CENSORS AT WORK
Mencken, H.L.
Censors at Work THE EDITOR, THE BLUENOSE, AND THE PROSTITUTE by H.L. Mencken Roberts Rinehart. 175 pp. $19.95. In the preface to his history of the "Hatrack" censorship case, written in the 1920s...
...Arthur Garfield Hays, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union who had been retained by Mencken to defend him and the Mercury, obtained injunctions against the Watch and Ward Society and the Post Office to keep them from interfering with distribution of the magazine...
...Mencken wrote, "It is conceivable that this detailed narrative...
...In April 1926, the Mercury published "Hatrack," a memoir in which Herbert Asbury recalled a prostitute who bore that nickname in his Missouri hometown...
...Mencken bit Chase's coin to make sure it was good...
...Fearing the worst, Mencken pulled the lead article scheduled for the next issue, "Sex and the Co-Ed...
...Frustrated and lonely, Hatrack took to entertaining her clients after church services—Catholics in the Protestant graveyard, Protestants in the Catholic cemetery...
...Still, it is good to have this blow-by-blow account of the censors at work, for Mencken was right when he pointed out, "Every censorship, however good its intent, degenerates inevitably into the sort of tyranny that the Watch and Ward Society exercised in Boston...
...Mark G. Judge (Mark G. Judge is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C...
...After reading "Hatrack," Judge James Parmenter dismissed the case against Mencken...
...may some day interest an historian of American culture in the early Twentieth Century...
...he was the Society's most visible antismut crusader...
...Newspapers around the country admonished him for "vulgarity" and accused him of trying to cash in on the case to sell more magazines...
...The Editor, the Bluenose, and the Prostitute lacks the wry wit and intellectual brilliance of Mencken's other writings...
...But Mencken's victory was Pyrrhic...
...In the preface to his history of the "Hatrack" censorship case, written in the 1920s but never before published, H.L...
...The Mercury spent more than $20,000 on its defense, and lost many thousands of dollars more when timid advertisers withdrew from the magazine...
...On Boston's famous Brimstone Corner, the editor confronted the bluenose, who bought a copy of Mencken's "bad, vile, raw stuff' and ordered Mencken's arrest...
...He failed to obtain the definite Supreme Court ruling he had hoped for...
...The magazine was openly contemptuous of blue-noses—particularly those to be found in the Watch and Ward Society of New England, whose secretary, the Reverend J. Franklin Chase of Boston, was outraged by articles bearing such titles as "Arsenals of Hatred," "Up from Methodism," and "Keeping the Puritans Pure," which singled out Chase himself for attack...
...Mencken decided to test the law by selling a copy to Chase himself...
...And Mencken's own time and energy were diverted from work he would rather have pursued...
...Indeed, if the Sage of Baltimore were still with us, he would marvel at the striking similarities between the Puritan "wowsers" who assaulted his American Mercury sixty years ago and the censors who strive today to banish Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye from classrooms and libraries...
...He denounced the piece as obscene and notified Massachusetts authorities that anyone who sold a copy of the Mercury would be in violation of state law...
...But as Carl Bode, the Mencken biographer who edited this volume, points out in his introduction, "the forces of censorship have always been formidable...
...Mencken's Mercury was, like the editor, witty and bright...
...It was a prescient comment...
...Among its contributors were Clarence Darrow, James Branch Cabell, and Margaret Sanger...
...The New York Herald Tribune fumed, "The case is flagrant enough to urge a stock-taking of current standards of decency in print...
...It gave Chase the opening he had been waiting for...
...Slowly, the "Hatrack" case came to a halt...
...Despite the Boston ruling, Chase persuaded the postal authorities to bar the Mercury's "Hatrack" issue from the mails...
...he was too deeply involved and took the case too seriously...
...By this time the "Hatrack" case was notorious, and to Mencken's astonishment his battle against censorship did not enlist the support of the press...
...The issue had, in fact, already reached subscribers, but Mencken understood the purpose of Chase's renewed assault: If the next issue were also officially barred, the Mercury would lose its second-class mailing privilege—and that would put the magazine out of business...
...Chase died while the case was at its peak, and his fellow censors fell to quarreling among themselves over the tactics he had pursued...
...Wowsers always desert one another in times of stress," Mencken wrote, "and when they begin to quarrel their fighting technique is extraordinarily foul...
...Hatrack yearned for the comforts of religion, Asbury wrote, but clergy and congregations barred her from the local churches...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
