#128 Sidebar: The Comstock Act, Free Speech and the Legalization of Birth Control
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2023
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I’m traveling and otherwise swamped right now, so it’s time for a Sidebar! In this episode we take a break from the 17th century, and look at the campaign to legalize speech about birth control in the 1920s and 1930s, a topic I wrote about more than 40 years ago. In the only original archival work I have ever done, I found a close connection, much of it by back channel, between Margaret Sanger, the most famous advocate for lawful birth control, and Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Long before the full recognition of the right of free speech in the United States, which would only happen in its modern form in the 1960s and 1970s, the fight over even the right to advocate for birth control was, fundamentally, the occasion for early expansion of free expression.
Along the way, we look at the persistent relevance of the Comstock Act, the mixed motives of advocates for lawful birth control, an example of “cancel culture” from a hundred years ago, and the still timely problem of organizations staying true to their mission or impairing their credibility by moving out of their lane.
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Selected references for this episode
The archives of the papers of the American Civil Liberties Union at Princeton University
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 128. |
| 0:10.7 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman. |
| 0:12.9 | I'm recording this episode on September 21st, 2023, in Princeton, New Jersey. |
| 0:19.4 | We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:26.0 | This episode is a sidebar, which is our term for an episode that's off the timeline of the history of the Americans. |
| 0:34.1 | I'm in the middle of another big round of travel, both work and fun. |
| 0:39.2 | The fun part starts tonight. |
| 0:41.3 | I'm flying to Poland for a week with a couple of lads from college. |
| 0:45.3 | I'll probably have something to say about that when I get back. |
| 0:48.2 | I have, however, spent most of the last two weeks caught up in work work. |
| 0:53.1 | I recorded the last episode early in the morning in a |
| 0:55.7 | hotel room in California. A couple of you reported that I sounded tired or down. And actually, |
| 1:01.9 | I was. Even history podcasters aren't superhuman. Of course, all this has cut into research |
| 1:10.6 | and writing time as well. So this episode's a bit of a cheat. |
| 1:14.5 | It's mostly material I wrote 40 years ago. |
| 1:19.0 | Longstanding and attentive listeners know that I say that I'm not a historian. |
| 1:24.7 | One of the reasons is that unlike professional historians, I don't create new historical |
| 1:29.8 | knowledge. This podcast is actually about the one time that I did. This episode is also a rare |
| 1:37.3 | example of me being inspired by current events. Those of you who follow progressives and media, |
| 1:43.8 | or especially on history, Twitter, |
| 1:46.1 | may have noticed that off and on in the past years, something called the Comstock Act has been |
| 1:51.1 | popping up in the discourse. The Comstock Act passed in 1873 by the federal government and |
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