The Press: Slamming the Door

Up to a housewife’s door in Alexandria, La. one day in 1949 stepped Magazine Salesman Jack H. Breard to sell combination subscriptions to several magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and Ladies Home Journal). But Breard was really trying to get arrested, to test a city ordinance forbidding door-to-door visits without prior permission of householders. Obligingly, Alexandria’s police arrested Salesman Breard, and he was ordered to pay a $25 fine or go to jail for 30 days.

Three associations, representing door-to-door sellers of everything from Fuller Brushes to encyclopedias, joined with Breard to appeal his case, since the law dealt a heavy blow to the house-to-house selling of $1.4 billion in consumer goods each year, including some 10,000,000 magazine subscriptions. They wanted to test the constitutionality of the “Green River” ordinance which over 400 U.S. communities have adopted since Green River, Wyo. passed the first one in 1931 to slam the door on solicitors. Breard’s lawyers charged that his arrest violated both freedom of the press and free speech. Last week, by 6-to-3, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise, affirmed the right of any community to restrict door-to-door selling. Justice Stanley Reed, speaking for the majority, wrote: “Subscriptions may be made by anyone interested in receiving the magazines without the annoyances of house-to-house canvassing.”