The Supreme Court: Free Mail & Free Speech

The use of the mails is almost as much a part of free speech as the right to use our tongues.

—Mr. Justice Holmes

Do Americans have a right to the unimpeded mail delivery of foreign Communist publications? Yes, said the Supreme Court last week in the first decision voiding an Act of Congress on the ground that it violated the First Amendment right of free speech.

In 1961 the Government discontinued its 13-year censorship of such mail. "It serves no useful intelligence function," said President Kennedy. Congress, how ever, was not convinced. In 1962 it passed a law requiring the Post Office to hold all incoming "Communist politi cal propaganda" for 20 days, then de stroy it unless the addressee returned a card saying he wanted it. Respectable critics began to note an obvious dan ger: Post Office lists of "approved" addressees might well result in the hounding of innocent individuals, such as scholars and journalists.

New York City's Leftist Publisher Corliss Lamont challenged the law when the Post Office detained a copy of the Peking Review addressed to him in 1963. To the Post Office, Lamont's suit showed that he wanted his Communist propaganda, and the stuff was for warded. As a result, a three-judge U.S.

District Court held Lament's case to be moot. In San Francisco last fall, how ever, a Danish journalist named Leif Heilberg won his case hands down in the same kind of court when he sued for unimpeded delivery of a Chinese Communist magazine printed in Esperanto.

By a vote of 8 to 0, the Supreme Court last week upheld both Lamont and Heilberg. "We rest on the narrow ground that the addressee in order to receive his mail must request in writing that it be delivered," said Justice William O. Douglas. "This amounts in our judgment to an unconstitutional abridgment of the addressee's First Amendment rights." In short, he may be embarrassed or harassed, just because he likes to read things that upset other people. The deficit-ridden Post Office is hardly dismayed. By quitting the censorship business, it can now save $250,-000 a year.