the Christian Sabbath. The Supreme Court has never overturned such laws, although some states subsequently revoked many of the laws under pressure from commercial interests. Freedom of expression During the 1940s and 1950s, the ACLU continued its battle against censorship of art and literature. In 1948, the New York affiliate of the ACLU received mixed results from the Supreme Court, winning the appeal of Carl Jacob Kunz, who was convicted for speaking without a police permit, but losing the appeal of Irving Feiner who was arrested to prevent a breach of the peace, based on his oration denouncing President Truman and the American Legion. The ACLU lost the case of Joseph Beauharnais, who was arrested for group libel when he distributed literature impugning the character of African Americans. Cities across America routinely banned movies because they were deemed to be "harmful", "offensive", or "immoral"censorship which was validated by the 1915 Mutual v. Ohio Supreme Court decision which held movies to be mere commerce, undeserving of first amendment protection. The film The Miracle was banned in New York in 1951 at the behest of the Catholic Church, but the ACLU supported the film's distributor in an appeal of the ban, and won a major victory in the 1952 decision Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson. The Catholic Church led efforts throughout the 1950s attempting to persuade local prosecutors to ban various books and movies, leading to conflict with the ACLU when the ACLU published it statement condemning the church's tactics. Further legal actions by the ACLU successfully defended films such as M and la Ronde, leading the eventual dismantling of movie censorship. Hollywood continued employing self-censorship with its own Production Code, but in 1956 the ACLU called on Hollywood to abolish the Code. The ACLU defended beat generation artists, including Allen Ginsberg who was prosecuted for his poem "Howl"; andin an unorthodox case the ACLU helped a coffee house regain its restaurant license which was revoked because its Beat customers were allegedly disturbing the peace of the neighborhood. The ACLU lost an important press censorship case when, in 1957, the Supreme Court upheld the obscenity conviction of publisher Samuel Roth for distributing adult magazines. As late as 1953, books such as Tropic of Cancer and From Here to Eternity were still banned. But public standards rapidly became more liberal through the 1960s, and obscenity was notoriously difficult to define, so by 1971,