| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915–1981. By Laura Wittern-Keller. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xii, 356 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-2451-3.)
It has been more than forty years since any significant scholarly attention has turned to the history of American state film censorship boards. Recently published histories of censorship emphasize producers' self-censoring efforts, the importance of pressure groups, such as the Catholic Church, or changes in the way studios managed movie content. Laura Wittern-Keller devotes her study to the origins of, legal challenges to, and eventual termination of state censorship efforts, a narrative that spans most of the twentieth century.	1
Wittern-Keller locates the origins of state censorship in Progressive Era ideals that favored the common good over individual liberties, expressed a faith in governmental, bureaucratic experts to protect this common good, and, most importantly, contained a widespread belief that motion pictures possessed a "special capacity for evil" (p. 13). Attributing that capacity to movies permitted the Supreme Court to deny, in Mutual v. Ohio (1915), First Amendment protection to and support a priori censorship of motion pictures. Though only seven states established censorship boards, their impact, along with that of the one hundred or so municipal censoring bodies, constituted a "national censorship of sorts" (p. 30). Movie producers, eager to avoid protracted court battles, managed their production to try to satisfy the boards.	. . .

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