Banned in Boston by Neil Miller

Author:Neil Miller [Miller, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5113-9
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2010-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Bostonians were of various minds as to what was occurring. In a joint statement, the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, and Company—two of the leading Boston publishing companies—criticized the suppression of twelve popular novels as “high-handed, erratic, and ill-advised,” concluding that “it is difficult for men of self respect to keep silent in the face of this violation of the historic tradition of Boston and New England.”

A month later, at a meeting at the Ford Hall Forum attended by 1,000 people, the new wave of censorship was criticized by Alfred Harcourt, of the publishing firm of Harcourt Brace and Company, and Hiller Wellman, a Springfield librarian who was soon to become an anticensorship leader. The Reverend Raymond Calkins, president of the Watch and Ward, deplored the current situation, defended the “old way” of doing things, and was greeted with applause. Publisher Harcourt paid tribute to the late J. Frank Chase. Watch and Ward nostalgia was in the air.

However, the new censorship had its defenders. The president of Boston University, Daniel L. Marsh, attacked Elmer Gantry as “pretty flabby.” He suspected that most readers would “plow through it,” as he had, in order “to be able to tell their friends what they thought of it.” That, of course, did not justify its being banned, but it seemed to argue that the book’s absence from Boston bookstores was no great loss to the public. The Pilot took a stronger position. In an editorial entitled “Commercialized Bunk,” it backed up Foley, denouncing Elmer Gantry as “a piece of propaganda against organized Christianity.” “Mr. Lewis may claim that his work is a satire and should be judged as such,” said the newspaper. “But what do thousands of readers know of satire, and how can they differentiate between the exaggerations of satirical caricatures and the reportorial accuracy of Mr. Lewis’s most famous characterizations!” It was a shame, wrote the Pilot editorial writers, that writers of “the Sinclair Lewis and Mencken type” should “prostitute their pens in the unholy cause of religious skepticism and agnosticism.”

A few weeks later, the Vatican issued its statement “declaring war on immoral books.”

And in a speech before the Catholic Total Abstinence League, District Attorney Foley warned that “as long as I am District Attorney, the standards of decency, purity, and morality set up by past generations in this country will be maintained by me.” He added darkly, “The people who believe that the standard of our fathers and mothers is not the standard for us are also the people who believe in teaching birth control and sex education in our public schools.”

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