arc, in Federal Plaza in New York City. It has been commissioned by the Arts-in-Architecture program of the U.S. General Services Administration, which earmarks 0.5 percent of a federal building's cost for artwork. Tilted Arc is a curving wall of raw steel, 120 feet long and 12 feet high, that carves the space of the Federal Plaza in half. Those working in surrounding buildings must circumvent its enormous bulk as they go through the plaza. According to Serra, this is the point, "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes."
The sculpture generates controversy as soon as it is erected, and Judge Edward Re begins a letter-writing campaign to have the $175,000 work removed. Four years later, William Diamond, regional administrator for the GSA, decides to hold a public hearing to determine whether Tilted Arc should be relocated. Estimates for the cost of dismantling the work are $35,000, with an additional $50,000 estimated to erect it in another location. Richard Serra testifies that the sculpture is site-specific, and that to remove it from its site is to destroy it. If the sculpture is relocated, he will remove his name from it.
The public hearing is held in March 1985. During the hearing, 122 people testify in favor of retaining the sculpture, and 58 testify in favor of removing it. The art establishment -- artists, museum curators, and art critics -- testify that Tilted Arc is a great work of art. Those against the sculpture, for the most part people who work at Federal Plaza, say that the sculpture interferes with public use of the plaza. They also accuse it of attracting graffiti, rats, and terrorists who might use it as a blasting wall for bombs. The jury of five, chaired by William Diamond, vote 4-1 in favor of removing the sculpture.
Serra's appeal of the ruling fails. On March 15, 1989, during the night, federal workers cut Tilted Arc into three pieces, remove it from Federal Plaza, and cart it off to a scrap-metal yard.
The Tilted Arc, decision prompts general questions about public art, an increasingly controversial subject through the late 1980s and early 1990s in the U.S. and abroad. The role of government funding, an artist's rights to his or her work, the role of the public in determining the value of a work of art, and whether public art should be judged by its popularity are all heatedly debated. Serra's career continues to flourish, despite the controversy. "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing," he comments at the time. "Art is not democratic. It is not for the people." Other works by Serra are in the permanent collection of museums around the world.