THE DRIVE AGAINST CULTURAL FREEDOM                                                                     209

now reached a stage where it has become a serious menace to the
social structure of the nation." ^"^

The report then attacked the liberal legal philosophy that has
developed in the United States over the past few decades in re¬
gard to the censorship of Hterature, asserting that it "serves as the
basis for excuse to print and ehculate the filthiest, most obscene
literature without concurrent literary value to support it ever
known in history." ^^^

To all manifold activities for the censorship of Hterature in the
United States, the American Library Association's 1953 mam'festo,
"The Freedom to Read," gave a teUing answer: "The freedom to
read is essential to our democracy. It is under attack. Private
groups and public authorities in various parts of the countiy are
working to remove books from sale, to censor textbooks, to label
'contioversial' books, to distiibute lists of 'objectionable' books or
authors and to purge Hbraries.

"These actions apparently rise from a view that our national
tradition of free expression is no longer vahd; that censorship and
suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the
corruption of morals. . . . Most such attempts rest on a denial
of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary citi¬
zen, by exercising his critical judgment, will accept the good and
reject the bad. The censors, public and private, assume that they
should determine what is good and what is bad for their feUow
citizens. . . .

"Suppression is never more dangerous than in such a time of
social tension. Freedom has given the United States the elasticity
to endure stiain. Freedom keeps open the path of novel and crea¬
tive solutions, and enables change to come by choice. Every
silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, dimin¬
ishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the
less able to deal with stress. . . . The freedom to read is guaran¬
teed by the Constitution. Those with faith in free men will stand
firm on these constitutional guarantees of essential rights and
will exercise the responsibiHties that accompany these rights." ^"^

Beginning with 1952, yet another Congressional committee