that we have raised today are also being considered before that committee. I don't know whether this should be through Mr. Mahony or whoever is shepherding that bill through that committee, but somewhere along the line we ought to be abreast of each other in some way, so that we don't conflict and we don't overlap and we don't step on each other's toes. Mr. DEAN. The Department of Justice has testified before the Post Office and Civil Service Committee on the Post Office Department proposal. I am sure we will be happy to have a witness appear on the Post Office bill here. I would think the principal witness would probably be somebody from the Post Office Department who is intimately involved in the development of that proposal. The Department of Justice did work closely with the Post Office in the development of the proposals and there was a general decision reached amongst the Departments in the selection of the three that did come up. Mr. KASTEN MEIER. Thank you for your offer to cooperate in that respect. It is a useful point to bring up. I think the committee can administratively resolve this. It is quite clear that we are interested in the implication of the other administration bill and the other bills before the Post Office and Civil Service Committee for obvious reasons. Whether through testimony or through submission, one way or the other, I think we can formally learn the significance and consider it. Thank you for you testimony today. It has been most helpful to this committee. I trust that we will hear further from you as these hearings develop and come to a conclusion. I would like to announce that the next hearing on this matter will be at 10 o'clock on Wednesday morning next, October 1. We will have a series of congressional witnesses at that time. The committee stands adjourned until then. (Whereupon, at 3:35 p.m. the hearing adjourned, to reconvene for further hearing at 10 a.m., Wednesday, October 1, 1969.) ANTIOBSCENITY LEGISLATION WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1969 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, The subcommittee met at 10:08 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 2141. Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Robert W. Kastenmeier (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Kastenmeier, St. Onge, Conyers, Mikva, Poff. Hutchinson, Biester, and MacGregor. Staff members present: Herbert Fuchs, counsel, and Paul S. Fenton, associate counsel. Mr. KASTENMEIER. The committee will come to order. This morning, we shall continue our hearings on pending antiobscenity legislation. Our first witness is our distinguished colleague from Utah, Hon. Sherman P. Lloyd, author of H.R. 3109 which will be placed in the record, and we are very pleased to welcome our colleague to the committee for his testimony. (The bill cited appears in Appendix B below.) STATEMENT OF HON. SHERMAN P. LLOYD, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF UTAH Mr. LLOYD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the subcommittee. I have a brief statement, with an appendage. I will read the state ment. Mr. KASTENMEIER. Without objection, the committee will hear the statement and the addendum will be made part of the record. Mr. LLOYD. First, I express gratification that this committee is conducting hearings on legislation aimed at the hard-core pornographer who uses the mails to send unsolicited obscenity into the American home. I felt, Mr. Chairman, that it would have been probably out of consideration for the time of the committee if I had submitted the statement. The fact that I chose to come personally is an indication of the emphasis I believe this kind of legislation should have. Largely as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roth v. United States, decided in 1957, postal authorities report that in 1968 alone, 167,792 complaints were received from people who received lurid advertising. 43-337-70—5 The Roth decision established a legal definition of obscenity which could be sent through the mails. The definition provides that to be legally obscene, the dominant appeal of the material must be to purient interest in sex, must affront community standards, and these are the key words "must be utterly without redeeming social value." Thus, under cover of some palpably saving words of social value, seemingly limitless obscenity may be distributed to the American home through the mail. Included with my statement this morning, Mr. Chairman, is a newspaper article carried in the Washington Post of June 29, 1969, reporting that one Marvin Miller, of Los Angeles, owner of only one of a reported 200 companies who have profited as a result of the Roth decision, is reaping annual profits of several hundred thousand dollars, and has a net worth exceeding $1 million as a result of an initial investment of $25,000 made only 3 years ago in the pornography by mail business. Unsolicited mailed obscenity going into my district, the Second Congressional District of Utali including the State capital, Salt Lake City, probably is typical of that mailed to other areas of the United States. The mailings apparently follow no set pattern. They may blanket an entire area such as "postal patron" mailing to every house in a small community in my district, which happened last year, or a family may discover it is on a patterned mailing list, or it may be a random mailing out of the telephone book. However the mailing list may be determined, the work of the pornographer in sending unsolicited obscenity into homes where there are minors is equally as violative of the concept of free speech, in my opinion, as slander and libel. In the first days of this session, on January 13, I introduced legislation patterned after the proposal of a distinguished member of your full committee, Mr. Cahill. Since that date I have corresponded with the respected committee chairman, urging hearings, and I am advised that since January, nearly 200 members have joined in introducing similar legislation, evidence of the healthy reaction of the American people to the excesses of free speech, an excess which has witnessed the development of free speech into pornography and pornography into degeneracy, Legislation which I present is aimed not so much at pornography as it is to the pernicious, predatory pornographer, sending unsolicited obscenity into homes where there are minor children. I emphasize that this legislation is not in my opinion proscribed by the guidelines established by the Roth decision. In accordance with current Supreme Court's opinion of constitutional criteria, it claims no jurisdiction over the newsstand, the bookstore, the stage or the motion picture theater and it places no inhibitions over the individual in his free choice of reading material regardless of content. It targets in only at the distributor through the U.S. mails of indiscriminate and unsolicited obscenities to homes where there are minor children. It responsibly sets off limits to those who profiteer by preying upon the excessive and all-consuming obsessions of the pornographic junkie. Thus, I believe the Roth case will not be a barrier. In the decision of Ginsberg v. New York, decided in 1968, the Supreme Court held that sexually offensive materials are not constitutionally protected where the interests of minors are concerned. The Court stated: "Constitutional interpretation has consistently recognized that parents' claim to authority in their own household to direct the rearing of children is basic in the structure of our society." My bill, H.R. 3109, will (1) prohibit mail-order sales of obscene materials to children of school age; (2) make the unsolicited mailing of "hard core" pornography, or offers to sell the same to a family with minor children a Federal crime punishable by fine and jail sentence. The only materials proscribed from unsolicited mailings or sale to minors are the stock-in-trade of the smut merchant: explicit portrayals of sexual intercourse, sodomy, homosexuality, and sado-masochistic abuse, with no artistic purpose other than the appeal to prurient interests. I agree with the words of another distinguished member of this committee, Mr. MacGregor, who has said: Anyone familiar with the lives and working of the Founding Fathers would be doubtful, at the very least, that they risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, so that some cunning pornographers would use the U.S. mails to destroy the moral fiber of young Americans. I believe, if somehow these great Americans of revolutionary times could come back to us, they would not hesitate to deal with these oligarchs of obscenity, these princes of pornography, these sultans of smut, with a directness and dispatch that might shock some who are more sensitive to their rights than their wrongs. (The addendum to Mr. Lloyd's statement is as follows:) PORNOGRAPHY PRODUCER KEEPS SAMPLES FROM STAFF (By Frank Murray) LOS ANGELES, June 28.-Marvin Miller has one unbreakable rule for the 50 employees who print and ship pornographic books at his factory-no free samples. Even Miller's 16-year-old son, in the mail room sending out books and magazines with pictures that make the Playboy style of nudity look like kid stuff, can't carry home any of the 500 titles. Miller doesn't want gifts or free-lance sales by his employees cutting into his $10 million annual volume as one of the Nation's major producers of erotic material which he advertises as pornographic, but denies is obscene legally. "I'm in the business primarily to make money," said the graying and bearded Miller at his desk before a map of his marketplace, the United States. Pornography is big business in America. It's made millionaires of Miller and others. And it's made monumental problems for parents and public officials. An Associated Press investigation disclosed: About 200 companies in the country produce pornographic books, magazines and films. Their works flood, uninvited, into millions of American mailboxes and through a chain of distributors, onto the shelves of bookstores across the country. Total sales of pornographic material are staggering. Estimates range upward from $500 million a year, dwarfing the likes of the huge Government Printing Office ($17 million annual sales). Miller says his hottest item, an amply illustrated handbook on intercourse, sold 500,000 copies in a year-or roughly equal to first-year sales of William Manchester's "Death of a President," 1967's best seller. Postal authorities are swamped with complaints-167,792 in 1968 alone-from people who receive lurid advertising. President Nixon has demanded a law to keep offensive sex ads out of the mails, and 187 bills are pending in Congress to control the tidal wave of pornography. Since 1957, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Roth vs. U.S. meeting the legal definition of obscenity has been as difficult as holding a greased pig. The Roth decision said that, to be obscene, the dominant appeal of material must be to prurient interest in sex, must affront community standards and must be utterly without redeeming social value. In the dozen years since that decision, a flood of pornographic mail has inundated American mailboxes. New court decisions generally have reinforced Roth. Almost any printed material with a story line, no matter how thin, is redeeming to a book of pictures otherwise obscene. And the community standard is being met, the courts have held, so long as others are selling material as explicit and lurid as what you've got to offer. The latest decision, in a Georgia case, overturned laws forbidding possession of material admitted to be obscene. ". . . The mere private possession of obscene matter cannot constitutionally be made a crime," said the court. "If the first amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch." Miller has cashed in on the court rulings. He reprinted the most recent decision as the cover page on his latest catalogue of sex publications. It not only helps sales, but, he says, it reinforces "my moralistic point of view: that the establishment shouldn't control the thoughts nor the ways in which people wish to enjoy themselves." Sales have been good. By his own accounting, Miller went into business three years ago with $25,000. Now, he says, his annual profit is several hundred thousand dollars and his net worth more than a million dollars. Evidence indicates his figures may be conservative. For example, his initial investment in the top-selling sexual manual was $2,000, including $1,000 to the couple who posed for the photos. His sales so far: $2.5 million or a thousand times his initial investment. But other business costs run dear. Miller, 40, says he's been arrested 30 times in two years. Last December he was convicted on three counts of mailing obscene matter and sentenced to five years in prison. He's free on bail while he appeals. In Los Angeles alone, Miller is fighting 54 counts of selling obscene books. He says his legal expenses last year topped $200,000. Police say that of the more than 200 companies in the erotic trade, 75 percent of them are in Los Angeles and suburbs. Mr. Chairman, I won't read the article from the Washington Post, nor have I brought exhibits with me, because I believe every member of your subcommittee has exhibits ad nauseum, and I might observe as a matter of judicial notice that the exhibits are plentiful. Mr. KASTENMEIER. That is an accurate observation. We observed at the last hearing that if the committee wishes to avail itself of exhibits, the Justice Department probably has sufficient evidence along that line. I appreciate your statement. Mr. LLOYD. Thank vou, Mr. Chairman. I would hope that in its research and in its judgment, the committee may be able to go even further than this bill does. I recognize this bill is a very tentative first step. It defines minors, for example, as being of the age of 16. I think perhaps the committee may find it possible to go above that age. This legislation is drafted in such a way as to attempt to insure that it will meet the objections which the Supreme Court has laid down in past decisions. Mr. KASTENMEIER. Your legislation is similar if not identical to that of our colleague, Mr. Cahill? Mr. LLOYD. It is the same legislation. Mr. KASTENMEIER. Have you seen the legislation before this committee offered by the administration? Mr. LLOYD. I don't have detailed information on the specifics outlined by the administration. I am familiar with the fact that other types of legislation have been introduced by other members, but I |