“Are You Free to Read, See, and Hear?”

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reinterpreted the First Amendment to develop a notion of media-related consumer rights from the 1940s to the 1960s. In reframing the First Amendment, ACLU leaders shifted their commitment from defending only matter created for educational, political, artistic, or intellectual purposes, to defending material produced purely for profit and pleasure. The chapter links the ACLU's attention to consumer rights to prewar developments, including Depression-era attention to consumers and consumption as causes of the economic downturn, along with the emergence of pressure groups that threatened consumer access to movies, books, and magazines. It also considers the ACLU's support for commercial producers of speech and its advocacy of a right that would significantly expand the boundaries of sexual civil liberties: the consumer's right to read, see, and hear. Finally, it discusses the ACLU's arguments for freedom of speech and privacy and how consumer rights affected its battle with the motion picture industry over the issue of self-censorship.