The new Victorians

Cancel Culture is happening on a historic scale, Part 3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In our new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” my co-author Rikki Schlott and I make the argument that Cancel Culture is occurring on the scale of many of the worst “mass censorship” events in U.S. history. This series expands on that research from the Sedition Act of 1798 to 9/11.

In Part 1 of this exploration of Cancel Culture in its historical context, we set the stage by using the response to speech after 9/11 to predict the campus climate after the October 7 attacks on Israel. In Part 2, we used America’s first free speech crisis, the Sedition Act of 1798, to illustrate that a high “body count” is not the ideal metric for how bad a particular period of censorship can be for the country and the culture.

Now, we’ll dig into the American Victorian era, which I believe is the best historical parallel to the mass censorship climate we have been living through since 2014.

The closest analogue to modern Cancel Culture

The American Victorian era (as opposed to the British Victorian era, which was similar in many ways but distinct) is the name given to the famously prudish, buttoned-up, and censorial period in America between roughly 1870 and 1914. We’re talking indecency laws, book bans, speech regulations — the works. Though no historical analogy is ever perfect, in my estimation the Victorian era is the closest parallel to Cancel Culture today.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Several notable modern commentators, including Noah Rothman and Andrew Doyle, believe that Cancel Culture most closely resembles the Puritan era in the early 17th century. Rothman and Doyle make good arguments in their excellent respective books, “The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun” and “The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World,” but I find the Puritan era too different from our modern society for it to be an apt comparison. America at that time was more like a series of tiny and highly distinct islands with a small and sparse population. It was not industrialized, it was less stratified by class, and far less ethnically diverse (though the religious differences were sharp, and even deadly, sometimes).

The Victorian era took place in a society more like our own: connected, wealthy, industrialized, diverse, and highly economically stratified. And unlike free speech crises like the Sedition Act of 1798 or the first and second Red Scares (which we’ll cover next in this series), the censorial behavior of the Victorian era was not ignited by a major war or national emergency. Rather, it was catalyzed by the imposition of rigid, largely upper- or upper-middle class social, religious, and cultural moral norms onto the general public — just like Cancel Culture is.

Perhaps the defining figure of American Victorian era censorship — and a perfect representation of the overall censorial attitudes of the era — is Anthony Comstock. Comstock was a vigilante anti-smut crusader who parlayed his fixation into a 41-year career as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He was largely responsible for the passage of an 1873 federal obscenity law (known as the Comstock Law), which he enforced personally as a “special agent” of the U.S. Post Office. This led most states to pass their own versions of the Comstock Law, which attacked everything from pornography to information about birth control, advocacy of “free love,” art, literature, and even the use of profanity in private letters. 

First Amendment law had not yet developed to constrain the reach of these statutes, and Comstock’s broad conception of “sin” served as the outer limit of free speech for decades. Yet even that wasn’t enough for Comstock, who would take censorship into his own hands when he found the law’s reach inadequate. On one occasion in 1895, Comstock was seen on Brooklyn trains personally pasting black patches over parts of advertisements for an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1913, Comstock was featured in a front page New York Times story for storming into the showroom of a prominent art dealer to demand that the dealer remove Paul Chabas’ masterpiece “September Morn” from the showroom’s display window. In one particularly absurd case, Comstock Laws even targeted advocates of nude bathing.

As detailed in Robert Corn-Revere’s “The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder:The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma,” Comstock quite literally believed he was on a mission from God, and described himself as a “weeder in the garden of the lord.”

Comstock was proud of his censorship record, too. He often bragged that he was responsible for convicting more than 3,600 people and disposing of 160 tons of material over his 41-year-long career. He even boasted of hounding 15 people to suicide. And while “impressive” for its time, that amounts only to an average of about 90 convictions per year. As we will see in the next part of this series, the number of citizens arrested for offensive speech on the internet in the United Kingdom (where Cancel Culture has the force of law … yay First Amendment!) was in the thousands.

How today’s cancelers compare to Victorian era censors

The most direct modern-day parallel to Comstock and the other censors of the American Victorian era are the “book banners” of the political right. For example, in fall 2021 in Llano County, Texas, a community group successfully pressured the local public library to remove “CRT and LGBTQ books,” including the New York Times bestsellers “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group,” and “Spinning,” a figure skater’s memoir in part about coming out as gay. The local government later voted to close the library so its catalog could be checked for “inappropriate” books.

Even my and Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” was included in a list of titles banned from classroom libraries in Florida’s Orange County school district, based solely on its designation as an “adult” title. This is despite the fact that some students are in fact 18 and that there is no content within the book that can be reasonably seen as “inappropriate” for minors. It’s even more disappointing, in fact, because the book is explicitly meant to flag and offer an alternative to the many habits of anxious and depressed people that are being taught to students of all ages these days. “Coddling” is a book that younger people really should read to help them avoid depression and anxiety, which just goes to show what can happen with vague and overbroad policies ostensibly meant to prevent harm.

Despite these cases of censorship, I put “book banners” in quotes because the overall situation is more nuanced. Sometimes books are simply moved from one section of the library to another — as was the case with the poet Amanda Gorman’s book, “The Hill We Climb,” which was relocated from the elementary to the middle school section of a Florida public school library after a complaint was made. It’s perfectly fine to object to the decision, but it doesn’t fit any reasonable definition of a “ban.” 

It’s also doubtful that even some of the most liberal advocates of free speech in any era would fail to understand why some parents object to the presence of certain books in K-12 libraries. For example, one of the most targeted books includes an image of a character performing oral sex on a strap-on (“Gender Queer”); one very graphically illustrates how to use a butt plug (“Let’s Talk About It”); and another gives underage gay kids tips for getting on hookup apps (“This Book is Gay”). This is why FIRE not only takes for granted that “age appropriateness” is and should be part of the analysis for what books are in K-12 libraries (and in the children’s sections of public libraries), but also outlines a process for reconsidering library materials that involves all stakeholders in order to provide “due process” for books.

As for “book banners” coming from the political left, there’s some complexity there as well. While they, too, have their fair share of attempts to remove or limit access to certain books like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Of Mice and Men,” left-leaning censors also have other tools at their disposal. For example, rather than outright banning or restricting access to certain books, they can remove “problematic” content from works of authors like Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine in new editions of their works through the act of “sensitivity reading” at major book publishers. Activists have also pressured publishers to pull books from publication or circulation based on claims they promote harmful stereotypes or because the author wrote about a race or culture different from their own. Either way, the goal is the same: Remove or restrict access to content they deem inappropriate, offensive, or racist from library (and bookstore) shelves.

And while today’s left-wing censors are not traditionally religious the way their Victorian era counterparts were, I tend to agree with John McWhorter’s contention in his book, “Woke Racism,” that modern wokism — with its own versions of dogma, liturgies, and original sins — functions for many purposes as a religion.

Of course, there are many things about which a Victorian era censor and a modern-day left-leaning canceler would disagree — but much of that has to do with circumstance and time rather than any fundamentally different perspective on the world and how they should act within it. Victorians and modern social justice advocates share a deep conviction that their fight is of profound moral and social importance and, therefore, that dissent is too great a risk to the future to tolerate. They both betray a certainty of their own righteousness and a willingness to use legal and social forces to get people to bend the knee. Like the Victorian era, the age of Cancel Culture is highly moralistic and relies on cancelers simply declaring dissenters as immoral or otherwise “bad people” rather than refuting the dissenters’ arguments. As Rikki Schlott and I argue in “The Canceling of the American Mind,” cancelers rely heavily on the psychology of taboo to win arguments without winning arguments.

It isn’t difficult to imagine, had they been born 150 years ago, today’s social justice fundamentalists (as Tim Urban calls the ideology) would have found themselves on the side of the Victorian censors. The urge to silence, cancel, and bully others into submitting to our own worldview has always been with us, and always will be. Only a genuine commitment to everyone’s free speech can protect us from the changing winds of prevailing orthodoxy.

Next up in this series, we’ll dig into one of the biggest mass censorship events in American history: the first Red Scare and the Palmer Raids.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Keeping with the theme of this article, be sure to check out the “So To Speak” podcast’s interview with author and FIRE Chief Counsel Robert Corn-Revere about his book,“The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder.”