Censored Mother Goose Rhymes by Kendall Banning (1929)
Flipped through an interactive version of this very funny book today at the Ransom Center’s wonderful “Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored” exhibit. (It’s out of print, so you can read the whole thing online.)
Originally published in 1926 and dedicated to “The Censors who have taught us how to ready naughty meanings into harmless words,” Banning reprinted it in support of the efforts to revise parts of tariff legislation that allowed customs agents to ban “obscene” books from the US—the book was distributed to congressmen in the middle of the debate.1
Banning (1879-1944) wasn’t some underground prankster: he was a war veteran, a poet (a New York Times review in 1913 said of his work, “no other poet in America at the moment has such a gift of pure melody”), an author of over a dozen books (he wrote books on Annapolis and West Point), and an editor of Cosmopolitan, Popular Radio, and Hearst Magazine.
Fun fact: Gertrude Stein owned a copy.
You can read more about the debate in the book From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America ↩︎
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