Banned in Boston - The Watch and Ward Society s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and

Zusatztext 91729599 Informationen zum Autor Neil Miller has worked at a not-for-profit development organization in South Asia for over twenty years. Prior to that he worked as an engineer designing electronics for medical imaging devices. He has received training at Briercrest Bible College, University of Waterloo, and Tyndale Seminary. Klappentext A lively history of the Watch and Ward Society--New England's notorious literary censor for over eighty years. Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society--once Boston's unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society's upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays. A spectacular romp through the Puritan City, here Neil Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase "banned in Boston." Prologue It 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 i...

Product details

• Authors: Miller, Neil Miller
• Publisher: BEACON PRESS
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.09.2011
• EAN: 9780807051115
• ISBN: 978-0-8070-5111-5
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 221 mm x 17 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous