Esquire Banned

For two years Frank C. Walker's Post Office Department has had a perfect batting average against magazines it cited, or simply scanned, as obscene: 23 cited; 39 put to the purity test; 62 second-class mail (cheaper rate) privileges revoked or denied. Last week sharp-nosed Postmaster General Walker, setting himself up as the No. 1 judge of what the U.S. public should read and of what it should be denied, personally turned thumbs down on Esquire.

His one-man ruling was not given on the obscenity grounds covered by his court's long hearing (TIME, Nov. 15). Overriding the judgment of his trial judges (2t01 in favor of Esquire), the Postmaster General dug up a postal statute he had never cited before. He found that Esquire was not (as the law requires) "originated and published for the dissemination of information of a public character or devoted to literature, the sciences, arts, or some special industry."

Walker postdated his ban to Feb. 28, and counsel for Esquire hastily laid plans for suit this week to overturn "a far-reaching, arbitrary, capricious decision by which one man sets himself up to decide what is in the public welfare." Esquire Editor Arnold Gingrich broadly hinted of group pressure on Catholic Mr. Walker. Said he: "[The Postmaster General] possibly had a commitment to carry out somebody else's wishes." From Catholic Bishop John Francis Noll (of Fort Wayne, Ind.), as chairman of the National Organization for Decent Literature, came a statement: "Esquire not even on our disapproved list for a year ... no collusion, no correspondence. ... As far as I know he doesn't think of me in connection with this Esquire business."

Smut v. Fun. The Esquire case had gone well beyond the original issue of smut v. good, clean fun and was taking on a serious aspect for the U.S. press. Said New York's Daily News: "The next logical step [of the Administration] will be to go after publications printing things deemed politically obscene, meaning unfavorable to the Administration. . . . The press had better stand up and fight ... or it will cease to be a free press."

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Banned from the mails at week's end, without a hearing, was the magazine View, slick 75-c-quarterly devoted almost entirely to art with a capital A. The objected-to material: reproductions of 1) surrealist nudes by Leon Kelley, 2) Picasso's Le Minotaure (in a Manhattan gallery's advertisement). Poet-Editor Charles Henri Ford stood up to fight.

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