Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age

Five: The "Clean Books" Crusade

FIVE The "Clean Books" Crusade Reeling from a series of hostile court decisions, yet convinced of the existence of great latent support for its suppressive efforts, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice concluded that the obscenity law was at fault and would have to be tightened. This conclusion was confirmed by a particularly intense Hurry of censorship sentiment which reached its peak late in 1922. The result was the "Clean Books" crusade of 1923-25, the most far-reaching challenge to American literary freedom in the 1920S, if not in this century. The outcome, however, was quite different from what its instigators had hoped, for it was in the heated "Clean Books" controversy that an articulate anticensorship coalition, so markedly absent in the early postwar years, at last began to take shape. 99 100 PURITY IN PRINT The vice societies had never been alone in their belief that censorship was needed to combat the alarming literary trends of the 192os, and as the magnitude of the postwar upheaval became apparent, the demands for stem measures grew still more widespread. The religious press was particularly insistent. The Baptist denounced the "coarseness and vileness" of current fiction; the Presbyterian Union Seminary Review of Richmond, Virginia, likened it to "vile mud"; and The Lutheran deplored the modem literary stress on the "odd and abnormal" and nostalgically urged a revival of "the old masters of fiction." The American Church Monthly, an Episcopal publication , called for "a crusade against plaUSible immorality in our 'Best Sellers.'. . ." The December 1922 Catholic World warned that recent Vice Society defeats indicated a national "obliteration of the moral sense," and declared: The more brazen offenders against decency, be they authors, publishers, or critics, may finally go to such extremes that the American people will be driven to some such drastic measure as a federal censorship law.1 The bitterest of these outbursts came from Zion's Herald, that venerable and influential voice of Methodism, which in October 1922 published an impassioned editorial excoriating postwar fiction as a "sea of filth" and many recent books as "literary garbage wagons" fit for "the jungle and the sty." "A book censorship," it concluded ominously, . . . is not a very appealing proposition to lovers of freedom; but if some such measure should become necessary for the protection of the young life in our midst, upon what reasonable grounds could it be opposed? Publishers and authors have it within their power to avert a situation that ultimately will compel all good citizens to unite in demanding a literary censorship.2 This editorial produced a small torrent of letters, including responses from twenty-eight Methodist ministers and church officials. Eighteen of these urged a ''book censorship" (the THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 101 term was never precisely defined)-nine enthusiastically, and nine "if necessary." Seven others said public denunciation would probably be more effective than legal suppression. Only three rejected censorship as a matter of prinCiple. The merest sampling of these letters is enough to suggest their flavor. "Go to it. Hit the thing hard. Scorch it with flame-vitriolic acid may reach it. . . . It looks as if this ferment of putridity was a new eruption of phallic worship"so wrote the Reverend Robert L. Roberts of Norwich, Connecticut. Others expressed themselves in a similar vein: We muzzle mad dogs. Why should we give literary charlatans unbridled license to prey upon our people? Books that leave a "bad taste" for adults should be burned.... It may be that we need another Anthony Comstock . . . and he should be backed either with such publicity as will deal a death-blow to its sale, or with such legislation as will tie the publishers' hands. . . . Give us the censorship. Authors of literary IDth ought to have treatment similar to the purveyors of deadly disease germs. call it "book censorship " or anything else. Other ministers spoke of "poison gas" and "the bubonic plague" in discussing current fiction. A California Methodist leader, denounCing the <1iterary ghoul" with his "slimy tracks," declared : "A militant censorship should at once be established, which will not only destroy their works but [will] deal peremptorily with the human rats themselves who produce such things." Another minister expressed the hope that the Zions Herald editorial would be "the torch to start a great conflagration." "Nothing less," he said, "will suffice to purge away some very undesirable elements in our modem life."3 The conflagration-or at any rate a fairly impressive blazewas not long in coming. ~ Indignation over postwar literature, and frustration over John Sumner's inability to control it, were reaching a critical level. "A great deal will be heard during the next few months 102 PURITY IN PRINT about censorship," prophesied Current Opinion late in 1922. "Those who believe in it, and those who don't, have for some time been lining themselves up into opposing camps.'" John Sumner, only slightly chastened by the failure of his «book jury" scheme, sensed this trend and became more aggressive. "If a certain element in the publishing business continues to publish degrading matter," he told the National Arts Club in November, and the other element complacent1y sits back and takes no steps to discourage these hannful activities, it is possible to imagine that a revenue-producing measure might be enacted providing for the licensing of book and periodical publishers, the requirement of a bond in connection therewith, and the forfeiture of a license where an act is committed . . . inimical to the best interests of the state.Ii A major book-censorship drive was gathering force. At this crucial juncture, Sumner gained a powerful ally in the person of John Ford, a sixty-year-old justice of the New York State Supreme Court. The Roman Catholic son of Irish immigrant parents, Ford had been raised in a small western New York town where his father had worked on the Erie Canal. Mter attending Cornell University on scholarship, he had read law by night and passed the bar exam in 1893. He then entered the state legislature as a reform Republican, and in 1906 won election to the Supreme Court on a ticket backed by both William Randolph Hearst and Tammany Hall. In 1920 he was reelected with strong bipartisan backing.6 The even tenor of John Ford's judicial career was rudely jolted late in 1922 when a Manhattan book dealer gave Ford's sixteen-year-old daughter a copy of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love from his lending library stock. The girl, coming upon some puzzling passages, took the book to her mother; Mrs. Ford, «in high perturbation," passed it along to her husband, a man whose firm jaw, precisely parted steel-gray hair, thin mustache, and bristling eyebrows bespoke a firm will and a ready temper. "If that book dealer had been within reach of THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 103 my hands at that moment, I have little doubt I should have done him bodily harm," he later recalled grimly.7 Stymied in his impulse to commit mayhem, Ford instead went to the police. He was dumbfounded to learn, however, that not only had Women in Love recently been given a clean bill of health in magistrates' court (in the Seltzer case) but that, in the Madeleine decision, the appellate court had set forth a series of principles which, it seemed to Ford, "practically wiped from the statue books" New York's venerable obscenity law.s Not one to suffer such reverses lightly, Ford at once concluded that the law must be strengthened. Unfamiliar with the subject, he contacted John S. Sumner, who quickly perceived that Ford's outraged sense of decency represented a highly valuable asset. With Sumner's encouragement, Ford mailed invitations to some fifty civic, fraternal, and religiOUS organizations to meet with him on February 24, 1923, in the Nimrod Room of the Astor Hotel. The response was heartening. District Attorney Joab A. Banton sent a representative, as did the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, the Protestant Episcopal Diocese, the Lord's Day Alliance, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Catholic Club, the antiprostitution Committee of Fourteen, the Knights of Columbus, the Girls' Friendly Society, the Episcopal Social Service Commission, the Salvation Army, Fordham University, the New York Civic Federation, the Colonial Dames of America, the Daughters of 1812, and some ten other groupS.9 To this motley but impressive assemblage Judge Ford related the story of his encounter with Women in Love, vividly portrayed the mounting threat of obscenity, and flourished, as his piece de resistance, a newspaper clipping which reported that the seniors at City College had just voted the Decameron and Iurgen their two favorite books-a revelation which aroused "the greatest indignation." Having thus demonstrated a humorlessness so complete as to disqualify them for any public purpose, the delegates proceeded to the main business 104 PURITY IN PRINT at hand. Judge Ford, having consulted with the district attorney 's office, outlined his ideas as to how the obscenity law should be tightened. When his proposals had been set forth and discussed, Ford offered final words of exhortation to his crusaders. Despite the machinations of "powerful publishing interests" and "blase literati" eager to "pollute the minds of our children, undermine the teachings of Church and parent, and desecrate the family shrine of purity and innocence," he told them, the "moral sentiment" massed in the Nimrod Room would surely triumph.lO Two weeks later, a more select group met in John Ford's judicial chambers and formed a "Clean Books League" to direct the legislative campaign. The members included the New York [Protestant] Church Federation, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, the Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.C.A., the Lord's Day Alliance, and the Episcopal Social Service Commission. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, founder of Manhattan's Free Synagogue, was subsequently added to the roster. Martin Conboy, a socially prominent attorney and Catholic Club president, became chairman. John Ford, declaring that the obscenity law should be made "horse-high, pigtight , and bull-strong,"asked John Sumner and Anson Phelps Atterbury, retired minister of Park Presbyterian Church and a Vice Society stalwart, to join with the district attorney's office in drawing up the desired legislation.ll Sumner worked quickly, and on March 22, 1923, the longpromised bill was introduced at Albany by Representative George N. Jesse, a Republican, and by Senator Salvatore A. Cotillo, Democratic chairman of the JudiCiary Committee. Both men were lawyers from New York City.12 The Jesse-Cotillo bill, as it was called, proposed to amend New York's obscenity law (Sec. 1141 of the Criminal Code) in four ways: 1. By providing that an obscenity indictment could be based on any part of a book, and that only this part could be admitted in evidence. THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 105 2. By making it explicit that "filthy" and "disgusting" books (two of the adjectives used in Sec. 1141) could be suppressed even if they were not sexually stimulating. 3. By making jury trials mandatory in obscenity cases. 4. By barring the introduction of expert testimony in obscenity trials "for any purpose whatever." John Sumner and his friends had indeed made their bill ''horsehigh , pig-tight, and bull-strong"l To the Clean Books League, the amendment seemed perfect. Was it not self-evident, asked John Ford, that the "ordinary, common sense, straight-out mind" of the average juryman, uncorrupted by a "coterie of literati," should decide a book's fate? John Sumner found it only fair to permit the suppression of books on the basis of isolated passages "because they are circulated on the strength of their worst passages."13 A few voices were immediately raised in protest. D. H. Lawrence sent a satirical telegram from New Mexico; Henry Seidel Canby declared in the New York Evening Post that any nation enacting such a law "would deserve no literature worth survival"; and the New York Times warned that the proposed amendment would give John Sumner "more power than Anthony Comstock ever dreamed of."14 Yet, broadly speaking, the initial response was curiously passive. The prevailing tendency was to make light of the whole "Clean Books" phenomenon . Attorney Jonah J. Goldstein, a veteran of the Seltzer case, pledged "strenuous opposition," but noted that the amendment in any case was doomed to defeat. Practically no one, as a Times reporter later recalled, had the "slightest expectation " that the bill would get anywhere. At a routine Assembly hearing, not a Single person appeared in opposition.15 This equanimity quickly faded when the Jesse-Cotillo bill sailed through the Assembly by a large majority and passed its first and second readings in the Senate with equal ease. With the "Clean Books" campaign now a serious and immediate threat, opposition began to emerge. The man who first sounded the alarm was Dennis Tilden Lynch, Albany cor- 106 PURITY IN PRINT respondent of the New York Tribune, who had followed the progress of the bill carefully. Early in April, Lynch notified the publisher Horace Liveright that Senate passage was imminent . Liveright at once began to speak and write against the "Clean Books" bill and patched together an ad hoc anticensorship coalition of magazine and newspaper publishers and printers' unions. Attorney Francis Gallatin, the New York City parks commissioner, was retained to represent this group.16 Senator Cotillo, reached in Albany, expressed surprise that there should be any opposition to such a worthwhile measure, but he nevertheless agreed to a JudiCiary Committee hearing. Despite Liveright's feverish efforts, the turnout for this last-minute hearing on April 18 revealed the perilous weakness of the opposition. Only Gallatin, the novelist Gertrude Atherton, a psychology instructor from Union Theological Seminary, New York American editorial writer Max Fleischer, a Hearst representative, and Liveright himself were present to challenge the bill. Opposing them was a host of witnesses representing religiOUS, welfare, and patriotic groups; the strong Catholic contingent, led by Judge Ford himself, included representatives of the Holy Name Society, the League of Catholic Women, the Knights of Columbus, the Federated Catholic Societies, and a personal emissary from Archbishop Patrick J. HayesP Despite its numerical disadvantage, the opposition group presented a vigorous case. Max Fleischer read a New York Times editorial (timed to appear on the day of the hearing) which declared that the Jesse-Cotillo amendment would make the Vice Society "an absolute and irresponsible censor of all modern literature." Miss Atherton suggested that the proposed law would merely "make New Jersey the most flourishing mart for prohibited books." Francis Gallatin earnestly warned that "Reds and Communists" might use a tighter obscenity law to ban the Bible. Somewhat more relevantly, the Hearst spokesman said that the bill could destroy New York as a magazinepublishing center, since owners of mass-circulation periodicals THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 107 would move elsewhere rather than risk capricious and potentially disastrous prosecutions. John Ford damaged his own cause at the hearing by an intemperate attack on literary critics-particularly Heywood Broun, whom he accused of cynically puffing worthless books merely because they were advertised in the World. Ford also characterized book publishers as concerned only about "the dirty profits from their own filthy books." Gertrude Atherton's calm reply-"This is perfectly absurd and ... entirely unfair"set Ford's intemperate outburst in sharp relief. As a dramatic finale, John S. Sumner placed in the hands of each committee member a dozen sealed envelopes containing, like Chinese fortune cookies, shocking excerpts from recent novels. These, he said, would prove beyond question the need for a tighter law.18 Despite the mystery envelopes, the legislators were impressed by the arguments of the opposition. What had seemed like certain passage a few days earlier was now in doubt. Governor Alfred E. Smith, while maintaining a careful neutrality on the Jesse-Cotillo bill, was sympathetic toward those who urged a further delay so the opposing viewpoints might be aired more fully.19 Liveright and his associates seized the opportunity to consolidate their position. On April 20, a more formal anti-"Clean Books" alliance, again comprised primarily of newspaper and magazine publishers and printers' associations , filed a brief with the Judiciary Committee denouncing the Jesse-Cotillo bill as "revolutionary" and "dangerous to the rights of publishers as a class." It would, the brief continued, "empower laymen, whipped and driven by fixed prejudices and opinions, to shackle knowledge at its source, in the name of social welfare, morality and religion."20 These efforts to organize an opposition to the "Clean Books" amendment forced into the open the uneasiness and distress over the trend of postwar fiction pervading large 108 PURITY IN PRINT segments of the literary and publishing communities, and revealed that many key figures were unwilling to take a decisive stand against censorship. Five leading New York book publishers , including John W. Hiltman of Appleton's, president of the National Association of Book Publishers, flatly rejected Liveright's request to join his opposition delegation at the crucial April hearing. Liveright later charged that at least two "influential and prominent" publishers had assisted the Clean Books League in drawing up the bill, and that a number of others had covertly aided the movement. Sumner himself claimed the support of several "reputable" publishers, though he did not identify them.21 In mid-April, the five-member executive committee of the National Association of Book Publishers, the principal trade organization in the field, rejected a recommendation from its censorship committee that the N.A.B.P. fight the Jesse-Cotillo bill. Such opposition, declared the executive committee , "would be a misstatement of the general attitude of the publishers." In angry protest, two of the three members of the censorship committee, Alfred Harcourt and George Palmer Putnam, submitted their resignations, Putnam simultaneously announcing his support of Liveright's coalition. Two pillars of the establishment, George H. Doran and Frank N. Doubleday, were named to fill the vacancies. (The chairman and third member of the censorship committee, Arthur H. Scribner, fully supported the hands-off policy of the executive committee.) Further, the executive committee of the N.A.B.P. chose this moment officially to deplore "the growing tendency on the part of some publishers unduly to exploit books of a salacious character for purely pecuniary gain."22 The Vice Society's oft-repeated appeals to the publishers, assuring them that safety for the conventional majority lay in ostracizing the unconventional few, had had their effect. The divided state of the book-publishing industry was mirrored in the indecisive stance of its trade journal, PublisherS Weekly. Early in March PW expressed disapproval of Judge Ford's crusade, but also reprimanded the bookseller who had THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 109 precipitated the crisis, and declared that each publisher and bookdealer should "re-examine his attitude" and "accept a personal responsibility for cleaning his own business. . . ." This effort at cautious compromise became still more evident after the N.A.B.P. refused to take a stand on the Jesse-Cotillo hill. While continuing to raise objections to the proposed amendment, Publishers Weekly attributed it to a wave of "unfortunate" book promotion deprecated by "all the better elements in the trade." In a tortuous justification of the N.A.B.P:s neutrality, this editorial continued: Many book publishers have felt so keenly the discredit on the profession by such selling methods that they have taken the position that this Bill was only intended by its sponsors to meet just that type of publication and that the books of honest character had nothing to fear from the revision. They have felt that to line themselves with the opposition would be to bring false interpretation on their real attitude toward objectionable books. This point of view, taken by the majority of the members of the Publishers' Association, brought about the position of non-action adopted by the Association.23 This line of reasoning was deplored by the New York Times, which warned of the risk "[iJf A and B stand calmly by and allow themselves to be made criminals, under the impression that the law will be enforced only against X and Y...."24 Few heeded this cautionary advice, however, and most leading book publishers, individually and through their trade association , did stand passively aside as the battle raged over one of the harshest literary censorship laws ever seriously proposed in America. Writers, too, were hesitant to identify themselves as opponents of the "Clean Books" amendment. The Authors' League, having remained aloof from censorship matters since its much-criticized involvement in the "Genius" case of 1916, initially showed little inclination to alter this stand in the Jesse-Cotillo fight. Despite Liveright's urgent requests, no Authors' League representative appeared at the April hearing, a fact which caused pOinted comment among the legislators. "Where," the New York Times later asked, "were the organiza- 110 PURITY IN PRINT tions of publishers and authors whose occupation, whether regarded as a business or as an art, was gravely threatened by this outrageous measure?"211 The League later permitted its name to be appended to the brief filed with the Judiciary Committee by Liveright's coalition, but otherwise took little active part in the early phases of the struggle. This passivity was the subject of an acrimonious public quarrel late in May 1923 when Theodore Dreiser wrote Rex Beach, a League founder, that such inaction was "deplorable." In a newspaper reply, Gelett Burgess, vice-president of the League, accused Dreiser of "seeking personal publicity" and warned him not to expect the League "to help protect his dubious sex-fiction." Dreiser retorted that the apparent indifference of the Authors' League toward "the ever increasing and censorious band of vicecrusaders " was evidence of its exclusive concern with "the safer and more popular forms of light fiction."26 A few of the older literary figures chose the crucial summer of 1923 to resume, with even greater vehemence, their attacks upon modern fiction. Writing in Current History for August, the seventy-one-year-old poet Edwin Markham, popular author of "The Man With the Hoe" (1899), lashed out at "The Decadent Tendency in Current Fiction" and asked plaintively : "Why this recrudescence of sex-excess when we have so much progress in other directions?" "[T]hese young radicals in fiction," he concluded, using familiar vice-society rhetoric, "... are spreading a contagion that will tend to corrupt youth and to engender an enervating cynicism in all minds."27 In an Independent symposium that spring, Henry Walcott Boynton, well-known editor and anthologist of the standard English classics, declared that the "most offensive" of the recent American and British novels were "mongrels" written either by "persons with alien names and frankly alien standards" or by their native-born emulators. In the same vein, John Farrar, editor of the Bookman and a Doran executive, suggested that such writers as Mencken, Hecht, Dos Passos, and Waldo Frank were "insoluble alien influences" who were "simply foisting THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 111 surface transcriptions of their own creeds, some of them shoddy and outworn, upon US."28 Discussing "Sex in American Literature" in June 1923, Mary Austin, a fifty-year-old writer whose highly successful novel of the Southwest, The Land of Little Rain, had appeared twenty-five years before, announced, as her opening premise, that "the love tradition of the Anglo-American strain ... touches more and higher planes of consciousness, than the love life of any other socially coordinated group." But, Miss Austin warned, the literary expression of this love tradition was being "asphyxiated in the fumes of half-assimilated and fermenting racial contributions." Particularly to be deplored, she suggested, was the "peasant" sexuality of the nation's Baltic and Slavic writers, and the unhealthy eroticism she found characteristic of "Semitic" authors: "Neither the Russian nor the Jew has ever been able to understand ... that not to have had any seriously upsetting sex adventures may be the end of an intelligently achieved life standard." It was these unfortunate alien forces, she implied, which accounted for the present "muddled stream of sex literature."29 To some of this older generation of writers, the censoring of an occasional risque novel seemed a regrettable but necessary expedient. George Barr McCutcheon, the author of Graustark and other popular turn-of-the-century romances, deplored literary suppression but added, "[I]f there is no other way to clean our rapidly spreading Augean stables . . . 1 am for the censorship." Henry Boynton found censorship a natural, if ineffective, response to the abysmal alien standards of propriety. Booth Tarkington declared: "If we could get a man like Will H. Hays, or Augustus Thomas, to act as a censor of books, 1 would approve of it very heartily, for 1 know these two men and know they ... can be trusted with power." Agnes Repplier, the sixty-five-year-old essayist who had written eloquently for the Allied cause during the war, unqualifiedly endorsed literary censorship as "a moral preservation that saves right-minded people from being thrown into a cesspool of immorality."80 112 PURITY IN PRINT In a widely publicized address on "Pernicious Books" delivered to Boston's Watch and Ward Society in April 1923, the respected Harvard professor Bliss Perry, biographer of Emerson, Whittier, and Whitman, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the Authors Club of New York, declared that the postwar rash of "unclean books" published by once-reputable firms constituted a "clear and present danger." Professor Perry praised legislative efforts "to protect the public from the moral contamination of rotten books," and declared that the vice societies, while not perfect, were doing good work and should be supported in their "constructive effort."31 One of the most embittered of this company of literary displaced persons was Hamlin Garland, sixty-three years old in 1923, his Main-Travelled Roads more than thirty years in the past. Writing in the New York Times Book Review late that year, when the "Clean Books" movement was still very much alive, Garland declared that the collapse of literary standards reflected the baleful influence of Manhattan, "a city of aliens, with a vast and growing colony of European peasants , merchants, and newly rich, who know little and care less for American tradition," Garland's proposed solution to this problem had at least the virtue of forthrightness: I believe in censorship. Over and over again I have been asked to sign a protest against the suppression of some indecent book, but I have always refused to do so, for I am certain that, on the whole, the restraining force is salutary. Censorship is, after all, only the organized collective protest against debasing forms of art. . . . I am quite certain that I can say anything worth saying under such laws.32 Garland had come far since 1890, when one of his own early novels had been rejected by Scribner's because of its slang, vulgarity, and radicalism!33 The bitterness of such attacks, and the open avowal of censorship which they sometimes entailed, jolted even those accustomed to literary in-fighting. Henry Seidel Canby, hitherto inclined to make light of this squabbling between the THE "CLEAN BOOKS" CRUSADE 113 literary generations, was forced by the "anger, the personal grievance" of writers like Hamlin Garland to revise his opinion. "I began to see," he later wrote, that far more was involved than I had supposed.... [T]hose who fought for the old tabus were really fighting against a tide that seemed to be swirling them from old moorings. Their violence was personal,34 Whether reflecting petty jealousies or deep-seated anxieties, these outbursts unquestionably contributed to the suppressive climate which very nearly made the "Clean Books" bill a reality. The controversy touched off by Judge Ford's campaign swept also into the tidy world of booksellers, whipping up a bitter debate at the Detroit convention of the American Booksellers ' Association in May 1923. The issue was raised by Henry S. Hutchinson, an elderly bookstore operator from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Speaking on "The Bookseller's Responsibility for the Book He Sells," Hutchinson denounced "certain publishers" for the "epidemic" of questionable books, and declared: "It behooves each one of us ... to take a stand for clean books ..., to sell nothing but wholesome books." Soon thereafter, a young Detroit bookseller named Arthur Proctor arose in spirited protest. Hutchinson, he suggested, was sadly out of touch with the generation of the 1920S. "We don't want wholesome books; we don't want