“America is a Land of Censored Opportunity”: The Daily Worker Obscenity Case of 1927–1928

Abstract

ABSTRACT In March 1927, the Communist Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker, published a poem, “America” by David Gordon, that compared the United States to a “neat whore house.” For more than a year, state and federal prosecutors pursued obscenity cases against Gordon, the paper, and its editors, which resulted in the paper paying a $500 fine, Gordon being sentenced to an indefinite term in the state reformatory, and two editors spending time in jail. The saga demonstrates the legal persecution that the Communist Party faced in the 1920s, and the way that the organization defended itself. It also allows us to examine how the obscenity laws were used to pursue political prosecution, and, finally, offers a glimpse at early Communist aesthetic approaches.