Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  Winchester’s pamphlet played a small but telling role in the growing opposition of the conservative Protestant camp to the changes that were afoot in mainline Protestantism in the wake of the twin movements for women’s rights and birth control access. A fundamentalist weekly, the Sunday School Times, became a frequent critic of the FCC while under the editorship of Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, who nineteen years earlier had written a heroic biography of Anthony Comstock. In August 1932, an uncredited writer for the paper lambasted Winchester’s publication as “vile” for discussing such topics as dancing, “petting,” and the possible naturalness of “the sex impulse”; the writer also approvingly cited a Southern Presbyterian missive associating the FCC with “sex filth” and a Northern Presbyterian dissenter reacting with disgust to the FCC because of “the horrible birth-control scandal of last year.” While the fundamentalists echoed the Catholics in opposing contraception, they were also critical of Catholicism: in the same issue, for instance, a writer denounced “the sensuous charm of the great cathedrals of Roman Catholicism, enslaving mortal souls by pagan rites rendered alluringly beautiful” and the “cheap and tawdry idolatry of this great apostate church.”92 Catholic-fundamentalist rapprochement around sexual issues was far in the future, but the birth control issue intensified both Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant opposition to the FCC and the mainline Protestants it represented.

  Despite persisting disagreements between liberal and conservative Protestants regarding birth control, there were signs of widespread approval among the public in the years following the Lambeth and FCC Committee reports. After taking a poll in 1938, Ladies’ Home Journal reported that 79 percent of American women approved of contraception.93 By 1940, polling by George Gallup consistently showed that between 70 and 80 percent of all Americans favored “the distribution of birth-control information to married persons by government health clinics.”94 As birth control gained in acceptance among Protestants and lay Catholics alike, culminating ultimately with the Supreme Court’s overturning remaining bans on birth control access for married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), other issues took its place as key points of contention. But the ire of conservative critics over birth control and sex more generally would not be easily assuaged.

  THE PERIOD FOLLOWING 1920 AND the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment witnessed conflicts and controversies of many kinds. Especially for conceptions of women’s rights and sexual freedom, the 1920s was a period of discord and decisive change. Sanger’s campaign for frank discussion of and legal access to birth control marked a pivotal moment in the history of American debates about sexuality and morals, and the acrimonious religious and political realignments of the period secured her deeply bifurcated reputation. Catholics, along with traditionalist Protestants, continued to denounce and view her in demonic terms. Liberal Protestants persisted in a mutually profitable relationship with Sanger, as they sought to distance themselves from Catholic authoritarianism—gradually adopting Sanger’s language supporting women’s right to control their own bodies and to experience sexual pleasure not bound to procreation.

  Certainly the political, religious, and philosophical divisions among these disparate parties were deep, and they traded bitter accusations. But all cared passionately about the betterment of the human race and the improvement of American society. All believed that both the nation and the world would benefit from increased propagation of particular types of human beings, and from decreased breeding among others. And all sought to persuade others of the rightness of their own position—by distorting or silencing the other side, if necessary—and to shore up that stance by every legal means available.95

  At stake, ultimately, in the religious war over birth control were competing moral visions about human liberty, autonomy, and freedom: rival convictions about the very definition of humanity and the proper place of choice, duty, and pleasure in human life. Catholic leaders loathed Sanger because they believed she sought to destroy the ties of love and fealty between mother and child, husband and wife, church and person. Sanger detested the Catholic hierarchy, in turn, because she believed it sought to control not only the thought and behavior of faithful Catholics but also the people, laws, and culture of the United States (indeed, of the whole world). Each position attracted adherents beyond the immediate constituencies of Sanger and Catholic leaders, as both parties made broad appeals to morality and referenced the human family, the needs of children, the goodness of parenting future generations, and the awesomeness of life itself. Both factions deeply believed in the rectitude of their cause, and there were vast and irreconcilable differences between their moral visions. The sharpest differences were matters of gender and power—a fact seen plainly by Sanger no less than by traditionalists such as Archbishop Hayes. The conflict over birth control was, in this sense, part of a much larger cultural debate in this period about female autonomy, one intensified by the successful suffrage campaign. As voters, women had now secured rights unknown to their foremothers; the larger impact on the nation of women’s citizenship was an unknown and, to many, truly terrifying prospect.

  But the birth control debate also revealed similar divisions regarding the authority of science, the limits of free speech, and the shape of modernity itself. Indeed, the debate about gender in the 1920s was deeply interwoven with an equally significant dispute about the role of religion amid modernity and about the status of scientific knowledge in relation to religion. While some political progressives saw religion as an essentially conservative if not downright oppressive force—an institution that sought unrestricted privilege and self-propagation in service to its rich, powerful, mostly male leaders—others viewed religion as a potentially progressive and vital institution, caring for the poor in a heartless world by agitating for a living wage over and against the capitalistic exploitations of the period. Just as progressives were leery toward anything that looked like a fundamentalist or Catholic attempt to suppress science or subjugate women, conservatives were suspicious about the free exchange of sexual knowledge and anxious to advance their version of traditional morality for the sake of church and nation. These forces—gender, science, knowledge, free speech, and modernity—collided in the furor over birth control in the 1920s, which changed forever the American conversation about religion and sex.

  CHAPTER 2

  CENSORSHIP OF LITERATURE AND POPULAR ENTERTAINMENTS

  THE BIRTH CONTROL CONFLICT THAT burgeoned in the 1920s intensified dissent in both religious and political realms over the exchange and distribution of sexual knowledge. Broad disagreements about the meaning of obscenity lingered into the next decade, only to erupt over materials quite distinct from contraceptive information. And the fault lines deepened: just as liberal Protestants had shifted to a more open position on birth control during the 1920s, the 1930s witnessed their gradual but steady retreat from censorship-minded public scrutiny of entertainment. This period witnessed the visible emergence of religiously rooted defenses of free expression, however cautious—as well as new disagreements among religious people regarding what should be considered obscene and whether government or religious authorities were in the best position to regulate obscenity. Mainline Protestants who might once have endorsed official or unofficial censorship became more skeptical of state efforts to censor art and literature, even as some religious people were growing more tolerant of the spiritualization of sex that had colored the FCC statement on home and marriage. Many of their fellow Christians demurred, however, and grew more adamant about the need to protect virtuous citizens from the ill effects of sexually suggestive ideas and graphic depictions of passion.

  The 1930s witnessed a new openness regarding sex in literature, accompanied by the proliferation of forms of popular entertainment often seen as provocative and trafficking in obscenity. These prompted new efforts at censorship by religious people, as local citizens and church people across the nation joined efforts to stamp out erotic matter that might boost immorality among youth.
But this era of censorship was notable for several new developments: Catholics supplanted Protestants as the most visible and vocal advocates of censorship in the United States, some liberal Protestants became more openly skeptical of censorship, and censorship created opportunities for collaboration, or at least alignment of interests, between Catholics and traditionalist Protestants.

  Writer and artist D. H. Lawrence. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.

  A dispute over one particular novel illustrated the swiftly changing fate of censorship in this period and signaled a new era in which censorship was more controversial than it had been under Comstock. On November 25, 1929, a Massachusetts district court convicted a local Cambridge bookseller, John DeLacey, and his store clerk for selling obscene literature in the form of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence’s sexually explicit novel about an adulterous love affair. DeLacey’s Dunster House Bookshop in Harvard Square was a favorite of college professors, cultured locals, and erudite readers who lived in or visited the area. Still, the shop had not stocked Lawrence’s book; DeLacey had only acquired it at the insistence of a customer who turned out to be John Tait Slaymaker, an agent of the anti-vice group known as the New England Watch and Ward Society. Despite the whiff of entrapment, money had exchanged hands in the procurement of an obscene book; local laws mandated a guilty verdict. Judge Arthur P. Stone issued an eight-hundred-dollar fine and a severe sentence to DeLacey—four months’ imprisonment in the House of Correction—along with a two-hundred-dollar fine and two-week sentence to the clerk.1

  Edged with the titillating forbiddenness long associated with Lawrence, the author of some twenty prior volumes that included the previously censored Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, the story was ripe to make headlines in major newspapers across the country. Slaymaker, using only part of his name to avoid recognition and persisting even after DeLacey noted that he did not carry the work in his shop “because of its nature,” had demanded that the bookseller order the novel for him from a third party. Newspapers splashily exhibited the spectacle of a bookish college supplier selling smut to an anti-vice crusader posing as a scholar, one who must have felt grimly triumphant as he returned to Watch and Ward headquarters bearing—finally!—his prize. The Middlesex County district attorney, Robert T. Bushnell, condemned the deceptive tactics of the Watch and Ward Society, whose crusading in Boston dated back to 1878. Remarkably, although he was the prosecutor handling the case and would have been the right person to denounce DeLacey, Bushnell warned instead that to “induce and procure the commission of a crime,” as agent Slaymaker did here, was to engage in “criminal conspiracy.”2 Nonetheless, the law demanded that he prosecute DeLacey, and he did.

  The court ultimately revoked DeLacey’s jail sentence altogether, lest the “brazen piece of effrontery” committed by Slaymaker vindicate the solicitation of a crime. Although censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover endured, the stunt at Dunster House Bookshop damaged the anti-vice cause’s credibility and reaped extensive public criticism. After Bushnell’s denunciations of the Watch and Ward Society’s methods, three members of the society resigned, and the board of directors initiated an impartial investigation to see if any “illegal, improper, or unethical” methods were employed in the Dunster House Bookshop case. Vigilante justice, which in the view of the Watch and Ward Society’s many supporters served the cause well, proved deeply embarrassing to other Cantabrigians, who found its methods unseemly and disliked the national spotlight such belligerent acts shone upon their fair city.3 Ripening beneath these disagreements over tactics, though, was a more fundamental dispute about whether it was appropriate to target literature for censorship in the first place.

  The Dunster House Bookshop made Boston “the butt of national ridicule”—“I am sick and tired of having Boston and Massachusetts represented as backwoods sections populated by yokels,” said District Attorney Bushnell after DeLacey was prosecuted. It also deeply damaged the standing of the Watch and Ward. Whether out of conviction or desperation, in 1930 the society invited the Roman Catholic leader of Boston, William Henry Cardinal O’Connell, to serve as an honorary vice president of the organization. The attempt by a Protestant organization to collaborate publicly with a Catholic leader known to warn his own flocks against consorting with Protestants was surprising, to say the least, although the society had cooperated with Catholic law enforcement officials in the past. The cardinal, well aware of the stain on the Watch and Ward’s reputation, declined.4

  Catholic leaders and some conservative Protestants began to shift their efforts beyond strict censorship laws to internal ecclesiastical modes of controlling the literary consumption of their flocks. The secretary of the Massachusetts Bible Society did join a campaign for reforming the state’s obscenity laws, but the leadership of Boston’s Catholic diocese conceded that censorship laws typically provoked “a resentful counterattack waged with the weapons of ridicule and satire which largely nullify the good of the prohibition” and that “civil law is not a cure-all adapted to remedy this evil.” Shifts in tactics by no means signaled a change in values, but this famous trial foreshadowed later modifications in efforts to uphold decency. By the end of the 1930s, the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Committee reported that Boston’s Watch and Ward Society had wholly ceased its efforts at prosecuting obscene books and had “completely withdrawn from the field.”5

  The Dunster House Bookshop case augured new fault lines regarding censorship and the religious control of literature containing sexual content. The deep conflicts that were developing in Anglo-American religious thinking about sex intensified those fault lines, and these conflicts were on vivid display in the wider religious debate over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As censorship lost credibility in many prominent circles, conservative critics continued to blast works and writers they deemed blasphemous. Analyzing Lawrence’s intentions for that novel along with its critical reception during the 1930s provides a way to link the political and religious conflicts that worked together to deepen the fracture in American Christian thinking about sex.

  While popular audiences would later think of Lawrence as little more than an author of titillating smut, he was celebrated by many nonconformists and literature critics in his own day, even as censors and traditionalist Christians viewed him with disgust. Denunciations of Lawrence, including scorn for his literary talent, were always deeply inflected with moral pronouncements about his subject matter and his determination to write about sex in the frankest language imaginable, defiantly using words many considered vulgar. Such words appeared in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which roused the most polarized reactions and was the subject of the fiercest controversies. The religious debates regarding that novel and Lawrence more generally reveal the deeper conflicts in Anglo-American religious thinking about sex that would roil obscenity debates for years to come.

  DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE (1885–1930) WAS born to a miner father and former schoolteacher mother in a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire, England, the fourth of five children. A sickly child who was an avid reader and painter, he was part of a conventional family, and his upbringing was traditional and rigorously religious. His mother made sure that he and his siblings regularly attended Sunday school and services at Eastwood’s Congregational Chapel, known for its stern morality.6 As an adult, Lawrence would criticize the prudery of Reformed Protestantism, yet he ardently praised other facets of the tradition, notably its music. Lawrence began writing poetry and fiction while working as a schoolteacher in London, publishing his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1910.

  In 1912, at the age of twenty-six, Lawrence fell in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his former college professors. She left her husband and children for him, and they married and remained together for the rest of Lawrence’s life. Frieda was avant-garde in her views about sex and marriage; she had had several lovers during her first marriage, including the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, a follower of Sigmund Freud who had published notable work on sexu
ality. Already a devoted fan of Nietzsche, Frieda drank in Freud’s ideas as reinterpreted through Gross, focusing on one in particular: “the act of sexual love was a sacrament and if the sacrament were freely given and taken the ills of society would disappear.”7 Frieda carried this view with her into her relationship with Lawrence and also continued to have numerous extramarital liaisons while with him; this understanding of the sacramentality of sex would emerge repeatedly in Lawrence’s writing. Lawrence cherished the romantic themes of sexual passion, raw physicality, and the wondrous beauty of human bodies in his writing, as well as his life, and for him, they had everything to do with true religion: sex itself was potentially a sacred experience.

  It was during his early married years that Lawrence’s literary work first encountered controversy, when his 1915 novel The Rainbow was labeled obscene. It contained scenes of lesbianism, nakedness, and exuberant sex, all depicted in graphic detail. After receiving a complaint, a London court ordered the publisher, Methuen and Company, to hand over all unsold copies of the book; the publisher then demanded that Lawrence return his advance of three hundred pounds. Lawrence’s New York agent confirmed that with its explicit scenes the book could not be published in the United States.8 Women in Love, a subsequent novel first written in 1913 and thoroughly revised in 1917, was rejected by several publishers for fear of a similar reaction before eventually finding acceptance—and courting much controversy among those desiring purity in print. Even friends and former disciples sometimes turned against Lawrence, as when one described Women in Love as “sub-human and bestial.” There were other criticisms of Lawrence’s work: he often wrote from personal experience, and associates who recognized themselves as characters in a Lawrence story sometimes threatened libel suits. Still others found his writing far too earnest, stilted, pompous, and preachy to be taken seriously.9