Lamont, Corliss, Freedom is as freedom does

(New York :  Horizon Press,  1956.)

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204                                                                                       FREEDOM IS AS FREEDOM DOES

live" with "Service is your way of making a eontiibution to the
community." Perhaps most amazing of all, the new impression of
the Handbook contained a complete blank page, representing
thirty Hnes cut out of the section entitled "My World."

After these various corrections and deletions had been an¬
nounced, the IlHnois branch of the Legion magnanimously re¬
scinded its vote of censure.

This absurd episode of the Girl Scout Handbook is less im¬
portant for itseff than for what it shows about the objectives of
the American witch-hunters. Those who attacked the Handbook
did not make the famfliar claim that it was spreading Communist
propaganda. Theh main charge was that it gave space to facts
and views which tended to support a liberal attitude in inter¬
national relations. This brings out the point that the anti-freedom
drive today is not merely against Communist ideas, but against all
ideas diverging from a confused right-wing orthodoxy.

Censorship imposed by private groups can have powerful
effect, as can that wrought by Con;"'essional inquiry. But ocea-
sionaUy, too, the Executive arm of the Government moves ponder¬
ously into the act. The U.S. Post Office Department, for instance,
can be counted upon frequently to complicate life and literature
by some egregious act of censorship. Thus in 1951 the Post Office
refused to deHver a rare edition of Aristophanes's classic comedy,
Lysistrata, to Mr, Harry A. Levinson, a book dealer in California,
Post Office officials claimed that the book was "plainly obscene,
lewd and lascivious in character"; that it was "well calculated to
deprave the morals of persons reading same and almost equally
certain to arouse Hbidinous thoughts in the mind of the average
normal reader"; and that the evfl effect of the play "was intensified
and heightened by the indecent and lascivious character of the
illustiations" by the Austialian artist Norman Lindsay.^^^

Aristophanes wrote the faree in a vain effort to end the Pelopon-
nesian War between Athens and Sparta. The cential theme is how
the women of the two city states banded together in a plot to
cease sexual relations with their men until a peace treaty was
  Page 204