Sublime

This basic framework—the disavowal of censorship and a pseudoscientific rather than moralistic condemnation of obscenity, predicated on a nonsectarian membership led by middle-class men

Scholars have also been particularly sensitive to the regulation of obscenity in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. Paul Boyer, Nicola Beisel, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Andrea Friedman, among others, have examined the ways in which urbanization, immigration, and the social construction of gender shaped reactions to obscenity.5

Despite such contestation, the attack on comics continued in the early 1950s. State and local legislation proliferated, coinciding with the delivery of Wertham’s 1954 magnum opus, Seduction of the Innocent.

The Warren Court, though, rejected clear and present danger for a “redeeming social importance” test, a unique burden foisted on no other form of expression. Because liberal notions of normalcy precluded arguments for prurience as itself containing social importance, or for graphic depictions of sexuality as inherently political forms of

The ACLU’s 1954 annual report displayed this inconsistency, denouncing censorship: “All censorship laws ever devised appear to rest upon vague definitions or to call for subjective judgments…. Censorship law makes thought control possible.”