The New Censors: Protecting Speakers and Consumers from the Private Sector in the 1940s–50s

On February 8, 1961, J.P. McGlynn, a Diesel Instructor with the Union Pacific Railroad, fretted over the latest achievements of the local Citizen’s Committee for Decent Literature; the group had convinced several newsstands in Omaha, Nebraska to stop selling Playboy, McGlynn’s favorite magazine and one he enjoyed reading with his two teenage sons.  Suspecting that Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s editor, and Pat Malin, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would share his perspective, McGlynn implored them to defend his “freedom to read.”  In the 1960s and ‘70s, the ACLU collaborated with Playboy attorneys to combat censorship while at the same time applying for and accepting substantial grants from the Playboy Foundation.  This budding relationship between the ACLU, Playboy magazine, and Playboy readers signaled a growing sense among many citizens their civil liberties included not just a right to speak, but also to read, see, and hear.  As ACLU leaders and others reframed the First Amendment to include consumers’ rights, they redrew boundaries between public and private with regard to sexuality.  But no one had a monopoly on the definition of privacy rights in the 1960s and decency groups like the National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL) advocated a competing notion, one that included the right to frequent public spaces without encountering private (or sexual) images and protect private spaces from unsolicited sexual material.  This paper argues that, in the sixties and seventies, the ACLU piloted major transformations in popular and juridical understandings of the First Amendment, bringing to sexual expression the gloss and respectability of constitutional rights and the crowd-pleasing allure of consumer choice even as it battled more conservative groups on the territory of privacy and consumer rights.