In class on Tuesday someone (can't remember who, sorry!) brought up in relation to Courtney's presentation the dichotomy between Starr's presentation of a really rather open, transparent public sphere with real interest in and access to the workings of government, and the type of mass obfuscation we've seen over the past several years from the Bush administration and the DOD, etc. We all wondered whether Starr's portrait was somewhat inaccurate, or if the sort of coverups we're used to really didn't go on then, and I think that in the reading for today we see perhaps a bit of an answer emerging--and it's an interesting one.

Starr's discussions in chapter 8 of early restrictions on civil liberties--particularly media and postal censorship and the ways in which seemingly benign laws were interpreted to lead to jail time for radicals--gives the impression that although "when free expression came under attack, the judiciary generally failed to protect it" (268), no one was really thinking about the things that weren't allowed to be said or that the government wasn't saying, and that it was only in the buildup to the first World War that people started to take notice as a result of frustrations not only with the Comstock legacy but with the growing suppression of radical ideas. If that's accurate, I'm really curious about his sort of equation of this kind of censorship of alternative political ideologies (and the subsequent coverups, i.e. the fact that it apparently took months for the Palmer raids to be come common knowledge, which is what got me thinking about Tuesday's discussion in the first place) with the censorship of "obscenity" discussed in the chapter earlier (and in Thomas's prior blog post).

So, if I'm reading this correctly and provided I'm not missing earlier examples, government coverup as we understand it now could almost be read as arising almost simultaneously with Victorian social mores, and censorship both political and moral is a sibling of government opacity?