The Jew as Adversary in the Battle Over Obscenity, Pornography and Sexual Morality – Part 4: Opening the Floodgates

Benjamin Garland
March 11, 2017

Allen Ginsberg

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

“Under the [Hicklin test], any obscenity in a work, no matter how slight, contaminated the whole; under the [Roth test], any slight redeeming trait purified it.” – Leo Pfeffer¹

The first major publication to reap the benefits of the precedent set by the Roth decision (discussed in part 3), was Howl and Other Poems by the Jewish “Beat” poet Allen Ginsberg.

The Beats, or the “Beat Generation,” were a literary clique centered around Ginsberg. They were all criminals, degenerates, junkies and mentally insane sexual deviants, and indeed reveled in those qualities and promoted them as the ideal way to be. In effect, they were the precursor to the broader “counterculture” movement which would ultimately revolutionize America with “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” in the 1960s and 1970s (see part 5).

Both of Ginsberg’s parents were Russian born Jews, and he had a very disturbed upbringing. His father was a socialist, and Ginsberg wrote of “getting hard-ons” while sleeping in bed with him, “rubbing up against his leg, just pressing close and holding on to him.”²

His mother was a die-hard Communist who brought him and his siblings to Communist summer camp, making Ginsberg a “red diaper baby.” She eventually developed paranoid schizophrenia and suffered severe hallucinations, believing Ginsberg’s father was trying to poison her and once seeing Hitler’s moustache in the sink.³

In her later years, she would wander around the house naked, and believed that the government was beaming radio waves into her brain and reading her thoughts. Ginsberg eventually sanctioned a lobotomy on her in an attempt to alleviate her suffering, and never forgave himself for this act.

Ginsberg himself was a lifelong homosexual and sexual predator who got off on convincing straight men to sleep with him, and was also a member and vocal supporter of the pederasty advocate group the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).⁴

Howl, written in 1956, was a reflection of Ginsberg’s deranged Jewish mind. With its innumerable references to “cocks,” “cunts,” “semen,” and those “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,” publishing it was a risky endeavor at the time, given the existing obscenity laws.

The “avant-garde” book store owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti decided to take the risk, after receiving assurance from the heavily Jewish American Civil Liberties Union that they would defend the publication were it to run into trouble – “which I almost hope it does,” Ginsberg wrote to his father. “I am almost ready to tackle the U.S. Govt out of sheer self delight.”⁵

Trouble it soon found.

Ferlinghetti was raided on June 3, 1957 (just three weeks before the Roth decision), arrested, and charged with obscenity. One of the shrewdest and most famous Jewish lawyers in the country, Jake Ehrlich, whom the popular TV character Perry Mason was based on, took the lead in the case.

Jake Ehrlich

Naturally, Ehrlich and his team structured their defense on the Roth decision, which had changed the definition of obscenity to whether or not a work overall had “redeeming social and literary value.” This didn’t leave the prosecutor with much to work with. He would have to somehow prove that the entire work was meaningless; an almost impossible task.

The defense, on the other hand, only had to track down a few of the untold thousands of literary authorities who could be shown to have credentials, to claim that the work was of great merit. Of this they brought nine.⁶

The presiding judge, Clayton Horn, despite being a devout Christian who had notoriously sentenced a shoplifter to a viewing of the Charleton Heston movie The 10 Commandments, followed a strict reading of Roth and reversed the charge and found Howl not obscene.

Aside from further liberalizing obscenity law, the attempted suppression of Howl catapulted Ginsberg, the Beats, and their works to national fame with the extensive media coverage. Howl sold tens of thousands of copies before the trial was even concluded, and Ginsberg and the Beats were profiled by such widely read outlets as Life, Time and the San Francisco Chronicle.⁷

Emboldened by the Roth and Howl decisions, Jewish publisher Barney Rosset decided he would challenge obscenity laws directly.

Rosset, born in Chicago in 1922, was a radical leftist even in his youth, publishing his first newspaper, The Sommunist (socialist/communist), while still in high school. He was under surveillance by the government for his radicalism, and suspected “disaffection,” beginning in 1943.⁸

Upon returning from WWII, where he served mainly as a photographer, Rosset joined the Communist party in Chicago for a time and then in 1948 produced the documentary ‘Strange Victory,’ in which he attacked America as racist like the Nazis. “We took Hitler home with us, specifically in terms of racial problems in this country,” he asserted.

America fought to save the Jews from Hitler only to have many of them turn around and stab her in the back.

After receiving a hefty inheritance from his father, who was a wealthy Jewish banker, Rosset purchased the publishing company Grove Press in 1951, where he employed Jews almost exclusively (see footnote), and would continue promoting his radical leftist agenda, becoming the foremost publisher of “counterculture” materials throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s.⁹

Being a far-left Jew, Rosset was virulently anti-White and pro-Black. He published radical Black authors such as Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka, who wrote outrageous anti-White vitriol such as: “Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats” and “You cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life.”¹⁰

Rosset was a pervert to boot. He was admittedly obsessed with pornographic materials his entire life. As such he was naturally against all forms of censorship. He compared censorship to anti-miscegenation attitudes (“the fear that your daughter would sleep with a black man and the fear that your daughter would read that book”), and fought vehemently for the dissolution of those two taboos, apparently viewing a society where everyone’s daughter could screw Blacks and read pornographic books without consequence as an ideal utopia to strive for.

Rosset was an unhinged, effeminate man, driven by his impulses. A Military Intelligence report described him as one who “totally lacks sound judgment.” “[H]e is incapable of appraising people,” it reads, “all of his impressions and judgments are based upon emotional reactions.” This assessment was agreed upon by all of Rosset’s associates who were contacted by Grove Press chronicler Loren Glass.¹¹

These impulses drove him into taking the risk that no other of his ideological kin were willing to take. He published two of the most infamous banned books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by British author D. H. Lawrence, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, back to back.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the milder of the two, came first (against the wishes of the Lawrence estate), specifically to pave the way for Tropic of Cancer.¹²

“Chatterley he really didn’t give too much of a damn about,” says one of Rosset’s colleagues in a 2007 documentary about him, Obscene. “He didn’t really think that was a wonderful book. But he was convinced that he needed a book of that stature in order to prepare the Tropic of Cancer case.”

It follows that Rosset would not appreciate Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as Lawrence’s anti-modernity, anti-egalitarian political and philosophical views were diametrically at odds with Rosset’s extreme leftism.¹³

Lawrence, though friendly with many Jews, was also somewhat of an anti-Semite, at least by today’s standards. He blamed the Jews for modern decadence, and would often berate and criticize them. In a letter to one “very bossy and over-bearing Jew,” according to Lawrence biographer Jeffrey Meyers, “he stated that the Jews were elitist and smug”; to another, Waldo Frank, he wrote that “they were a cringing race, for their pride as the Chosen People both provoked and compensated for their persecution.”

On another occasion Lawrence wrote, in agreement with Edward Gibbon (paraphrasing what Gibbon wrote in his history of the Roman Empire), that “the Jews are the great haters of the human race – and the great anti-social principle.”¹⁴

According to Lawrence, “humanity hated the Jews” because of their conceited, self-worshiping religion, which he personally found to be “abominable.”¹⁵

Though Lady Chatterley’s Lover is indeed a bit explicit, especially for its time, for his part Lawrence was against outright pornography. In his essay Obscenity and Pornography, he wrote: “But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously. It would not be very difficult.” ¹⁶

“About Lady C,” he later wrote to Aldous Huxley, author of the prophetic Brave New World, “you mustn’t think I advocate perpetual sex in and out of season. Nothing nauseates me more than perpetual sex in and out of season. . . . God forbid that I should be taken as urging loose sex activity.”¹⁷

It would then seem that Lawrence, who died in 1930, would have been displeased to see how the Jews later used his work as a means of clearing the path for “genuine pornography” and broader sexual liberation.

D H Lawrence

Henry Miller, on the other hand, was Rosset’s hero. “He just had a contempt for this country that I shared,” Rosset explains, in Obscene. “I said, well we’ll publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover first and when we win that battle we will then do Tropic of Cancer. I didn’t do that to save humanity, I did it to save Tropic of Cancer.”

Rosset’s plan paid off in spades. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was cleared and became Grove Press’s most successful publication, selling almost 2 million copies by 1960. This earned them enough money to fund future court battles, and secured their reputation as the premier fighters on the front line of the battle over obscenity.

Following this victory, Rosset and Grove Press prepared to publish Tropic of Cancer, which had first been published by their European counterpart, Obelisk.

Founded in France by a Jewish expatriate from England, Jack Kahane, Obelisk specialized in publishing books that were banned in English speaking countries (those who traveled through France could then easily purchase them).

Following his death, Kahane’s son Maurice Giordias took over Obelisk, and changed its name to Olympia in 1953. Giordias, like his father before him, delighted in subverting European mores with obscenity: “It was great fun,” he recalled in a memoir,

The Anglo-Saxon world was being attacked, invaded, infiltrated, outflanked, and conquered by this erotic armada. The Dickensian schoolmasters of England were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was standing on end beneath their wigs, black market prices in New York and London for our green-backed products were soaring to fantastic heights.¹⁸

Tropic of Cancer is an unbelievable sewer of filth – an all out assault on decency.

“This is not a book,” Miller writes in the introduction. “This is a libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty … what you will.”¹⁹

Miller, though not a Jew himself, was married to one. And he writes of a Jewess, Tania, in Tropic of Cancer (which is semi-autobiographical), “for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew.”²⁰ He then fantasizes about having sex with her as follows:

O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. . . . I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. . . . After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. . . . I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces…²¹

Needless to say, the ante had been raised a bit from Lawrence’s much tamer work. Nationwide outrage brought Tropic of Cancer to court in over sixty different obscenity trials following its publication.

Grove Press had convinced vendors to carry Tropic on the promise that they would pay the court costs should it run into trouble, and they did just that – for all sixty some odd cases – using their massive profits from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The most significant of all these cases was the infamous “Chicago trial,” which was the first to rule the book not obscene. “What goes unmentioned in accounts of this crucial trial,” Josh Lambert writes in Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews and American Culture,

is the prominence of Jews among the advocates for Miller’s novel. Haiman, the plaintiff who initiated the suit, was Jewish, and so was his lawyer . . . Elmer Gertz. The book’s publisher, Rosset, considered himself half Jewish. The paperback of Miller’s book contained an introduction by the poet Karl Shapiro, whose most recent collection of verse was titled Poems of a Jew. Gertz called as the first expert witness to testify on behalf of the novel . . . Richard Ellmann, son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine. The presiding Judge, Samuel B. Epstein . . . had come to Chicago in 1911 to lead one of the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish communities.²²

And so it went. With the stroke of a pen of one Jewish judge (who just so happened to be a personal friend of Barney Rosset’s father), Tropic of Cancer was cleared, against the wishes of the people of Illinois, who were represented by law enforcement officials of no less than ten different districts.²³

Even the Mayor, Richard Daley, had put heavy pressure on Judge Epstein not to clear the book, but it was to no avail.²⁴

“The day [Judge Epstein] handed down his decision,” Rosset wrote in his autobiography, “I sensed we were in the home stretch. No matter what came next, I knew Tropic of Cancer had been set free from the philistines.”²⁵

Soon after, the Supreme Court concurred with the Chicago decision, officially clearing the book nationwide on June 22, 1964.

This resulted in the Illinois Supreme Court’s reversal of another obscenity conviction, that of Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce.

Lenny Bruce and his many high profile battles with the authorities had become a counterculture cause célèbre around this time. Allen Ginsberg even formed an ‘Emergency Committee Against the Harassment of Lenny Bruce’ and circulated a petition of protest that was ultimately signed by eighty-eight public figures, about half of whom were Jews such as Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Max Lerner, Lionel Trilling, Paul Newman, Woody Allen, Susan Sontag, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Howe.²⁶

Bruce, born Alfred Leonard Schneider in 1925, had been testing the bounds of decency and shocking audiences and authorities as early as 1957, the same year as the Roth decision, with disgusting bits such as: “A kid looks up at his father and he says, ‘What’s a degenerate?’ The father says, ‘Shut up, kid, and keep sucking!’”²⁷

On one occasion he came out on stage naked at a strip club where he was set to perform, and urinated in a hole on the stage to “protest” on behalf of strippers, who had been complaining about getting their high-heels stuck in it.²⁸

His first obscenity arrest was at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in 1961. He was arrested for several different bits, one where he called the audience “cocksuckers,” and another where he kept repeating “come in me, come in me, come in me,” attempting to make the point that since those three words taken individually (“come,” “in,” and “me”) are innocuous, regarding them as obscene when strung together is somehow unreasonable (such was the typical Lenny logic that many people, with a straight face, claimed was “brilliant social satire.”)

Lenny Bruce during one of his arrests.

The case was brought before the same judge who presided over the Howl trial mentioned above, Clayton Horn, who instructed the jury so narrowly within the confines of Roth they had no choice but to find Bruce not guilty.

“We hate this verdict,” one juror told the press. “But under the instructions there was nothing we could do but give the not guilty verdict.” A second juror added: “That’s the way all of us felt, and I hope you newspaper people will report this, that we all felt the law should be tightened.”²⁹

Ultimately Bruce was arrested at least eight times for obscenity, and many other times for drugs and other offenses. Once he was even arrested for an elaborate scam in which he posed as a priest and solicited donations for a leper colony. He made quite a habit of sabotaging his own trials though, repeatedly firing high profile lawyers and insisting on representing himself, and then acting outrageous in and out of the courtroom.

For instance, on December 16, 1964, he recited in court a bit of his about an outraged liberal who was judged unfairly by an all Black jury. For the punchline it is revealed that the liberal, who claimed to have “been since 1939 with that integration shit,” was still a racist deep down (one of Lenny’s main themes was that all Whites are inherently racist): “They gave me twenty years for raising my voice – those niggers!”

Judge Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to be the first Black to serve on the Supreme Court, was not amused. According to Jewish lawyer Martin Garbus, who was present, Judge Marshall’s “head jerked up and he nearly dropped a pen from his hand.” Bruce, seeing this reaction “stumbled, tried bravely to explain the joke, but could not. Then he knew he had lost the case and sat down.”³⁰

On another occasion, in December of 1964, with astonishingly idiotic chutzpah, Bruce invoked the alleged eternal victimhood of the chosen ones, exclaiming to an already exasperated courtroom: “I am a Jew before this Court [and] I would like to set the record straight, that the Jew is not remorseful.”³¹

This latter case was the most important of all of Bruce’s trials, which taken altogether were by far the most numerous and costly in the history of American obscenity law (see footnote).³²

He was convicted to four months in the workhouse, but granted a stay of execution. This gave him the opportunity to appeal, which he blundered through in his characteristically stubborn and self-defeating way and ultimately lost.

Rather than serving the four months, Lenny jumped bail, leaving New York for San Francisco, where he essentially went off the deep end. His stand-up routines were reduced to him rambling and droning on, obsessing over his court battles – generally in a drugged-out stupor – and were deemed boring and unfunny by even his staunchest defenders and fans.

High on a joint soaked in DMT in a hotel room in March of 1965, Bruce told his friend Eric Miller to spit in his face, and then stripped naked and jumped up on – and then fell through – a two-story high window, badly injuring his legs and ankles, before screaming wildly and fighting with cops and ambulance attendants.³³

Eighteen months later, on August 3, 1966, he fell off the toilet onto his bathroom floor. He was naked, with a needle sticking out of his arm, dead of a morphine overdose at the age of 40.

Despite his early death, Bruce effectively paved the way for, and is considered an influence and hero by, all dirty comedians (who are all too frequently Jewish) that came after him, singlehandedly doing for comedy what the Jew Howard Stern – who needs no elaboration – did for radio, by breaking down all bounds of decency.

The Jewish owner of the Cafe Au Go Go, Howard Solomon, who had been charged along with Bruce, later had his conviction reversed on appeal, effectively exonerating Bruce posthumously. The decision cited to reverse Solomon (and by extension Bruce) was Memoirs v. Massachusetts, concerning the book Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland.

Jewish Judge Arthur Klein of the New York Supreme Court had ruled Fanny Hill not obscene in 1963, and it was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fanny Hill’s significance laid in the fact that, unlike Howl, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer, it was well known that it was purely pornography, without any pretense to “artistic merit” or “redeeming social value.”

Cleland intentionally made the book salacious in order to make a quick buck, as he was facing debtor’s prison. He never denied this motive.

Justice Tom C. Clark wrote in the Supreme Court’s decision of Fanny Hill that he had “’stomached’ past cases for almost 10 years without much outcry,” but “this book is too much even for me.”

“Memoirs is nothing more than a series of minutely and vividly described sexual episodes.” After setting up the story for “10 pages,” he explains, the

remaining 200 pages of the book detail her initiation into various sexual experiences . . . presented to the reader through an uninterrupted succession of descriptions by Fanny . . . These scenes run the gamut of possible sexual experience such as lesbianism, female masturbation, homosexuality between young boys, the destruction of a maidenhead with consequent gory descriptions, the seduction of a young virgin boy, the flagellation of male by female, and vice versa, followed by fervid sexual engagement, and other abhorrent acts, including over two dozen separate bizarre descriptions of different sexual intercourses between male and female characters. . . .

“There can be no doubt that the whole purpose of the book is to arouse the prurient interest,” he continued, stating the obvious. “Likewise the repetition of sexual episode after episode and the candor with which they are described renders the book ‘patently offensive.’ These facts weigh heavily in any appraisal of the book’s claims to ‘redeeming social importance.’”

Justice Clark was in the minority though. The ultra-liberal Warren Court ultimately concurred with the Jew Arthur Klein, and declared the book not obscene on March 21, 1966, with a 6-3 vote. After that, all obscenity cases on appeal at the Supreme Court were summarily reversed.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill were all defended by the Jewish lawyer Charles Rembar. In his book on the trials, The End of Obscenity, Rembar wrote that the “Fanny Hill decision produced the cry, pained or joyful, as the case might be, ‘The lid is off!’”³⁴

“[W]ith each of the books I defended,” Rembar goes on to explain, “most people who gave attention to the matter were against its publication. It cannot be stressed too often that it was the United States Constitution that saved these books, and not the will of the people.”³⁵

And regarding the minority who agitated against “the will of the people,” with this revisionist interpretation of the Constitution, the over-representation of Jews also cannot be over-stressed, as I believe the above evidence shows.

Two other major landmark decisions on obscenity were handed down by the Supreme Court on the same day as Fanny Hill.

One was for the issue of “hardcore pornography,” with the infamous Jewish smut-peddler Eddie Mishkin (see part 2) as defendant. The other was on the issue of “pandering,” with Ralph Ginsberg, who was – believe it or not – also a Jew, as defendant.

Both were affirmed – but to little effect. The new criteria for obscenity, now the Roth-Memoirs test, was so broad that as long as one added a veneer of “redeeming social value” – be it a few quotes from Shakespeare, or whatever – they could get away with just about anything.

Or, as Jewish activist Leo Pfeffer gleefully put it in his book God, Caesar, and the Constitution, all that could be hoped to be censored now was “the hardest of the hardcore.”³⁶ And, as we’ll see in part 8, even that would be unleashed by the end of the decade.

The veritable floodgates, for all intents and purposes, had been opened.

These decisions did not happen in a vacuum though, of course. They ran concurrent to the shifting view on sexual permissiveness being brought about by the largely Jewish-driven sexual and cultural revolution raging throughout America at that time.

This sexual and cultural revolution will be the topic of the next three parts, beginning with part 5, where we look at the Jewish intellectual movements of psychoanalysis, sexology, and the Frankfurt School, and their pseudo-scientific justifications for sexual liberation, and part 6, where we explore in depth the life and theories of the Jew Wilhelm Reich.

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Notes

1. Leo Pfeffer, God, Caesar, and the Constitution: The Court as Referee of Church-State Confrontation, 1974, p.315
2. Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius, 1992, p.328
3. Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, 2011, p.266
4. Bill Morgan, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, 2010, p.37
5. Ronald L.K. Collins & David M. Skover, Mania: The Story of the Outraged and Outrageous Lives That Launched a Cultural Revolution, 2013, p.226
6. For an abridged transcript of the trial see Lawrence Ferlinghetti and J.W. Ehrlich, Howl of the Censor, 1961
7. Collins & Skover, p.253-254
8. Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, 2013, p.5
9. Ibid., p.14-15: “Most of the key players at Grove were New York Jews. Fred Jordan, Rosset’s right-hand man throughout the 1960s, was a Holocaust survivor. . . . As the company expanded, Rosset hired more New York Jews, including Morrie Goldfischer; Nat Sobel; Herman Graf; Myron Shapiro, who ran the book club; Jules Geller, who ran the educational division; and Harry Braverman, who was a prominent editor and jack-of-all-trades at the company on and off throughout the 1960s. All of these men came from traditions of left-wing Jewish activism and cultural entrepreneurship, with many having close ties to labor groups such as the Socialist Workers Party.”
10. Amiri Baraka, The Dead Lecturer: Poems by Leroi Jones, 1964, p.63; “Black People,” Published in Grove Press’s Evergreen Review, 1967
11. Glass, p.5
12. Jay Gertzman, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist, 2013, p.265
13. For more on Lawrence’s political and philosophical views see here
14. That Jews have an “irreconcilable hatred of mankind,” was Gibbon’s exact phrasing in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II, Chapter 16
15. All quotes from Jeffrey Meyers, D.H. Lawrence: A Biography, 2002, p.132-33 (emphases in original)
16. D.H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, 2004, p. 241
17. Meyers, p.361
18. Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, 1981, p.114
19. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934, p.5 (ellipsis in original)
20. Ibid. p.8
21. Ibid. p.11
22. Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews and American Culture, 2013, p.2
23. Glass, p.114: “Arlington Heights, Skokie, Glencoe, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Niles, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Winnetka, and Evanston.”
24. De Grazia, p.380
25. Barney Rosset, My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, 2016, p.203
26. David E. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity, 2012, p.140
27. Ronald L.K. Collins, The Trials of Lenny Bruce, 2002, p.49
28. Ibid., p.96
29. Ibid., p.87
30. De Grazia, p.452
31. Collins, p.299
32. Ibid, p.383: “The legacy of People v. Bruce is unparalleled in the history of American law. When it was over, really over, the prosecution of Lenny Bruce for misdemeanor obscenity: Involved at least eight obscenity arrests (for Bruce alone)—Entailed six trials in four cities—Took some four years and some 3,500 pages of trial transcripts—Required eight state trial judges (not including the numerous judges who heard bail matters and preliminary motions, etc.)—Involved more than a dozen state attorneys and double that number of billable-hour defense lawyers—Prompted legal actions by Bruce in federal courts in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—Consumed untold man-hours and amounts of public monies—Involved appeals and/or petitions to state high courts, federal appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court (presided over, in total, by twenty-five state and federal appellate judges, plus nine more judges in People v. Solomon)—And bankrupted Bruce, who once made nearly $200,000 a year in the early 1960s.”
33. De Grazia, p.475
34. Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer & Fanny Hill by the Lawyer Who Defended Them, 1968, p.13
35. Ibid., p.174 (emphasis mine)
36. Pfeffer, p.312