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

Six: The Latter 1920s

S I X The Latter 1920s It is by now a historical cliche to observe that the 1920S generated more froth than any other ten-year period in American history, and that as the decade rushed to its climax the froth billowed higher than ever. Confident in the knowledge that Calvin Coolidge and then Herbert Hoover were minding the store, Americans settled down to enjoy themselves. Radio sales statistics, Florida land prices, and stock-market quotations jOined Lindbergh in the stratosphere, while on earth Tunney, Valentino, and Jolson, flagpole sitters and marathon dancers, offered a dizzying kaleidoscope of distractions. To their intense frustration, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and similar organizations elsewhere found themselves increasingly shunted to the sidelines amid 128 THE LATTER 1920s 129 all this activity. With so much going on, it was harder to make the headlines. Too often now, when the newspapers did turn their attention to the vice societies, it was to report another defeat. Only rarely after 1924 did the vice organizations succeed in suppressing an over-the-counter book. (An important exception to this generalization will be taken up in the next chapter.) By 1930, John Sumner's dream of becoming a benign literary czar had vanished; he was, indeed, hard put simply to hold his organization together. Meanwhile, the libertarian coalition called forth by the «Clean Books" crusade grew firmer, and the anticensorship position was elaborated and hedged about with persuasive arguments. But, paradoxically, the period which saw a steady reduction in the pressure against books also brought a sharp intensification in censorship activity directed at magazines and the stage. BOOK CENSORSHIP ON THE WANE Numerous cases attest to the dismal regularity with which John Sumner's ventures in the literary realm in the later 1920S proved abortive. In June 1927, for example, he failed ignominiously to suppress The President's Daughter, Nan Britton's lurid expose of her alleged relations with the late President Harding, whom she named as the father of her daughter. Shocked by this profanation of «the memory of a deceased statesman," particularly one who had praised the Vice Society so warmly only four years before, Sumner personally led six Manhattan policemen in a raid on the offices of the publisher, A. & C. Boni, seizing the printing plates and all remaining copies of the book. A magistrate refused to indict, however, and Sumner was forced to return the seized property and give up his efforts to silence the embarrassing Miss Britton.1 A second defeat came in 1928 at the hands of Sumner's old nemesis, Horace Liveright. Earlier in the decade Liveright had paid Maxwell Bodenheim $1000 for a still-unwritten novel. When Bodenheim delivered the manuscript, Liveright found 130 I'URITY IN I'RINT it "filthy" even by his own permissive standards. In several acrimonious sessions with the author, Liveright and his editor T. R. Smith cleaned up the more glaring passages, and the book was published in 1925 as Replenishing Jessica. Despite his efforts at purification, Liveright was soon slapped with a grand jury obscenity indictment-secured by Sumner. Retaining Arthur Garfield Hays, he loyally defended Bodenheim's novel as a "highly moral" work by "a great author and poet." The case hung fire until March 1928, when it was heard in general sessions court. Although Sumner offered damaging testimony as to Liveright's private opinion of Replenishing Jessica, the jury, after listening in considerable boredom to a reading of the 272-page book, took only fifteen minutes to return a verdict of not guilty.2 This series of setbacks, so depressing to John Sumner, reached its nadir in The Well of Loneliness case of 1929. The Well of Loneliness was written in 1927 by Radclyffe Hall, a Britisher known up to that time as the author of several quite conventional novels. In a perhaps idealized recollection, her longtime companion Una Vincenzo has described how Miss Hall came to her one day "with unusual gravity" seeking advice in a difficult decision: [S]he had long wanted to write a book on sexual inversion, a novel that would be accessible to the general public. . . . It was her absolute conviction that such a book could only be written by a sexual invert, who alone could be qualified by personal knowledge and experience to speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority. . . . I told her to write what was in her heart...