Banned in Boston is a faithful and comprehensive history of the operations of the Watch and Ward Society, an organization dedicated to guarding the moral character of that city for about a century. But the book's focus is to document, not to speculate on the nature and implications of censorship. So if you are looking for an account of how our ideas of censorship and freedom of speech have evolved, then Banned in Boston is more of a "case history" than a deep exploration into the question.

I did find the extended section on Burlesque theater really interesting (indeed, how could anyone not?). And, a former Boston bookseller myself, I was surprised at how widely accepted the idea of censorship was in the city, and for how long--apparently, the position of "Official Censor" -- a city government position, was only abolished in 1982, two years before I first came to Boston for college.

And it did renew my interest in HL Mencken.

The high point of the book from my perspective was not the well-drawn portraits of the succession of leaders of the Watch and Ward, or their differing approaches--some pugnacious men on a moral crusade, some preferring to work behind the scenes, flexing their power and privilege (and sense of moral rightness) quietly. Those were interesting enough, but the book really came into focus for me when the understanding that existed between the Watch and Ward, law enforcement, and Boston's booksellers--something called "The Gentlemen's Agreement" -- began to break down.

The Gentlemen's Agreement was an unwritten directive, whereby the Watch & Ward would quietly notify booksellers that a book had been determined to be obscene and "actionable" (that is, in violation of the state's obscenity laws), and booksellers would just as quietly remove all copies from their shelves. If they failed to do so, they risked being brought up on criminal charges for being purveyors of obscene material if they happened to sell a copy. Both Watch and Ward and police were in the habit of trying to purchase books deemed actionable in undercover operations, and then arresting (or demanding the arrest of) the unfortunate clerk who unknowingly ran afoul of the law. Prior to the Gentlemen's Agreement, the arrest and trial was the only way to receive an official ruling on the obscene nature of a book--basically, bookstores wouldn't know a book was actionable until action was taken. The Agreement sidestepped the problem by letting booksellers know which titles would land them in court cases if they were sold. No muss, no fuss, and the people of Boston never even knew that there were gaps on the shelves.

It was illuminating to learn how meekly the city's booksellers acquiesced to this state of affairs, where some extra-official entity would, without transparency or oversight or method of appeal, have the final say over what could be sold in a bookstore. But "Free Speech" didn't have the meaning it does now, and censorship was only one of a number of areas in which the Watch and Ward was concerned. It also raided gambling dens, exposed hotels that were acting as brothels, went after speakeasies and dope dens, and in general guarded the moral character of the city. At a certain period their influence was absolute and no one seemed to question that their role was a necessary and good one.

Except the writers. H.L. Mencken was the first to get himself deliberately arrested in order to expose the capriciousness of Boston's obscenity laws and the way they were enforced. But other authors (and their publishers) eventually followed suit, recognizing the potential for publicity....to the point where being "banned in Boston" was a sure way to get one's book national attention and sales. Upton Sinclair parlayed his novel "Oil" into a national bestseller by making the most of its trial for obscenity in Boston. Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser.....writer after writer who produced what we now deem as American classics had their day in court in Boston---mostly with excellent results in terms of sales in the rest of the country.

And judge after judge found themselves increasingly frustrated at the hopeless attempt to determine a legal definition of good literary taste -- until eventually even the prosecutors in these cases told the Watch and Ward representatives that despite their duty to uphold the letter of the law, they were not in sympathy with the goals (not to mention the secretive and underhanded methods) of the Society to ensnare booksellers in their pursuit of morally questionable literature.

It was the ridiculousness of having to determine the immoral nature of books like "Oil" or "The Sun Also Rises" that eventually led to the booksellers of Boston to reject the role of the Watch and Ward, and to the Massachusetts State legislature to completely rewrite the obscenity laws. So that by the time I stepped off the bus in the Boston terminal in the early 1980s, suitcase in hand and a suggested reading list from my college adviser I was to complete before the semester started, there was not a single book on the list that could not be found in any of the numerous bookstores in the city. And the idea that any of them might be banned for obscenity was as absurd a notion as the idea of the Watch and Ward members handing out free copies of "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

To be honest, before reading this book I was only familiar with the phrase "Banned in Boston" in relation to the GG Allin compilation album. Miller provides a fascinating history into censorship in Boston as developed and maintained by the Watch and Ward Society - an independent, secretive, private organization that decided the reading and theatre habits of Bostonians for decades. ( )

Neil Miller's Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society's Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil (Beacon Press, 2010) tells the story of the New England Watch and Ward Society (begun 1878 as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, an offshoot of Anthony Comstock's New York organization; renamed 1891).

The book doesn't get off to a very auspicious start, noting as it does on p. 3 that Boston's Park Street Church (built 1809/10) was "designed by Christopher Wren" (died 1723) ... the church's architect, Peter Banner, may have been inspired by Wren's design for St. Bride's Church in London, but unless Wren was as talented at communicating from beyond the grave as he was at architecture, he can hardly be called the church's designer. Aside from this howler, though, I very much enjoyed this volume.

By way of introduction, Miller tracks the many changes wrought in Boston during the second half of the 19th century (decline in the traditional Boston industries, expansion into new neighborhoods, population growth as immigration reshaped the city's demographics, and political shifts). To combat "indecency in books, pictures, and performances," as well as gambling, prostitution and drug use, men of the major traditional Boston families populated the membership rolls and filled the coffers of the Ward and Ward Society. One early advocate, Harvard professor George Peabody, compared the group's activities to the city's storm and sewer drains, "quietly, unobtrusively working underground, guarding us from the pestiferous evil which at any time may come up into our faces, into our homes, into our children's lives" (p. 9). It was, as Cleveland Amory put it, "the old guard on guard" (p. 11).

By fighting for restrictive laws banning printed matter which contained "obscene, indecent, or impure language, or manifestly tending to the corruption of youth," and then (quietly, for the most part) going after publications which they felt met those criteria (an 1881 edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, for example, or a whole variety of French publications and plays), the Society helped make "Banned in Boston" a well-known phrase (and even a lucrative one, as Miller notes, for booksellers in other cities).

Miller recounts Watch and Ward-inspired bookstore raids (in which owners were arrested for selling the likes of Rabelais' works and The Decameron), and the understanding eventually reached between the Society and the city's booksellers, which involved the creation of the Boston Booksellers Commitee (three booksellers, three Society directors), who met and decided on the "acceptability" of new books before they could be sold. From 1915 through the late 1920s this quiet agreement held, and books deemed "actionable" (among them works by John Dos Passos and Aldous Huxley) simply didn't appear on the shelves of Boston's stores or receive notice in its newspapers.

But it wasn't just books the Ward and Ward sought to control - Miller writes of their (mostly successful) efforts to combat various other vices as well, from prostitution to political corruption.

And then the regime began to crumble; with the death of longtime agent J. Frank Chase came the end of the "gentlemen's agreement" on book censorship, as Boston law enforcement authorities (with the backing of the Catholic Church) began taking a more active role in book-banning (with seventy books banned in the year leading up to January 1928, including works by Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner). Authors, publishers, and even some Watch and Ward members thought things might be getting a little out of hand, although the authors tended to find it to their advantage, as Upton Sinclair pointed out ("I would rather be banned in Boston than read anywhere else because when you are banned in Boston, you are read everywhere else").

One of the final straws proved to be a major overreach by the Watch and Ward, as its agents entrapped a Cambridge bookseller into selling a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The bookseller was convicted, but the Society's methods were decried by defense and prosecution attorneys, plus the judge. The heavily negative press coverage of the case led to a severe drop in financial support for the Watch and Ward, and the departure of several leading members. Between the bad press and the Depression, the society was in deep trouble. But its leaders carried on, continuing the quiet suppression of books and working with magazine distributors to keep objectionable periodicals off the racks (in 1930 54 of 122 magazine issues submitted to the Watch and Ward were withdrawn from sale).

Beginning in the 1930s the Watch and Ward began to focus on burlesque shows, to varying degrees of success, and then began a renewed campaign against a wider range of vices under the leadership of Louis Croteau in the early 1940s. With Croteau's death in 1948 the torch of censorship burned itself out, and Miller's final chapter tracks the Society through its last decades, as it continued its campaigns against gambling and official corruption but left the censorship to others (including the official city censor, the last of whom was the very-appropriately-named Richard Sinnott).

Miller concludes his book with the important caveat that while not all censorship in Boston originated with Watch and Ward, "it is extremely difficult to defend an organization that spent its early years trying to ban Whitman, Balzac, Boccaccio, and Rabelais ..." (p. 178). The group, he concludes, made "banned in Boston" into a "national joke," "created a stultifying intellectual climate in Boston," and by its own sometimes overzealous tactics did much to diminish its claims to moral authority. Much of what they sought to eradicate was, Miller maintains, "a rearguard action against historical forces ... inevitably a quixotic venture" (p. 182).

A fast-paced, highly readable account of a forgotten (and not-much-lamented) chapter in Boston's history.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/10/book-review-banned-in-boston.html ( )