One Hundred Years of Fortitude

These days, the writer Theodore Dreiser and his magnum opus, An American Tragedy, are little known outside literature seminars. Yet he “dominated the American literary scene” in the first half of the twentieth century. Literary critic Irving Howe said of Dreiser that he was “among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had,” while the great journalist H. L. Mencken called Dreiser “a great artist” and wrote that “no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters.”

An American Tragedy was Dreiser’s first commercial success and later one of his biggest critical successes. It was made into a movie in 1931 and again in 1951 under the title A Place in the Sun, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. 

Published one hundred years ago this year, the book is important for another reason: It was an early victim of censorship.

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Back then, book bans operated much as they do today: Well-funded social groups used wide-open state and federal laws to agitate for social reforms. One of these groups was the Boston-based New England Watch and Ward Society.

Founded in 1879, the society became a leader in the genteel fight against social ills such as prostitution, gambling, alcohol abuse, and “impure literature.” The United States at the turn of the century had become reform-minded, which dovetailed well with the society’s interests. In 1911, former Harvard President Charles William Eliot praised the society for investigating social evils and combating them “by drying up the sources of immorality and crime.”

Censorship was another of the society’s aims. The Boston Booksellers Committee, founded in 1915, became the main agent of censorship organizing. Comprising three Watch and Ward officials and three pliable store owners, the group evaluated new publications and told the city’s booksellers which titles to reject. 

Though it had no formal power, the committee became hugely influential. One word from J. Franklin Chase, the Watch and Ward Society’s leader and a committee organizer, was all that was needed to sink a book’s prospects. The committee worked with the Boston district attorney to keep out inappropriate titles. It was a sort of censorship CIA.

The movement even had a slogan: “Banned in Boston.”

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In 1927, the committee tried to suppress An American Tragedy. Dreiser, by then, was no stranger to censorship. His novel The Genius, first published in 1915, had been “deemed so shocking that its sale was immediately prohibited by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.” Likewise, in 1916, his book Sister Carrie was attacked for its immorality and eventually banned in New York City and Cincinnati.

Dreiser was known for his realistic depictions of gritty urban life, and An American Tragedy was no exception. He based the novel on the real-life murder in 1906 of Grace Brown, who was pregnant, and the trial of her lover, Chester Gillette, who was found guilty and sentenced to death. It was banned for its sexual content and “obscene language.” 

On April 16, 1927, Donald Friede, vice president of Boni & Liveright, Dreiser’s publisher, traveled to police headquarters and persuaded Lieutenant Daniel Hines to buy a copy of An American Tragedy. Hines bought the book and immediately asked a judge to issue a summons for Friede. 

A week later, Friede appeared in municipal court, defended by ACLU cofounder Arthur Garfield Hays. Hays had a résumé ripped from the law school textbooks, having been part of the defense teams for Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes (the “Monkey Trial”) and Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He thought it unfair to condemn an entire work on the basis of one passage. 

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Judge James Devlin, however, had no qualms about this. Declaring the book obscene, he fined Friede $100. Hays appealed to the state superior court and got a trial scheduled for April 16, 1929. This time, he showed up with Dreiser, who testified to his novel’s non-obscenity. Hays told the jury that there were over four hundred passages in the Bible with a greater “frankness of expression” than anything in An American Tragedy. “What book of the ages,” he asked rhetorically, “which has stood as literature would stand up under the tests which have been applied to Dreiser?”

That night, hundreds gathered at Ford Hall Forum for an anti-censorship rally. People carried placards that read “Verboten” and “Taboo.” There were skits and speeches. Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger sat on stage, gagged. A letter from Upton Sinclair was read aloud in which he said, “I would rather be banned in Boston than read anywhere else,” because “when you are banned in Boston you are read everywhere else.”

Next day, the door was slammed on further merriment when the jury found Friede guilty. An appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court also failed, resulting in Friede’s fine climbing to $300.

The banning of An American Tragedy is little-remembered today, probably because the censors won. Yet the case is an important one. Though Hays’s holistic argument — that a book should not be reduced to its most controversial content — did not result in his client’s acquittal, it did inject the idea into judicial deliberations.

That injection led to a different result for a more famous book ban target: James Joyce’s Ulysses. The lifting of that ban kicked off a long era of anti-censorship activities, as well as courthouse triumphs (D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, to name a few).

Has that era come to an end with the new censorship battles of the last few years? Only time will tell.

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