Art by Pelecymus
From “Mother Earth’, November 1913, New York City, published by Emma Goldman, edited by Alexander Berkman
By Emma Goldman
The period in human history known as the dark ages still continues to conjure up pictures of horrors, of religious censorship and persecution.
Today we are passing through a similar stage which, though perhaps not as violent as the past, is still full of bigotry, persecution and outrageous imposition. It is our moral censorship.
Both the old and the new are closely related to each other. Both spring from the religious, especially Christian, mania of the only true God and the only pure faith. A mania that has been back of the Inquisition of the past and is responsible for the moral censorship of today.
This spirit can no longer inflict physical pain with implements of torture, but it can rob you of your livelihood, drive you out of town, send you to prison for years, and can inflict mental tortures harder to bear for the modern man than physical pain was for the heretic of the past.
Indeed, there is any number of good people — judges, preachers, social workers and other old maids of both genders — who would, if they could, inaugurate a reign of terror, depicted in the great American classic, “The Scarlet Letter.” Nor would they hesitate to make the modern Hester Prynne pay the same terrible price as the heroine in Hawthorne’s novel.
More than one Hester Prynne has already had the scarlet letter “A” branded on her breast, and many more would be exposed to the same degradation, if our professional moralists would dare go so far.
That the spirit of perverse cruelty to persecute and humiliate human beings for no other offence except that they lead their own lives, is making itself felt even today, no one familiar with the activity of our moral censors can possibly deny.
Only the other day it was suggested in the newspapers that prostitutes should be publicly flogged to cure them from “their evil tendencies.”
A similar heroic was recently performed in San Francisco. Barbary Coast, the erstwhile home of prostitution, was closed by the police, and the unfortunate girls scattered to the winds. As to what becomes of them is not the concern of our moralists. They are above human considerations.
Already that brutal act has borne fruit. One of the girls attempted suicide, and then it was learned that 400 other girls had decided upon the same course, because of their utterly destitute state. On the other hand, those of them who still cling to life, will find quarters in the so-called respectable part of the city, and all of San Francisco will become a Barbary Coast.
Time and again the ghosts, as Ibsen calls our social wrongs, have been hidden in our social closets, locked away behind iron bars and driven into hiding places. But again and again they have crawled from their graves, spreading infectious disease and social epidemics.
As it is in life, so it is in the various phases of life expressed in art. The sincere dramatist and writer, whose inspiration is human nature with its ebb and tide of passion and longing, will never be deterred by moral pigmies from placing his observations before the world. And those who have nothing to say, who are crude and unreal in their portrayal, will be of less danger to mankind if given a chance to be heard than if their works are suppressed. That was certainly borne out by the stupid attempt to censor the “Lure” and the “Fight” and to suppress the Suffragette.
Had the police and the newspapers kept their hands out of the pie, the plays could have existed but a very brief period, so utterly unreal, crude and inartistic are they. But thanks to our moral idiots the plays have had a phenomenal run. The same holds good of the leading paper of the English militants. Had Saint Anthony not meddled with the sale of the Suffragette, no one outside of the suffrage ladies’ inner circle would have learned anything from the wisdom of Christabel Pankhurst. Truth is that she has out-Comstocked Comstock in her “Plain Facts About a Great Evil.” Her narrow, limited attitude towards life and towards prostitution should net her a medal from the Purity League, but the moment Comstock laid his dirty paws on the paper, the Suffragette sold like hot cakes. Therein lies the result of moral censorship: it creates a perverted curiosity that the frankest and ablest discussion could never produce,
Yet when our authors and dramatists are confronted with the menace of moral censorship, they, instead of making a defiant stand, go down on their knees and declare for the “highest kind” of morality, although they must know that real art has no more to do with good or bad than nature has. Both are beyond good or evil; their function is life, and the latter is entirely too complex, too limitless, too subtle, to permit of any moral yardstick of value.
Bearing in mind the play-making calibre of the Veillers the Scarboroughs and their ilk, one is not at all surprised at their weak-kneed protestations. But what is one to think of the author of “Hagar Revelly’? Mr. Daniel Carson Goodman has made a commendable attempt, at least, at a real social novel, and while the work is uneven and inadequate from a literary point of view, it yet proves him to be free from the moral hypocrisy of the ordinary American writer. Yet when the antiquated Comstock sweeps down upon the publisher, Mitchell Kennerley, and in open daylight commits highway robbery in stealing the plates and copies of the book, Mr. Goodman also begins to whine about his high moral intentions, and how he really aimed to make vice unattractive, thereby in a measure lending power to the outrageous imposition on the part of our moral censors.
Advanced men and women are beginning to see that the whole scheme of curtailing human expression, in whatever form, is rooted in our present-day morality, imposed on us by the State and the Church for the protection of their crimes against humanity. It is precisely for this reason that libertarians will not stand for our moral sneaks who, like thieves in the night, creep into their lives and spread themselves in all their vulgarity. Anyone with a spark of self-respect and with love of freedom must oppose the invasion into thoughts and ideas, and must insist on untrammeled opportunity to express himself, whether by pen, brush, or speech, or in his personal relations, on the all-absorbing issues of modern times. That is the only way to rid society from its arch-enemies, the moral censors and inquisitors.
Also
At home in the house of the Lord, from Open Road (1984)
The Failure of Christianity, by Emma Goldman (1913)