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GATHINGS COMMITTEE

A Congressman's Indignation

On 16 June 1952 Congressman Ezekiel Candler Gathings went to war against obscenity as chairman of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. He had been upset about newsstand titillation since he had come to Washington, D.C.: "Everytime I went to the drugstore to get cigars there would be a long line at the bookstand looking at the lewd covers.… I thought, what is this country coming to if we are distributing this type of thing to the youth of the land. Then, to follow it through, these kids seem to have the idea that one must go out and commit rape."

The Investigation

Representative Gathings established his credentials by sponsoring a congressional inquiry on radio and television during which he admitted that he did not know the difference between a good and a bad television program. Then Speaker Rayburn appointed him chairman of a special committee to investigate "Immoral, obscene, or otherwise offensive matter" in print. He and eight congressional colleagues, aided by two lawyers, two investigators, and a budget of twenty-five thousand dollars, studied an array of some one hundred exhibits with such single-minded zeal that they were ridiculed in the press. Seeking to reassure people uncertain about his motives, Gathings reassured them: "We are interested only in the extreme type of publication of pornographic material.… Only what's available at the corner drugstore or what you can order through the mails."

The Report

The committee's report was released early in 1953, coinciding roughly with publication of the first issue of Playboy. The report alleged that there were 70 million comic-book readers in the United States who bought 100 million comics a month, 30 percent of which contained objectionable material. The committee charged that millions of girlie magazines are published in America and that one in ten Americans reads them, or at least turns the pages. Over half the report was reserved for the subject of lurid paperbacks, which, the committee charged, deserved most of the blame for the "trash and obscenity" being circulated in print form. Paperback publishers took objection, pointing out that 90 percent of paperbacks are reprints of hardcover books and that it is unfair to characterize all paperbacks on the basis of a small and selective sampling.

The Indifference

The Gathings Committee prompted little response aside from polite criticism. Books were defended against the conclusions of the report by two of the committee's own members, who prepared a minority dissent arguing that books promote knowledge and freedom of expression and thus deserve protection. Representative Gathings, annoyed by the criticism his efforts attracted, withdrew into the legislative shadows until his retirement in 1969.