Explore "Border Guard" by Don Whitehead on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Censors are unloved creatures. They are damned by writers, artists, and liberal thinkers wherever men cherish free expression. They are regarded generally as crude conformists who wear their righteousness as proudly as a Boy Scout wears his merit badge.
Every rule is likely to have its exception. The exceptional censor in the United States is a tall, good-natured, erudite lawyer named Huntington Cairns, who might justifiably be called the nation's watchdog against the importation of obscene books, pictures, and other items of a questionable moral character. It would be too much to call Cairns "the beloved censor. " But if a department of the government were capable of affection, then the Treasury Department (and the Customs Bureau) at least should feel this warm emotion for the man who has kept them remarkably free from foot-in-mouth embarrassment for more than a quarter of a century.