Censorship and Puritanism

CENSORSHIP AND PURITANISM

Prohibition

The 1920s are now popularly perceived as an era of hedonistic rebellion against Victorian repression. Prohibition, the decade's defining institution, made dissipation a matter of principle and lawlessness chic. But the speakeasy would not have existed without the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, a triumph for puritanism. Deriving from optimistic overconfidence in the power of law to promote human virtue, Prohibition—which became the law of the land in 1919—was an experiment no less characteristic of the 1920s than other more rebellious experiments. Puritanism—contemporaneously defined as the fear that somebody somewhere is having a good time—remained a powerful force throughout the decade.

Wartime Influences

The battles between puritanism and the New Freedom were triggered by the marked changes in American society resulting from World War I. Young men who had never traveled went to France. A great war was fought, and boys died for idealistic slogans promulgated by old men. Women enjoyed previously unheard-of personal liberty, and many of them held what had been regarded as men's work during the war. The war brought new prosperity and new leisure. The issues were youth versus age, small town versus city, native-born versus immigrant, fundamentalism versus science. The struggle was particularly evident in the arts. New ideas were expressed in new ways, and new subjects were treated in previously unprintable words. The huge movie audiences saw things that had never appeared on the stage. The moralists were under siege and fought back.

Lewis and Fitzgerald

Though neither was censored, two novels published in 1920 fired opening shots in the war against philistinism and repression. Sinclair Lewis's Main Street proclaimed that the midwestern small town was hell on earth populated by vulgarians and ignoramuses. F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise announced that there was "a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.…"

Jurgen.

Two organizations that vigilantly monitored printed obscenity were the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society. So many books and periodicals were prosecuted by the latter body that the words "banned in Boston" became a joke or a recommendation. The first unintended success achieved by the Society for the Suppression of Vice under its executive secretary, John S. Sumner, resulted from its action against James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919). On 14 January 1920 the printing plates and unsold copies were impounded, and Guy Holt, Cabell's editor at McBride, was charged with violating the New York antiobscenity laws. The alleged obscenity had to do with double entendres and phallic symbolism:" 'There is a great deal in what I advance, I can assure you. It is the most natural and most penetrating kind of logic; and I wish merely to discharge a duty.' " The two-year ban of Jurgen made a silly book important. When the case came to trial in 1922, Judge Charles C. Nott instructed the jury to acquit the publishers: "It is doubtful if the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers."

Banned Books

Books prosecuted in New York during the 1920s included D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and a translation of Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming. Boni & Liveright editor T. R. Smith was tried and cleared in connection with a translation of Petronius's Satyricon and Maxwell Bodenheim's Replenishing Jessica. In 1929 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a novel about lesbianism, was cleared by the New York court after having been banned in England. The Bostonians took action against Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Lewis's Elmer Gantry, Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter, John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, an issue of Scribners Magazine in which Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was serialized, and the issue of The American Mercury with Herbert Asbury's "Hatrack," a short story about a prostitute. Some sixty books were suppressed in Boston during 1927.

Ulysses.

The most egregious example of literary censorship in the 1920s was the ban against bringing copies of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) into the United States, even as personal property. Customs agents were empowered to confiscate copies in the possession of ship passengers arriving in America. Again, the result was to call attention to the novel, and Ulysses circulated in pirated copies. Joyce was unable to secure an American copyright for his work until 1933, when Bennett Cerf and Donald S. Klopfer of Random House arranged a test case in which Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book could be published and sold in the United States.

Clean Books

In 1923 and 1925 unsuccessful attempts were made to pass a "clean books bill" in the state of New York. The puritans' relentlessness is testimony to their belief in the power of literature—in contrast to the flippant contempt expressed by Jimmy Walker, then a member of the New York Assembly and later the flamboyant mayor of New York City, who commented that "No girl was ever ruined by a book."

Indecent Performances

On 9 February 1927 the police served warrants against the actors and managers of three New York plays—The Captive, Sex, and The Virgin Man —for violation of section 1140A of the criminal code forbidding indecent performances. The co-author and star of Sex, Mae West, was fined $500 and sentenced to ten days in jail, along with the producers. Similar sentences were handed down for the authors and producers of the other plays.

The Hays Office

In the early 1920s the movie industry was damaged by a series of scandals: the Fatty Arbuckle rape trials, the drug-related death of Wallace Reid, the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor implicating actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand. Moreover, religious groups were calling for boycotts of movies featuring female nudity and sexual suggestion. Threatened with state and federal regulations, the movie industry acted to police itself by organizing the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). Will Hays (1879-1954), postmaster general in the Harding cabinet, was hired to head the cleanup in 1922. His first act was to ban Arbuckle from the screen after the comedian had been acquitted. So firmly was Hays in control that the MPPDA became known as the Hays Office. In addition to imposing standards of behavior on performers, the Hays Office formulated a code to eliminate the production or distribution of movies that:

1. Dealt with sex in an improper manner
2. Were based on white slavery
3. Made vice attractive
4. Exhibited nakedness
5. Had prolonged passionate love scenes
6. Were predominantly concerned with the under-world
7. Made gambling and drunkenness attractive
8. Might instruct the weak in methods of committing crime
9. Ridiculed public officials
10. Offended religious beliefs
11. Emphasized violence
12. Portrayed vulgar postures and gestures, and
13. Used salacious subtitles or advertising[.]

By 1930 the thirteen points were elaborated into the Motion Picture Production Code, a document of some seven hundred words of more specific prohibition: actual childbirth, surgical operations, sex hygiene, cross-racial sexual relationships, "sexual perversion," and justified adultery were among the banned subjects; comic treatment of ministers of religion was not allowed; the presentation of "the use of liquor" was severely restricted; and the words "Gawd" and "damn" were examples of unpermitted profanity and obscenity. The code's prohibitions were wideranging but not exclusive: the omission of any reference to abortion, for example, demonstrates not that the subject was permissible but that it was unthinkable. The industry's reliance upon the code endured for more than twenty years, weakening—at first gradually—after World War II.

SOME BOOKS CENSORED OR
BANNED IN AMERICA DURING
THE TWENTIES

Anon, A Young Girts Diary

Maxwell Bodenheim, Replenishing Jessica

James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

Floyd Dell, Janet March

Viña Delmar, Bad Girl

Mary Ware Dennett, The Sex Side of Life

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

René Fülop-Miller, Rasputin, the Holy Devil

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

Ben Hecht, Gargoyles

Ben Hecht-Wallace Smith, Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath

J. K. Huysman, La-Bos

James Joyce, Ulysses

Robert Keable, Simon Called Peter

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover

Lawrence, Women in Love

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

Frances Newman, The Hard-Boiled Virgin

Diana Patrick, The Rebel Bird

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter

Arthur Schnitzler, Casanova's Homecoming

Upton Sinclair, Oil!

Marie C. Stopes, Love in Marriage, or Married Love

Jim Tully, Circus Parade

Arnold Zweig, The Case of Sergeant Grischa

Sources:

Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print (New York: Scribners, 1968);

Felice F. Lewis, Literature, Obscenity, and Law (Garbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976);

Raymond Moiey, The Hays Office (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945).