Censorship Project Started Material Sources Needed

Hi All - I am going to embark on a project related to censorship. It will of course be philatelic in nature. What I have not settled upon is scope and focus. I am thinking of a broad-based approach that uses postal history to supplement a discussion that goes far and wide. It will be an exhibit type endeavor.

As to what I am seeking, I would be grateful for exhibits that are already out there that relate or focus on censorship be it military, political or just the type driven by menial people. If it relates to censorship in any way, I would love to see it or hunt it down.

I am just starting out but would like to somehow tie together in a cogent manner censorship as diverse as what took place on Twitter to military censorship and everything in between. Have an attorney friend that happens to deal with censorship issues at times and I am going to try and bring some of his perspective into the mix but how to tie that to philately seems like a mountain to climb. If there is something philatelic that is demonstrative of censorship it will be considered.

On this Memorial Day when we salute those who served to preserve our freedoms, I cannot think of a better way to shine a light on one freedom that is constantly under attack in all ways big and small.

Look forward to your leads and input.

Roger

Do you hate me?

Don

You have plenty of scope in the USA. lol

The first thing I would do when starting into any new field in a serious manner is to review what others have already accomplished. Stand on their shoulders. In this case I would not rush to buy material, but instead I would spend not less than one month exploring the societies like the Military Postal History Society and the Civil Censorship Study Group. Explore journals, books and monographs published by them and by others. And yes, exhibits as you mention. Then buy very cautiously at first so the book-knowledge and philatelic material builds upward together.

(All theoretical advice of course. Not sure I have ever exactly done this!)

Sounds to me like Rodger is trying to look for a broad view of censorship/philately. What he is looking for is different directions he can look into.

With that in mind, I'll point to a design that was censored:




I hope this helps.

Joe

Interesting subject, rogdcam!

I doubt this is what you had in mind, but I have always thought it would be interesting to do an exhibit on 'philatelic censorship'. Countries issue politically controversial stamps all the time. Sometimes when those stamps are used on mail to 'the enemy', the offending stamps can be blacked out. Sometimes the action is sanctioned/required by the receiving postal service, sometimes the gov't requires that action, and sometimes a local postmaster may take matters into his/her own hands. I can imagine examples of stamps commemorating/celebrating a memorable but controversial subject and have the local postmaster or local postal worker taking offense and blacking out, even on domestic mail.

Let us know how your new project works out.

Thank you so much John for the excellent advice. It mirrors exactly what I intend my approach to be. I am going to take as long as I need to study and explore all of the information out there and will use the assets which you mentioned. I am in no rush. If it takes a year or more then so be it. Buying materials to build my exhibit will happen after I start to clearly see the direction(s) I want to go.

Alub - That is what I am talking about! A great start and thank you so much.

Mooter - You are very much channeling my thoughts as to where I might be heading. Not so much the military censorship which mostly consisted of checking for the wrong things being said but actual malicious behavior done because somebody or some entity let an ideology drive an action.

This is going to be a tough one to arrive at a final outline for. It is such a broad topic, and it could easily turn into a monster. On the other hand, I do not want it to be too confined. I want it to be broad, to be big, to still be coherent. Make any sense?

It is a visceral project for me. For various reasons I detest censorship and think that it is usually done by weak and/or lazy people. Too easy to just erase speech or cancel a person than actually deal with something. Click and done. The type we are talking about at least.

We seem to be in a period when the answer to many things at all levels of discourse is to shut down speech that you don't like. It is troubling and is why I am going to do this as best I can.

Hopefully I can also tie-in the legal aspects of the topic since the usual suspects when it comes to defending free speech have been notably absent or even FOR censorship in recent years.

<<<<DON

vvv (behind)



<<<assorted SCF posters

<<<me

Now to money making:

Over/Under 6 <<<Las Vegas line on time before thread goes to general discussion

Over/Under 8 <<<<Las Vegas line on time to topic being locked

Over/Under 11<<<<<Las Vegas line on time to topic's removal

3:4 <<<<<<Las Vegas line on likelihood any individual post will be removed.


<<<<<<<Vegas floorshow while waiting


<<<<<<<audience

Another direction you could go:

The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to send "obscene, lewd or lascivious," "immoral," or "indecent" publications through the mail.

This law is still on the books and has been used (so far) as the basis to outlaw the mailing of Mifeprestone in a currently being litigated case in Federal Court.

Thus this topic, Comstock Act of 1873 is currently deeply decisively politically and such politically divisive topics tend to be moved (General Discussion), locked or tossed (hidden).

Edit to correct spelling of divisive.

Are you going to focus on USA mail?
Are you going to focus on " malicious behavior done because somebody or some entity let an ideology drive an action" censorship or positive censorship too?

Rob Roy - I am not certain at this early stage if I will focus on the Unites States or WW. In my mind right now, there are no limits geographically. As for "positive censorship" that seems to be an oxymoron. No? Could you provide an example of positive censorship?

Mention of the Comstock Act led me to find this timeline:

1775
A year before independence, the Continental Congress creates the Postal Service—not as a government agency, but as one of several new independent alternatives to the British postal system. One advantage: This allows American dissidents to communicate without the authorities intercepting their letters.

1835
Southern mobs seize and burn abolitionist material sent through the mail. The postmaster general refuses to intervene, establishing a de facto policy of permitting the censorship of such literature in the slave states.

1844
The libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner establishes the private American Letter Mail Co. The government reacts by outlawing it, and in 1851 the experiment ends.

1861
The Civil War begins, and both the Union and the Confederacy adopt their own forms of postal censorship. The postmaster general spends a year refusing to deliver papers deemed disloyal to the Union cause.

1873
The Comstock Act makes it illegal to knowingly mail or receive any "filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character," as well as any contraceptives, any abortifacients, or any information about acquiring or using contraceptives or abortifacients.


1878
The Supreme Court upholds the government's right to bar "circulars concerning lotteries" from the mail—and, provided it has a warrant, to open and inspect packages to find such material.

1887
Police arrest the libertarian journalists Moses Harman, Edwin C. Walker, and George Harman for publishing and mailing a feminist argument against marital rape. The author's description of such an assault is deemed obscene under the Comstock Act.

1917
After the U.S. enters World War I, the Wilson administration cracks down on anti-war and anti-draft literature. In the case of the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, the government doesn't just bar the material from the mail—it arrests editor Emma Goldman for "conspiracy to induce persons not to register" for the draft, imprisons her, and eventually deports her.

1944
The government intercepts the international correspondence of tax resister Vivien Kellems—a prominent critic of the Roosevelt administration—and leaks it to columnist Drew Pearson and Rep. John M. Coffee (D–Wash.). Coffee quotes from it on the House floor while accusing Kellems of subversion.

1953
The CIA starts reading correspondence between people in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The covert program quickly extends to a much larger watchlist, with the agency illegally opening more than 13,000 letters a year until the operation ends in 1973.

1970
As part of its campaign against the underground press, the FBI considers a scheme to spray copies of The Black Panther with a chemical called Skatole before the issues are shipped to distributors, thus giving them "a most offensive odor." The bureau drops that particular plan but finds other ways to harass alternative papers using the mails.

2001
In the wake of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, the government creates the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking system to collect the information on the exterior of virtually everything mailed in the United States. One cybersecurity specialist later sums up the program for The New York Times: "Let's record everyone's mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with."

The timeline you found has considerable overlap to the table of contents of the 1977 book "Unmailable", which if nothing else, seems to have a potentially useful bibliography and endnotes.