FREE EXPRESSION AND CENSORSHIP IN AMERICA: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
by Herbert N. Foerstel. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. 272 pp. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 0-313-29231-0.

Reviewed by Ronald M. Labbé, Department of Political Science, University of Southwestern Louisiana
 

Herbert N. Foerstel has served as the head of Branch Libraries at the University of Maryland at College Park and presently occupies a seat on the board of George Washington University's National Security Archive, a research institute bent on developing a collection of materials on international affairs through means that include use of the Freedom of Information Act. His earlier works include SURVEILLANCE IN THE STACKS (Greenwood, 1991), an exposé of an FBI program aimed at monitoring the use of American libraries by citizens of other countries; SECRET SCIENCE (Praeger, 1993), which explores governmental control of science and technology in the United States; and BANNED IN THE UNITED STATES (Greenwood, 1994), a guide to book censorship in schools and public libraries. Foerstel is evidently a man with a commitment to intellectual freedom and a sensitivity to the compromising influence of the government and the interests it considers worth protecting.

As Foerstel points out in the introduction to his latest work, there is always something insidious about official efforts to limit free expression. They are always rationalized as a necessary means of protecting some overriding value. Steps taken in another day toward a national security state were justified as a way of protecting American freedoms from foreign adversaries. Today's efforts to combat obscenity, or indecency in art and on the Internet, or to deal with the issues of abortion, homosexuality or campaign finance, all of which have free speech implications, are defended as efforts to preserve American institutions and values. If it is possible for an encyclopedia to have a thesis, the thesis of this one is Foerstel's assertion "that whenever the rights of Americans prevents their exercise, there must be fundamental and principled conflict." This book is Forestel's latest effort to take up the challenge and do battle on behalf of American freedoms.

Unlike most other encyclopedias this is not an edited work of essays written by a number of scholars. Its one hundred twenty-two alphabetically arranged entries were all researched and written by Foerstel himself. The draftsmanship is clear throughout and each entry is followed by at least one reference source. The emphasis is on the twentieth century although not infrequently reference is made to issues and persons of other eras in individual entries. The encyclopedia includes biographies, "admittedly selective," of justices, attorneys and other figures who have been prominent in the free speech field such as Supreme Court Justices Black and Douglas, and attorney Alan Dershowitz. There are also quite a few biographies of lesser known figures such as Dennis Barry, the art museum director who brought the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit to Cincinnati, Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary who began the process of declassifying Cold War documents, and Jeffrey Daniels, who took City College of New York to court when he was dismissed as chairman of the university's black studies department following a speech he made that was widely interpreted as anti-semitic. There are even essays on a few popular figures such as Frank Zappa and Howard Stern. The essays identifying individual groups that are active in the free speech debate today and those treating salient legislative acts are perhaps the most informative items. A few items are devoted to very general topics such as the First Amendment, the Internet, and motion pictures. Individual items can impress as being either somewhat trivial or overly general, but the work as a whole conveys a detailed account of the various threats to freedom of expression to be found in the United States today. The encyclopedia concludes with a short bibliography, a table of cases and an index.

As encyclopedias go, this is a short one, taking fewer than two hundred fifty pages of text, and the author has aptly entitled it "An Encyclopedia" and not "The Encyclopedia." Brevity need not be a defect in itself, but in this instance it results in part from Foerstel's failure to handle a single free speech case as a separate item. One hundred twenty-four cases are listed in the table of cases but none of them is dealt with alone, not NEAR V. MINNESOTA, or GITLOW V. NEW YORK, or SCHENCK V. U.S., or MILLER v. CALIFORNIA, or NEW YORK TIMES V. U. S. This is not to say that they are not mentioned, because they are, and they are usually mentioned in an appropriate context. But this approach results in some very important cases being treated only briefly and then in connection with several references. Some researchers are likely to find this disappointing. Also, a work like this should include a discussion of the principal tests or approaches used by the Supreme Court in deciding free speech cases. "Clear and present danger" is mentioned, to be sure, but only in connection with several other items, namely "criminal syndicalism", "William O. Douglas," "flag desecreation," "hate speech," "obscenity," "sedition" (principally), and the "Smith Act." Black's "absolutist" position is mentioned but not evaluated. The "balancing" and "bad tendency" tests are not dealt with and neither is the important "preferred freedom" position.

These matters would certainly be dealt with in a more compendious work. But it is difficult to read this volume without forming the impression that the author's chief aim is to play the role of a "whistle blower." The message of this small encyclopedia on freedom of expression and censorship is that the very government that we have empowered to protect liberty can itself be a threat to it in ways that are least likely to be perceived as threatening. It is not a new point but it is one that can never be repeated too often and we need to be grateful for any work that makes it and gathers new evidence to support it.