Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It was hidden inside a light blue false cover with glittery squiggles. This was 1981 and I could not imagine how my refined grandmother, Jeanette, had come to possess a novel that was best known for its salacious sex. It was only after my Uncle Joe died last year, nearly a half century later, that I would learn the book’s significance.
Joe Ronsley grew up in Chicago with my mother, Arlene. He became the first member of the family to attend college, enrolling at Northwestern University. He initially studied commerce, intending at some point to take over my grandfather’s florist business but soon gravitated toward literature. Following graduation and military service, he dutifully joined Ronsley Florist, though it was evident to him (and he suspected others) that he possessed neither the business acumen nor the sharp elbows to make it in the Windy City.
An opportunity to pursue his passion came when Continental Insurance made an unexpected bid for the building housing the florist shop. The shop was sold and Joe returned to Northwestern to pursue graduate work under the renowned Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann.
I caught brief glimpses of Uncle Joe in my youth, usually during holidays and important family events. He and his family had moved to Montreal, where he taught literature at McGill University. I knew him for his devotion to his family, his fastidiousness about food and his work on Anglo-Irish literature. He wrote his dissertation and first book on WB Yeats and helped establish the Canadian Association for Irish Studies.
Joe and Aunt Joanne encouraged me to attend McGill. There I came to know him better and in many ways he inspired my academic career, although I studied politics, a field he no doubt viewed (but did not say) as inferior. The gap between politics and literature can appear narrow or vast. Uncle Joe was a traditionalist who embraced the written word and rejected literature as a vehicle for politics and activism. He was closer in sensibility to Nabokov, who said that ‘a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss’.
His teaching emphasised close engagement with texts, which he often read aloud. Students who preferred postmodern literary theory often found him old-fashioned, but those who loved literature appreciated his passion.
For years I assumed that literature and politics occupied separate spheres in my uncle’s life. While preparing his obituary, however, I discovered a brief reference in a 1962 American Library Association newsletter to a lawsuit brought by ‘Northwestern University graduate student Joseph Ronsley’ against officials in Lake County, Illinois that focused on Tropic of Cancer. I wondered why I had never heard about this lawsuit and set about researching the case.
Few books attracted more controversy than Tropic of Cancer. First published in France in 1934, it was banned in the United States for decades. When Grove Press published American hard and paperback editions in 1961, local authorities intervened. Journalist Anthony Lewis observed a year later: ‘Tropic of Cancer has run into more massive opposition from censors across the United States than any other serious publishing venture in memory.’
Today’s book banning controversies often focus on public institutions, such as schools and libraries. However, in 1960 censorship was directed primarily at authors, publishers, booksellers and distributors who faced threats of criminal prosecution, fines and blacklisting. Chicagoland became a key battleground. Local police and prosecutors mobilised and aggressively blocked sales after learning about Tropic at the 1961 conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. However, their efforts were opposed by an equally determined force in a partnership between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a group of faculty and students from Northwestern University, including communications professor Franklyn Haiman, Ellmann and Uncle Joe, who was still a graduate student.
The controversy provided the ACLU the opportunity to test a more expansive understanding of the First Amendment in the courtroom. Rather than focusing on the rights of authors and publishers, ACLU lawyers highlighted the rights of citizen consumers.
Haiman v Morris was filed in Cook County in December 1961. ACLU attorney Joel Sprayregen advanced the ‘constitutional right to read’, arguing that citizens should have standing to challenge ‘illegal official conduct which has deprived them of the right to read books of their choice’. However, with Grove Press joining the suit, the focus moved from rights to more traditional arguments over obscenity. Ellmann proved a particularly compelling witness. He praised Tropic’s ‘craftsmanship’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘earnestness of purpose’, compared it with works of Faulkner, Hemingway and Whitman, and insisted that prurient sections of the book were essential to the entire corpus. Judge Samuel Epstein ruled in favour of Haiman, declaring that freedom of expression ‘becomes a useless privilege when the freedom to read is restricted or denied’.
Days after Ellmann’s testimony, another lawsuit was filed to the north in Lake County: Ronsley v Stanczak pitted Uncle Joe against the county state’s attorney, Bruno Stanczak, and sheriff Norris Froelich. The contrast between the parties was striking. Stanczak publicly denounced the book as ‘filthy’ and asserted its purpose was to ‘demoralise and scandalise people, particularly teenagers’. Joe told the Daily Northwestern: ‘I don’t think these men should have the right to tell me what I can read and what I cannot read.’
Building on the arguments made in Haiman v Morris, but without the involvement of publishers to muddy the legal waters, ACLU attorneys Alexander Poliakoff and Burt Joseph, Uncle Joe’s good friend and neighbour, claimed that the First Amendment should protect readers seeking access to ideas. Judge Decker agreed. In a significant ruling he held that constitutional safeguards were not just designed to protect authors and publishers but ‘the reading public as well’. He also noted that the sheriff and state’s attorney lacked legal authority to interfere with the book’s distribution and issued an injunction preventing further interference. The litigation formally ended a year later with county officials agreeing not to intervene in obscenity matters without following appropriate legal procedures.
The impact of the decisions reverberated beyond northern Illinois. Historian Leigh Ann Wheeler, in her insightful book How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, noted that the two cases inspired similar citizen/consumer-initiated lawsuits across the country. These cases rested on a new understanding of the First Amendment centred on what Judge Decker described as ‘the right of a free people to choose their own reading matter’.
Meanwhile, courts across the nation reached conflicting conclusions on whether Tropic of Cancer was obscene. The matter ultimately reached the US Supreme Court which, on the same day in 1964, issued the Jacobellis v Ohio decision concerning obscenity in film and Grove Press v Gerstein that focused on Tropic. The decisions raised the obscenity bar significantly, creating a standard by which obscene material must not simply be of ‘prurient interest’ but also ‘utterly without redeeming social importance’.
Tropic thus impacted two critical aspects of the freedom to read: the right of citizens to sue to protect their rights; and what government officials could identify as obscene.
Learning of Joe’s involvement was especially meaningful to me, because I discovered the case while co-editing a volume on student voting rights. A chapter I had written explored how university constituencies, including students, faculty and administrators can mobilise intellectual resources and form partnerships with non-profits and legal defence organisations to defend essential democratic rights. It was heartening to realise that decades earlier my uncle, alongside professors and students at Northwestern, had done exactly that in defence of the right to read.
Understanding Uncle Joe’s motivations is more difficult. He was not an activist and even his children did not know about the case. He told Wheeler he was merely an ‘instrument’ of his friend, Burt Joseph. However, that explanation strikes me as incomplete and typically self-effacing. He was not the sort of person to spend December weekends chronicling the challenges of purchasing Tropic of Cancer in Lake County bookstores, let alone to sue a Chicagoland sheriff unless there was some greater principle involved.
I suspect that Joe was conflicted. The book did not embody the literary values he most cherished. He told Wheeler that he disliked Tropic of Cancer and considered its sexual content gratuitous. And yet he had other values. He was a lifelong member of the ACLU and its Canadian counterparts. As a scholar of Anglo-Irish literature, he was deeply familiar with writers such as Joyce and Denis Johnston, whose careers intersected with struggles against censorship. Most importantly, he had a principled belief that government officials should not be able to tell him what he could and could not read. I was pleased to learn that he spoke about the case with his granddaughter Emma, now a constitutional lawyer, and even displayed a copy of Wheeler’s book, for which he was interviewed, on his bookshelf.
And here is a lesson for the ongoing relationship between politics and literature, especially in the Trump era: even those who embrace a more traditional approach to the written word can be political and impactful. I will never know if Joe fully appreciated this, or what impelled his involvement in the lawsuit, however there is some solace in knowing he helped advance a constitutional understanding of the public’s right to read. I do not know whether my grandmother ever read her cloaked copy of Tropic of Cancer but I suspect she kept the book all those years, even when she moved after my grandfather died, because she intuited that Uncle Joe participated in something important and she was proud of her son.