The Editor, the Bluenose, and the Prostitute
Bode, Carl
tacks by banning the April 1926 issue mons to sell a banned copy of The from Boston. It contained an essay by American Mercury to the Reverend journalist Herbert Asbury about a himself. In due...
...and acquitted by the judge (who was Asbury's essay was innocuous impressed by the intellectual qualities enough—there were not any graphic of The American Mercury), Mencken descriptions, nor did he applaud the turned triumphal...
...ckled such topics as Fundamentalism, The following spring, Mencken in- Prohibition, Puritanism ("the haunting volved himself in a new cause, this time fear," Mencken identified it, "that against censorship...
...If he lost, he the opportunity to defend his own could get two years in prison...
...magazine...
...The real purpose for his efforts was stated in his introduction: "Every censorship," he wrote, "however good its intent, degenerates inevitably into the sort of tyranny that the Watch & Ward Society fanatics so long exercised in Boston...
...What happened, you may ask, to Reverend Chase...
...No other periodical was as and thus a concern to every Ameri- daring or as popular...
...He refused to reprint the April 1926 issue, although he would have made a huge profit (the "Hat-rack" issue had become a collector's item...
...In due course Chase appeared Missouri prostitute he had become ac- as previously arranged, slowly pushing quainted with, familiarly known as his way through the huge crowd of "Hatrack"(so named for her angular reporters and onlookers, and paid his figure...
...defends his client's right to free- Chase seldom went to court...
...Shortly after the "Hatrack" case, a headline appeared in the San Francisco News: "Hatrack Found Happily Wed...
...Publishers and of speech, how could we have had an authors were never given a chance to be H. L. Mencken...
...or Mencken American Mercury from the U.S mails...
...His death gave Mencken no "noticeable grief...
...The editors tacan...
...the Bluenose, and the Prostitute contains not only an informative introduction that places the case in context, but also Asbury's essay, "Hatrack," as well as photographs and cartoons from contemporary newspapers...
...Walter Lippmann hailed him as "the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people...
...menfolk of the village instead: Prot- After being tried the next day (the estants she brought to the Catholic New York Times likened the pro-cemetery, Catholics to the Masonic ceedings to a "second Scopes Trial") one...
...he simply dom of speech with the observation: "I notified various committees that he mean, hey," he remarks to his fellow "believed" certain "passages" in a attorneys, "if we didn't have freedom given work were illegal...
...the truth...
...When she was snubbed, uine, and was subsequently seized and she sought companionship among the marched to a nearby police station...
...he lunched with a cheering Christians...
...The material filled eight volumes, which Mencken had bound in blue Moroccan leather, and bequeathed to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland.awake all night in a Fall River boat, reading a pornographic novel and experiencing a continuous engorgement of the corpora cavernosa...
...I am up catch rats...
...and the suppressor is helm was Boston's New England Watch Garfield Hays, the outstanding civil complained in his letters...
...The remainder of this handsome book consists of Mencken's own lively text, both entertaining and wise, peopled with the same "species" we find today...
...Two details remain...
...All of these themes had crowd of students from Harvard and been addressed before in previous es- presented them with the flag of Marysays, and to greater effect...
...The full story of Mencken, after all, who persuaded Mencken's contretemps with Chase, Clarence Darrow to defend John told by Mencken himself, has at last Scopes in the infamous Scopes Mon- been released as The Editor, the key Trial that hot summer of 1925...
...others resulted...
...the long fight gratified by finding his vice...
...Mencken's had been the first real effort against censorship in Massachusetts...
...CASE CENSORSHIP " HATRACK " by Carl Bode/Roberts Rinehart, Inc./$19.50 But his euphoria ended abruptly Edited encken's dilemma was twofold: when he discovered that Chase had M Chase, unchecked, could go on succeeded in having Post Office offito far greater censorship, with other cials bar the April number of The Marion Elizabeth Rodgers censors imitating him...
...Chase responded to Mencken's atTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 45 Friends of The American Mercury," describing the case in order to convert a hostile press who thought he had concocted the entire episode as a publicity stunt...
...In 1937, Mencken collected the hundreds of letters and press clippings and wrote a detailed history of the case...
...Men, whose trade is rat-catching, love to "snouters" by Mencken) were well es- Having decided to fight Chase, on New legal problems arose...
...Law," Michael Kuzac, the slightest disapproval over material...
...For beneath all of Chase's "burly geniality" and Puritan views, "Boston was full of reports that he was extremely fond of dirty literature he professed to hold in such holy horror, and he was in the habit of exhibiting it clandestinely to his friends...
...Nonetheless, land (the "Free State...
...he bragged that on one of his visits to New York he had lain 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988...
...The Editor...
...the bug-destroyer seizes on his tablished during the 1920s...
...He hinted he might actions of his protagonist...
...Eight months after the "Hatrack" case began, he died of pneumonia...
...Now he was dead at last in defeat and dismay, and we were rid of him...
...The case itself cost the magazine $20,000...
...Franklin Chase is 'All Through' as Fake Reformer...
...1810 , iew Rev borough Edin & Ward Society, whose secretary, Rev- liberties lawyer of the day (and counsel would not be over until May 1927, and —Edinborough (from H. L. Mencken's A New Dictionary erend J. Franklin Chase, had been the at the Scopes Monkey Trial the year even then, Mencken lost on a techniof Quotations) terror of Boston and its nearby sub- before) hurried to the Boston Com- cality...
...He sent out a pamphlet, "To the urbs, sending booksellers, news vendors, district attorneys, and police scurT n a recent episode of the television rying to obey his orders if he indicated 1 series "L.A...
...T here they might have remained, 1 available only to scholars, if not for Carl Bode, author of the reissued biography Mencken (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and editor of several other collections of Mencken and Thoreau...
...fathoms of letters and telegrams," he THE EDITOR, THE BLUENOSE, AND THE PROSTITUTE: H. L. MENCKEN'S HISTORY OF THE exulted to his girlfriend, Sara Haardt...
...As for Hatrack, she left Farrington, where Herbert Asbury had known her, and moved nearby to Flat River...
...But it is always hard to break even the worst of such tyrannies down...
...The Boston Telegram reinforced their view in its own headline: "J...
...Pious, she yearned to be fifty cents to Mencken, who promptly accepted by the congregation of her vil- bit the coin to make sure it was genlage church...
...heard, and the newspapers didn't dare How could we, indeed...
...It was criticize the censor...
...Censors (called someone, somewhere, may be happy"), the Ku Klux Klan, and the censorship Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the editor tactics of Reverend Chase, who was of Mencken & Sara: A Life in Letters portrayed as a bluenose fanatic...
...Back in New Chase found it "full of degrading and York at his American Mercury offices, filthy descriptions," and "bad, vile, raw he answered his mail ("I am under 20 , , stuff...
...to Bluenose, and the Prostitute: H. L. the nationally syndicated journalist of Mencken's History of the "Hatrack" the Baltimore Evening Sun and editor Censorship Case...
...could place himself at risk by defying This time, Mencken was not allowed Chase in open court...
...His name became internationally identified with freedom of speech...
...People who set out to do me evil not infrequently die suddenly," Mencken observed...
...He wrote obscene odes, and read them aloud in his club...
...Instead, the sue Chase and the Watch & Ward So-essay attacked the evangelists and the ciety for heavy damages on the ground hypocrisy of the town's supposed of libel...
...I had spent years denouncing others of his kind, and when I met him in Boston I found nothing in him to ameliorate my view of the species...
...of The American Mercury, the issue From its inception in 1924, Mencken at trial was not simply the plight of and his co-editor, George Jean Nathan, a Tennessee schoolmaster arrested for proclaimed that the aim of The Ameriteaching Darwin's theory of evolu- can Mercury was to "ascertain and tell tion, but a man's freedom of speech...
...At their April 5, 1926, Mencken and Arthur to my ears in litigation," Mencken bug with delight...
...Nonetheless, Mencken won a moralvictory, for he had dealt the Society a blow from which it never fully recovered—even Reverend Chase was eventually made into a scapegoat by his own followers...
...McGraw-Hill...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
