Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society's Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil

225 Pages·2010·1.09 MB·English

by  Neil Miller

For Paul Brouillette
Contents
Prologue The Battle of Brimstone Corner, April 1926
PART I: EARLY DAYS
Chapter 1 Founding Fathers, 1878
Chapter 2 First Forays into Censorship, 1881–1898
Chapter 3 Politics, Poker, and the “Social Evil,” 1884–1897
Chapter 4 Mrs. Glyn and Sin, 1903–1909
Chapter 5 Tough Guys and “Blue Bloods,” 1907–1925
PART II: THE WATCH AND WARD GOES TO WAR
Chapter 6 New Bedford, 1916
Chapter 7 The Battle of Diamond Hill, 1917–1918
Chapter 8 Café Society, 1917–1919
Chapter 9 Corruption Fighters, 1913–1924
PART III: DECLINE AND FALL
Chapter 10 Mencken versus Chase, Round 2, 1926
Chapter 11 Censorship Goes Wild, 1927–1928
Chapter 12 Boston, 1929
Chapter 13 The Dunster Bookshop Fiasco, 1929
Chapter 14 Depression Days, 1930–1938
Chapter 15 This Was Burlesque, 1931–1953
Chapter 16 The Forties, 1941–1948
Chapter 17 A Kinder, Gentler Watch and Ward, 1948–1967
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliographic Essay
PROLOGUE
The Battle of Brimstone Corner, April 1926
I
T WAS A PROVERBIAL MATCH OF THE TITANS. In one corner was H. L. Mencken,
the most prominent editor in America, the great iconoclast and savage
and sharp-tongued foe, in his words, of all “preposterous Puritans,”
“malignant moralists,” and “Christians turned cannibals.” In the other
corner was the Reverend J. Frank Chase, Boston’s reigning censor and
moral policeman, secretary of the powerful New England Watch and
Ward Society, scourge of small-time gamblers, burlesque promoters, and
writers who trafficked in “hells” and “goddamns” and anything that
smacked of frankness in terms of sex. The scene was Brimstone Corner,
just off the Boston Common, in front of the Park Street Church, a block
from the gilded dome of the State House. It was at the Park Street
Church where the Watch and Ward Society (then called the New
England Society for the Suppression of Vice) was originally established
in 1878.
A week before, Chase, whose word was law to Massachusetts
booksellers and magazine vendors, had ordered the banning of the April
1926 issue of Mencken’s magazine, the American Mercury. It contained a
vignette called “Hatrack,” a tale of prostitution and hypocrisy in a small
Missouri town that Chase contended was obscene. Across the river in
Cambridge, the proprietor of a Harvard Square newsstand had been
arrested for selling a copy of the magazine to a Watch and Ward agent.
Mencken had taken the train up to Boston from his hometown of
Baltimore on April 5, 1926, for the purpose of challenging the Watch
and Ward Society by selling Chase a copy of that very issue. Henry Louis
Mencken was a small man, with “a plum pudding of a body and a square
head stuck on it with no intervening neck,” as British journalist Alistair
Cooke described him. He parted his hair in the middle, and his eyes, so
small that you could see the whites above the irises, gave him “the
earnestness of a gas jet when he talked, an air of resigned incredulity
when he listened, and a merry acceptance of the human race and all its
foibles when he grinned.” He usually dressed “like the owner of a
country hardware store,” noted Cooke. On ceremonial occasions,
however, he dressed “like a plumber got up for church.” This day was
one of the latter.
More than a thousand curiosity-seekers—largely Harvard
undergraduates—turned out for the spectacle on the Common. Some
hung off trees and out of windows. Mencken’s lawyer, Arthur Garfield
Hays, lately a counsel for the defense at the Scopes “monkey” trial in
Dayton, Tennessee, arrived first, at about 1:50 in the afternoon. He
mounted the steps of the Park Street Church carrying a bundle of fifty
copies of the American Mercury, clothed in its famous green cover, to sell
just in case Chase declined to show up at the last minute. The crowd,
impatient to snap up copies of the magazine, rushed towards him,
holding out dollar bills. When Mencken stepped from a taxicab a few
minutes later, accompanied by a Baltimore Sun reporter and an Alfred A.
Knopf book salesman, he found no place to move or even stand. It was
that crowded. Traffic officers tried unsuccessfully to disperse the mob as
the editor and his lawyer pushed their way across Park Street to the
Common, where they could barely gain their footing.
A man claiming to represent Chase approached Mencken and offered
to buy a copy of the Mercury. Mencken waved him away. It was Chase
he was waiting for. And then, amidst cries of “Here he is!” the
superintendent of police, Michael H. Crowley, cleared a path for the
Watch and Ward secretary. He was accompanied by Captain George W.
Peterson, chief of Boston’s Vice Squad, and a young plainclothes officer
named Oliver Garrett, later to become a notorious character in Boston.
“Are you Chase?” demanded Mencken.
“I am,” replied a solidly built man with glasses and a walrus mustache.
“And do you want to buy a copy of the Mercury?”
“I do,” came the reply.
Chase offered Mencken a silver half-dollar, and, in a theatrical
moment that delighted the throng, the editor took the coin and bit the
end of it to make sure that it was genuine. Then he handed over a copy
of the magazine.
“Officer, arrest that man!” commanded Chase, addressing Captain
Peterson. The Boston police and the Watch and Ward had had their
differences over the years—sometimes the vice organization’s agents had
acted as if they were the Boston police—but this time the police were
more than happy to do the Watch and Ward’s bidding. Garrett, the
plainclothes officer, tapped Mencken on the arm.
Mencken still had three copies of the Mercury in his hand. “Throw
them away,” his lawyer counseled.
Mencken tossed the magazines into the air. There was a scramble, and,
in the rush to get a copy, the crowd ripped the magazines to pieces.
Chase handed his over to Peterson.
Then Mencken, hat low on his head and trademark cigar in hand,
accompanied by Hays and followed by several hundred onlookers, was
marched up Tremont Street to police headquarters at Pemberton Square,
four blocks away. He was led to the second floor and booked on a charge
of violating Chapter 272, Section 28, of the Public General Laws of
Massachusetts. The charge was clear—that he, Mencken, “did sell to one
Jason F. Chase certain obscene, indecent, and impure printing…
manifestly tending to corrupt the morals of youth.” After that, Mencken
was taken to the Central Municipal Court and formally arraigned. A
hearing was set for 10 a.m. the following day, April 6. Mencken was
released on his own recognizance, with a surety bond fixed at $500.
Chase had won round one.
PART I
Early Days
1
CHAPTER
Founding Fathers, 1878
H
ALF A CENTURY EARLIER, on a late May afternoon in 1878, some 400 to
500 men gathered at the vestry of Boston’s Park Street Church to found
the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. The historic
church, with its brick facade and white New England spire, designed by
Christopher Wren to rise ten feet higher than the State House dome, was,
in many respects, the natural spot for such a gathering. The spire was,
after all, as a Boston guidebook put it, “a heaven-pointing finger at the
very center of Boston life.” And the church itself exemplified the two
sides of the organization that would soon change its name to the New
England Watch and Ward Society. Park Street Church was an institution
with a passion for reform, where William Lloyd Garrison launched his
antislavery campaign in 1829, and where the American Education
Society, the Prison Reform Society, and the American Temperance
Society were established. At the same time, the Congregational church
was historically one of the most rigid in Boston. Its early minister,
Edward Dorr Griffin, who gave Brimstone Corner its name, is said to
have sprinkled sulfur on the sidewalks on Sunday mornings to entice
visitors to his hell-anddamnation sermons.
That afternoon, women were barred from the meeting, although some
twenty-five of them stood at the entrance of the vestry, clamoring to be
admitted. “If this is a meeting for the suppression of vice, why can’t we
go in?” a female voice demanded above the din. But the discussion was
deemed unfit for the delicate ears of Boston womanhood, and the
women were compelled to remain outside.
The main speaker was Anthony Comstock, founder and secretary of
the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the first organization
of its kind in the country. The New England society was to be its first