June 24: Roth v. United States

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the obscenity conviction of publisher Samuel Roth in Roth v. United States on this date in 1957. Voting 5-4, Court decided that “obscene” material has no protection under the First Amendment. Justice William Brennan, Jr. wrote the majority opinion, which defined obscenity as material with a “dominant theme” that “taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest” to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.” This was a significantly narrower legal definition of obscenity than the one that had previously prevailed, which had been used to ban literary works of all sorts. (It would take another sixteen years for the Court to determine that obscenity itself was constitutionally protected.) Samuel Roth was a Polish Jew who established four literary magazines in the 1920s (using profits from a school he founded to teach English to immigrants) and published (without permission) excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which landed him in jail on pornography charges. After 1933, he began distributing pornography in earnest and served several years in federal custody. Roth was also a poet who wrote on Jewish themes in The Menorah Journal and The Nation, among other publications, before he became a pariah in the literary world.

“He was a steadfast Jew and Zionist (garnering the admiration of the great British Zionist writer Israel Zangwill) who became so distressed by what he felt was lack of support from his co-religionists that he, after claiming to be instructed by Jesus in a vision, wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All Frontiers of Civilization, a vicious 325-page anti-Semitic tract that was used by Nazis for propaganda and is kept in print by right-wing white-supremacist groups today.” —Michael Bronski