Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  In 1934, US Catholic bishops established the Legion of Decency as a mechanism for mobilizing the faithful and other concerned Americans to work for decency in movies, urging adherents to stay away from films deemed dangerous to their moral well-being. Within a few months of its founding, Catholic leaders declared that over two million Americans had signed the Legion’s pledge.25 Advocating consumer boycotts rather than federal legislation, the Legion soon eclipsed the efforts of the WCTU, which acknowledged the Catholic organization’s good results, noted the cooperation of Protestant organizations in its efforts, but continued to push for federal legislation. The film industry, sensing that self-regulation under the Legion was highly preferable to a federal law, began more intently to work on self-censorship.

  That year, a prominent Catholic and public relations officer in the Hays office named Joseph Breen was appointed head of the Production Code Administration, serving as the chief enforcer of the Hays Code. Under Breen’s direction, officials worked to cut suggestive lines from scripts and change plotlines when they were deemed too immoral. After the censors read the script for the film Casablanca, for instance, filmmakers made adjustments to lessen the suggestion of adulterous sex in the affair between Rick and Ilsa, though it remained strongly implied. A few years later, because of the censors, the strong sexuality of A Streetcar Named Desire was toned down, and a full four minutes of scenes were deleted before its release. The censors also banned a French film version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (L’Amant de lady Chatterley).26

  Catholic concern about the cinema’s influence was so high, in fact, that in 1936 Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical letter on the topic, Vigilanti Cura, that praised the Legion of Decency while condemning the “lamentable progress—magni passus extra viam—of the motion picture art and industry in the portrayal of sin and vice.” Vatican leaders had already twice addressed delegations of the International Motion Picture Congress, the second held in Rome earlier in 1936. But the subject was of “such paramount importance” and the hazards of “pernicious and deadly” effects on morality so grave that the leadership deemed it necessary to address it in this encyclical. The document reproached film industry leaders for not carrying out their pledge to safeguard “the moral welfare of the patrons of the cinema.” It exhorted bishops across the world to press Catholics in the motion picture industry to work for virtuous entertainment, as part of the larger program of Catholic Action (the organized effort mobilizing lay Catholics for church work as well as broad social reform and spiritual improvement). Bishops were also to obtain an annual pledge from members of their dioceses similar to the one developed by the Legion of Decency, promising to abstain from motion pictures “offensive to truth and to Christian morality.” Moreover, the pope’s encyclical called for a bishop-led national office in every country to review all films and categorize them as “permitted to all,” “permitted with reservations,” and “harmful or positively bad.” Such a system, though expensive, would protect the morality of Catholics and non-Catholics alike and help ensure that films in all nations would promote “the highest ideals and the truest standards of life.”27

  Film censor Joseph Breen of the Hays office inspects the garb of two actresses to ensure their harem costumes are fit for the moviegoing public. BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES.

  Popular pulp magazines also received attention from concerned citizens, especially Catholics—who were, after all, long accustomed to literary bans because of the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Convinced that the lewd stories printed in such magazines were a “moral poison” and part of a “widespread… campaign to destroy the morals of both youth and adults,” Catholic bishops in 1938 founded the National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL), which was headed by John F. Noll, bishop of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and a committee of other Catholic leaders. Concerned that popular romance, true confession, and crime and detective magazines glamorized premarital and extramarital sex, divorce, and criminality, the NODL enlisted local Catholics across the country to help eliminate such publications from stores and communities and make them inaccessible to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. NODL supporters took a pledge to abstain from reading such literature and, still more, to refuse doing business with stores that sold it. Local NODL members visited drugstores, newsstands, and other shops to urge sellers to get rid of these materials for good; if urging didn’t work, the threat of a boycott just might. In some areas, compliant storekeepers could display NODL certificates of approval to assure customers of their respectability.28

  As these organizations found success in their efforts to suppress sexual content not only for believing Catholics but for the whole of American audiences, resistance arose. As early as 1936, the Nation editorial board warned readers of the insidious Catholic influence over the motion picture industry, noting that the Hays Code had been written by the Catholic hierarchy and that Breen had now been given “dictatorial powers” to demand revisions in movie scripts even before production began. According to the editors, the MPPDA and the Legion of Decency were in cahoots, and the Catholic Church was all but running Hollywood. Given that seventy million Americans attended the cinema each week, while there were only around twenty million Catholics in the nation, non-Catholic moviegoers surely had the right to decide “whether they wish to have their films censored in advance by the Catholic church.”29

  The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson later gave the same treatment to NODL, denouncing the Catholic “zealots” who “have become unofficial censors of American magazines” with far too much public power. Pearson was especially incensed at the influence NODL had on US postmaster general Frank Walker, a Catholic. Similar complaints echoed in the liberal Protestant magazine the Christian Century, where articles condemned Catholic censorship efforts as encroachments on civil authority and American liberty. An article titled “Vigilante Censorship Is Spreading” denounced the church’s “cultural Ku Kluxism,” “terroristic censorship,” and “cultural storm troopers,” while the magazine’s editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, called the church hierarchy “the counterpart (or should I say, the prototype?) of the fascist or nazist or communist ‘party’ with the dictator at its head.” Edmund Wilson, criticizing Catholics’ role in suppressing his Memoirs of Hecate County and their more general “efforts to interfere with free speech and free press,” likened the church to the Stalinist comintern. The visibility of Catholics as censors prompted liberal Protestants to retreat from advocating moral monitoring of popular entertainments. It was a protracted sequel to the war over free speech and Catholic power that played out in the birth control controversy of the 1920s.30

  Just as liberal Protestants had loosened their stand on birth control during the previous decade, in the 1930s they shifted away from supporting censorship of mass entertainment. Their aversion to the methods of both the Legion of Decency on film and the NODL on literature evinced a shift in liberal Protestant sensibilities whereby, as one historian puts it, “moral criticism of public entertainment went from being a duty of the middle-class to evidence of its outmoded prudishness.”31 As Catholic leaders in essence took over the role of public moralists, those same Protestants who had as late as 1931 scorned the “glib rationalizing” of the anti-censors more or less joined their cause.

  With Protestant-Catholic tensions so rife in the nation, it was early for conservative Protestants and Catholics to collaborate significantly on issues of mutual concern. But censorship was one area where they could and occasionally did. One contemporary writer, R. L. Duffus, intrigued by the “patchwork of incongruities” that had come to characterize contemporary Boston, placed censorship cases such as the Dunster House Bookshop incident at the center of his perceptive analysis of the emergent religious realignments that were rapidly transforming the “little old Boston” of the Boston Brahmins, those cultured descendants of the commonwealth’s founders. Once a largely Protestant city, Boston’s majority was now Irish Catholic. Differences of both opinion and temperament divided these Eng
lish and Irish settlers, Duffus noted, but “in respect to their opinions about domestic morals the two stocks and the two religions are not far apart.” Likening Cardinal O’Connell and A. Z. Conrad—Boston’s Catholic archbishop and the long-serving pastor of the Park Street Congregational Church just off Boston Common—Duffus noted that their different theologies did not prevent concurring attitudes toward “questionable” literature. Catholic and conservative Protestant cooperation was nowhere better evidenced, according to Duffus, than in the New England Watch and Ward Society, a “perfect example of the catholicity—with a small ‘c’—of Boston’s Puritanism.” Although Protestant in origin and administrative leadership, it was an important vehicle where “Catholic and Protestant joined hands” in unity against immoral books. Catholics and conservative Protestants had discovered their agreement about “modern influence[s]” that, to their minds, imperiled the traditional family; their collaborations were just beginning.32

  In the wake of the Dunster House Bookshop case, the religious politics of censorship shifted away from federal law toward attempts by religious authorities to oversee and regulate the bounds of propriety. Traditionalist Protestants and Catholics alike took steps to impose order over popular literature and mass entertainments, and the efforts of groups like the Legion and NODL, like those of Watch and Ward, generated critique from those who did not fully share their worldview or their sense of what was appropriate to read or see on the movie screen. The ideas about religion and sex that D. H. Lawrence conveyed in his novels reaped divided reactions even when the books were out of court and the national spotlight, serving as a bellwether of much that was to come.

  LAWRENCE WAS A PARAGON OF unconventional, nonconformist thinking, and his writing represented a threat to the nation’s Christian consensus on sex. It was not simply that he advocated for a wholly different morality than that of Christian chastity, traditional marriage, and the family; the larger threat lay in the fact that he presented his own vision of love and sex as a genuinely religious one, a compelling and authentic alternative to traditional Christianity. His work, influenced by radical thinkers such as the sexually daring writer Edward Carpenter, pioneered a fusion of sexual candor and religious ecstasy that would help shape how future sexual revolutionaries, including some Christians, thought about sex and sexual morality. While that wider impact was not yet evident in the 1930s, the substance of his writing, most especially Lady Chatterley’s Lover, helps explain how he drove a wedge into the Christian agreement about sexual virtue.

  “I am a passionately religious man,” wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Lawrence in 1914, “and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”33 Whatever Lawrence may have meant by the word—and critics have long wrestled with his intention—neither he nor his works were “religious” in any conventional, institutional sense. The author was a seeker of physical and spiritual vitality, a lover of spontaneity and inward feeling as well as fleshly embodiment, a romantic who opposed the aridity of the rational intellect to dream of sacred creativity. He wrote elsewhere of poetry as “religious in its movement,” of “the essential feeling in all art” as religious, and of cosmic reverence as driving all of life.34 As a later observer would note, in order to achieve his own religious quest and escape from “dead beliefs and ideas,” Lawrence had to “break free of any religious life-experience that was regimented by legalistic and moralistic religious tradition.”35 A “passionately religious man” he was, by his own definition, but even so, his brand of religiousness was sure to alienate if not incense those committed to a more traditional piety.

  In an eloquent and highly personal essay published in 1928, “Hymns in a Man’s Life,” Lawrence wrote tenderly of the Protestant hymns he learned as a child, acknowledging that “they mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.” However “banal” they might be in structure and substance, he urged readers to imagine the wonder they had excited in him as a child and that remained with him still. Indeed, Lawrence meditated, such wonder was surely “the most precious element in life,” one that alone could stave off the boredom and deadness of modern civilization; the “sense of wonder” was “the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea,” “our sixth sense,” “the natural religious sense.” Science, too, wrote Lawrence, partook in this selfsame wonder and was in this sense “as religious as any religion,” at least until it became stuffily didactic (“as dead and boring as dogmatic religion”).36

  As a onetime devout Protestant, Lawrence remained throughout his life consumed by the Bible, Jesus, and the theme of holy love, but his was no ordinary religiosity. In one critic’s wry words, Lawrence aimed to “keep the poetry of the hymnal” as well as “desecrate the church.”37 In condemning its rigid prudery, however, he meant to call attention to the deeper joy and purity he felt the institution had destroyed, in its Protestant and Catholic forms alike. As he wrote in an essay posthumously published in England and not published in the United States until 1953, “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the Catholic Church was not inherently anti-sexual, since it had made marriage “a sacrament based on the sexual communion, for the purpose of procreation,” such that the “act of procreation is still charged with all the sensual mystery and importance of the old past.” If the church taught differently now, it was the pope and the priests who had distorted its true message. Lawrence rejected what he believed to be the dry, cracked disembodiment of the Protestantism of his time in favor of a rich sacramentalism that had a mystical reverence for physicality and sexual union at its center.38

  Interwoven throughout Lawrence’s hot-blooded religiosity, then, was a keen sense of the vitality, the basic sacredness, of sex. In his essay “Making Love to Music,” Lawrence wrote that “sex is so large and all-embracing that the religious passion itself is largely sexual.”39 In another essay, he denounced the hypocrisy that forced men and women to renounce their own sexuality in service to some distorted morality. Writing of the accusations levied against his so-called lurid and obscene novels, Lawrence retorted that he was “one of the least lurid mortals,” for he absolutely detested “cheap and promiscuous sex… heartless sex.” Rather than cheapening sex, Lawrence saw himself as writing against the artificiality of modern life, above all against contemporary forms of prudery that brought only coldness and misery into human relations. Sexuality, which enacted the “natural flow” of sympathy between creatures, was central to Lawrence’s highest religious ideal.40

  Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover deliberately and unremittingly represented such ideas. The novel is a love story between unlikely lovers: the aristocratic Connie Chatterley and her estate’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, both unhappily married to other people. Their relationship centers on their sexual passion and compatibility, suggesting the mutual sympathy and dynamism they find in one another and the restoration of their religious awe after years of dismal numbness. Connie’s unpleasant husband, Clifford Chatterley, is an example of the absolute deadness of most men of his class, a man the novel early on describes as having a cold heart, paralyzed and impotent from his time in the war, “chirpy” and “watchful” with a “slight vacancy” about him, a “blank of insentience.” Connie, on the other hand, is “a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and sturdy body and slow movements full of unused energy,” sensual in every respect. When, walking in the wood, Connie and Clifford happen on Mellors and she sees him for the first time, she feels him as “a swift menace… like a sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.” Gun slung over his shoulder, the “almost handsome” servant stares “straight into Connie’s eyes with a perfectly fearless, impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like”; she spies in his eyes “a look of suffering and detachment, yet a certain warmth” and sees him as “curiously full of vitality.” Their eyes meet, and it is “as if he wakened up”; subsequently, once Connie returns to her daily life with the dull Clifford, she is filled wit
h “an inward dread, an emptiness, an indifference to everything.” The chapter ends with Connie going through her days “drearily, wearily,” stuck on the “empty treadmill” of habit. “Nothingness!” she inwardly despairs. “To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!”41

  Mellors lives close to the earth and is more comfortable around the animals he tends than people. Indeed, he seems animalistic himself, in Lawrence’s descriptions, living by instinct and closer to nature than civilization. When Connie later chances on him bathing outdoors and first sees his beautiful naked back, sculpted by years of outdoor physical labor, it is “a visionary experience” that “hit[s] her in the middle of her body.”

  She saw the clumsy breeches slipping away over the pure, delicate white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a certain lambency, the warm white flame of a single life revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!