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

Two: The Vice Socieities in the Progressive Era

TWO The Vice Societies in the Progressive Era The surge of enthusiasm for social justice and civic regeneration which swept America in the early years of the twentieth century seemed, at first, a great boon to the vice societies. Their long-standing interest in ridding the cities of moral hazard was fully in tune with the Progressive desire to remedy the evils and injustices piled up through decades of helterskelter urbanization and industrial growth. The vice societies had traditionally placed heavy stress on the welfare of the child-"We are fighting ... to protect the young," the Watch and Ward Society had declared in 18g81-and this solicitude proved highly appealing to a generation that worked for child-labor laws, applauded a White House Conference on Children, and created a Federal Children 's Bureau. Even the lurid rhetoric of the vice-society 23 24 PURITY IN PRINT ideology seemed less blatant amid the emotional, quasi-religious fervor of Progressivism. The link between Progressivism and the vice societies may seem tenuous in retrospect, but to the reformers of the day it was real enough. In 1903 Robert A. Woods, Boston settlement-house leader and social worker, warmly praised the Watch and Ward Society as "a sort of Moral Board of Health" that was making a "profound contribution to the work of every uplifting agency...." Similarly, William Forbush's The Coming Generation (1912) ranked the New York Vice Society with child-labor laws and juvenile courts as forces "working for the betterment of American young people." The aged Charles William Eliot, lately retired as president of Harvard, in 1911 offered the ultimate Progressive accolade when he praised the Watch and Ward as "a thoroughly scientific charity."2 At the heart of Progressive reform lay the dual convictions that human misery and social disorder were rooted in environmental maladjustments, and that these could be corrected by men of good will. Books and magazines obviously were as much a part of the urban environment as were sweatshops and adulterated food, and if these latter evils were valid objects of social control, then certainly a movement dedicated to the surveillance of the printed page was equally defensible. Implicit here were two assumptions: that "obscenity" was as dangerous as the other evils against which the reformers battled, and that its presence could be ascertained with sufficient precision to justify censorship. These assumptions were rather casually made in the Progressive period. Later, when statistics, surveys, and elaborate investigation came to be considered essential prerequisites to social action, the difficulty of defining "obscenity" and of proving its bad effects dampened the censorship ardor of most social reformers. For a time, however, the vice societies were welcomed within the capacious Progressive tent. The president of the Boston School for Social Workers was only one of a long succession of reformers who appeared at the annual Watch THE VICE SOCIETIES IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA 25 and Ward meetings to endorse its work. When E. T. Devine praised the campaign against "salacious literature" at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1906, the evidence suggests that he voiced the feelings of the great majority of his colleagues.8 The vice societies, for their part, proved highly skilled at stating their goals in the Progressive idiom. "The old idea of 'charity,'-of giving alms to the poor, healing the sick, providing for the orphan and the aged," declared the Watch and Ward in 1915, «has gradually given way to a larger conception : ... to prevent ... the moral diseases which lead to misery and crime." The vice societies (continued this analysis) fully shared this new conception, for they sought "to eliminate from our social system those who for pecuniary profit would pander to the passions of the vicious, provide temptations for the weak, and coin character into tainted money."· The bond between Progressivism and the vice societies involved personnel as well as pronouncements. As the preachers and philanthropic businessmen who had sustained the vicesociety movement in its infancy passed from the scene, their places were taken not only by younger men of commerceJohn H. Storer and Godfrey Cabot in Boston, for examplebut also by reformers who were involved in a great variety of good causes. By 1910 the Watch and Ward's officers included such men as Charles Birtwell, secretary of the Children's Aid Society; William Cole, a social worker at Boston's South End House; Joseph Lee, president of the...