| Title | : | Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society's Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0807051128 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780807051122 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 209 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2010 |
—an anonymous Bostonian, 1929
In this spectacular romp through the Puritan City, 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.”
Bankrolled by society’s upper crust, the New England Watch and Ward Society acted as a quasi-vigilante police force and notorious literary censor for over eighty years. Often going over the heads of local authorities, it orchestrated the mass censorship of books and plays, raided gambling dens and brothels, and utilized spies to entrap prostitutes and their patrons.
Miller deftly traces the growth of the Watch and Ward, from its formation in 1878 to its waning days in the 1950s. During its heyday, the society and its imitators banished modern classics by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis and went to war with publishing and literary giants such as Alfred A. Knopf and The Atlantic Monthly . To the chagrin of the Watch and Ward, some writers rode the national wave of publicity that accompanied the banning of their books. Upton Sinclair declared staunchly, “I would rather be banned in Boston than read anywhere else because when you are banned in Boston, you are read everywhere else.” Others faced extinction or tried to barter their way onto bookshelves, like Walt Whitman, who hesitantly removed lines from Leaves of Grass under the watchful eye of the Watch and Ward. As the Great Depression unfolded, the society shifted its focus from bookstores to burlesque, successfully shuttering the Old Howard, the city’s legendary theater that attracted patrons from T. S. Eliot to John F. Kennedy.
Banned in Boston is a lively history and, despite Boston’s “liberal” reputation today, a cautionary tale of the dangers caused by moral crusaders of all stripes.
Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society's Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil Reviews
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Boston is a city of contradictions. Full of anxiety about sex and morals and religion, frantic in its tight-assed sanctimony. But on the other hand, rebellious, tending toward dirty-mindedness, inquisitive, full of big ideas and modernity.
Class and cultural differences have historically fed into that dichotomy. The city’s history is another significant factor- being one of the first big American cities and one of the very oldest gives Boston a parental sort of feeling towards the rest of the country, as if it has a duty to set an example of what a good American city should be, while still yearning to stay relevant and not dissolve into the faceless “before.”
As one individual puts it in this book, “Boston is a ‘state of mind.’ Some may believe that state of mind is conceited, even ridiculous, but it nevertheless is properly self-respecting in its opinions.”
Nowhere is this interesting tug-and-pull better seen than in the Watch and Ward Society’s influence on the city from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th. (And what a dystopic-sounding name- “Watch and Ward Society” could have been taken straight out of Orwell’s 1984). Banning books, movies, poetry, plays, games, even words, this classically Boston-Puritanical society aimed to make Boston pure again, to borrow some phrasing from our, ahem… unique commander-in-chief.
Purity, at the turn of the century, seemed to be the driving force behind nearly every area of life. America’s need to purge itself of impurities fueled, not only censorship in many large cities, but also Prohibition, factory food-making- rather than letting the dirty, dirty immigrants make your bread, let machines do it! (for more on this, I highly, highly, highly recommend
White Bread, which I read almost a year ago but still think about like once a week), and food temperance movements (which we can thank for our Graham crackers and our dry cereals).
Such fanaticism for purity, I can’t help but speculate, must stem from America’s own realization of its own impurity. The Civil War was ugly, and it was brutal, and it- along with subsequent Jim Crow laws and lynchings- exposed our own brutish selfishness as a country. After that, perhaps the country felt itself in need of a moral bath, and this in turn sparked all these purity movements.
This theory certainly holds true for the members of the Watch and Ward Society:
First we have Chase, secretary to the society, punching lawyers in the face when he doesn’t like their client (does that seem morally upstanding to you?). And then there’s the matter of him drinking and spending the night in a hotel with an unmarried woman who wasn’t his wife. And what was his justification for this? Oh, they weren’t there to have sex. They were there under false pretenses, to catch prostitutes and johns going to the hotel. Mmhmm okay. Whatever makes you sleep at night.
Then, we have Cabot, card-carrying Watch and Ward member, one of the largest donors ever, and the most Brahminy of the Boston Brahmin. He was, suffice it to say, anal retentive and a self-flagellating masochist. He took cold baths, didn’t even allow tea in his house, and is described by his son as “ascetic, puritanical, self-denying; art, literature, and nature were to be studied rather than enjoyed.” He “was much happier when he found something to condemn.” He tried to censor his wife’s reading material: he thought his wife shouldn’t read George Eliot, of all people, especially when he wasn’t home (I don’t really think of Eliot as racy or sexually charged, so I’m not sure what his issue is?). All-around fun guy, clearly. … Meanwhile he’s writing letters to his wife with sexual fantasies about how he wants her to pee in his mouth and he “greedily” swallows it, or how he envisions his sweet little wife as “an utterly starved giantess” who would devour him alive, “an act he describes in explicit, highly erotic, almost ecstatic detail.”
So, clearly, these sanctimonious W&W-ers aren’t quite as pure as they pretended, and, I imagine, they’re just overcompensating and/or trying to control their internal dirtyness by making their external world clean and sexless.
Readers, beware: This isn’t a criticism of the book itself, since obviously being nonfiction it’s not like the names could be changed, but… God keeping track of all the C surnames was difficult. Cabot, Crowley, Caldwell, Chase, the other (unrelated) Chase, Cockinos, Comstock, Casey, Coakley, Curley, Calkins, Corbett, Croteau. I still am not clear on who those people are, and definitely have most of them confused with one another. But that’s just unhappy coincidence of names. -
Give this an extra .5 if you're interested in Boston politics, or history of the period from 1890-1950.
The book was more readable, and more well researched than I'd anticipated. I picked it up for both of the .5 reasons I mentioned above, but it was a surprisingly dense look at a time when America's cultural conservatism still bordered on oligarchical. More deep than it is narrow, Banned in Boston got well into the weeds on how decisions about censorship were made, the political machinations that lead to banned books, and the backlash that eventually became associated with them. Things like Watch & Ward fundraising letters, in-theater systems of warning dancers about municipal censors arriving, and how the legal proceedings for various lawsuits around bans were all covered in more depth than they might be in a more broad review of the nation at the time.
If you're between books, and the topic interests you, I'd suggest reading this. It's quick, well written, and you'll absolutely learn something. If nothing else, it will give me someone to take a tour of all the forgotten monuments with. -
There was a time when the label "Banned in Boston" was something that every author hoped for because it meant huge sales.
Banned in Boston tells the story of Boston's Watch and Ward Society, a group of people that got together to decide what could be read, seen, heard and just what other sort of trouble people could get into. You might call them a privately funded vice squad that had a long hey day. -
As a big fan of The Watch and Ward Society, I was eager to dig into their illustrious history of vice smashing wack-a-mole. Miller's detailed research into this subject has a very entertaining first half with such characters as: Godfrey Lowell Cabot (a real puritan's puritan), Anthony Comstock (The Grandfather Paladin), Jason Franklin Chase (The Supreme Censor), and Joseph C Pelletier (The Blackguard DA of Suffolk County). There are stories of raids on brothels, wire tapping, using university students to spy on businesses, entrapment, gun fights, fraudulent warrants. etc. Lots of fun stuff really. I love these guys. All of these stories help explain why "banned in boston" became such a well known catchphrase throughout the country.
However, once Chase dies the story becomes a bit...repetitive. Miller chooses to focus on the various books the organization worked to ban and included in-depth analysis on the various court cases that came to be. Some of these are certainly interesting - Upton Sinclair's "Oil" especially so. However, book banning is certainly less exciting than late night brothel raids, or breaking up gambling dens. I was still enjoying it, but towards the end I was starting to...get a little bored. I was waiting for the death knell of the organization nearly as eagerly as Mencken!
One moment of the story that caused me to throw up my hands was that Miller glosses over the fact that one of the Secretary's of the WW was BEATEN TO DEATH BY GANG MEMBERS. I just got through relatively mundane stories on burlesque bans, and MORE book ban attempts when he just tosses that one in. Would have liked more information about that Secretary and...ya know...his murder. Especially since his death played a part in their catalyst to change their focus as an organization.
*** for a great 1/2 to 3/4s of the book. Cabot's love letters he wrote to his wife NEARLY bump this up to **** but there are too many stories about book bans that just end up being a Streisand effect for the author's controversial work. It's very well researched and definitely worth a read if you're interested in Boston history or the history of free speech censorship in the US. -
It was okay. It tried to cover to many things at once so it felt as if I was reading a crammed paper instead of a book. It is also possible that this is meant for a niche group that I am not part of. Maybe you should know all the mayors and famous Boston Brahmin before picking up this book. I got a nice history lesson but I was quite lost at certain points.
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Great resource for anyone interested in early 20th century Boston history, censorship or free speech/expression. This book led me on to read This Was Burlesque, a memoir by burlesque queen Ann Corio.
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I live in Boston, although I'm not originally from here, so I think this was particularly interesting to me. It's a bit of a niche history, but I found it well written and it gave me another perspective on my adopted city. I'd like to know more, which is a good sign for any noon fiction book.
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For a book centered around censorship, gambling, burlesque and prostitution, I found it to be shockingly dull. It took me weeks to get through it when I thought for sure I'd be done within days!
