Flashback, September 1951: ‘Streetcar’ Brings to Hollywood ‘The Method'—and Censorship Issues

A Streetcar Named Desire wasn’t the first Hollywood adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play when it was released in the U.S. 75 years ago this month, but it left the most lasting impact on the film industry. Unlike The Glass Menagerie the year before, it was perfectly cast and adeptly directed by Elia Kazan (as he had done on Broadway).

Moreover, with Marlon Brando repeating his sensational stage turn as brutish Stanley Kowalski only a few weeks after Montgomery Clift’s acclaimed performance in A Place in the Sun, it demonstrated the full power of the style that Kazan had been advancing at New York’s Actors Studio: “The Method,” with performers encouraged to use their memories of past emotional experiences to create a character.

Critics and audiences applauded how Kazan had translated the sweaty sensuality and tragic lyricism of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning drama from the stage to the screen.

But the source material’s frank depiction of an offscreen gay character, nymphomania, and sexual assault, among other issues, put Warner Brothers Studio on a collision course with the movie industry’s censorship arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Much of this latter story is told in a long section of Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951), a volume of revealing letters, telegrams and memos edited by film scholar Rudy Behlmer. As much of a landmark as the film is considered in terms of its overall excellence (including, by Alex North, the first notable jazz score in a major Hollywood film, and Harry Stradling’s vivid cinematography), the pitched battle over its content represented a milestone of its own.

PCA executive Geoffrey Shurlock may have summed it up best: “For the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment. Before then we had considered Anna Karenina a big deal. Streetcar broke the barrier.”

Kazan and Williams presented a united front against the PCA. They grudgingly softened the treatment of the promiscuity of faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois and the intimate relationship between her dead husband and an older male friend. But they drew the line at the PCA’s suggestion that she could imagine her rape by Stanley because of her mental fragility.

Williams protested to PCA head Joseph Breen, vehemently and eloquently, that if the sexual assault were treated in this fashion, “the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the safe and brutal forces in modern society. It is a positive plea for comprehension.” He vowed that if he and Kazan had “our backs against the wall…none of us is going to throw in the towel!”

Kazan and Williams won that round, though making one compromise (spoiler alert): Stanley would be punished by having wife Stella leave him. They were able to prevail again when Breen seemed ready to wobble about the rape scene.

What neither the director nor playwright could imagine was that the Catholic Legion of Decency would interfere just as the film was ready for release. Its threat to issue a “Condemned” rating—guaranteed box-office poison—led Warner Brothers to cancel the movie’s Radio City booking and call editor David Weisbart in, without Kazan’s knowledge, to make further excisions.

The studio refused to accede to Kazan’s plea that the film be released in two versions clearly labeled as being edited or not. In all, he estimated, the 12 cuts amounted to roughly five minutes—footage not seen until Warner Brothers restored it for the director’s version in 1993. (The deleted scenes are in this YouTube clip.)

Vivien Leigh, the only member of the central quartet at the heart of the drama who was not carried over from Broadway (producers thought she would provide a greater box-office boost than Jessica Tandy), was, unlike Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, classically trained rather than schooled in The Method.

But she had played Blanche in a London production directed by husband Laurence Olivier, and, as author and screenwriter Logan Kelly discussed in this 2023 post on the Collider blog, she threw herself so strongly into the role onscreen that it exacerbated the bipolar disorder that was already afflicting her.

Though Brando drew favorable notices with his film debut the prior year, The Men, it was Streetcar that stunned longtime Hollywood professionals. 

His transformation into Blanche’s loutish but sensual antagonist was revelatory, in the same manner described by Truman Capote watching him in rehearsal for Broadway: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated.”

Ironically, despite the effect that Brando’s performance had on cinema acting, he did not join fellow nominated cast members Leigh, Hunter, and Malden in the winner’s circle. Best Actor that year went to industry veteran Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Brando would have to wait another three years to collect his, for the equally electrifying On the Waterfront.

This Day in Film History (‘Virginia Woolf’ Erodes Censorship Barriers)

June 21, 1966—Mike Nichols was so worried about the reaction to his film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that he left the Pantages Theater early with the movie’s editor, Sam O'Steen.

Nichols need not have been concerned about the popular or critical reception to his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed yet controversial plays of the postwar period. 

With the draw of real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, this scalding marital drama may have been, at $7.5 million, the most expensive black-and-white movie ever produced, but its $10.3 million box-office take ensured profits for Warner Bros.

Over the winter, Hollywood poured more honors on the film, with 13 Academy Award nominations, including for every category in which it was eligible—the first time this had occurred since Cimarron in 1931. Subsequently, wins went to Taylor (her second Best Actress win), Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, and Haskell Wexler for Best Cinematography.

From the moment Edward Albee’s play opened on Broadway in 1962, it was considered a hot property—but also, in some quarters, too hot to handle. Its frequently profane language and sexual explicitness unnerved the trustees of Columbia University enough that they overruled the recommendation of its Pulitzer Prize panel that the award go to the playwright.

Acquiring the property was unusual for Jack L. Warner, an aging mogul with conservative tastes that increasingly veered towards prestige musical blockbusters like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

At least sone among the studio hierarchy felt qualms about the finished product, which retained much of Albee’s incendiary dialogue. At one early screening, Life Magazine reported, one Warner executive groaned when the lights came up, "My God! We have a $7 million dirty movie on our hands!"

They were right to be concerned. Though the Production Code that had restricted profanity and sex onscreen for the prior three decades was coming under increasing fire from filmmakers and critics, it still presented roadblocks.

The Catholic Legion of Decency, which aimed to identify and boycott any movie it deemed morally objectionable, represented an especially significant roadblock to widespread distribution and popular acceptance of the film. Archbishops and priests promoted pledges by the faithful to avoid any cinema that the organization condemned.

Nichols had fought constantly with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to stick as closely as possible to Albee’s original dialogue and plot. He had survived being removed when generous starting hours for Taylor and Burton left the production 30 days behind schedule and with double the budget. He was not about to let the picture sink before it had a good chance of being seen by the public.

When the 80 judges for the Catholic Legion panel met, Nichols promised Warner execs, he would have his good friend Jacqueline Kennedy—practically a venerated figure after her husband’s assassination—sit behind prominent clerics like “Monsignor What’s-His-Face” and pronounce at the picture’s conclusion, “How Jack would have loved it."

The plot worked, as the Legion assigned Virginia Woolf a new rating—A-IV (“morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations")—which took into account the work’s moral seriousness while signifying that its often scabrous language and subject matter were not for the squeamish.

After haggling with Warner Bros. over its content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a similar strategy as the Legion, designating the film as the first to bear the notice, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." Its first attempt at a rating system followed two years later.

While the censorship walls crumbled rapidly on the nation’s cinemas in the late 1960s, it took a bit longer for the old restrictions to fade on television. I well remember the first time the film aired on CBS in February 1973.

Then 13 years old, I wondered exactly what was being signaled when the “Tiffany Network” issued its pre-viewing disclaimer urging parents and “sensitive viewers” to use “judgment and discretion.” I soon received what The New York Times’ Howard Thompson termed “an adult earful.”

Nowadays, in whatever medium it appears, it is seldom that such editorial handwringing occurs. Although CBS aired the show starting at 9 pm, when many kiddies would be fast asleep, Turner Classic Movies, for instance, has been known to show it during daytime. 

(A waggish filmmaking friend of mine once noted that TCM never had to worry about children watching their movies, as the cable channel’s average viewing age was 65!)

Viewers who couldn’t get beyond the blistering language that caused so much sturm und drang were likely to miss the symbolism of the names given the feuding, sadistic middle-aged academic couple at the heart of the play and film: George and Martha.

Like the first American President and his wife, Albee’s couple were unable to conceive—certainly not a baby, perhaps only drink-induced disorder and destruction among fellow academics ostensibly oriented towards reason.

Flashback, November 1900: Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ Released by Half-Hearted Publisher

When the publishing firm Doubleday, Page released Sister Carrie in November 1900, it was without publicity, reflecting the company’s growing doubts and lack of enthusiasm. 

Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.

Praise on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.

Little did anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’ actions.

If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist. 

(One key scene in Sister Carrie was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union workers and scan drivers.)

Along with his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer), Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.

As critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size (900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to be regarded as a classic.

Still, it is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.

No, unlike Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted style, with clotted, cliched sentences.

When he mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes (e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

In tone, that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative believability.

No stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to tone down some passages.

Originally, for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet."

Sara revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."

(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)

Indeed, Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by not punishing her for living out of wedlock.

As time went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940 letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."

Readers should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well, through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and money in a big metropolis:

*Like Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;

*His sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;

*Like Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and alcoholic, in New York.

*Like Hurstwood, Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.

Sister Carrie concluded in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died on Christmas Day.

With a plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While this flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."

(The image accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)

Quote of the Day (Edna O’Brien, on ‘Any Artist Who Bows to Pressure’)

“Doctrinaire opinions are anathema to art, and history has shown us that any artist who bows to pressure, political or otherwise, is a lost soul.”—Irish fiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, and memoirist Edna O’Brien (1930-2024), preface to An Edna O’Brien Reader (1993)

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on How ‘Unharassed Writers’ Trouble Bullies, Racists, and Predators)

“Writers, journalists, essays, bloggers, poets, playwrights can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population. Truth is trouble. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.”—American novelist, essayist, editor, and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), “Peril,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019)

(Photo of Toni Morrison taken at a lecture at West Point Military Academy in March, 2013. Author of photo: West Point - The U.S. Military Academy.)

Quote of the Day (James Patterson, on How ‘You Can Explain a World Through a Library’)

“One of the wonderful things about books is it allows us to find out about different ways of thinking, of living, different problems people have, different ways of finding joy. You can explain a world through a library and that’s a good thing. To cut that down is not useful.”—Bestselling American novelist James Patterson, reacting to a Florida elementary school’s removal of one of his youth adult books from their library, quoted by Marco della Cava, “James Patterson: If Florida Bans My Books, 'No Kids Under 12 Should Go to Marvel Movies,'” USA Today, Mar. 15, 2023

The image accompanying this post is a photo of Patterson taken in the Blue Room of the White House on Nov. 21, 2019.

This Day in Constitutional History (Alien and Sedition Acts Omen of Later Freedom Threats)

July 14, 1798—As tensions with France verged toward war, President John Adams (pictured) signed the last of four pieces of legislation passed over the past month by the Federalist Party in Congress to crack down on Gallic immigrants and their Irish Catholic and domestic allies. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the first major federal attempt to curtail immigration and press rights, sparked a furious reaction by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Vice-President Thomas Jefferson.

If you want to know about the evolution of such current controversies as immigration, states’ rights, voter suppression, the role of the press, and resistance to unpopular federal measures, this early wide-ranging attempt to interfere with the Bill of Rights is a good place to start. 

Actually, the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed attempt to label both Muslims and Mexicans as security threats has thrown an unexpected spotlight on a period of history that Americans have conveniently forgotten—or never really learned. 

For years, the passage of these bills and Adams’ signature “were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency," according to Adams’ keenly appreciative biographer, David McCullough. 

Yet it would appear that, two hundred and eighteen years later, the principles of the Alien and Sedition Acts “have sprung, with surprising vigor, from their resting place in history,” wrote Jelani Cobb in a “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker right after the last Presidential election. The last few weeks have only made that observation even more relevant.

The question of revolutionary France was the great fault line in the decade following adoption of the Constitution. The Democratic-Republicans regarded the new republic as a natural extension of the American Revolution by a nation that had served as our ally in the war, while the more Anglophile Federalists regarded it first with suspicion, then, as the Reign of Terror took hold, with horror.

The execution of Louis XVI plunged France into war with the Bourbon dynasty’s Continental allies, and, in the case of monarchical England, a newly sympathetic force. The possibility of involvement in that conflict compelled President George Washington to issue a Proclamation of Neutrality.

To be sure, there were plenty of domestic issues—notably, the place of the First National Bank in the new nation—to divide the Federalists from the Democratic-Republicans. 

Yet the quarrel with France ensured that the divisions would be relentlessly rancorous. For the argument about the French Revolution was, at bottom, an argument about ours—about what was the true legacy of that struggle, and about which side was the worthier custodian of its legacy.

Additional tensions arose in the Adams administration over France’s seizure of ships by neutral countries such as the United States. Adams’ attempt at negotiations collapsed when the French government demanded bribes. The resulting X, Y, and Z Affair (christened because of the initials standing for redacted names in the correspondence that Congress insisted the President release related to the incident) led to the abrogation of the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, and fiscal authorization of new frigates.

The Federalists also used the opportunity to smite their Democratic-Republican opponents. through four measures: 

*The Naturalization Act, the most dramatic of the measures, increased the period necessary for immigrants to become citizens from five to 14 years.

*The Alien Friends Act authorized the president to deport foreigners deemed "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime.

*The Alien Enemies Act allowed the president to arrest, imprison, and deport any foreigner subject to an enemy nation.

*The Sedition Act made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the Federal government, including the Congress and the preside

The four pieces of legislation collectively christened the Alien and Sedition Acts were the Federalists’ attempt to stem the dissent and anarchy they saw all around. In a time of unrelenting demographic and political change, it found favor among those who wanted to calcify current conditions before they changed again.

The immediate cause of the legislation was the Quasi-War that had erupted between the U.S. and France. The French and their Irish Catholic allies newly arrived on U.S. shores seemed to the Federalists like a fifth column, undermining the U.S. from within. 

But limiting immigration was, for the Federalists, not just a matter of national security; it was also an early—and unusual—attempt at voter suppression. 

Once settled, French immigrants had displayed, by Federalist lights, a dismaying tendency to vote Democratic-Republican. 

More alarmingly, the same phenomenon was occurring with Irish immigrants. What began, in the early 1790s, as a primarily Irish Protestant immigration to the U.S. had shifted, by the end of the decade, toward an Irish-Catholic flood that elected Democratic-Republicans in key urban districts of Philadelphia.

By 1798, “The Year of the French,” a French-aided rebellion by the United Irishmen had raised a threat close to England. Such Federalists as Harrison Gray Otis and Roger Griswold made no secret of their contempt for the new arrivals from this now-revolutionary homeland. 

Reflecting the partisan spirit in which the legislation was framed, the Sedition Act stipulated that "opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States" and publishing "any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the president or the Congress would resist in imprisonment or fines. 

Notice the one official left out among these maligned groups: the Vice-President. As the current occupant of that office was Jefferson, the Federalists had no objection to any criticism lobbed against him. 

Adams had no interest in using the authority handed to him by the Alien Acts to regulate immigration, so he kept Secretary of State Timothy Pickering on a short leash when it came to enforcing that.

But the choleric President was too thin-skinned to ignore insults, and before long journalists and politicians were being locked up or intimidated into silence for running afoul of the Sedition Acts. 

Among those who ran afoul of the new legislation was Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of Philadelphia's Democrat-Republican Aurora and the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who died of yellow fever before he could be brought to trial, and Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican representative from Vermont, who had said Adams’ foreign policy proved the President should be confined to a "mad house." 

By itself, a prison term would have been enough to make newspaper editors nervous about criticizing the administration. But the financial penalty of $2,000 may have been even more staggering. The sum would have been difficult-to-impossible to pay, forcing the editors into bankruptcy and debtor’s prison.

The Democratic-Republicans did more than register their disapproval at the polls; they also sought to defy federal power at the state level. Jefferson and protégé James Madison crafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, passed by those two legislatures not only declaring their opposition to the bills but explaining why they were null and void.

With Jefferson still a member of the federal government, he and Madison had to hide their authorship of the resolutions.(In fact, this would not become known until the 1820s, when both were old men no longer actively involved in electoral politics). 

But the resolutions, by insisting that a single state could nullify federal law, laid the groundwork for the Nullification Crisis 30 years later led by John C. Calhoun. By this time, Madison was insisting that his work and Jefferson’s could not be construed into an implied endorsement of Calhoun’s defiance of federal authority. But the genie had been let loose from the bottle, and Madison and Jefferson were, in effect, the intellectual grandfathers of secession.

Once Jefferson was inaugurated in 1801, the Alien and Sedition Acts became effectively inoperative. The legislation expired the day before he took office, and those jailed under its terms were released. The courts progressively viewed the legislation, as Associate Supreme Court Justice William Brennan noted in Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), and null and void. 

Although the legislation certainly excited and crystallized opposition to the Federalists, it did not by itself ensure their defeat at the polls. Instead, responsibility for their loss in 1800 lay in the feud between Alexander Hamilton, the party’s guiding light, and the Federalist who refused to act on the basis of political faction, Adams.

The President, contemplating the impact of another war on the young republic, authorized peace negotiations in 1799. Hamilton then launched an intemperate attack on Adams, dividing the Federalists and ensuring they would never win another Presidential election.

Quote of the Day (George Packer, on the Peril of Self-Censorship)

“The problem with free speech is that it’s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance. But, once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them—how to think freely at all—and ideas perish at conception.”— George Packer, “Comment: Mute Button,” The New Yorker, April 13, 2015

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on the ‘Book Burners’)

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire,” June 14, 1953

A quarter century before Dwight Eisenhower warned Dartmouth graduates against book burners, the practice would have been regarded as a throwback to the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages. But on this date in 1933, German counterparts to Dartmouth—the finest their country had produced—gathered in university towns to incinerate approximately 25,000 books for propagating“un-German” ideas.

The authors whose works were burned that day form an indelible part of the modern era: Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Forster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, Andre Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emile Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.

High Nazi officials, along with professors, university rectors, and university student leader,s addressed the mass audiences at the awful ceremonies, in which the books were heaped onto bonfires attended by band playing and “fire oaths.”

It was only less than half a year since Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, but he had already provided an extraordinarily vivid symbol of how fast he would move against enemies—not just those he could see, but those whose thoughts he wished to suppress.

Only two months before Eisenhower spoke, Senator Joseph McCarthy had demonstrated that the same 

thing could happen here—or, rather, in United States Information Service (USIS) posts in Western Europe, many of whose libraries felt pressured by the senator’s bumptious young aides Roy Cohn and David Schine to remove books by the likes of Dashiell Hammett, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, and Henry Thoreau.

When American forces came upon Nazi concentration camps at the end of WWII, General Eisenhower had members of Congress and journalists visit the gruesome sites so that the horror of what occurred would be seen, understood and documented. He knew, as well as anyone, that it was but a short step from burning books to burning people. Privately, he had grown to loathe McCarthy for his bullying. But concern about looking undignified—his vow not to "get into a pissing contest with that skunk"—led him to issue only veiled warnings such as the one at Dartmouth. Onlyy when “Tailgunner Joe” went after the institution to which Ike gave his best years, the U.S. Army, did the President finally determine that this modern-day know-nothing needed to be destroyed--and even then, his hand remained, publicly, largely hidden from the controversy.

(The image accompanying this post, of the May 10, 1933 book burning in Berlin, comes from the U.S. National Archives.)