The printed attack on marriage has steadily become more audacious. Sexual degenerates have torn down the last veil of reticence and made a mockery not only of marriage, but also of every ideal of decency. Humbert Wolfe, author of several volumes of prose and verse, a member of the British Labor Government, soliloquizes in the Saturday Review of Literature (May 7, 1932): "Is it possible, I have been driven to ask myself, as I contemplate the orgiastic development of the most admired contemporary literature, that there exists anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world such a thing as romantic love or happy marriage? I am indeed so overshadowed by what all the young and vigorous write and the old and feeble applaud that I am positively embarrassed to commit the words 'romantic love' and 'happy marriage' to paper." Outside the books issued under church influence or direction few printed appeals are raised in behalf of the blessings of love and marriage.
A deplorable aspect of this problem, however, is the frequent inability to convict offenders. Prosecutors decry the difficulty of securing a conviction and sentence in New York City, and since the present law limits prosecution to the place of mailing, most of the obscene literature trials are held before juries in that city. Postal inspectors call New York the center of the lewd book trade.
Swelling the tide of printed propaganda for immorality to a new high level, crafty publishers present allegedly professional treatises on questions of sex and marriage. These books profess a broad sincerity in their desire to stimulate the public study of the physiological side of marriage in all its details. Declaring that its purpose is "for the good of the race," a New York concern sends out a book on sex with the following emphasis: "This remarkable book is different from all others because it is frank and fearless.... So outspoken is this book that the Federal Government has twice attempted to ban it from this country."
Similarly notorious are the various publications advertised in the cheap magazines. These are books which are mailed C. O. D. in "plain wrappers," the morbid advertisements of which ask: "Are you discontented with the stupid lies and furtive, ashamed answers the world gives you in place of the naked, fearless truth you desire? Do you want some sane, safe, unashamed advice? Clip the coupon below. Send it today without any money, and in a few days you will receive the most startling surprises of your life."
Appealing to a morbid inquisitiveness, particularly of young readers, they advertise: "Here is a book full of the curious secrets and wisdom that only doctors possess, things that people never talk about, facts about a safe and sane sex life and how to obtain it. Frank, outspoken, and daring in its modem views, it is nevertheless the very book needed for adolescent youth as a guard against error."
Or they address their intrigue to moronic minds in such invitations as these: "Nature has given you a mysterious power that psychologists call sex attraction. If you understand the use of this fascinating gift, you are sure to be popular at parties, dances, and picnics, beloved and admired and successful. By learning to understand this magic power, you can be successful in the fascinating game of love, sought after and admired by many, with loneliness barred forever from your life."
A new field of exploitation has been opened in "sex magnetism." The circulars of an Eastern publishing company, eminently successful in this field, feature these bold, arresting headlines: "Are you engaged to be married? Wait! The chances are twenty to one that your affianced is temperamentally unfit for you. Why twenty to one? Because only one marriage in every twenty is a happy one. Sex magnetism will show you the truth that you do not want to find out when it is too late. If, after you study sex magnetism, you ascertain that the engagement must be broken, just permit your affianced to study the course with you, and the separation will be agreed to by both parties. This has always been the case."
If the intelligent reader, whose sensibilities are not outraged by this crude display and the subsequent description of the sixty-two great "truths" of sex magnetism, has the courage to read more about the red fire of passion, he will be told that the former price of this volume of new revelation was $25, but that, "realizing the times and because millions of men and women need its revelations, need them badly and quickly," the price has been slashed to $2.95. This, we declare, is $3.00 too much.
Many of these books lack genuine intention to help solve the problems they emphasize. A study of their contents often reveals much unnecessary, erotic material. Few of these publications are the work of a recognized author or issued by a standard publishing house. Books on birth control are often sent free of charge as extra inducements for the purchase of the "fascinating and helpful volume." Any one who permits himself to be deluded into signing the special cut-rate coupon which offers to send a volume, advertised as a reprint of a limited, private edition (originally priced at $15), for $2.98, will find that he has made a poor bargain, even as far as the mechanics of the book are concerned. In a few weeks, when letters advertising Parisian love secrets, matrimonial prospects, unexpurgated editions of orgiastic writings begin to flood his mail, he will realize that his name and address have been sold to some of the most unscrupulous filth-mongers in the country. I have in my files direct evidence of this name selling with the prices demanded for customer lists. No trust should be placed in these glib promises "to keep your letter strictly confidential." In Nostrums and Quackery (Vol. II, p. 178), by Arthur J. Cramp, M. D., the reader finds a picture of 1,000 bundled letters mailed to a Joliet, Illinois, women's medical-benefit association under the pledge of strictest secrecy. Together with 130,000 other names they were, however, sold to a New York letter bureau which makes a business of buying and selling letters and addresses.
In their zeal for spreading information on sex subjects, we find that the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the Y. M. C. A., and other organizations have issued much literature. There can be no doubt that this publication program has been prompted by good intentions; but a glance at some of the material calls for criticism. For instance, we find official endorsement for the works of Briffault and others who ridicule religion. The late Havelock Ellis was called "the best interpreter available of the wonders and beauty of sex." Ben Lindsey's Companionate Marriage is described as a book that attempts to work out solutions on a basis "nearest to the ideal under the circumstances." Margaret Sanger is mentioned as giving "practical advice to the engaged and newly married." The same attitude characterizes other literature of these two bodies. Some of it, I do not hesitate to declare, is fundamentally objectionable.
There are well written and trustworthy books which reverently discuss the facts of life. These books are recommended by the Church in the same definite manner that the objectionable titles are rejected.
The indictment of pornography in print is heightened by certain American periodicals. We not only publish more magazines than any other people; we not only issue larger and more lavish magazines than the European publishers can afford; we not only boast of the most formidable subscription lists in the world; but, with the single exception of Russia, we also have the greatest number of magazines that cultivate license. The growth of printed lewdness is astonishing. It is estimated that between 1870 and 1919 hardly twenty-five sexy publications were issued in the entire country. Between 1920 and 1935 the number skyrocketed to 291. From 1933 to 1938 ninety-two new magazines of this type made their appearance.
An examination of the story plots featured by popular magazines from 1900 to 1905 has revealed that in only 3 per cent the extramarital sex relations of the hero or heroine were condoned. In 1932, however, a similar investigation showed that in 45 per cent of the magazine plots such relations were passed without rebuke.
Not only the popular magazines but publications that have been regarded as intellectual and "highbrow" have on repeated occasions deserted the high standards of their founders to join the extreme leftists. Even Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly have no unimpeachable record in this respect. Within recent months magazines of this type have featured articles in which a mother brazenly endorses premarital relations for her own daughter and a coed tabulates in detail the alleged intimate experiences of her fellow students.
Besides, a new group of magazines has hurtled itself into a conspicuous place on the news rack, the publications specifically devoted to the presentation by word and picture of the morbid, the risqué, the sensational. In this group we find some of the newer pictorial publications which, under the slogan "A picture is worth a thousand words," now make the appeal of the sordid even more widespread, — the sophisticated magazines, like Esquire, which in their suggestive pictures and vile humor are undisguised menaces to the morals of every reader.
Periodically authorities are aroused to their duties, and a cleanup order is issued. Not long ago the Postmaster General barred one of the excessively objectionable issues from the United States mail. But censorship in this country is often grossly deficient. Our neighbors to the North bar more than a hundred of our magazines from the Canadian mails. In Australia, as the Christian Century reports (January 4, 1939), the flood of indecent magazines that pours into that country has led to custom regulations banning "not only indecent, obscene, or blasphemous works or articles" but also “literature which in the opinion of the minister, and whether by word or by picture or partly by words and partly by picture, (a) unduly emphasizes matters of sex or crime or (b) is calculated to encourage depravity." Seventy-two American magazines are outlawed under these regulations!
Indecency never dies, and the devil of impurity, if driven away, often returns with seven other evil spirits. John S. Sumner, who for twenty-five years was representative for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and who has long fought printed indecency, declares: "We try to catch these art magazines; generally we are successful. Unfortunately we can't stop them altogether from being published because the next issue after their conviction may be one that is completely innocuous and clean; only by and by, when the publisher assumes that our watchfulness is on the wane, dirty material is sneaked in again. Here you are not dealing exclusively with petty criminals ignorant of the law. You are dealing all too often with publishers who can afford to employ clever attorneys. I recall the case of a publisher of no fewer than four dirty magazines whom we arraigned. His attorney pleaded that the man had a boy in college and a girl in high school, that the publicity following conviction would ruin the lives of his children. We promised that the publicity would be withheld if, in turn, he gave us a written promise to destroy his magazines and never again enter the shady publishing business. He wrote that promise. We kept ours. A few months later I read in the Bridgeport newspapers that he had been arrested on the charge of distributing indecent literature. Many of these publishers are like the many-headed hydra. Chop off one of its heads, and two grow in its place."
Nauseated by this magazine sewage, Frank R. Kent, Washington newspaper man, sounds the alarm against the "truly extraordinary extent to which the country is drenched with smut by the steadily increasing stream of pornographic periodicals and dirty fiction magazines." He declares: "The plain truth is that in the matter of literary lewdness we have taken the lead away from the French. It used to be that Paris held the palm for this sort of thing. Americans in the French capital were accustomed to marvel that a civilized nation should openly permit the sale of such filth, and it was taken to indicate that the French as a whole were essentially a dirty minded people. But they do not think that now. They can get here in the old home town not only more such publications, but dirtier, both as to "art" and as to reading matter. And not only have we produced a great crop of coarseness peculiarly our own, but the more obscene French papers have now been translated into English and appear on the news stands along with the originals. In the small towns they are seen in the greatest profusion, and make an imposing array. When you stop to analyze, scrutinize, and check up, there is here presented more reason for apprehension as to the future than in any other single symptom in America today."
This is no exaggeration. The "art" publications peddled to our high-school youth show that the debauches of Sodom and Gomorrah are perpetuated within our national borders. A New York committee found that in certain popular short-story magazines 80 per cent of the stories were "off color," while others used from 50 to 90 per cent of their space for suggestive pictures. Stripped of their literary pretensions, these poisoned sheets are combinations of printed and pictorial degeneracy that must be repudiated by every Christian and that should be proscribed forever by the laws of the land.
We may well conclude that the racy, sensual magazines contribute to the staggering increase of sex crimes. In this connection the New York Police Commissioner reports that during 1936 sex offenses to the number of 1,251 were reported in that city, while during 1937 the number had increased more than 50 percent, to 1,892. In a bulletin issued by Notre Dame University a large part of the presentation is devoted to the statement of a young man now in prison for his sex crimes. In part he says: "I'm no different from any one else. I can see now what made me what I am. It didn't come from inside me, but from outside, ... from those filthy magazines that you nice people allow to be plastered all over your news-stands.... I was a kid at a news-stand when I started down.... It was one of your respectable citizens who started me down, the wealthy guy that owned the news stand. He used to bring his rotten magazines to my stand and show me the worst pictures and say, 'Hot stuff! It'll make you rich!' How was I to know that the stuff was poison? Where's the big shot that gave me the start? I know. He's still doing his corrupt business, and he's free."
More veiled in their assault on the virtues of courtship and marriage, more wide spread in their distribution, and therefore more harmful are the widely heralded "true story" magazines. These confessions, regularly written in the first person, cultivate the impression that they are authentic revelations, designed to show the pitfalls of courtship and married life and to demonstrate how young people can emerge both better and nobler from harrowing sex experiences. Never in the history of American printing has any type of publication been so welcome as these sheets. To the everlasting discredit of an irresponsible coterie in the American clergy it must be said that among the strongest endorsements these publications have received are the florid sanctions of American ministers.
In two propaganda brochures, entitled, respectively, What Ministers of the Gospel Think and Say of the World's Fastest-growing Magazine and A Magazine with a Great Moral Force, we find these almost unbelievable statements over the signatures of clergymen:
A national secretary of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America states that this magazine is "very greatly needed" and will "tend to encourage good reading, especially by our young people."
A New York clergyman of unidentified connection vigorously asserts: "It is my sincere conviction that this magazine is the most uplifting force in this country."
A presiding elder of an Oklahoma Methodist Episcopal district claims: "I think your magazine will be a great blessing to the young life of our country."
A college president in Illinois permits this to appear in print over his signature: "I am very happy to commend the excellent purpose you have before you in publishing the magazine. You are following the correct educational ideal, and your efforts deserve hearty response and support."
A Missouri Methodist Episcopal preacher waxes sermonic and pens these pastoral lines: "The plan and scope of the True Story magazine impresses me as deserving the highest praise and fullest cooperation from all workers for the uplift of humanity. I bid you Godspeed."
An Episcopal rector, a D. D., in Idaho, goes above the sky limit: "I commend this, in my estimation, greatest of story magazines. Would that every growing boy and girl could peruse its pages!”
A senile preacher in Wisconsin regards this magazine as a means of grace and opines: "Although eighty-one, I love your magazine. True stories build morals, lead souls to accept the divine will towards humanity. My soul craves for the truth."
In the light of the actual influence exerted by this type of magazine such clerical endorsements are lurid follies. When some of these ministerial enthusiasts were subsequently questioned, they refused to restate their pastoral approval. It is not without some significance that the promotion department of this "confession" magazine admitted, when pressed for an answer, that it was unable to state whether the clergymen who had lent their names in the spread of this publication had received a year's subscription gratis. Be this as it may, however, the fact remains that, whether one thousand or ten thousand clergymen endorse these publications, this approval does not justify their existence. One of the most salacious books ever written was printed with the papal imprimatur, the official stamp of the Pope's approval. Yet even devout Catholics would not attempt to employ the principle of the argument which these "uplift" magazines advance, and say that, just because the Pope endorsed a prize of Italian pornography, it deserves to be scattered broadcast.
In meaningful contrast to the unbecoming attitude of these clergymen (who in some instances vouched for the magazine without seeing it or who, when they found that the "truth" taxed even their elastic credulity, confessed, as did a Michigan ecclesiastic: "At times one is incredulous, for it seems as if some of the true stories were humanly impossible. However, if MacFadden vouches for them, I can swallow even some 'whales'") is the aloofness of the New York public library. These magazines, which significantly have become the most popular reading-material in the Atlanta penitentiary, are barred from the Gotham library system as "below the standard." They condemn themselves before the tribunal of common decency as miserable misrepresentations, featuring twisted ideals and warped morality.
In Collier's a prolific author of these "true stories" admits:
"I have made a thousand confessions, but this is my last, and the first sincere one I have ever made for publication." Admitting that he wrote endless pages of sentimental slush because, as some one else has said, "the wages of sin is a check from a confession magazine," he states: "I have sinned more often — on paper — than Mephisto himself. I have done more severe penance — on paper — than the most devout Trappist monk. My conscience has been purged, calcimined, and resurrected on an average of three times a week. I have sinned and sinned and sinned — but I always told. I am the king of confessors. I sit on a throne embroidered with rehearsed sins. I shake cast-off consciences out of my sleeves. My subjects are all gloomy characters with dark pasts, although a few of them gaze wistfully into the future toward the promise of another sunrise."
The commercialism of these magazines shows itself in their advertising columns, which feature Gipsy dream books, sex secrets, Parisian portraits, obscene photos, the salacious writings of atheists, Hindu crystal balls, zodiac signs, luck-in-love rings, and similar atrocities.
In addition, the business interests supporting these publications do not always inspire our confidence. One of these magazines conspicuously bears the name of a man who was arrested, prosecuted, and found guilty of spreading improper literature. When a magazine with such antecedents constitutes itself a guardian of marriage morals, no one should be accused of prejudice if he is inclined to feel that the widely heralded "uplift" movement bears only the earmarks of financial uplift for the publishers.
The strongest objection is furnished by the stories themselves. Their pages fairly reek with disgusting scenes and with transgressions of chastity. Adultery follows upon adultery, one unclean scene gives way to another, and the whole is repulsive. The publishers claim, it is true, that they do not reward iniquity and that sin is punished. But there is proof positive that in many instances these claims fall flat, that passion often triumphs, and that perverted sexual relations are condoned. Reading through five pages of seductive scenes and then coming to a brief paragraph at the conclusion or to an even briefer sentence which states, in effect, that after all it is best to be good, is just as valueless in helping young people to purity as a tissue-paper parasol would be in a cloudburst!
If it were not for the fact that these treacherous sheets are sometimes found in Christian homes and avidly read by a certain type of church-member, it would not be necessary to appeal for cooperation in banning this periodical poison from all self-respecting homes. Censorship, legislation, clean-literature campaigns, even if they were applied, could offer only incidental help. The decisive factor is the subscription list. Keep it down!
Similarly hostile to high marriage standards is the godless novel. The motion picture and the plays of the legitimate stage have bolted the bounds of chastity, it is true, but even in their widest departure from decency few footlight or screen performances have featured unnatural vice and perversion. Yet novels that have come into marked prominence in the last years tell all and expatiate upon lurid emotional processes, with details in which only the printed page can indulge.
Even much of the less objectionable fiction of the day comes from the pen of men and women who are unsparing in their denunciation of the present marriage contract. Joseph Hergesheimer complains that marriage is a "notorious failure." Faith Baldwin, who has written many stories and books about love and life, insists: "Marriage isn't ordained in heaven, let them say what they will. It's an unnatural relationship, and there is proof that it was started as an institution to protect property." H. G. Wells, British Utopian, calls for a "courageous revision of the marital tie" and condescendingly admits: "The Christian marriage, like most marriage institutions of the world, meets the needs of a peasant life with passable success." Owen Johnson, author of triangle and social-problem novels, predicts startling changes in America's marriage ideals, and claims: "Out of the chaos of family life today will come a new sort of order." Booth Tarkington tells the million-plus readers of the American Magazine that marriage is "an increasing cause of human unhappiness" and demands a new matrimonial deal of "complete freedom, independence, and self-determination."
The worst offenders are often the best sellers. Some who for sheer brilliancy of literary attainments have been the recipients of, wide-spread plaudits and have been honored by Pulitzer prizes and Nobel awards are hopelessly negative from a religious and moral point of view. Writers like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, and others may serve as illustrations. Commenting on a book by the last-named author, William Alien White remarks: "Seventy-two seductions in one book are too many." Lewis's forte consists in denunciations, particularly of clergymen and the Church. One of his well known novels pictures a minister who is dishonest and perverted. "The fact that no such minister exists in the Church," remarks a reviewer, "or, if he gets in, does not continue to stay in the Church did not make any difference to Lewis. He wanted to depict a bad minister." The zeal with which he prosecuted this purpose was indeed worthy of a higher aim. First of all he hired a Unitarian preacher who had started his ministry as a Methodist to give him technical advice and act as a detail man. Then, we are told, "for six months he subscribed to many church-papers and read them diligently. He had his work-room filled with Bible dictionaries, theological works, Methodist disciplines, hymn-books of every type." A visiting preacher remarks: "I have often taken stock of his library during the incubation of the new book and found him with a preacher's library larger than many a preacher has had after ten years in the ministry."
Similar determination is betrayed in his other books, which offer a sordid record of attempts at seduction, abortion, unhappy marriages, adultery, open flaunting of the law, illegitimate birth, divorce, and the long catalog of similar atrocities. Yet Sinclair Lewis's Main Street sold in 725,000 copies; his Elmer Gantry reached 400,000, — a total of a million and an eighth copies of a penetrating attack against Christian marriage.
Below all this is a substratum of indecency. It has remained for this decade to feature the novel that glorifies ugly, unnatural vice, to flaunt the amatory curiosa before the eye of the youth of the nation, to circulate the filth that was once limited to privately published editions, to revive the smut of classical degeneracy (against which even a pagan morality protested), and to appeal for the sale of unexpurgated editions.
Laura Simmons, professional book-reviewer, writing in the New York Times, confesses: "Even a hard-boiled reviewer has been shocked to enter an elegant, immaculate library, where a speck of dust would distress our gentle hostess, and find tables and chairs strewn with appalling dirt and sewage supposed to 'broaden' the family tastes in drama and literature."
Some time ago a publisher sent me for review an attractively printed book described on the jacket with this endorsement: "Here is a big American novel — big in size, big in conception, big in the vast sweep of its background. It presents something new, an entirely modern treatment of the great Western trek, of Indian raids, of railroad building.... It will be acclaimed as one of the big books of the year and has qualities which, we believe, will place it among the lasting volumes of our times." I sent this volume for review to a pastor in California, who carefully read the book and then wrote: "The first fifty pages seemed innocent and interesting enough; but then the reader is suddenly introduced to 'Frenchy' in a salacious hotel-room scene.... With all due respect to the historical setting and the many fine scenes of early railroad and pioneer life in Texas, the book, to my mind, is rotten to the core, having no less than 400 pages interspersed with minute descriptions of ... lustful scenes.... These pages leave very little to the imagination, and I am glad that my children did not get hold of the book. In fact, I think it ought to be barred from the mails. I could not write a review for publication lest undue and additional attention be called to the book. This reading has been a lesson to me never to approve any book without having read all of it." — A mere cursory glance at the opening pages of any modern novel, least of all, at the publisher's blurb on the jacket, will not give an adequate picture of the contents. The introduction to filth is often disguised and veneered.
With printed impurity more accessible than ever before, we need not search far a field for the agencies that help to spread this vice. Lending libraries, which have grown up overnight as so many poisonous fungi, clutter their shelves with titles that help to initiate high-school boys and girls into the sins of the flesh. The corner drug store, the same institution that offers a lavish variety of antiseptics, antitoxins, disinfectants, and sterilizing supplies of all kinds, now often displays the printed filth that infects the mind and soul and destroys the tissues of purity. Here, where the pure-food-and-drug act of a scrupulous law demands that nothing inferior or adulterated be sold, a poison is dispensed that stunts the brain and paralyzes the soul. Here is the worst that rodent minds have ever written, offered to the children of the nation for two pennies a day. This, we submit, is the cheapest moral dynamite known to any age.
The printed depravity of the past may have killed the purity of its thousands, for pornography is an ancient sin; but the pages of present-day impurity slaughter their ten thousands. Scoring the heroine in a widely read novel, Mr. George W. Ochs Oakes, former editor of Current History, summarizes: "Never a word of condemnation of her immoral life; no disapproval of scoffing at religion; no dispraise of scornful ridicule of the sanctity of marriage; no contrition for misdeeds; no penitence for parental disrespect; no penalty for debauchery, not even remorse; instead of making retribution or atonement, rich rewards of halcyon days of marital bliss are vouchsafed the unregenerate culprit. And this mess of corruption, garnished by a faultless hand with felicitous pictures and dazzlingly beautiful imagery, the masterpiece of adroit craftsmanship, this foul witch's cauldron, is served to self-respecting men and women, to eager boys and ardent girls, to distort time-honored standards, to undermine their beliefs, to implant a virus of scorn for homely virtues, to shatter the precious maxims and formulas which have preserved our conventions and safeguarded our morality.... The heart sickens; the soul falters. To feel that in the years to come those who hold most dear the standards we cherish, the fundamentals which we have regarded as the basis of our civilization, that all these will be blasted, blackened, and corrupted by the vile pictures of our life which are drawn by recognized, popular writers of our day and are bequeathed to those who follow after us is the damning legacy of our times!"
Critical, analytical Joseph Wood Krutch admits: "If one turns to the smarter of those novelists who describe the doings of the more advanced set of those who are experimenting with life, to, for example, Mr. Aldous Huxley or Mr. Ernest Hemingway, one will discover in their tragic farces the picture of a society which is at bottom in despair.... To Huxley and Hemingway — I take them as the most conspicuous exemplars of a whole school — love is at times only a sort of obscene joke.... But the joke is one which turns quickly bitter upon the tongue."
The avid rehearsal in print of this sophisticated sin often stimulates the desire to keep up with the hot pace set by the author and his characters. Every suggestion of immorality or glorification of a triangle relationship is a potential incentive to parallel wrong. The assassin of President McKinley admitted that he had been incited to murder by the writings of Emma Goldman. Jesse Pomeroy, one of the most vicious murderers in American criminology records, confessed that he had read scores of cheap novels on murder, robbery, and crime. The seeds that have been planted in impressionable minds by these sowers of impure suggestions have helped to produce a terrifying harvest.
James Dougall, the English writer in the London Daily Express who led the crusade against The Well of Loneliness, summarizes the consequences of this abandon and license: "It is easier to corrupt the mind than to purify it. The poisonous influence of these depraved works of genius is twofold. They debauch the imagination of their readers. They also debauch the imagination of the novelists who are forced to compete with them in the market."
To meet the competition of the cheap magazine, the radio has frequently become allied with the printed, page in the attack on the home. America, the Catholic weekly, declares that of the twenty quarter-hour dramatic sketches broadcast daily between eight in the morning and five in the evening, sixteen base their theme on the disregard of the marriage bond. In many other broadcasts the marriage relation is likewise held up for coast-to-coast ridicule. Some comedians are notorious for their sarcastic jibes at love and home-life.
Small wonder that as a nation we laugh scornfully at the sanctity of marriage, that standards of marital right and wrong have often lost their hold on the American mind! Just as the narcotic addict becomes habituated to steadily increasing measures of an opiate, so the blasé philosophy continually demands a stronger dosage of this printed poison.
But great wonder that an unexplainable inactivity on the part of many Christians in this country permits this situation to pass without forceful protest! The Church has repeatedly voiced its disapproval, it is true; but its words are mocked by this glut of nauseating fiction. Its best efforts are weakened by every counter move in homes that tolerate any form of this literature of lust. Add to this the corruption of politicians and officials who extend protection to guilty booksellers and news dealers, the utter inadequacy of American law to cope with the hazards of this situation, the restricted scope and power of civic societies, whose efforts to ban objectionable publications often result in publicity and free advertising, and altogether we have a discouraging picture of America's slow, but noticeable surrender of its citadel of decency. Not until Christian families shall bar forever all contact with this contagious impurity; not until leaders in our congregations lend their individual and cooperative efforts to civic movements designed to send pornography back to the hell from which it was spawned; not until graft and extortion have been minimized in our political life and men of integrity are willing to assume leadership in our community affairs; not until the Church strengthens its own field forces and at the same time encourages more insistently the writing and reading of the better books — can we begin to regain the territory lost in the last decades.
The fight against filth will be an up-hill battle. For several For Better, Not for Worse years correspondents have sent me printed circulars describing a book issued by an atheist publishing company in New York City. These sheets advertise a book which is said to unmask the Bible and brand it as a deceitful volume. The illustrations printed on this circular are so vile that help was asked in having these repulsive pictures barred from the mail.
Now, the United States postal law is clear on this subject. Its provisions specify: "Every obscene, lewd, lecherous, filthy book, pamphlet, picture of an indecent character, ... and every letter, packet, or package ... containing any filthy, vile, or indecent thing ... shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post-office." However, when I brought these lewd pictures to the attention of the authorities in Washington, the solicitor of the post office declared that the United States mail would not bar this publication, although every decent person in the country who might be forced to look at these drawings would immediately brand them as lewd and demand that the United States follow the ruling of the Canadian government in refusing this book entrance to their dominion. I did not base the objection on the fact that these circulars were anti-Biblical; the claim was simply this, that these pictures were indecent, displaying situations never revealed in the Bible.
Because the battle is so hard, it must be fought with increased determination. If Government supervision is lax and its statutes remain unenforced, we may see the forces of protest organize in our own cities and consign piles of indecent publications to the flames. The apostle did not condemn the burning of the disavowed magical literature in Ephesus, even though he knew that after the smoke of these sorcery texts, valued at 50,000 pieces of silver, had disappeared, witchcraft would continue to hold its treacherous sway. When Luther threw the papal bull into the flames, he, too, realized that, though he might destroy that document, he could not completely wipe spiritual arrogance off the face of the earth. While the flaming piles could never be made large enough to consume the total tonnage of cloacal [sewer-like] filth in our country, these fires would be more than gestures; they would bum, like the Indian flares that once lighted our Western heavens, as war fires summoning the nation's youth to a crusade against filth.