Jews and Porn: Roth vs. The United States

Roth vs. The United States, which led to changes in laws regarding obscenity in the U.S., probably did not get started because of something Jewishy

In Benjamin Garland’s Merchants of Sin (2017) — which is somewhat similar to the infamous Culture of Critique series from Kevin MacDonald (c.f.: William 2022a, 2022b, 2022c, 2023a, 2023b) — the author asserts that Jews were heavily responsible for the pushing of pornography into American culture. Citing multiple historical court decisions, Garland argues that widespread of pornography and the lack of arrest of pornographers,

“[This] is due to a series of landmark liberalizing court cases over obscenity during the past century, along with a general loosening of the attitude on sexual morality, both of which the Jews have played a very heavy hand in [emphasis added]”

Page. 4

For this article, I will not focus on early laws like the Comstock Act, which prohibited the U.S. mail service from sending obscene material. Primarily because such writings will be saved for other works, and because the history of such legislation is also fraught with moral issues surrounding sex. For example, Anthony Comstock — who the Comstock Act is named after and who is used as the first example of anti-pornography legislation by Garland — felt guilty about masturbation, which led to him being against pornography (Leonard 2016); his Christian background and strong moral ethics led him to go against pornography. However, it was not simply pornography Comstock was against, but any information related to contraception’s, for example, and even anatomy books about the human body in a medical context (Austin 2021). ¹ None of this information is mentioned by Garland, instead leaving the reader to assume that it was simply anti-pornographic content.

For this article, I will focus on Roth vs. The United States, which Garland uses as the 2nd example of Jewish involvement in pushing porn and changing supposed American ethics at the time. The first example was about comics, which Garland complains were also violent as they featured gore — going as far to say comic books were causally responsible for some crimes (see Garland, page. 15) and then blaming Jews because the authors were Jews! While some comics did push the lines, Garland spends most time complaining that Jews wrote such things rather than mentioning gentiles publishing similar work. Clearly not an unbiased work and nowhere does it suggest Jews had a “very heavy hand” as we are presented with a biased history, but let us continue with Roth vs. The United States.

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In Chapter 3 “Roth vs. The United States”, Garland spends little time telling us about Roth. Instead saying how he re-published older literary works in an unauthorized manner, how he was a self-hating Jew for a bit (he claimed Jews attempted to subvert, later walked back on these words), and the fact he re-published pornography. According to Garland, we are expected to believe that Roth published pornography at his book store and through the mail service because of Jewish reasons because

“Ironically, Roth was himself a supreme example of a “subversive” Jew, one who did incalculable damage through his relentless insistence on distributing obscene and pornographic materials. This seeming paradox is likely explained by the fact that Roth actually believed that he was doing the right thing fighting against censorship – a sort of freedom crusade”

Why do we have to take this at face value, though? The lack of information given by Garland about Roth does not allow us to see if Roth was truly doing this for “Jewish” reasons or because it truly was about fighting against censorship. Rather, the lack of context surrounding Roth is left out and the reader is expected to believe that such acts done by Roth were due to him being a Jew who also was subversive.

Jay Gertman’s seminal “Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist” (2013), provides more information about Roth. And of the information that was provided, it seemed like Roth truly was doing this to fight censorship, and the material Roth sold is was more than just pornography, contra Garland.

At a time Roth would repeat religious words from an evangelical pamphlet given to him during his jail term movements. One time while repeating the passages in a ship, a Rabbi took his pamphlet and warned him of his immortal soul. This, according to German, was Roth’s first brush with censorship. According to German, “His avowed response was a lifelong obsession…with fighting convections..” (15). Clearly, there is no paradox contra Garland. Nowhere in his life does it make mention of him doing such things for Jewish reasons, but rather for being against censorship. There can exist no paradox, contrary to Garland claiming to find a paradox when there might not be one.

Moving on, Garland fails to mention that the works Roth published were not simply about sex, but also about social issues going on in the underbelly of America.

Not only the correspondence but also the advertising circulars and ledgers in the Roth Archive show Roth’s efforts to not only make money from prurient titillation but also to broaden the horizons of middle- and working-class readers from the heartland of America, as well as city dwellers who worked in offices and stores and in the professions. In his 1920s magazines, in his under the-counter pornography of the interwar period, and in the largest mail-order book business of the 1940s and 1950s, he introduced to a broad audience writ ers such as Joyce, Lawrence, Paul Morand, Céline, Genet, and the objectivist poets, including Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky. He also published writers of the Southern Gothic genre, and published as well one of the best send-ups of it. A Scarlet Pansy (1933) was an early novel about transvestites; another pseudonymous work presented an African American protagonist’s attempts to marry a white woman and join a Madison Avenue social and ar tistic set. Roth gave wide circulation to important novels about the predatory racket of clairvoyance at both upper- and under-class levels (Nightmare Alley) and about child abuse (Forlorn Sunset). All of these works were modernist projects. His advertising methods—extensively documented by the listings he kept of targeted media, text, illustrations, expenses, and sales figures for the books themselves—offer an understanding of the uniquely American nexus of mass popular entertainment and avant-garde poetry and prose.

We are led to believe by Garland that Roth was simply pushing pornography content, not other works that discussed different things.

While Roth did push pornography, it’s important to keep in mind that we do not know to the extent of how much pornography was distributed and how much of it was other works from other authors. However, it’s important to remember that convictions made regarding obscenity's being caught by the U.S. mail service might not provide strong rebuttals to the claim that it was widespread. As was said by Gertzman:

One of the attractive aspects of the pandering complaint was that it allowed the postal authorities to conflate fraud (if the books themselves were insufficiently sexually explicit) with obscenity.

Furthermore, the government was being biased in who they went after. People like Roth were targeted, while “people letters” also discussing sex were not. As Gertzman writes,

“An understandable reason for the Roths’ interest in the fate of the Rebhuhns was that it strengthened their belief that federal obscenity prosecutions were directed against the mail-order distributors like themselves who were targeted as smut mongers, as opposed to those booksellers who had gained the status of people of letters. An example is the open and unhindered sale by well-reputed publishers of such works as René Guyon’s The Ethics of Sex Acts, advertised in 1934 by Knopf as “a discussion of onanism, incest, homosexuality, fetishism, and even such ‘extraordinary’ variations as necrophilia and coprophilia.”

Thus, it’s not like Jews hand the primary or largest hand in the escape, gentiles also had their share of the pie, too. However, according to Garland’s history, it was primarily a Jewish thing rather than the government just being biased in who they want after pushing obscenity.

Furthermore, of some of the unauthorized works Roth published, he did go through pains to make sure it passed censorship laws. Some writers also got mad at him for removing some passages that were to obscene, and when he would change some passages to be more obscene.

The reason for Roth’s focus from literary erotic to straight-up erotica was because of the turmoil going on between literary organizations and writers, leaving some people in the crossfire being known as prudes, concerns about losing profits over published works, and the fact that he was seen as a “pirate”. So, when the man was ostracized from the literary community for being a pirate (even though copyright laws at the time weren’t very existent and thus what Ross did was not illegal) and leaving some stuff out during re-publications of erotic work, he went to straight smut. Not because of some innate Jewishness, it was just how the tides rolled for Roth at the time.

This is a short article, but to be fair, Garland has a short history of Roth. There isn’t much to say besides what I said, but the book regarding Roth does provide more examples. I just feel like here is enough as at some point it would just be repeating itself.

Anyway, contrary to Garland, Roth vs. The United States was not solely due to Roth’s publication of pornography, but also other works, And Roth’s reasoning for his actions most likely have nothing to do with him being Jewish, is not related at all to his walked-backed on anti-Jewish sentiments, and the government was biased in who they were tailing for these things. So, evidence — if presented — on how many Jews were involved in the pornography business during this time needs data clean from government biased and to include gentiles who published pornography but who did not face legal repercussion, also evidence that their Jewish history played a role rather than they were simply Jewish, too.

It’s important to remember that Roth was not the only person who was against what the government was doing at the time, especially when the Comstock Act of 1873 prohibited the mailing of obscene material. As said in the book,

Many companies protested the Post Office’s “unmailable” decisions, and many heads of such companies attended the postal hearings in Washington. But Roth may have been the only victim of the “fraudulent and unmailable” labeling to point out that the consequences of a fraud order did not end with the loss of revenue from one or more books. After the fraud order had been is sued for Bumarap, he wrote a fifteen-hundred-word memorandum explaining that several of his banks had told them they would close his account, naming the institutions. As of this moment, I have no means of banking the money which my customers send me for books. What is happening here? Is it possible for the Post Office Department to put a man out of business by sending its agents to his bank every time he opens a new account [i.e., a new business name, the mail from the previous one having been blocked] and suggests to him [sic; the context suggests the bank president] that it was not a good idea to get this account? If what Roth refers to were standard procedure for the Post Office, there would have been more complaints about it than his. Even so, the possibility of this kind of treatment was shared by many capitalists in the underground economy. In their cases, as in Roth’s, it was the man, not the books he published or other services he provided, who was at issue.

While Roth certainly did go against the laws at the time multiple times, it was not solely Roth but an underground network of people also doing the same thing as Roth.

Roth because the poster boy because of what was going on with him, but also because such actions and legal issues led to Roth vs. The United States. The central question was whether obscenity is protected by the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and press. Roth v. United States clarified that obscene material does not enjoy First Amendment protection, setting a precedent for future cases involving obscenity, and that community standards as a measure for obscenity introduced a flexible approach, allowing for variations in standards across different communities. However, this “community standard” was revised later in 1973 during Miller vs. California.

So, is the first example in Merchants of Sin a good example? Not really. What led up to Roth vs The United States seems to have more do with being against censorship rather than trying to subvert American culture.

1. Side note: From the sounds it, it does not seem like people really liked Comstock, at least during the army. From diaries, it seemed he was annoying to the soldiers with his constant pushing of morality onto them, going as far to making the soldiers trash his barracks after annoying them.